MSNBC losing contact with reality

From the most egregious to the least, several instances in which commentators on MSNBC have lost contact with reality in an apparent move to narrow their audience down to the hard-core "reality-based community".

Commentator 1

Chris Matthews repeats - with his own layer of apparent make-believe - Media Matters' vicious smear that Mike Huckabee called for Ethnic Cleansing of the West Bank in an interview reported by the Associated Press.  Dennis Prager examines the issue in a short audio clip. Prager points out some of the dangers of such a despicable lie. It puts Huckabee's life in real danger.

Everybody knows that Arabs vote and participate in government in Israel. At least one Arab town in Israel, given the opportunity to leave the State of Israel, declined. Huckabee's position as described in the AP report does NOT require expulsion of Arabs on the West Bank, despite Chris Matthews' definitive statement that "You've got Huckabee saying he's gonna clear out all the Arabs in the West Bank, just get rid of them all!".

And even the Left (well, not the hard left, but at least most Democrats in Congress) came to a position of supporting Jews living in parts of the Left Bank (oops, West Bank - Heh.) and other areas claimed by the Palestinians shortly before Condoleeza Rice expressed concern about a certain development proposed in the West Bank. The American position hardened considerably during the Obama administration. Curtailing Israeli settlements again became a big focus of American foreign policy (slightly simplified and exaggerated in the video. Recent events have changed the focus somewhat).

Although Huckabee's position is now very different from that of the Obama administration, how do Media Matters and MSNBC justify extrapolating the wild claim about "ethnic cleansing" from Huckabee's comments? One of the few times Prager has EVER recommended suing someone.

Commentator 2

Lawrence O'Donnell has been moved into Keith Olberman's prime time slot. Here, Lawrence O'Donnell reaches deep into his own mind to find racist intent in a cartoon about food. He also claims that the cartoonists' portrayal of President Obama is out of line with the exaggerations of other political cartoonists. Quote:

In your most recent cartoons, Bush's ears have become so large they look like airplane wings.

I don't draw Bush as a human being any more. He's become a cartoon character who also has a beak-like nose and circles for feet -- just two simple black circles. I draw Bush smaller and smaller as his incompetence grows larger and larger.

Obama's big ears in the cartoon in question were nowhere near as big as Bush's big ears here (though they did look a little like bat ears. And you know how everybody hates bats). Of course, no cartoonist ever portrayed Bush with the features of an animal Or as a monster. They leave that to commentary on Israel.

And then there's lefty political illustrators.

O'Donnell also told his viewers where the  creators of the cartoon live, and made some pretty wild suggestions about how people should harass them in their private lives. Typical of the Left. You know: sending busses full of union members or ACORN associates to picket at people's personal residences and all. The Left is really into the personal destruction of people who don't agree with them. "Shut up or you'll be next" is the message for the rest of us.

In a more comical vein, O'Donnell also went ballistic over a Republican Congressman sleeping in his office. This is only O.K. when Democrats do it, apparently.  When Republicans do it, it's tax fraud. One certainly can't expect someone from the Democratic Party to be meticulous about paying their taxes.

Commentator 3

I don't think that I would rate Rachel Maddow's recent "False" rating by Politifact (in her claim that Gov. Walker is lying about a budget shortfall in Wisconsin) as her absolute worst departure from the truth. And in this case, she could have just been accidentally selective in reading her source document. But really she should be more careful. Her first "False" rating by Politifacts involved more work in uncovering the falsehoods. And here, she helps David Letterman along in a whole string of falsehoods.

Departure from the above on MSNBC

MSNBC is still not entirely monolithic. On Morning Joe recently, commentators concluded that the coverage of the Wisconsin union protests probably did show some liberal bias. I wonder which way the network will go in the future?

Dad warned me about professors in the social sciences

Instapundit picked up an article from the New York Times about a social scientist who identified a new "outgroup" - conservatives.  About time:

He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded . . .

Heh.  This just cracks me up.  Hundreds of highly-educated people who study patterns of discrimination professionally are shocked to discover what most everyone else already knew -- that THEY are currently  discriminating against an "outgroup".  Many of them really do live in a little intellectual bubble.  Makes you wonder where else their limited focus blinds them to understanding what is going on in the world.  Tigerhawk has further observations:

Er, have any of you ever met a social psychologist? They are an intimidating bunch. . .

Reason #42 why the "academic freedom" justification for tenure is a crock, by the way.

Anyway, the relevant professional society debated and but ultimately rejected an affirmative action program for conservatives, for which I suppose we should all be grateful.   The last thing conservatives need is to sully their ranks with social psychologists.

I left a comment. Wonder if I'll get flamed?  Tigerhawk gets some traffic:

My Dad taught at a college with a more conservative faculty and staff than most colleges. He observed during the early 70s that the sociology professors were reliably the rudest people at any faculty function - talking loudly during speeches, leaving en masse during speeches or at other inappropriate times while projecting a sense of boredom and derision, etc.

Maybe social scientists are still stuck in the 60s and 70s with regard to their prejudices against conservatives.   Daniel Henninger recently suggested that the irrational belief among the liberal elite that the Right is inherently violent can be traced back to an essay written in 1964. I think the backlash to the media's delusional focus on the Tea Party after the Arizona shootings was kind of a surprise to some of the people who deeply believe that the Right is dangerous.

Stevie Wonder:

When you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer.
Superstition ain't the way.
Hey, hey, hey.

Take a little break to listen to the video linked above. It's from Sesame Street. Two drummers, great bass guitar and brass, kids on percussion.  Everything comes together.  The music was definitely better than men's fashion back then.

UPDATE:  Dad did not warn me about economics professors:  STEPHEN DUBNER ON POLITICAL BIAS IN ACADEMIA:

“It is interesting — and sobering — that two fields, psychology and economics, that we rely upon to describe and amend bias in the world are themselves so susceptible to bias within the ranks of their practitioners.”

It also may lead many people, reasonably, to dismiss much of their work as politically tainted and untrustworthy.

Ronald Reagan's 100th Birthday

Tear Down This Wall.

Background of the speech:

Our friend Peter Robinson was the man who wrote the speech. . . .

Part 2

John Hinderaker: How Ronald Reagan made me a conservative pundit

I grew up in a Republican family, became a left-winger when in college and was a Communist for a while. By 1976 I was a garden-variety liberal Democrat. I voted for Jimmy Carter, enthusiastically, in that year. But then the wheels came off. Gas shortages, inflation, chronic unemployment--"stagflation," previously thought impossible by most economists--and weakness overseas. Liberal pundits scolded young people for expecting more. They said that America's decline was only natural, and we should all get used to it. The best course, according to the liberal consensus, was to move toward a state industry model like Germany's or Japan's. . . .

But shortly after the Reagan administration ended, something strange happened. The Left tried to rewrite history. A veritable cottage industry sprang up, consisting of journalists, politicians and pseudo-economists who tried to convince Americans that what they had lived through in the 1980s never really happened. I would have thought such an effort must be doomed to failure--who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?--and that revisionist history isn't possible until the eyewitnesses have passed from the scene. But no! The idea that the Reagan administration had been a disaster for most Americans was actually taken seriously in many quarters. . . .

I don't know who Rocketman is, but he makes some interesting observations, categorized under "Rants":

Where 2 years ago we saw magazing covers with Obama as FDR, today we see them with the President embracing Reagan. And the MBM (make-believe-media) has been working hard in order to exploit every opportunity to refer to something Obama has done or said as being “Reagan-esque”. . . .

No matter how studiously Obama or the progressive left imitate Reagan, they will never be able to be like him. That’s because to them, Reaganism is a certain pose to be modeled, a scene to be played, “optics” to be achieved, a tone to be struck, another phony affectation that can be mastered.

60 Minutes Retrospecitve:  Reagan in historic video clips defines fascism, criticizes the Republican Party (many of these criticisms are still valid today) and describes the process by which the mainstream media build stories to fit their desired narrative.

Wanna be a professional blogger? Ed Morrissey made it.

There are some Mommybloggers out there who have hit the big time, but I only follow a couple of them with any regularity at all. A few Mommybloggers make quite a bit of money through endorsements and advertisements. (Caution to Mommybloggers: get permission before writing about family members, especially children, in any depth). A larger number make a little money by placing ads on their blogs.

There are Mommyblogs (and some Daddyblogs) out there which appeal to specialized audiences - special needs kids, empty nesters, etc. In fact, there are specialized blogs out there for just about any interest. Ace (mild language warning) recently compared blogs and discussion forums to the intellectual salons of old - a way for people to continue their education into adulthood. But the more specialized the interest, the less likely a blog is to have a following large enough to generate a respectable amount of money. And most bloggers don't go into blogging as a career. But some have found careers by blogging.  Two who have are The Anchoress (an assertively Catholic blogger who sometimes comments on politics) and Ed Morrissey, who writes mostly about politics.

I started following blogs becauseI was concerned about the way the media covered politics. So most of the blogs I follow include at least some political content. The Anchoress, Elizabeth Scalia, writes about her "blogfather", Ed Morrissey on the occasion of an interview by Nick Gillespie of Reason TV.  Scalia got paying jobs writing (and later editing) due to her ability to gain a following as a blogger.

When he started blogging, Morrissey was running call centers for the alarm industry. He started blogging because he thought it was one thing he could do to help his country.  His first blog, Captain's Quarters (motto:  "Thus every blogger, in his kind, is bit by him who comes behind") got Scalia interested in blogging. It was one of my favorites as I started looking into the blogosphere, too. She writes:

. . . Ed managed to blog in a way that was smart, gentlemanly and fair and I thought I might be able to do that, too.


Heh. Clearly I have not managed to be as smart, gentlemanly or fair as he, but I am glad I took the plunge; blogging has changed my life, very much for the better — both personally and professionally — in that it has taught me how to slow down, take a breath and consider the Marquis of Queensbury Rules before jumping into a fray. I sometimes do revert to Bad Lizzie, but I am learning how to be more gentlemanly; it’s slow-going since, as long-time readers know, I was raised by blade-in-mouth barbarians.


Still I credit my blogfather for the lessons, and also for the encouragement. . .

Scalia now edits the columns of Ed's wife, Marcia, who lost her sight in her twenties due to diabetes, at the Patheos website.

Hard-core libertarian Nick Gillespie's interview with Morrissey is very interesting. It reveals that Morrissey started blogging when his wife was in the hospital. Similarly, Glenn Reynolds, an even bigger name in the blogosphere, started blogging when his wife was very ill. Most of the first crop of bloggers started out spending money on their blogs rather than making money. Blogging in its early days was full of interesting people who wrote just because they wanted to. The vast majority of bloggers still do.

If you're hoping to make money blogging (directly or indirectly) someday, you probably need to count on writing for the love of it for some time first. And keep your day job.

The Mainstream Media's Delusional Focus After the Arizona Shootings

I thought it would be a good idea to document some of what happened in our national media following the terrible Arizona shootings, for future reference.

Following the lead of CNN and the New York Times --- Paul Krugman in particular, the Mainstream Media and a few politicians on the Left started immediately to make the connection between the Arizona shootings, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. And they got details about the shooting wrong, too. Local media and alternative media did a better job.  And much commentary in the MSM was more responsible than news reporting. Don't miss Dr. Krauthammer's take.  He is a psychiatrist, after all.

The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's?

Or should we call the Mainstream Media the "Make-Believe Media"? Compare the continuing references to "civility" in connection to the Arizona shootings (in order to connect the shooting in people's minds to the early false reports) with the incidents the MSM doesn't report nationally because the victim is conservative and/or there is no possibility to connect the perpetrator with conservative motives.

I think Krakatoa made an interesting point early on in the media frenzy:

Pretending that you can compartmentalize all the woes in the world into one neat box of causation called "Republican/Conservative/Colonialist White Male bigotry" gives you the illusion of the power to easily deal with those problems.

There's another reason that they lie: Misinformation gets results.

Glenn Reynolds wrote a piece in the WSJ about the Politics of Blood Libel on the Left. Sarah Palin later used the term "blood libel" in a statement, leading to a furious reaction from the Left and defenses of the use of the term from the Right - and even from Alan Derschowitz. (scroll through search results) Ann Althouse quickly compiled a little list of violent incidents which the Left tried to pin on conservatives. Jim Treacher on Twitter: "So what term would the left prefer for how they're using lies to try and connect their political opponents to murder?"

Ed Driscoll, February 1: "No Matter How Cynical You Get, it is Impossible to Keep Up"

New York magazine, November 16th, 1992:

I think the effect of Fox News on American public life has been to create a level of cynicism about the news in general. It has contributed to the sense that they are all just out there with a political agenda, but Fox is just more overt about it. And I think that’s unhealthy.

Bill Keller, the New York Times executive editor, yesterday.

Keller added: We have had a lot of talk since the Gabby Giffords attempted murder about civility in our national discourse, and I make no connection between the guy who shot those people in Tucson and the national discourse. But it is true that the national discourse is more polarized and strident than it has been in the past, and to some extent, I would lay that at the feet of Rupert Murdoch.

From the comments - Shannon Love: 

You’ve got admire the technique the same way you admire any good con.

By simply repeating they don’t believe there is a connection over and over again, they can plant the idea that there is a connection just by shear repetition. Eventually, when people hear about the shooting their minds will instantly associate that with Fox News, Palin and whomever else they wish.

It’s pysch 101, basic formative association.
They revealed their unprincipled and irrational biases in their rush to judgment about the shooting and now they are using their denouncement of their own mistake as a smear.

NoahP:

We live in an era almost without grace. The Missoula Community Theater stages the Mikado with lyrics calling for the beheading of Sarah Palin to applause and laughter. Following national exposure by the indispensable James Taranto in “The Best of the Web Today”, we get nonapology apologies but no apology to Sarah Palin and her family.

And if some deranged Leftist should harm her or her family would the NYT and their ilk take any responsibility? Not a chance.

James Taranto. . . this incident is shocking but not surprising. For all the bogus accusations being thrown at Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, genuinely hateful political rhetoric is commonplace in the art world, even in art that is not overtly political. . . .

Californio:
Wait – Didn’t the Times initially report that the Tucson incident should be blamed on Sarah Palin and the Duke Lacrosse team?

“We got the narrative right but the facts wrong…”

Remember how eager the MSM is to place blame on the Right as the 2012 elections approach.

Democratic Pollster Mark Penn: What Obama really needs is an Oklahoma City moment.

Earlier Related Posts:

The Establishment: Observations of Shannon Love on changes in the Left during the last 40 years.

CNN puts itself "in the crosshairs": Examples of irresponsible reporting and deceptive reporting - including sneakily deleting lines from the President's speech.

The Disturbing World of the Arizona Shooter: Legitimate issues which the mainstream media IGNORED while trying to blame Sarah Palin for the shooting.

Perry Mason could teach today's reporters a few things: How to restore some credibility to the media. How readers can spot deceptive news reports. Poll showing distrust of media.

The New Civility in Washington D.C.: Representative Cohen compares Republicans to Nazis. Not the person I would expect to do something like this.  Fascinating.

Libeling the Right: The only way the Left can win in America: Because Leftist policies are failing around the world in front of our eyes.

Newsweek finds a new way to keep the Big Lie alive: Including false suggestion through cover art.  Despicable.  Also, Daniel Henninger explains the origins of the Left's belief that the Right is violent.

More "adjustments" of temperature data from the CRU?

The BBC recently came out with a dramatic article stating that 2010 was the warmest year since 1850 (widely recognized as the last year that temperatures dropped at the end of the Little Ice Age.)

The WMO analysis combines data from three leading research agencies, and is regarded as the most authoritative.

The three records are maintained by the US-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and jointly in the UK by the Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

Then two scientist looked at the original data from the CRU in East Anglia (of Climategate fame) and found that temperature data had been altered.

Comparing the actual data for each year, from 2001 to 2010, with that given in the press release shows that for four years the original figure has been adjusted downwards. Only for 2010 was the data revised upwards, by the largest adjustment of all, allowing the Met Office to claim that 2010 was the hottest year of the decade.

One wonders why the data from the UK would need to be changed, apparently for publicity purposes, when the data released by "denier" Roy Spencer's university already showed 2010 to be in a statistical tie with 1998 for the warmest year in 40 years. Didn't that quite fit publicity needs?

These kinds of discoveries of altered data just keep happening.  And not just in climate science. There are several reasons for this.

One disturbing thing about alterations in temperature data by climate scientists, starting several years ago with IPPC data, is that the scientists who revise the data typically refuse to say why or how they determined that historical data should be changed.

The discovery of alterations in the data from the CRU comes close on the heels of another scandal in the UK involving the failure of the Met Office to predict the cold winter there:

. . . . the weather service caused a sensation by making the startling claim that it was gagged by government ministers from issuing a cold winter forecast. Instead, a milder than average prediction was made that has been resoundingly ridiculed in one of the worst winters in a century.