PSoTD

The news media is becoming a league of professional voyeurs, nothing more. When the police say this:

But Police Chief Tom Boren insisted Thursday that Sander's Internet activity had no connection to her disappearance.

"The issue of the Internet and the spinoff of that has been literally crippling our investigation," Boren said.

They mean, the news media is crippling the investigation, because they are the ones obsessing about this angle in Emily Sander's disappearance/murder.

No More Broder.

especially since there's no national holiday such as Feces Day.

------------------------------------------------------ NBC Meet The Press ------------------------------------------------------ MEET THE PRESS WITH TIM RUSSERT

WEEKEND LISTINGS 11/25/07

JAMES CARVILLE

Democratic Strategist

MARY MATALIN

Republican Strategist

MIKE MURPHY

Republican Strategist

BOB SHRUM

Democratic Strategist

It may have the extra benefit of helping viewers heave up what they over-ate.

Dear news media:

99% of the country doesn't give a shit if the President pardons a turkey. Why you treat this like real news, devoting newsprint and airtime to such a dipshit story, is perhaps the real story. Here's what I'd like to see: real journalism about the motivations and sheer lack of effort taken by news media in running this canned calendar piece.

Only the names change.

2006
2005

Anyone halfway intelligent in the newsroom has to wonder about this - in a country of hundreds of millions of people, on the web site of the highest office in the land, they run an online poll to name the turkeys to be pardoned. How many votes?

28,000 votes. Doesn't that tell the news media something - something along the lines that America doesn't give a shit about this story AT ALL, and more to the point, maybe America would like to have Thanksgiving without the President sticking his head into the holiday with a dumbass stunt? That's not just Bush, but any of the Presidents. They have better things to do, we all know that, so quit shilling for the turkey farmers and Disney with the coverage of this event. And quit insulting American intelligence.

Pundits should avoid ending any of their "punditry" with the acronym "fwiw" to avoid having readers jumping to this term.

There's a debate in Pennsylvania about whether government email should be available to the public.

A vote in the state House last week could prove to be a crucial litmus test on the commitment of York County's delegation to open government and legislative reform.

A heavy majority voted to keep government e-mail secret - unavailable to taxpayers looking for information about how their elected officials do the people's business.

Reps. Eugene DePasquale, D-York, and Steve Nickol, R-Hanover, backed openness. Figures. They're two of our delegation's best.

In this age of electronic communications, the rest of the county's delegation might as well have just voted to keep everything secret.

It seems to me that there has to be some recognition that there is informal email, and formal email, relating to the status of the ideas discussed. Much of email is conversational or the bouncing of suggestions back and forth, and I can't see that being that beneficial to have included in open records. In fact, I could see it as counterproductive - what if every citizen's email complaint or comment to an elected official was available for anyone to see? Is that really a good thing? Do we really need to see the unsolicited messages sent to local government?

On the other hand, there's too much official stuff getting done via email to allow it to sit in the "black hole".

I think this York newspaper editorial gets it about right - there have to be content standards, rather than format standards, that determine whether a document falls within public records.

Somebody from costumes in the original movie production of Wizard of Oz should sue.

Rosie O'Donnell is not interesting, nor particularly insightful. She's not a journalist. She lets her emotions get her into pathetically stupid public tiffs. So why is MSNBC interested in bringing HER in?

Go tell John Micek he should link to only my posts. I'm sure he'll appreciate it... I know I will!

Or, short of that, tell him that every third paragraph about Morganelli should be changed to something about Lake Tobias or Clyde Peeling's Reptiland or something like that. They need blog discussion too!

BUFFALO - Verb. "Orig. West. a. to intimidate or frighten, esp. by means of mere bluff

The American Prospect's Paul Waldman skewers the trivial bluster of Tim Russert.

If an interviewer forgets to bring up Buffalo, Russert surely will. Asked by Kurtz how he avoids getting an inflated ego when he spends time interviewing presidents (a softball question designed just for Russert; try to imagine Kurtz asking the same thing of Tom Brokaw), Russert responded, "If you come from Buffalo, everything else is easy. Walking backwards to school, for a mile in the snow, grounds you for life." When Bill Moyers asked Russert whether he relied too much on the word of Bush administration officials during the run-up to the Iraq War, Russert replied, "Look, I'm a blue-collar guy from Buffalo. I know who my sources are. I work 'em very hard. It's the mid-level people that tell you the truth." Any questions about his being too close to the establishment are met with "Blue-collar! Buffalo!", brandished like a cross before the vampire of accountability. Russert may be the only journalist in America who considers all his conversations with government officials off the record unless they request otherwise — an extraordinary gift to the powerful and an inversion of ordinary journalistic practice — but that doesn't make him an insider. Because he's from Buffalo.