Ground Zero Mosque dominates last week’s media coverage

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 2 Comments

You might be in the Tea Party if: you regard the entirety of lower Manhattan as a war memorial.

In a move of such metacritical complexity that it may threaten the space-time continuum, the New York Times reports that a Pew Research Center survey found that stories about the so-called Ground Zero Mosque constituted 45% of straight news on cable and radio. I personally look forward to the day when the Times is composed entirely of news reports on statistical surveys of the contents of the news, and Combat! blog can comment on them. Overall, the GZM story accounted for 15% of total newspaper, television and radio coverage, an entity that Pew amusingly refers to as the “newshole.”

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Bill Keller, in the Times, with “political correctness”

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 1 Comment

In all the rush of moving, celebrating our nation’s independence from Britain, and getting on a plane at six in the morning to go to Iowa—plus keeping up with our drinking—Combat! blog missed this gem about the New York Times and the word “torture” in Salon. Overdue props to Pete Jones for the link. The Times, like most newspapers, had used “torture” to refer to waterboarding until shortly after the September 11th attacks, when the Bush administration quietly explained to editors that A) it was waterboarding the shit out of everybody and therefore B) waterboarding was obviously not torture. After that, the Times started referring to waterboarding as “intense interrogation techniques” or “the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks.”

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Recession looks a lot like a depression to young people

By Dan Brooks in Millennials 4 Comments

The New York Times managed to make me feel both sad and angry—my two basic emotions!—with this article about the career prospects of recent college graduates as compared to their counterparts in previous generations. That’s the sad part. The angry part comes with Louis Uchitelle’s framing device, which wisely presents the article’s many surprising/dry economic statistics in the context of one particular Millennial, Scott Nicholson. If he still hasn’t found work, I suggest Nicholson hire himself out as the world’s least sympathetic protagonist. He graduated from Colgate in 2008 and has lived with his parents since, unable to find work. He also just turned down a job with Hanover Insurance Group that would have paid him $40,000 a year.

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Specious trend of the day: icing

By Dan Brooks in specious trends 4 Comments

Actual trend of the day: 17 year-old girls drinking sugar liquor

Because I am very old, I read the New York Times in order to keep up with various social trends. It’s a little like reading Madeleine L’Engle to keep up with developments in contemporary physics: one encounters compelling stories, if not reports of, you know, this world. Tuesday, the Times turned the tables on its old adversary reality with this article about icing, which suggests that the trend—of which actual evidence exists, for once—may itself be artificial. It’s a Times trend piece in reverse: the people doing it believe in it, and the newspaper thinks it’s made up. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The reader not wearing flip flops and a khaki visor may ask, what is icing? To which I reply: take a knee, bro.

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Rhetoric watch: Krugman on the disintegration of government

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 6 Comments

"Allowing our mascot to be hunted to near-extinction since 1849."

In the course of last Friday’s Link Roundup, we mentioned that members of the Department of the Interior tasked with regulating the oil industry were revealed to have “[taken] bribes and engaged in drug use and sex with oil industry officials” in 2008. That was awesome. In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman promises more cops-‘n-robbers-get-together-to-do-coke-and-shout-out-the-window-of-the-squad-car frivolity with the headline, “Sex & Drugs & the Spill.” It turns out that’s just a come on, though, for a column about how anti-government sentiment can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the kind of thing you need to do when you’re competing for eyes with Freakonomics. It’s like when Maureen Dowd wrote about the hot, throbbing need for derivatives regulation.*

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