George Bush is being briefed in the Oval Office on the day's Iraq news..  

"Finally, sir," the staffer says, "five Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq today."

Bush goes pale, his jaw hanging open in stunned disbelief. He buries his face in his hands, muttering "My God...My God".

"Mr. President," the staffer says, "we lose soldiers all the time, and it's terrible, but I've never seen you so upset. What's the matter?"

Bush looks up and says "How many thousands are in a brazilian'?"

In another headline unlikely to bring peace to the Middle East any time soon, the BBC announces that "The BBC has obtained evidence that Israelis have been giving military training to Kurds in northern Iraq."

Proving that the Republican smear machine never runs out of those ideas that the Republicans are so proud of, we now have the National Republican Congressional Committee claiming that a Democratic candidate for congress in Minnesota "didn't vote" in certain years, including the year she ran for congress.

I've mentioned the White House web site's little feature Ask the White House, and how I don't think that all the questions supposedly submitted by the public actually were.

Well, if I'm right that the White House asks as well as answers these little inquiries, then the ask the White House crowd has now failed to answer its own question.

The message we send is simple enough: permission to torture requested; permission to torture is hereby denied everyone, inclusive of George W. Bush, president of the United States of America.

The Republican Party in Oregon during the last several years has descended into ideological extremism and partisan bickering. The performance record of the Legislature under Republican rule is a bitter joke. Nothing gets done, everything is reduced to an ideological slogan.

Thanks to an idiot spammer leaving heavy code as multiple comments to this, which tied up my machine evry time I tried to view them to delete them, I'm reposting this entry with the one legitimate comment appended, and deleting the original post.

Originally posted Sat Mar 04, 2006:

Have you noticed the incredible deterioration of basic journalism skills?  The Who, What, When, Where, & Why school of giving readers the information they need to know whether they want to read the story?

I read a NY Times story the other day--scanned is more like it--and reached the end without seeing any info that would have justified the headline.  So I went back and read more slowly.  There it was--in the 11th paragraph.  And the point they had pulled for the headline wasn't the primary point of the story, or even the secondary point of the story.  It was tied with probably 5 other points for being the tertiary point of the story.

And that was the NYT.

In Rochester, NY a few years ago there was a sudden deterioration of headline writing ability.  Here in Vermont, where almost all newspapers are "small town" by definition, I've seen headlines that would have been laughed out of any journalism class in the country 30 or 40 years ago.  The one example I can remember:
Flakes pile up, then vehicles across the county

I know I'm getting old, but I don't think that explains it.  Things are deteriorating a lot faster than they are being fixed.  A water heater that once carried a 30-year warranty might now have a 5-year warranty.  You can't reach a live human being at hardly any business you call.  Most businesses think they're doing you a favor by keeping you as a customer.  Headline writers can't write headlines, reporters can't report, legislators can't legislate, analysts can't analyze, NASA has an accident rate that would make a car manufacturer blush in shame, and on and on.

This is the basis for an "American Empire?" Someone should tell the Project for a New American Century that we need to worry about making products that work and won't kill you, creating customer service departments that can at least define the words "customer" and "service," and keeping citizens here healthy and employed before we even start start worrying about controlling the world.

Comment from Sarah on Sun Mar 05, 2006 at 11:30:39 AM EST

Tell me about it...

Our regional rag, the Virginian Pilot, ran the AP story about the FEMA tape of the Katrina presidential briefing on the front page (The first shocker, as usually news this big and revealing would be relegated to a deep inside page) with the headline, "President Confident During Katrina Briefing". The tie to this headline was a short reference in the 12th paragraph of the article to Bush expressing confidence in the level of preparedness of the government to deal with the situation. If the headline would have been written from the lead of the story as would be proper, it should have read, "FEMA Tape Shows President Warned About Levees Before Storm".

As a former managing and copy editor this sag in journalistic competence and ethics makes me sick.  

Here's a very interesting take on the voting patterns in the U.S., which so many of us assume to include poor people voting against their own economic interests. My main quibble is that he doesn't seem to consider the effect of the pervasive Republican propaganda machine, or the fact that election results can be drastically altered by convincing even 2% of former Democratic voters to switch because of the so-called "values" issues.  But still worth reading. From Gary Younge in today's Guardian (U.K.):

Lee and I always debate things, among them, how is it with massive deficits, a failed "war", poor health care, terrible low-paying jobs, well, how are the folks so fooled by Texas Hat? Join me now for some Six history....

Kudos to The Economist magazine for at least telling the truth about the current state of things in the course of its cheerleading for globalization and free markets.

File this under "we sort of knew that", but the hard data is all the same........

Read Older Articles