George W. Bush is a historic embarrassment that will forever stain the legacy of American democracy. Listen to short clips from his press conference yesterday and see if you can make it through a couple of minutes without averting your eyes:




I always come back to the same point because it is the one that makes the biggest difference. The press failed us. This man was always stupid -- and glaringly so. The press needed to tell the American people that the emperor had no clothes on. Instead they spent so many years covering his ass. That's how this imbecile was elected a second time. It was great failing of the press, while they thought they were being "neutral." Your job isn't to be neutral, it's to be objective.

A neutral sports reporter would be laughed out of the press box. The Cowboys beat the Giants 42-10. The neutral reporter says they both played fine. The objective reporter says the Cowboys kicked ass and the Giants sucked. Report the score!

A neutral reporter says John McCain and Barack Obama are both fine candidates who represent a change from George W. Bush. An objective reporters says that John McCain's policy proposals are nearly identical to George W. Bush's. They agree on at least 95% of the issues.

You don't have to say John McCain sucks, that's an opinion. But you do have to say that he is nearly a carbon copy of Bush. That's a fact. If you don't report that, then you are not doing your job of informing the American people. That's how we get incompetent presidents like George W. Bush -- because the press was too scared to report the obvious truth.

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This video is an awareness test. See if you can get the right answer to the question they ask:





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The right-wing and the media are playing a game called Six Degrees of Barack Obama. This is where they try to connect anyone who has ever said or done anything controversial to Barack Obama and then ask Obama to denounce and reject them. It is a guilt by association hatchet job that leaves the false impression that Obama agrees with these folks.

You can play this game with anyone, but so far they have only done it to Obama. Is Obama supposed denounce and reject everyone he has ever met just in case they've done something stupid in their lives? How many people do you know that you would have to denounce if you were subjected to this same scrutiny? I'd have to eliminate at least half my family and friends. Do you know anyone who doesn't have family, friends or associates who have said things that would sound really bad if the media repeated them over and over on TV?

Go ahead, play Six Degrees of Barack Obama and see if you can connect yourself to Obama and find out whether he has to denounce and reject you as well:




Young Turks on You Tube

This year the leading Democratic candidate has been charged with being an "elitist." What surprise! That's what they're charged with every four years. George W. Bush went to Andover, Yale and Harvard, his dad was president and he had everything in his life handed to him on a silver platter and the media said his opponents were elitists and he was an average Joe. Why do they keep falling for this same crap every time? Are they this stupid or are they complicit?





We also discussed who is more elitists between the different campaigns here (warning: some strong language). I know it was Hillary Clinton who originally brought up this elitist charge this time, but then again it's hard to separate her from a Republican these days, as I explain in this video (also some strong language).

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The hits keep on coming with this guy. I have to give O'Reilly credit, he is an entertainer. As you can tell in the video below, I can't stop laughing just listening to his rants.

Some people are taking these threats far more seriously, but I have to confess that I find them funny. Listen to what we have below -- the man threatens to come up people's noses. How is that not funny?



Media Matters, of course, has more, including O'Reilly's (half-joking) threats to strangle his enemies.

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The WNBA tried a letter writing program to inspire their fans to write into their local papers and complain that the league wasn't getting enough press coverage in the sports section. The results were disastrous, as we explain in the video below.























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I get to blog on the same page as Dan Rather - that's pretty cool. Allow me to milk this moment. I agree with Dan about "The Real Issue". The man's an icon, and I got a great video here of Rather speaking about fear in the media from an interview at Berkeley last year.

This man knows journalism and it's sad that nobody listens unless he says something "newsworthy" like the word "Tart". My advice to Dan is to call Bill O'Reilly a Douchebag, (I'm sure you can back it up), then see what you can do with the press coverage.

AOL News invited Dan Rather to respond to the controversy following his remarks about the state of television news.

Let me put one thing to rest right away: CBS Corp. Chief Executive Les Moonves' charge that my "dumbing it down, tarting it up" comments about the CBS Evening News were "sexist," presumably because of my use of the "T word" in describing a newscast anchored by a woman. Nice try at misdirection from the issue at hand -- the parlous state of news, particularly television news -- but no cigar; I've used that phrase dozens of times in the past (such as documented here, here, and here) to describe the disturbing trend in news toward shallow, celebrity-obsessed coverage, in contexts where it clearly had nothing to do with gender.

Now that we've settled that, how about we have a real conversation in this country about the real issue: Our nation and our world face enormous challenges, many being of the life-or-death variety. Nuclear proliferation. Climate change. The health-care crisis. The growing gap between rich and poor. The ways that the war on terrorism has changed how we understand and interpret our Constitution and our bedrock values as a free and democratic society. There are debates about these and other pressing issues before us but, for the most part, they have been limited to our political elites, and these folks tend to already have a dog in the fight.

In fewer than nine months, the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations will likely be locked up. In less than a year-and-a-half, we will be going to the polls to choose a new president. Yet the rank-and-file American voter is not being drawn into the central debates of our time. And the information he or she gets about the presidential campaign is largely limited to the political horse race.

Why? One of the big reasons is the absurdly disproportionate coverage that news organizations give to celebrity "news" and other tales of scandal and prurience. They hope for a short-term ratings and demographics fix, while the long-term, important problems -- the ones that actually have a bearing on our lives -- get pushed out of broadcasts and the ever-shrinking "news hole" in print publications.

We can talk about that, we can debate whether this is good for our country and what we should do about it -- or we can turn this into another celebrity story involving two anchors and a network CEO.

There is a difference between how the right-wing views the press and the rest of us view the press. The radical right-wing is so divorced from reality, they think the facts that the press bring readers is made up. They claim that they do not believe the mainstream press at all, except for all the times they quote them of course.

When the New York Times quotes the US commanders on the ground in Iraq or the insurgents, they are not making it up. Those American generals and those Iraqi fighters actually said those quotes. You might not like some of the results of that reporting, but it is essentially true.

The problem that we have with the press (when I say "we," I mean people who are centrists but are now called liberals because they believe in science and the US constitution) is that they needlessly buy into Republican talking points that subtly but importantly shade the truth.

So, Jay Leno has been helming the 'Tonight Show' for fifteen years now. The story of the backstage dealing that brought the show to him rather than David Letterman has been chronicled repeatedly. But once he had the show, he kept it. Now, fifteen years have passed.

Why do you think Leno has been able to stay on so long? You could make the argument that the 'Tonight Show' was such a sturdy franchise that anyone who didn't rock the boat too hard could have kept it afloat, and that in fact that's exactly what Leno has done. You could also make this argument: that throughout his tenure, he has made a point of pruning away anything and everything that marks him as a distinct personality, and what is left is a human-shaped bit of business that is perfect for hosting a national late-night show. He has an overlong and underfunny monologue that is almost painful for the way in which it offends equally and conceals Leno's real political beliefs, whatever they are. (For proof of this, see this interesting interview he did with Dan Rather in 2000.) He then proceeds to some strained banter with his band leader and announcer, comedy bits that depend upon the same joke (Americans don't know very much-have you heard?), and B-list conversations with A-list guests in which he never seems particularly engaged. Finally, Leno hands the last segment over to a mainstream musical act. Done. Good show. Is that an unfair assessment, or is it exactly what happens, night after night?

Here's a clip of the earlier, edgier Leno appearing as a guest on Letterman's NBC show back in the early eighties. Much of Leno's material deals with the dumbing-down and blandification of television. Maybe he was doing research.



[Ben Greenman's acclaimed new book of fiction, A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both, is now available. Order it here.]

According to a new study, people have a hard time distinguishing between an opinion held by many people and an opinion held by one person but repeated many times. This seems like a sad commentary on human brainpower. Is there any? Study to come. I mean, the first time I read this article I thought I was utter nonsense--but by the third time I was starting to think it made some sense. It does go a long way toward explaining political talk radio. Or, for that matter, politics in general.




[Ben Greenman's acclaimed new book of fiction, A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both, is now available at bookstores everywhere.]

Earlier I posted the advertisement featuring retired General John Batiste for votevets.org, it turns out Batiste got fired from his consultant job at CBS for making that video.

On May 10th Batiste joined Keith Olbermann for this "exclusive interview"... not the most difficult interview Batiste will face, but an interview about the events non-the-less.

From the new This American Life television show on Showtime. Why do cameras change us so much? Especially when they're not even real. Click on the photo to launch the video. (thanks: kottke.org)

An ocean of pink flowers, a mini-concert by a well-known performer, guests lists submitted in advance, a custom-made death gown: why such an "over-the-top" funeral for someone who lived life with such quiet dignity?

Again, Anna Nicole is a puzzle. I don't care about her, at all. I didn't care about her in life. I'm never against someone who looks good in ads or in Playboy, but I'm not usually for them either. So then she's dead, maybe by overdose, maybe not, and suddenly she's a profoundly sad cautionary tale that exposes the excesses of our culture? I think the way she operated was simple: people were blinded by the light coming off of her and then repulsed by their awareness of how that light was produced: smoke, mirrors, drugs, surgery, and sycophants. She'll be buried. She deserves a burial. Almost everyone does. Otherwise, the corpse is just picked clean by scavengers. It would be terrible if that happened.