The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Steyn on: Edwards' Monstrosity and the Media's War against the Good Guys
In the words of the venerable Mark Steyn: "There are two Americas, and neither has the square footage of John Edwards' new house."
Exactly: all 29,000 Sqare Feet of it! Shoot, I am just glad Edwards announced his candidacy in the backyard of that Katrina-ravaged low-income New Orleans home, where the common folk can feel some solidarity with this modern day Baron. I just hope he dusted off his shoes before he walked back into the "big house". Check out Steyn's laser-targeted wit about this wonderful case of cognitive dissonance at NRO's The Corner.
But the previous are just the hors d'ouvres; Steyn penned this gem for Western Standard, a Canadian magazine--he begins the piece:
In Tom Stoppard’s play Night And Day, the African dictator Mageeba explains his views on freedom of the press:
“Do you know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr. Wagner?”
“Not exactly, sir, no,” says the Fleet Street hack.
“I mean,” says Mageeba, “a free press which is edited by one of my relatives.”
Here in the citadels of western civilization, we have a slightly different problem: our relatively free press is a press edited by relativists.
Item: Six imams returning from a big conference of imams were removed from a plane at Minneapolis Airport after other passengers grew concerned about loud cries of “Allah akbar!”, the imams reseating themselves in the same configuration as the 9/11 hijackers and demanding seat-belt extenders, even though none was of sufficient girth to need them. Aside from Fox, America’s national media showed little interest in the story. But nor, oddly, did the local media. After complaints, the managing editor of The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Anders Gyllenhaal, replied to at least one reader: “I don’t think the paper dropped this story, but I do think it had run its course… I think this is one of those stories that runs for a couple of days, then subsides.”
Well, the reason he thinks this is one of those stories that runs for a couple of days is because he chose to run it only for a couple of days. Had it been something more consequential – like, say, fictitious stories about guards at Gitmo desecrating the Koran – he would have run it into the ground.
Item: The Associated Press reported that six Iraqis were burned alive in a mosque. Their source for the story was Iraqi police captain Jamil Hussein. The US military denies the incident took place. So does Iraq’s Ministry of the Interior, which says that there is no-one in the Iraqi police called “Jamil Hussein”. Which is odd, given that the Associated Press has quoted him dozens of times. Since they know him so well, why don’t they just produce him at a press conference? Instead, apart from some swipes at bloggers, the AP’s execs have refused to address the controversy. Thousands of American newspapers have run stories relying on the testimony of a man who does not appear to exist. And what all those stories have in common is that they paint post-Saddam Iraq as a disaster.
And the snowball just gathers up steam from there; check out the whole article.
Exactly: all 29,000 Sqare Feet of it! Shoot, I am just glad Edwards announced his candidacy in the backyard of that Katrina-ravaged low-income New Orleans home, where the common folk can feel some solidarity with this modern day Baron. I just hope he dusted off his shoes before he walked back into the "big house". Check out Steyn's laser-targeted wit about this wonderful case of cognitive dissonance at NRO's The Corner.
But the previous are just the hors d'ouvres; Steyn penned this gem for Western Standard, a Canadian magazine--he begins the piece:
In Tom Stoppard’s play Night And Day, the African dictator Mageeba explains his views on freedom of the press:
“Do you know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr. Wagner?”
“Not exactly, sir, no,” says the Fleet Street hack.
“I mean,” says Mageeba, “a free press which is edited by one of my relatives.”
Here in the citadels of western civilization, we have a slightly different problem: our relatively free press is a press edited by relativists.
Item: Six imams returning from a big conference of imams were removed from a plane at Minneapolis Airport after other passengers grew concerned about loud cries of “Allah akbar!”, the imams reseating themselves in the same configuration as the 9/11 hijackers and demanding seat-belt extenders, even though none was of sufficient girth to need them. Aside from Fox, America’s national media showed little interest in the story. But nor, oddly, did the local media. After complaints, the managing editor of The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Anders Gyllenhaal, replied to at least one reader: “I don’t think the paper dropped this story, but I do think it had run its course… I think this is one of those stories that runs for a couple of days, then subsides.”
Well, the reason he thinks this is one of those stories that runs for a couple of days is because he chose to run it only for a couple of days. Had it been something more consequential – like, say, fictitious stories about guards at Gitmo desecrating the Koran – he would have run it into the ground.
Item: The Associated Press reported that six Iraqis were burned alive in a mosque. Their source for the story was Iraqi police captain Jamil Hussein. The US military denies the incident took place. So does Iraq’s Ministry of the Interior, which says that there is no-one in the Iraqi police called “Jamil Hussein”. Which is odd, given that the Associated Press has quoted him dozens of times. Since they know him so well, why don’t they just produce him at a press conference? Instead, apart from some swipes at bloggers, the AP’s execs have refused to address the controversy. Thousands of American newspapers have run stories relying on the testimony of a man who does not appear to exist. And what all those stories have in common is that they paint post-Saddam Iraq as a disaster.
And the snowball just gathers up steam from there; check out the whole article.
Labels: Democrat, John Edwards, Mark Steyn, Media Bias, Media War
