It seems like only yesterday Newsweek was sold to the highest bidder for $1.00. Of course a sweetheart deal like that had to have a catch, in this case the buyer’s assumption of the liabilities on Newsweek’s balance sheet. In 2009 alone, Newsweek lost $30 million, most likely due to “journalistic” efforts like this one:

Obama’s critics have gone from being racists to being just plain reckless. They see us as a gang of hayseed, Bible-thumping hicks clinging to their guns and religion while the most brilliant man ever to occupy the White House proceeds to turn America into a European-style democratic socialist state. Sullivan believes Obama is so smart he may just outfox everyone:

The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he’s a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the president may just end up outsmarting them all.

For those who are unfamiliar with Andrew Sullivan, he is the Editor of The Daily Beast and contributor to Newsweek. He is most recently notorious for being a Trig-Truther and the class-act that spun-off a piece about Sarah Palin’s presidential campaign negatives using Steve Job’s death:

I know which one will get the bigger headlines tomorrow. And there is some comfort in knowing it will pain her.

Sullivan’s list of journalistic indiscretions and mind-numbing bloviating is so long and undistinguished that even just publishing the headlines causes irreversible loss of gray matter. I, your humble corespondent, have saved you from that fate.

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The Daily Beast posted an article recently titled, “20 Most Useless College Majors.” The journalists who wrote the story concluded that a B.A. in journalism is the most useless degree of all.

According to the report, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics was reviewed to come up with the list, including starting- and mid-career salary levels, the expected change in the total number of jobs from 2008 to 2018 and the expected percentage change in available jobs from 2008 to 2018.

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Peter Beinart, who writes for the Daily Beast, is clueless. I say this because I don’t quite understand how he sees the Middle East. He takes various conservative pundits to task for selectively pushing Democracy. He brings examples of where it seems, at first blush, the US even went so far as to attempt to thwart burgeoning democracies by agitating for coups. He does this while praising Barack Obama for helping push Mubarak out, urging fundamental political reform, etc. etc.

Now, I don’t know which Obama he’s been watching, but I only recall an Obama who’s been flailing about helplessly when it came to Egypt and unwilling to support pro-Democracy groups in Iran.

My main issue comes with the meat of Beinart’s claims about conservative foreign policy as respect to democratic idealism. He takes the Bush administration to task for supporting coup attempts against all regimes Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Hamas in Gaza. Of course, he claims that both were democratically elected; which is true. Of course they’ve both turned into serial human rights abusing regimes where any pretense of democracy has been swept under the carpet, but hey, it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?

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From Politico:

On the eve of Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast’s turning two years old, Brown took to the site’s pages Tuesday to announce some big news: Howard Kurtz is joining the Beast as Washington bureau chief.

Funny, Kurtz was on Imus yesterday morning and, unless we missed it, didn’t breathe a word about it. In fact, he said this:

Kurtz’s other employer, The Washington Post, is still publishing everyday, but, like the rest of the newspaper world, is struggling to stay current amidst technological advances. Many veteran print reporters are jumping ship to online outlets like the Huffington Post.

“I’m old-fashioned enough to think that newspapers, particularly the best ones, will continue in some form,” Kurtz said. “I like turning the pages. I know young people think that sounds like something out of the stone age.”

Maybe he didn’t really mean it.  Or maybe he got tired of living in the Stone Age. Wonder when he’ll be invited back on the show.

Press release follows: (more…)

Most of the time media bias is difficult to prove. Whatever the story might be, it’s not often possible to prove how the same material would have been handled if the party labels had been reversed. So the claim can often be made “we’d have done the same thing if it were a Democrat.”

But every once in a while events in the real world provide us a rare opportunity to make a direct comparison between how Republicans and Democrats are treated under very similar sets of circumstances. One of those rare opportunities happened over the last month and provides us with a textbook case of media bias.

In August of this year, Sarah Palin was scheduled to make an appearance in Florida. On August 17, the Florida Times-Union ran the following bit of news:

Slow ticket sales have bumped Sarah Palin’s appearance next week in Jacksonville to a smaller venue. “An Evening of Hope with Sarah Palin” was moved from the 2,936-seat Moran Theatre to the 609-seat Terry Theatre. Both theaters are part of the Times-Union Center for the Performing Arts.

This relatively minor local story was picked up by MSNBC and the Guardian the following day. A day after that, the AP did its own version which appeared on the website of the local NBC affiliate and the local Fox affiliate in Jacksonville but also on the website of the Boston Herald. No word on why this would matter to readers in Boston. (more…)

Next we’ll hear that James O’Keefe attended a dinner party honoring Apartheid South Africa’s former president, P. W. Botha. If so, and the accusation verified, O’Keefe’s “insensitivity” to human (and civil) rights would barely register against that of Max Blumenthal’s boss at The Daily Beast, Tina Brown.

I’ll report. Y’all decide:

“N**ger!” taunted my jailers between tortures,” reported the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner about his suffering. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!”  laughed my torturers. For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell. That’s four feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.

I do not refer to Nelson Mandela. No, the prisoner was a black Cuban named Eusebio Peñalver, whose incarceration and torture at the hands of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s Stalinist regime stretched to 29 years, surpassing Nelson Mandela’s record in time behind bars and probably doubling the horrors suffered by Mandela during this period.

“The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and booze, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent,” wrote Ernesto “Che” Guevara in his diaries.  When during a 1959 press conference a Cuban black asked Guevara, “what his Revolution would do for blacks?” Che sneered: “we’ll do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the Cuban revolution. By which I mean: nothing!” (more…)

Sure, it’s a silly question.  Still, it’s nice to see the lapdogs of the Democrat-Media Complex finally ‘fess up to an act of malfeasant journalistic cheerleading on a scale never before seen in this country.  From Newsbusters:

Two prominent journalists appeared on Friday’s Good Morning America and casually admitted that Barack Obama has received glowing coverage from the press. Former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown announced, “No, [Obama] got the best press known to man. Let’s face it.”

Howard Kurtz, host of Reliable Sources on CNN and a Washington Post columnist, corrected, “in the history of civilization.” The liberal Brown quickly agreed, “In the history of civilization, incredible.”

Well?  Did he?