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All the news that fits after crime and animal stories

Do you ever wonder why you see so many stories on local TV about crimes or wrecks and fires? In my small, local TV market the thing is drug busts. Interstate 10 runs through the city and county, and the local drug enforcement agents have had themselves quite  an operation for some time busting big semi trucks and SUVs and other cars they profile stop for various traffic offenses.

And animals. The local TV news directors have learned that animals pull at the heart strings. Ears perk up on animal abuse stories tons more than they do for a “misdemeanor” homicide. That isn’t to say I “heart” animal abuse. I still have a hard time looking at Mike Vick without some semblance of disgust.

The reason you see so much of the above is because it is easy, or” cheap ” as David Cay Johnson points out in this excellent piece in the journalism journal Nieman Reports. Your city council or school board or water district might be ripping you off because reporters are too busy chasing dog stories their editors sent them out on. You wouldn’t know you were getting reamed though because the reporter’s beat has given way to the easy and cheap.

If you want a real insight into what local news is really all about — and it’s not the conspiratorial, political clusterf**k that the far right has led you to believe — then check out this article.

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Right wing candidates behaving like drug cartel thugs

Some of the loudest squawking about illegal immigration is coming from the Right and specifically Tea Party types. Those same types are also using the drug cartel violence as a major reason for supporting moves such as mass deportation or imprisonments of illegal immigrants not to mention locking down the borders.

So perhaps it is ironic that some Tea Party candidates are using the same type of intimidation against reporters that has led to the deaths of more than 30 Mexican journalists in the past four years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalist. Nothing so extreme has come from the Right as killing reporters on el Norte side of the border, at least yet. But the recent roughing-up of an Alaska journalist who dared to ask Republican and Tea Party Senate Candidate Joe Miller a valid question at an event shows that the Right is not  above using violence to intimidate U.S. reporters.

Then you have the Republican and another Tea Partyier running for New York governor who threatened to “take out” a reporter. GOP candidate Carl Paladino became engaged in what was described as a near scuffle with a columnist who had been writing about his out-of-wedlock daughter.

What is even more shameful is the American public is letting this kind of behavior become the norm. Perhaps some in the public dislike the press or at least those who don’t report subjects slanted in their favor like the GOP state-run TV channel Fox News. Will this country have to resort to protection details for reporters like in Mexico? I can’t see U.S. journalists allowing that to happen because they rightfully don’t want to be subsidized by the government.

Yet, until some Americans start complaining about the behavior of these thug politicians and their entourages, we will tread more and more down the path being traveled by those journalists down South of the border. And where those reporters are increasingly ending up is not at all a pleasant destination.

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Confession is good for the soul, mind and perhaps a good laugh

A writer who is his own editor has a fool for an editor. That is a play, of course, off the old saying a man who is his own lawyer has for his client. That being said, some writers find themselves sometimes stuck with an someone who is both an editor and a fool. Nevertheless, someone who writes can always use an extra pair of eyes and a brain provided those eyes and brain are encased inside a being that is neither a fool, nor a lawyer. That is just a joke. I’ve found attorneys who were much more useful at times than an editor, especially if one is writing about something that could potentially lead to litigation.

I think I lost my point, but that is really okay because the aforementioned will be published shortly without the assistance of an editor. I can only hope that once I do self-editing, which often is done more than once after one of my blog posts are posted, that nothing I have written comes across like that now famous post by blogger Amanda Hess.

The fame Hess now possesses is actually more because of a correction that what she wrote on a blog recently:

“This blog post originally stated that one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive. In fact, the statistic applies to black men who have sex with men. Also, the photo caption incorrectly attributed Bayard Rustin’s photo to “Wikipedia Commons.” The correct title is “Wikimedia Commons.”

Hess was trying to make a serious point but, holy smokes Bullwinkle!

As  mind-blowing as the correction may be, you have to hand it to Hess for getting her post right even though it has now in post-Twitter-dom been labeled as the “correction heard around the world.” Hess apparently has editing at times although this was not one of those, thankfully. Just think about being an editor who let that little gem slip by!

Not everything that is published on this blog is 100 percent absolutely correct just as not every utterance from every person’s lips is not 100 percent correct. I speak of those matters both factual and mechanical. I sometimes apologize for “editing on the air” or editing after my blog has been published. That happens several times quite frequently after writing something. I understand the impression that mistakes leave, but like Amanda Hess, those mistakes are  human. I have even made mistakes writing while actually concentrating on a word or concept. But as my hero Forrest Gump once said: “It happens.”

Much is to be learned from the Amanda Hess correction though I think the moral of the story is yet to be written. So far be it from me to write it. Adios! If something needs correcting, well, I will probably correct it.

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Here is for change, or at least a stack of Benjamins

The Christian Science Monitor has a very good story I would suggest anyone who wants a real gut check on politics should read. The article is about the race between Democrat Andrew Cuomo — of the New York Cuomo’s — and Republican nut job Carl Paladino. Then you probably need to read the related story about just who this Carl Paladino is and why his campaign mail literally stinks. Now my recommendation isn’t because I give two hoots about the New York governor’s race. Albany is a nice town. I went there once, but I don’t think I want to live there.

Instead, the article looks at how the disillusioned voters in the country are grasping at straws for someone different, someone who will shake things up. I understand that but you have people like Carl Paladino, a rich real estate developer who is trying to buy a governorship, and whose solution to the “Ground Zero mosque controversy” is to take over the property by eminent domain. Who does that remind you of? The Ballpark in Arlington? Iraq? Torture? Spying on American citizens? You guessed it, Gee Dubya Bush.

Christine O’Donnell, running for the U.S. Senate seat on the GOP ticket in Delaware, is at least giving us some red-faced chuckles a minute. Witchcraft? Masturbation? Jeez, her campaign needs to come with an “R” rating.

The crux of the biscuit is that people do want genuine change. They elect whomever is different, or at least who they think is different. But then the person they elect turns out to be the same old crook  or the same old hack doing the bidding for his or her special interest. It’s all the same Brothers and Sisters. Why I didn’t even know our “illustrious” Congressman Judge Ted Poe has a Libertarian opponent. But he does, David Smith, who is described by political guide Politics1.com as a “software developer and Tea Party activist.” I am not a Ted Poe fan. I think he spends too much time railing on whatever is the right-wing cause of the day, mainly those danged Mexicans, when he could be helping his district. So a Libertarian doesn’t sound all that bad. Smith even has some great ideas, more Utopian than reality, when it comes to veterans health care. How he proposes to pay for these great ideas make no sense whatsoever. Plus, there is the Tea Party thing. Man, let me tell you when you have someone to the right of Ted Poe running against him, it is like Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I know you want change. I want change. Actually, I’ll take big bills even. Hundreds if you got ’em. I had no illusions Obama was going to bring any major change to the office of president and politics in Washington. I was right. But at least we don’t have President John McCain, or God Forbid, President Sarah Palin. Just don’t be fooled when your Tea Party stamp-of-approval candidate gets elected and gets caught with his or her hand in the cookie jar or with his foot in the adjacent men’s room stall. The more things change in Washington, the more they remain things.

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Fox and the high-tech lynching of Shirley Sherrod

It seems that a travesty of the size of the latest so-called “viral video” could not have happened. A heavily edited video of a speech that made Shirley Sherrod, a black U.S. Agriculture official in Georgia, look as if she had purposely discriminated against a white farmer. This got her fired by Obama administration officials who are racially sensitive. Sherrod was instantly made a pariah by Fox News, who ran with the story either before they knew the entire contents of the video or purposely jumped on the story because they seem constantly on the look out for high profile blacks who can embarrass Obama.

Here is how that warm ray of Fox sunshine Bill O’Reilly played the story:

O’REILLY: Well, that is simply unacceptable and Ms. Sherrod must resign immediately. The federal government cannot have skin color deciding any assistance.

This was on Tuesday, a full 24 hours after the story initially aired on Fox. Bull O’Really insisted that since some sanity — albeit limited — existed on other news outlets and the story was slow to surface elsewhere than Fox, the liberal media was obviously afraid to hurt Obama. This after the so-called “mainstream media” was slow to jump on other stories involving blacks with alleged ties to Obama such as those in ACORN and the New Black Panthers.

O’REILLY: In the big picture scheme, this is a small story. Every administration in history has had employees do dumb things. Ms. Sherrod made a mistake and is paying for it.

But what about the American media? Why the news blackout when things become unpleasant for the Obama administration?

The simple answer is bias. The establishment press tilts left and is reluctant to do damage to a very liberal president. I think that is absolutely true. There is no other reason to spike stories that bring millions of viewers to the Fox News Channel.

You’d think the other TV news operations would want to attract that large audience as well. Apparently, they don’t.

Well, Bull O’Really you’d think those operations would also want to get the story right, but all didn’t. Now it turns out that the story as reported by Fox was maddeningly wrong. And now Fox is all looking like their complicity didn’t exist.

I can’t give the great synopsis of all that is wrong with the Shirley Sherrod story that is examined by St. Petersburg Times media critic Eric Deggans. A wonderful read.