Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, has died at the age of 89. Happily he lived to see the end of the Soviet regime that his books excoriated. Dry stuff, for those who haven’t read him, but his books revealed horrors that, by the end of Gulag, became completely banal as a result of…
Category: Media
The Value of Media Neutrality
The news that an AP reporter traveled in company with Taliban terrorists and filmed the execution of two Afghan women indicates that it can. Many people are pretty upset about the AP reporter’s role in the murderous event and not without some justification. Journalists are supposed to tell the story without bias or agenda. Or…
Proper Crime Reporting
The city of College Station, Texas knows how to properly report a crime – with a full description of the event and the suspect: On July 09, 2008 at approximately 1654 hours, Officers from the College Station Police Department were dispatched to the intersection of the Highway 6 and William D Fitch for an aggravated…
Blogging Exposed
Emily Gould’s piece about blogging for Gawker last year is a love-lorn letter to the business of blogging and what it can put a person through. A bit fluffy, but personal, entertaining, and worth a read. I particularly liked this bit: "you know, you really shouldn’t read the comments." Good advice – unless you like…
Super-duper Delegate Scooper
Another day, another story about why Democratic superdelegates haven’t stepped into the Democratic primary battle like a referee, waived a battered Hillary Clinton to her corner on a TKO, and called the fight for Barack Obama. Here’s the best reason why not: American voters want to decide this spectacle – the most interesting and perhaps…
Marilyn’s Past Resurfaces
Some celebrities fame is so great that they only require one name to identify them and Marilyn Monroe is surely one of them. I first became a fan of hers in the late 1970s after seeing this picture in Parade magazine. Pretty hot stuff for a 12-year-old from Nowheresville, Indiana! Marilyn’s been dead for over…
Chilling Effect in Canada
Kathy Shaidle reports that she and other bloggers are being sued by Richard Warman, a former member of Canada’s Human Rights Commission and frivolous lawsuit filer extraordinaire: Canada’s busiest litigant, serial "human rights" complainant and — the guy Mark Steyn has called "Canada’s most sensitive man" — Richard Warman is now suing his most vocal…
Phil Gramm a Terrorist?
That’s what Shaun Mullen of the Moderate Voice says. His justification? Gramm, the former Senator from Texas, played in instrumental role in dismantling decades-old banking regulations during the Clinton administration. Terrorist. We’d better lock Gramm up as a matter of national security. Imagine the gall, doing away with obsolete rules from a by-gone era. Evidently…
"So you want attention, eh?"
Kids these days – it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Turns out the 11-year-old boy who reported an abduction attempt in Houston earlier this week was making it all up. "He admitted that he had been missing his mother who was at work a lot and and made up the story…
Dangers of Politically Correct Reporting
My favorite writer at The Moderate Voice is Polimom and it’s good to see that she’s back and blogging again! Today she writes that the Houston Chronicle’s policy of using "racial or ethnic identification only when it is clearly pertinent" went too far by failing to include important information about the at-large suspect: On the…