Maybe FDL could have some sort of meet the press type of segment. Maybe it’s too much to deal with.

BTW, Jane, you rock my world. I thank you with heart, enthusiasm and heart-shape pupils. And your whole team for that matter. Y’all are totally significant. During the Libby trial you guys smoked the MSM for coverage. MSM not even close to the same league. Good work!

With respect and kindness and heart-shape eyes,
Mike

Russer a Journalist?

How about a fluffer for Jack Welch?

-GSD

AMEN. Finally someone is speaking truth to power. Russert and Matthews take their marching orders from Jack Welch. Russert is the biggest no-talent-shit-for-brains on all of network TV. And while I’m at it, NBC is so disappointing and lame that they would hire a Tim Russert. Welch must carry a big stick.

The Daily Howler did a great piece on Russert and Tweety Matthews and David Gregory about a week or so ago. The Howler, like Jane, get the big picture. What is saddening me is Chris Cillizza falling to his knees to pay homage. So sad. He had such promise.

Russert joined NBC News in 1984. In April 1985, he supervised the live broadcasts of the Today program from Rome, negotiating and arranging an appearance by Pope John Paul II, a first for American television.

The Pope Controls Tim Russert?

Does Russert speak Italian?

If you buy into the establishment credential mode then Russert does not fit there either with a very weak law school degree, Cleveland Marshall or something, no real legal experience. Russert like George Tenet is just another mediocre ex senate staff guy on a personal mission of personal advancement. But the guy is flat out not interesting and sits perched on licensed spectrum for those who pay attention to msm, which seems to be this website.

Russert joined NBC News in 1984. In April 1985, he supervised the live broadcasts of the Today program from Rome, negotiating and arranging an appearance by Pope John Paul II, a first for American television.

The Pope Controls Tim Russert?

The Oracle @ 83

“Meet The Press” should be renamed:

MEET THE REPUBLICAN SOCK PUPPET ! ! !

I think these two birds stayed on song. The consensus here seems to be that Timmeh isn’t the absolute worst Sunday Talking Head – the competition for that is too fierce – or even the worst in the MSNBC studios – Tweety owns the network franchise. And besides, MTP has a long & intermittently honorable history & – above all – NAME RECOGNITION. The sole problem appears to be with the third word in the title “Meet the Press”, to which the primary objection appears to be that it offends federal false-packaging laws – fair comment at worst but more likely too true.

Big Russ his own self might appreciate the obvious compromise – cut the show’s name to the acronym & leave the rest to the blogosphere. And since Timmeh has reached Shrubdian status in offending large contingencies all along the political continuum then perhaps a jolly good blogotilt would be fun for all!

The two above should be granted FIFO status. I’ll try now to keep the rockhead rolling:

Meet The Pope. [Thx, #26]
Meet The Puppet. [Thx, #83]
Meet The Patina.
Meet The Pseudo.
Meet Tim Please.
Make Tim Pay. [or]
Make Tim Plenty.

& my personal favorite:

Meet The Phacsimile.

Gotta be easy to top that one, folks.

Rayne @ 219

Your point about the corporatist scum whose exploitation of the airwaves as exemplified by this assclown is getting to what I’d like to see more of.

While what is happening in Congress now is important even more important is the fight to come where we re-institute ‘fair use’ and put the likes of PH and ‘Pills’ Limbaugh out of business.

We must never just be ‘viewers’ we must be pushing and kicking and busting up those who have stolen the radio and TV spectrum for their propaganda.

Media must be fair and balanced in fact not just as a caption on a TV screen. We must elect legislators who see that the media must be an accurate source of information for the people.

And who are willing to pass laws to make it so.

I’m not gonna be asking GE or any other corporation to play fair I’m gonna work to make so that if they don’t….

They get to go to jail.

Big talk you might say….

I say this: If we don’t purge our media space of the lies and bad information which poisons it now that poison will kill our society.

It’s that clear cut, as the widespread belief that Saddam was behind 9/11 which made The MeatGrinder a reality so clearly shows….

Bad information is not merely aggravating…

It kills.

I’m sure everyone here already knows this. I’m just sick and tired of reading about rotten scum like PH and want to see a more proactive agenda designed to combat his lies.

To, as we have started to do to the Republicans….

Drive him into the sea!

Thanks for your fightin’ words! The news media in the country are as dirty and criminal as the Bush Junta that they shill for. But I disagree on two points, more on strategic grounds than content…

“If we don’t purge our media space of the lies and bad information which poisons it now that poison will kill our society.”

“It’s that clear cut, as the widespread belief that Saddam was behind 9/11 which made The MeatGrinder a reality so clearly shows….// Bad information is not merely aggravating…//It kills.”

It’s not so much bad information that can kill our society, as the deliberate disempowerment of our people, and the non-transparent, Bushite-controlled secret vote counting–that is, blunting or destroying the peoples’ power to change things, including their power and right to broaden the spectrum of political discussion (which is now so absurdly and artificially narrow).

The “Fairness Doctrine” would not exclude fascist opinion. It would just shove it over to the rightwing end of the spectrum, fairly balanced by all other opinion, across the spectrum to the far left.

Although I wouldn’t mind never hearing another winger again, or what passes for a liberal inside the Beltway. We wouldn’t have to ban them, though. In a truly competititve “marketplace of ideas,” their talentless, weirdo fascist, or corporate shill, asses would be gone.

Re: 50% of Americans at one point believed that Saddam had WMDS and/or had something to with 9/11. Just want to point out that, at the same time that 50% had this disinformation rattling around in their heads, 56% opposed the invasion of Iraq. Feb. ‘03. This means that some significant portion of our people, who believed these things, didn’t believe that the threat was that great, or justified war–that is, they didn’t trust Bush, and were trying to think for themselves and decide what the best policy was.

This is a very important comparative stat. 56% is a lot–it would be a landslide in a presidential election (and, believe me, it was), and it had to have included some Republicans and Bush supporters. I have anecdotal experience of the views of some Republicans during that period, and my experience corroborates the stat. These Repubs thought the war was wrong and they furthermore said that “Bush is nuts!” (their words).

The problem is not so much that the corporate news media were lying and disinforming people and cheerleading for war. The problem was that that 56% of the people who opposed the war couldn’t get their will enforced, couldn’t get a hearing, and couldn’t slow the process down, for common sense to prevail. IF ONLY Congress had not given away their war power, and had required Bush to come back to them, with UN and major allies support, for a declaration of war, this tragic war would never have occurred.

We now know, though, that the “Help America Vote for Bush Act” (fast-tracking of “trade secret” vote counting by Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit/recount contorls) was passed in same month as the Iraq War Resolution, and is closely related to it. All the powers-that-be knew that the Iraq War was an impossible sell–especially with the Vietnam War in living memory. (They are so similar!). So they had to rush it through, with no time for thought, and no time for the UN weapons inspectors report, and no time for good vetting of the intel–and then they had to manufacture a phony endorsement of it in the 2004 election. The horror went forward (100,000 Iraqis slaughtered in the intial bombing alone, according to the British doctors’ report). Then the Abu Ghraib torture photos came out. (63% of the American people oppose torture “under any circumstances”–May ‘04). That is probably why Ohio was necessary (massive highly noticeable suppression of black and other Dem voters).

Something else that happened in spring ‘04: Calif’s Sec of State Kevin Shelley began looking into Diebold, sued them, decertified their touchscreens and demanded to see their source code. May ‘04. He was later “swift-boated” out of office on entirely bogus corruption charges. Shelley was a national leader on honest vote counting and protecting the vote. Other Secs of State were following his lead, starting to investigate this technology. He had to go. (I think it was a Rove operation, personally.)

Anyway, I just wanted to point out the American peoples’ remarkable resistance to Bush war propaganda. (It’s now up to 75%!) But the thing that can really poison and destroy us is the peoples’s continued powerlessness and disenfranchisement–and their mystification at why they vote and nothing changes. It’s very demoralizing. And we must work hard against their giving up–becoming so depressed that they explode with rage (which is easy for the fascists to suppress), or just become listless and cease to care. We CAN change things, but we must focus on our power–our right to vote–and strategies to restore it.

The fascist Bushites (and their Democratic colluders) don’t want power to be free. They want it to be costly, so they can buy it. They resent and despise the American people and our notions of equality. They also hate everything that is PUBLIC and that represents the common good. We need to expand that sphere–the common good–beginning with restoring PUBLIC vote counting.

Not qualified!?

“Russert “has received forty-three honorary doctorate degrees from American colleges and universities”

About Timmeh

OK. I took the link but it didn’t really say anything about Russert digging out and reporting news. It sounded as though he was more or less management from the start.

Managing TV assets doesn’t really seem to be actual journalism.

Maybe there’s a new paradigm that I’ve missed. I am fairly old. That’s probably it.

News corporations should not be allowed to exert the partisan views of their ownership upon the journalists working for them. The owners should, in fact, be very much “off hands” in regards to everything related to the actual journalism (this includes influence via the managing editor or whatever other person is the liaison between ownership and the press itself). The Fairness Doctrine desperately needs to be reenacted.

Corporations (and, really, lobbying in general) should have no influence whatsoever on our politicians’ decisions, or their chances at winning. Corporations should NOT have an equal say as a citizen in government. The individuals in the corporation already have their say, after all (why doesn’t anyone bring this up, anyhow?). I dare say that one citizen should be worth more, politically, than every corporation combined. Take the money out of politics, or The Great Experiment will prove to be a failure.

Without something akin to the Fairness Doctrine, Rome will fall again.

So long as money is a vote in politics, Rome will fall again.

I’m going to nitpick this one from #55:

Just as the “sticky” aspect of the LaBrea tarpits was not a virtue sought by the dinosaurs trapped there.

The tarpits (’La Brea’ means approximately the same thing) are way too recent for dinos. They find mammoths, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, other stuff. (High percentage of carnivores, trapped while scavenging. Lots of animals missing stuff only on one side, because the other was in the tar and inaccessible.)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4459759/

How can you say the guy is not qualified? You can certainly accuse him of being out of touch and being “inside the bubble”, but you can’t say he’s unqualified.

Please don’t be as nutty as the blogs on the right.