Category: media and media people

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media and media people

The Independents Streak

I learned something the other night, on the new Fox Business show The Independents: Mr. John Stossel’s eponymous show is the highest-​rated show on that same network.

It’s no shock. It’s my favorite show, there, too. And I know folks who have even upped their cable or satellite packages solely to view Stossel every week.

Call it a comfort, call it a relief, call it whatever, but it’s nice to know that one’s own political and rhetorical tastes are shared by a growing number of others.

One thing to like about Stossel is also a reason to like The Independents. The hostess, saucy Kennedy (of MTV fame), and her cadre of commentators, Matt Welch and Kmele Foster, aim to keep the debate civil. They said as much. And followed through. No yelling; a minimum of over-​talk. Apparently the format of the show is to invite two guest commentators every episode (one from “the left” and one from “the right”), and on the debut episode we watched Fox contributors Basil Smikle and Jedediah Bila … the latter ostensibly a conservative, but who sounded just as libertarian as the show’s core committee.

Fox’s increasing independent-​minded viewership — and, like the show’s creators, I’m using “independent” partly as a code word for “libertarian” — is being rewarded with more fare to their tastes.

Modern society needs an independent streak. We gain; Fox gains.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people too much government

Got Ads?

First the hush-​hush secrecy; then the lies. Now something even … worse?

President Barack Obama doesn’t think the American people can handle the truth. Neither do several progressive non-​profit groups in Colorado that have produced a plethora of cringe-​worthy ads promoting Obamacare.

One print ad, “Let’s Get Physical,” pictures a young women giving a thumbs up sign and showing off her birth control pills standing next to a scruffy-​faced man-​boy, with the text: “OMG, he’s hot! Let’s hope he’s as easy to get as this birth control. My health insurance covers the pill, which means all I have to worry about is getting him between the covers.* I got insurance.”

No worries, eh? The asterisk informs readers that, “The pill doesn’t protect you from STDs.”

Another advertisement, “Brosurance,” reaches out to young … drunkards. “Keg stands are crazy,” we’re informed. “Not having health insurance is crazier.” It continues: “Don’t tap into your beer money to cover those medical bills. We got it covered.”

Gee, thanks. In fact, both print ads end with the “thanks obamacare!” slogan.

So, can floundering Obamacare be saved by harnessing the awesome power of sex appeal and inebriation and huge dollops of kitsch and irony? Only if young people are as vacuous as these ads insinuate.

“Younger Americans may indeed be reckless enough to do keg stands and have unprotected sex on a regular basis,” Nick Gillespie wrote in Time, “but they’re not so dumb as the ‘Got Insurance?’ ads — or the architects of Obamacare — seem to think.”

Because, as Gillespie and others point out, Obamacare overcharges young people to supposedly lower costs for others. Let’s get real, bro.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people

Too Much Truth

Both what to report and when to report it can be legitimately debated in an editorial room. But not whether to accept demands to conceal “unflattering” truth for the sake of being allowed to report at all.

That’s the “dilemma” some news organizations face when they wish to report from within a country whose government will deny access unless they toe the line.

The reportage by longtime Reuters journalist Paul Mooney, who specializes in China, has apparently been too candid. The Chinese government has denied him a visa. His career there may be over. What should Reuters do?

Not what Bloomberg News did when its reporting incurred the displeasure of Chinese officials. Bloomberg spiked an investigative report about the financial ties between billionaire businessmen and Politiburo officials, for fear of being ejected from the country. Bloomberg insists that it has merely delayed the story. But the motive is clearly a desire to appease the Chinese government, which has already blocked the Bloomberg News website inside China and refused new visas to Bloomberg journalists.

Instead of killing or deferring disapproved journalism, any news outfit threatened with expulsion by an authoritarian government should publish its honest reports and let the chips fall where they may. If kicked out, it should seek other ways to report on the country. Covert communiqués from careful Chinese citizens. Secondary sources if necessary. That’s better than actively cooperating with wrongdoers to hide their sins.

It’s really not too different from crime reporting. Crime bosses don’t like a nosy press, either.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people national politics & policies too much government

The End — er, ACA — Is Near

First, NBC’s Nightly News anchor Brian Williams reported that the “website for the president’s new health care law is back up tonight after yet another technical problem over the weekend that prevented people from signing up for health insurance … yet again.” Then he went on, bemoaning, “For many middle-​class Americans who buy their own health insurance, there could be another frustration and that is ‘sticker shock’ — after some learned they must buy new policies that cover more, but cost more as well.”

Couldn’t be. In pushing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Barack Obama had promised, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

And presumably “afford” your plan, too. (Well, there are good old-​fashioned government subsidies!)

Williams then turned to correspondent Peter Alexander, who announced that the absolute catastrophe of the healthcare​.gov website “is masking what is the real issue here, how much these plans will actually cost.”

At Forbes weeks ago, the headline to Avik Roy’s column suggested a connection: “Obamacare’s Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn’t Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are.”

A website that crashes to hide the cost of insurance the law demands you purchase seems far-​fetched. Next they’ll claim the Administration somehow knew so many folks would lose their insurance policies.

Er, well, “That millions will lose or have to change their individual policies is not a surprise to the administration” noted Alexander.

Say, what?

NBC News found “buried in the 2010 Obamacare regulations language predicting that ‘A reasonable range for the percentage of individual policies that would terminate … is 40 percent to 67 percent.’”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people national politics & policies

Wacky Ways to MSNBC the World

Alex Wagner of MSNBC’s “Now with Alex Wagner” fame decided her fellow network hosts had fecklessly failed to exhaust the world’s reservoir of inane 30-​second political pronouncements. So, her vignette informs us:

Minimum wage was mentioned in the State of the Union earlier this year and then it wasn’t brought back up again. This should be something we think about and talk about every single week. This is one of those building-​block issues that should supersede almost anything else we have. Economic security is foundational to American success.

Where to start?

Perhaps, by wondering if any serious person really thinks the minimum wage is an issue so paramount in the economy that it “should supersede almost anything else we have.”

Er, “we have”? Who’s editing scripts over there?

But let’s cut to the chase: Ms. Wagner is arguing that “economic security” not only comes before “American success,” but is “foundational” to that success.

Hmmmm?

According to the great Wikipedia in cyberspace, “economic security” is “the condition of having stable income or other resources to support a standard of living now and in the foreseeable future.” So, does Wagner really mean to suggest that before Americans were able to achieve success, wealth, we already had guaranteed to us plenty of steady income to finance a fine and dandy standard of living for as far off into the future as we could foresee?

Americans worked hard for this wealth; it wasn’t legislated.

Economic “success” creates economic security, not the other way around.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people too much government

Detroit Ironies

Detroit, Michigan, is a failed city. In recognition of this, its government went to court yesterday to beg for bankruptcy status, and the protection that implies — mainly, the legal ability to force the re-​prioritization of its $18 billion debt:

In his opening statement, attorney Bruce Bennett said he “could stand here for hours” to describe the “mountain of evidence” that shows Detroit is insolvent. Without relief, he added, 65 cents of every dollar … residents pay in taxes could be needed to address the problem, leaving little for everyday services for 700,000 residents.

There’s hardly anything hopeful about this story.

Recently, libertarians have noted that the people of the city have begun to band together, solving voluntarily and through community and market activity the deficit in services coming from city government. Fine, fine, but enough for a solution?

Still, for real drollery, consider the witless comment by MSNBC’s most witless socialist, Melissa Harris-​Perry, that Detroit’s troubles are the result of what happens when government becomes “small enough to drown in a bathtub” (a witticism of my friend Grover Norquist). Hilarious, in that Detroit’s corrupt and spendthrift pols are anything but libertarian, and Detroit government anything but small.

The fact that Detroit can no longer competently enforce some of its own laws only shows the ultimate result of the policy of over-governance.

Despite what socialists and (perhaps) some libertarians may say, liberty is not “no government.” It’s the right amount of good government, defending rights and property from vandals, con men, thieves.

In Detroit, the vandals have been the government.

And a bankruptcy ruling would simply confirm that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.