Media — Blog — Of Liberal Intent

WHO NEEDS FOX NEWS?

Tuesday night, like most Tuesday nights, I settled in to watch election returns. To my horror, there were no election returns. Not, mind you, that I really expected the whole nine yards, with pundits pontificating, or boffins with their sleeves rolled up yelling about what the early returns from Door County told us about the Catholic vote, but I did at least expect that, even in this all-coronavirus all-the-time news cycle, there would at least be the reassuring little box up in the corner showing the percentages, Nope. Not even anything in the little cavalcade of minutiae which crawls along the bottom of the screen. Well, this morning after much too much prowling around news sites, I discovered that all of this was, at least nominally, because there weren’t going to be any returns for a week or so. Clearly, it’s already become tres gauche to care about who is the president of the United States, though perhaps we have another month or so before giving a damn will become an actual crime.

Media, PoliticsBigly CovfefeApril 8, 2020Politics, television, CNN, MSNBC, Trump

(PROPOSED) TALKING POINTS FOR (PUTATIVE) PUNDITS

I’ve been feeling a bit peeved lately. It seems the pundits and political analysts are not reading my column! And they keep repeating the exact same things over and over, the things they’ve been saying for two years now. If they would read my blog, and understand it, they might not be getting things so wrong.

Media, Politics6 for 2October 25, 2018politics, Hillary, Trump, media

IT’S THAT WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR

I love election night. I’ve loved it since 1962, when I sat mystified as the voters had their say on something called the Stanley Plan, which was going to redraw our legislature to comply with the Supremes’ command that state legislatures conform to one man (as would then have been said), one vote.

Politics, MediaBigly CovfefeOctober 24, 2018election returns, election 2018, election night

THE DOVISH WING OF THE WAR ON TRUMP

About that time, I found myself wondering whether these street protests were going to become a regular feature of the Stable Genius’ tenure in office, as with the Vietnam and civil rights era protests; extended campaigns such as these require a considerable attention span and public stamina, qualities which meseems are difficult to find huge quantities of in America today.

Politics, MediaBigly CovfefeApril 9, 2018politics, media

WHERE DO I SIGN UP?

Since this isn’t my first post about obituaries, I suppose it would be fair to say that they’re an interest. Just don’t call them an obsession. I even had a job back in the day which privileged me to give them a scan every week or two just to keep my part of the assembly line moving.

Media, SocietyBigly CovfefeJanuary 24, 2018Facebook, obituaries

YO DUDE, IT’S THE MAN OF THE YEAR!

Back in the day, there was this national institution known as Time, a magazine which was of common occurrence in homes and waiting rooms across the land. Today, not so much, though it has managed, to its credit, to remain in continuous publication even as paper publishing, especially of magazines, has become fraught with peril. Back in 1927, when I was still pretty young, the magazine’s founder decided to recognize the Man of the Year, perhaps more as an excuse to put national hero Lucky Lindy on the cover yet again than from any thought that the public would be still interested in quibbling about the suitability of the selection each and every year.

MediaBigly CovfefeDecember 15, 2017media

LEST WE FORGET

Did you hear that Charlie Manson died the other night? If you did, it was no thanks to any news I saw the night that it happened or, for that matter, the night after it happened, and I watched a lot of news those nights, owing to my custom of switching to a news channel during the many commercials which festoon the evening’s football game. Pick your ideology—Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC, and you can even throw in C-SPAN, and…Nada, Zilch, Commandante Zero. He didn’t even make that cavalcade of trivia that scrolls along the bottom of the screen. Susan Collins, Al Franken, John McCain, Charlie Rose. Angela Merkel, Robert Mugabe, Vlad Putin, a merger between two cable outfits, even the death of fifties singer and latter-day ham actress Della Reese-- they were all there, but not the man who at one time was arguably the most recognized man in America. All of this news is very important and interesting (well, maybe except for the cable TV merger), but does it really have to shove an uber-important death out of our minds?

Media, SocietyBigly CovfefeNovember 24, 2017Charlie Manson, Robin Williams, celebrity death, media, news

LOOK, POPPA, JUNIOR’S A PUNDIT!

Last week my inner political junkie kicked in, and I decided to watch some late-night C-SPAN. What they offered me was watching a young lady with the same unusual surname as a well-known ABC financial reporter holding forth on the administration’s regulatory policies. I had just finished reading a magazine column by a man with the same unusual surname as an even better-known CNN anchorman. My apologies to all concerned if I jumped to an incorrect conclusion, but it occurred to me that these might be relatives, perhaps even children, of their entrenched media celebrity sires. That’s called nepotism, and it’s still nepotism even if you’re the finest political analyst of your generation.

Politics, MediaBigly CovfefeOctober 26, 2017political commentators, nepotism, covfefe