Media: September 2007 Archives

L.A. Times columnist Rosa Brooks has an odd take on the Columbia-Ahmadinejad story:

Ahmadinejad was playing to global public opinion, and though he lost some PR points for incoherence and general bizarreness of message ("In Iran, we don't have homosexuals"), he gained some for coming off as a bit more mature than his prissy, infantile host. ("In Iran, when you invite a guest, you respect them," Ahmadinejad observed dryly.)

Bollinger, meanwhile, was playing to a different audience. After taking a beating for giving Ahmadinejad a forum, he was eager to show the media, alumni, concerned Jewish organizations and a raft of bellicose neoconservative pundits that he was no terrorist-loving appeaser of Holocaust deniers.

In a narrow sense, both Ahmadinejad and Bollinger achieved their goals. Ahmadinejad showed that he could be dignified in the face of crass American bullies..... And Bollinger showed that he can be a crass American bully, which, in our current political climate, is what passes for "courage."

So far I have no serious disagreement. As I noted a few days ago, it was poor form for Bollinger to invite Ahmadinejad into his house only to spit on him. But according to Brooks, this would have been OK if Bollinger had only chosen to mistreat a different president:

(I)f Bollinger had invited President Bush to Columbia and made those same unvarnished remarks to him, and Bush had toughed it out and struggled to answer half a dozen unfiltered, critical questions from an audience not made up of his handpicked supporters . . . . Well, that ... would have been free speech at its best.

So if you're rude to Iran's genocidal tyrant, you are "prissy, infantile" and "a crass American bully." But if you're rude to the president of the United States, well, that's "free speech at its best."

Bush Derangement Syndrome strikes again.

OK, I realize that some might argue that Mr. No-Spin jumped a long time ago, but I just can't enough of the lead for Bill O'Reilly's new column (which will appear in Sunday's Daily News):

Whenever I start feeling sorry for myself over personal attacks by my far-left media opponents, and those have been known to happen, I think of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Come on, Bill, Blessed Teresa? Don't you think you're more like Job, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Christ all wrapped into one? Come on, man, let's show a little humility.

That said, I do think O'Reilly is getting a bum deal in this phony brouhaha over his supposedly racist comments. Earl has offered a rather tepid defense below, but too tepid, IMO. Earl's position boils down to: Bill's probably not more racist than a lot of other people, when truly, I don't think his comments were racist at all.

If you hear them in context -- and I heard the whole conversation on the radio this morning -- O'Reilly is not saying that he's surprised that black people were behaving civilly at the restaurant and concert he went to. What he did say was that he thought a lot of other white people -- those whose only experience of African Americans is what they see on the nightly news or MTV -- would be surprised. And that's essentially the same comment black civil-rights leaders have been making for years in their protests of the media's depiction of African Americans.

No wonder Juan Williams, who is black and was being interviewed by O'Reilly at the time of those comments, didn't object. Far from it, he agreed with him. Indeed, in response to CNN's over-hyped treatment of the story, Williams said, "It had nothing to do with racist ranting by anybody except these idiots at CNN."

Take a moment to see who's driving this story: It was spurred by Media Matters, a far-left outfit run by right-wing-hit-man-turned-left-wing-hitman David Brock. It's a smear on the part of a long-time smear artist. And CNN has made a big deal out of this because, well, CNN is a ratings-toxic network that routinely gets its snot kicked in by O'Reilly's Fox.

So O'Reilly is right when he says he's getting a raw deal. But that doesn't make him a Mother Teresa, not by a long shot.

I can't help but chuckle at this headline from the Washington Post: Iranian Leader Fails To Ease Tensions.

"Fails"? That would suggest there was some reasonable expectation that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would "ease tensions" with the world during his visit. And did anyone seriously believe that would happen? What was he going to say that could possibly make people feel better about the fact that his country is arming the murderers of our soldiers, or that it's acquiring nukes, or that it has zero regard for human rights? It's one thing to say the guy deserves a chance to say his piece (a right he denies to his own people), but did anyone really think that in saying his piece he would actually help to make ours a more peaceful or just world?

The answer to that question, believe it or not, is yes. Leave it to the good folks at the WaPo to actually find some goofball who held out hope that Ahmadinejad might be a peacemaker. And wouldn't you know, he was a college dean, at Columbia no less:

"(Ahmadinejad) had an opportunity to present himself to the American people in a way that would make conflict less likely. And I don't think he succeeded," said John H. Coatsworth, the Columbia University dean who moderated a speech."

There's an understatement!

I've got some other headlines for the WaPo:

O.J. fails to reconcile with ex-wife

Bush fails to woo crowd at MoveOn convention

Hilton fails to model safe-driving skills

Vick fails to show great compassion to animals.

In bathroom, Craig fails to disprove rumors about his sexuality

Given the way his CBS gig collapsed three years ago, one would think Dan Rather would have the good sense to disappear from the public scene. Lay low, and hope history forgets the sad closing chapter to a proud career, in which the newsman broadcast a bogus, inflammatory story about President Bush's National Guard service in the closing days of the 2004 election. But no, Rather is showing no sense whatsoever, filing a $70 million lawsuit against CBS for his self-inflicted demise.

Of course, if Rather had any sense, he likely wouldn't be in this position in the first place.

After all, if Rather had some sense, he wouldn't have based his story on documents that were obviously fraudulent -- against the advice of his network's own authenticators -- just because it was too hot a story to pass up.

If he had some sense, he wouldn't have continued to defend the documents -- and fat-mouth those who revealed them to be phonies -- after they were exposed before the whole world.

If he had some sense, he wouldn't have tried to protect the sources who gave him bum information in the first place.

So all in all, it should come as little shock that Rather would now be so arrogant as to think CBS owes him tens of millions for his own self-destruction. Still, one shudders to think the network might pay him off just to make him go away, when what Rather deserves is a legal defeat that might provide the humbling that public humiliation obviously hasn't.