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Posted on 07.09.09 by Danny Glover @ 10:59 pm
Barack Obama is president because people wanted to believe the best of him. He convinced them “hope” that he would “change” Washington. Obama could be trusted; he wasn’t just another politician who would say one thing to get elected and then do the opposite. Wrong! Obama has been in office only six months and already has a string of broken promises or vows that have “changed course” or “stalled.” Actually, Obama’s record is worse than that because promise auditors like PolitiFact and National Journal aren’t tracking all of Obama’s broken promises — like the big one on taxes*. I covered that topic in my latest column for American Issues Project:
Filed under: Blogging and Government and News & Politics and People Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 06.19.09 by Danny Glover @ 3:39 pm
Congress can’t consider major legislation with someone trying to tack pork onto it. The leading Senate bill to impose a government option for health care is no exception: Eating pork is supposed to be good for your health. That must be the thinking behind the porky projects Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming found in pending healthcare legislation. … The healthcare bill also includes a “Community Makeover Program” to spend up to $10 per person for beautifying streets in select locales. Coming soon to a Pennsylvania township near you — the John Murtha Yellow Brick Road. Maybe Uncle Sam could get Ty Pennington of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” to make a reality series based on the program. Those are excerpts from my blog post for American Issues Project yesterday. Read it all. While you’re there, read my post about nuclear energy from earlier in the week, “The Nuclear Option.” Filed under: Blogging and Government and News & Politics and People Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 06.19.09 by Danny Glover @ 1:39 pm
At the start of the year, I chastised Washington Post blogger Dan Froomkin for what I perceived to be a double standard in how he approached his job as a White House watchdog. Yesterday, Froomkin learned that the Post will not renew his contract to write “White House Watch” because “interest in the blog also diminished.” As someone who endured two layoffs within a year and is now serving in a temporary job during hard economic times, I hate to see anyone lose his job. But I believe Froomkin, a liberal, hastened the demise of his own blog when he wondered aloud whether he should be less skeptical of President Obama than he was President Bush, a relatively conservative president. His lack of coverage of Obama’s firing of a supposedly independent inspector general provides evidence that he has been doing just that. Read my thoughts on Froomkin at On Target, the blog of Accuracy In Media. Filed under: Blogging and Media and News & Politics and People Comments: None |
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Posted on 04.02.09 by Danny Glover @ 1:15 pm
A link from Instapundit to Pajamas TV’s drive to recruit citizen reporters to cover the anti-tax “tea party” protests across America intrigued me enough to make me click. I’m a fan of the tea parties and have chastised the mainstream media for ignoring them. I’ve contemplated organizing an event myself, but as a journalist, I liked even better the idea that I might be able to contribute by covering one or more planned protests in my area. I lost interest in PJTV’s project after a couple of clicks, though. That’s when I found the company’s “Citizen Reporter Agreement.” PJTV fashions itself a new media innovator, but the contract is about as “old media” as they come. It takes advantage of citizens willing to volunteer their time to report the news while also imposing professional standards and heavy legal liability on their amateur work. First, look at the contract terms that are all take and no give: Filed under: Blogging and Media and News & Politics Comments: None |
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Posted on 03.10.09 by Danny Glover @ 5:01 pm
On Jan. 1, 2008, I started a new blog called Taxation With Representation. I planned to track every penny I paid in taxes so I could show Americans how much of their hard-earned income they lose in a year to the government. The blog, a modern-day twist on the “no taxation without representation” motto of British colonists more than 200 years ago, was my declaration of a new war on taxes — and a reminder that the taxes our “representatives” slap on us are far more oppressive than anything our democratically inclined ancestors paid.
You can see the frustration and anger in rants by news celebrities like Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer. And you can see it in grassroots plans like this, which a friend e-mailed to me last week: Filed under: Blogging and Government and History and News & Politics and People Comments: 11 Comments |
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Posted on 03.04.09 by Danny Glover @ 10:46 am
The Obama administration has released a new logo for the pork-laden stimulus bill written into law last month. It’s a perfect target for satirical fun. Michelle Malkin is promoting the work of the Photoshoppers. The original Obama logo is on the left, and the best Photoshop so far is on the right.  
Filed under: Blogging and Just For Laughs and News & Politics and Photoshop Stop Comments: None |
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Posted on 02.10.09 by Danny Glover @ 12:00 pm
This is the kind of deep, insightful coverage you get when you give a liberal blogger prime-time access to the leader of the free world:
For the rest, including slams on Chuck Todd, go to Americablog. And remember that Americablog (rightfully) cried foul when phony reporter Jeff Gannon/James Guckert was given access to the White House press room during the Bush administration. You can’t argue with Americablog’s lead sentence, though. Barack Obama obviously is smart to let the leaders of the liberal blogosphere cover his press conferences. That’s the kind of change the left can believe in. Filed under: Blogging and Government and Media and News & Politics and People Comments: None |
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Posted on 02.01.09 by Danny Glover @ 10:39 pm
When Pajamas Media launched a few years ago, I was skeptical about its chances for success (even though I was, and still am, a regular reader of many of the blogs in its network). It reminded me of the numerous dot-com operations that were built on venture capital years earlier. My skepticism grew when I became the executive producer of Eyeblast.tv and learned, through our marketing director, how difficult it was to negotiate ad placements through Pajamas Media. Running ads there would have helped us promote the Eyeblast brand to a key demographic, conservative bloggers, but we never did buy any space. The hassles were many, and the rate was too high. Now comes word that Pajamas Media is killing its blog ad network as of March 31. Some of the bloggers who had grown accustomed to quarterly subsidies aren’t too happy about being “off the dole“; others are pondering their futures online with more introspection; and bloggers who never had a stake in Pajamas Media are weighing in, too. For what it’s worth from the perspective of this 20-year mainstream journalist who also has endured two layoffs in the online media startup world, once in 2000 and once a couple of months ago, I believe Atlas Shrugs is onto something:
I have seen the same problem in many newsrooms. As the associate editor of IntellectualCapital.com, I constantly made the case (unsuccessfully) for spending less money to find new voices rather than buying “names” in an effort to generate The Almighty Buzz. IC folded in 2000. Pajamas TV was chasing buzz when it hired “Joe The Plumber” as its war correspondent in Gaza. The company has indeed gone off the rails, and unless it changes course, another venture soon will be added to the growing ash heap of new media history. Read a roundup of reactions in the extended entry. Filed under: Blogging and Business and Media and News & Politics and People Comments: 2 Comments |
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Posted on 02.01.09 by Danny Glover @ 1:23 pm
Thousands of deer are hit on America’s highways every year, but the collisions aren’t typically caught on tape. Leave it to “Don’t Be Evil” Google, the company that is everywhere, to be the first. One of the drivers in the Google Maps “Street View” project hit not just any deer but a baby deer at that. The end result was an image of Bambi sprawled in the middle of a New York road.
It was only a matter of time before some blogger found the image and created a stir online. Google then pulled the pictures and explained the incident on its blog:
I’m curious how the footage made it online in the first place when both the local police and Google were alerted to the accident immediately. If not for that oversight, the accident would not have been the least bit newsworthy. Filed under: Blogging and Technology Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.16.09 by Danny Glover @ 7:39 pm
Barack Obama made plenty of them while running for president, and PolitiFact (a joint product by one of my former employers, Congressional Quarterly) is tracking 510 of them to make sure he is true to his campaign word. Keep your eye on The Obameter. And here’s another site worth watching: ReadTheStimulus.org. It’s a joint project of several conservative groups designed to cast some light on the Obama-led Democratic stimulus plan. I love how quickly projects like this can come together online. Filed under: Blogging and Government and Media and News & Politics and People and Technology Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.14.09 by Danny Glover @ 2:36 pm
Citizen journalists beware. If you give your videos and other content to Fox News, CNN and other outlets that are more than happy to take it for free, you may have to pay taxes on it. That’s the word from StinkyJournalism.org, which claims to have “uncovered a real hornet’s nest for both for-profit media companies’ business models and citizen journalists who must now examine how much work they have ‘donated’ to any one media outlet over the past year.” Tax forms and even accountants may be necessary. But citizen media expert Dan Gillmor said odds are slim that the dreaded federal gift tax will hit most amateur reporters. He also suggested that it could benefit them in the long run by forcing a change to business models that established news organizations have adopted to get free content. [Cross-posted at my anti-tax blog, Taxation With Representation] Filed under: Blogging and Government and Media Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.08.09 by Danny Glover @ 10:14 pm
Personal Democracy Forum has released its list of top political blogs for 2009, and one conclusion is clear: The free-wheeling, independent blogosphere of yore is no more. The first thing I noticed on the list is how many of the top political blogs are the work of old media empires. The fourth, fifth and sixth slots are owned by CNN (1980, old in the cable news world), The Atlantic (1857) and The New York Times (1851). The Atlantic also owns another blog that ranks No. 22, and the blogger ranked 29th was at The Atlantic until several months ago. Other old media brands are among the top 50 blogs, too. They include The Wall Street Journal (No. 12), ABC News (18), Time (23 and 47), CQ Politics (34), and Mother Jones (39). Politico (14) and Salon (21), mainstream publications that are relative newcomers to the political journalism world, also made the list. And two niche blogs with big media parents, Treehugger (owned by Discovery) and Threat Level (Wired), rank seventh and eighth. National Review, the granddaddy of conservative political publications (founded in 1955), has a group blog in the No. 15 spot, and Reason, the mainstay of libertarian journalism (1968), ranks 30th. That’s 17 blogs in the top 50, or 34 percent, with ties to established media brands. Filed under: Blogging and Business and Media and News & Politics Comments: 4 Comments |
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Posted on 01.04.09 by Danny Glover @ 11:40 pm
The Washington Post has hired a liberal blogger from Talking Points Memo to write for a soon-to-be-launched blog. Ben Smith at Politico celebrated the move as a sign of the changing media times; Erick Erickson at RedState panned it. I agree with both. Smith is right to note that Greg Sargent’s “variety of career path, which ran via a newspaper, a magazine, an ideological online outfit, and an old-media monolith, is going to become far more common as time goes on,” and I see that as a good thing. Journalism can become a much better and more trustworthy profession if those of us in the trade are open about our personal beliefs. Since my early days at a local newspaper, I have argued that political reporters in particular would do their employers and their readers a service if they disclosed their political leanings. Assign conservatives to cover liberals and vice versa. Reporters then would have the kind of skepticism they need to do their jobs, and employers and readers could more fairly judge who’s fair and who’s not. I don’t have a problem with the Post hiring Sargent. Although I haven’t followed his work much lately, I did while writing Beltway Blogroll for NationalJournal.com. He does good work, as does everyone at TPM. And I know he’s a liberal, so I can put whatever he will be doing for the Post in that context. Filed under: Blogging and Media and News & Politics and People Comments: None |
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