The Boston Globule: “Elephant? What ‘elephant’?”
DA EXCITIN’, EVER-GROWING NEWS-SUPPRESSION BUSINESS
Mark Steyn disreporting:
To the briefly famous Susan Roesgen of CNN, the parties are not safe for “family viewing.” Which is presumably why the Boston Globe forbore to cover them last week. The original Boston Tea Party was so-called because it took place at Boston Harbor, which I gather is a harbor somewhere in the general vicinity of the Greater Boston area. So there would appear to be what I believe the journalism professors call a “local angle” to Wednesday’s re-enactment. Might be useful for a publication losing a million bucks a week and threatened with closure by a parent company that, in one of the worst media acquisitions of all time, paid over $1 billion for a property that barely a decade later is all but worthless.
But I digress. Asked about the tea parties, President Barack Obama responded that he was not aware of them.
Of course he was unaware. After all, it wasn’t in all the papers. It was just pure coincidence that the DHS Rightwing Menace Report was rushed out in time for the Tea Parties. Otherwise, we’d have to believe that Obama is a Fascist-Lite political hack for whom domestic terrorism is a mere political football. And that simply Cannot Be(tm).
As Marie Antoinette said, “Let them drink Lapsang Souchong.” His Imperial Majesty at Barackingham Palace having declined to acknowledge the tea parties, his courtiers at the Globe and elsewhere fell into line. Talk-show host Michael Graham spoke to one attendee at the 2009 Boston Tea Party who remarked of the press embargo: “If Obama had been the king of England, the Globe wouldn’t have covered the American Revolution.”
But he would have given himself better gifts.
And bowed. Deeply.
- Entries
The Internet is what's destroying the financials of the news business. Not anything else -- not being too liberal, not being too conservative, not being too anything.
You could have the absolute perfect general-interest newspaper in the United States, and it would not be immune from the realities of the the web's effects on monetization of content.
Steyn is a smart guy, so it's kind of disappointing to see him lapse into such a flimsy argument.
Newspapers are struggling much more than TV. Fox is doing great.
I take your point about newspapers going the way of town criers. But even town criers stood in the middle of town and yelled to everybody, not just half the town. I know that I've refused to purchase newspapers I thought were biased--I'm not alone either. Hell, I don't even usually link to to the NYT--I don't like to give them ANY traffic.
Every paper has to pick and choose what to include. But this rises to the level of disinformation. This is designed purposefully to SUBTRACT from public knowledge. It's not news--it's Anti-News, meant to leave the reader less informed than when he started.
I think we should continue to point out bias. It might shame them into doing the job that they promised. Maybe some kid going into journalism will think twice before he huddles with the herd. At a minimum, our apolitical neighbors might learn something and start asking questions. Somebody should.
Might one suggest another Tea Party - this one roughly, say, 250,000 to 500,000 strong, on Independence Day (how appropriate is that?), which falls on a Saturday this year. To be held, of course, on the National Mall in D.C. - with the major event being a march to the White House.
Maybe - if a couple of hundred thousand folks with signs, etc., stroll onto Pennsylvania Ave, The Obamanation might notice the event?