Read it here.

Just now on Opie and Anthony — don’t even ask me how I got them on the dial (never have before and based on how entertaining they weren’t, don’t expect I ever will again) — but they did have this to say:

We’re next… And forget about any apology — see what good that does you.

UPDATE: Now I get it. They were participating in Imus’s radiothon, held at the MSNBC studios due to previous arrangements — the same MSNBC that just cast its simulcast of Imus out of its programming. For two minutes on the car on the way to shul this morning I heard him expressing, plainly and frankly, both his continued regret and acceptance of personal responsibility — “If I hadn’t said that stuff, we wouldn’t be here” — and his disgust with MSNBC over his treatment from them.

It is disgusting. I don’t love it any more. I hate it.

Yesterday morning Steven A. Smith, ESPN’s one-note radio host on New York’s WFAN sports radio (oddly, no useful link available directly to ESPN) was railing — which is how he expresses everything — about how if Imus had made these remarks about Jews it wouldn’t even be a question whether he would be fired. This is preposterous, and disproved by the facts — repeatedly. But good to drag the Jews into this — you’re not alone, Steven.

Here’s my prediction: Imus will, contrary to my earlier prognostication (which, if you don’t mind my saying, was one of the early blog reactions to this story), go, his interesting and successful and lucrative (none of which is to say “highly meritorious”) career extinguished at a ripe old age because a true high-tech lynching is under way which cannot be stopped. I earlier expressed my lack of regret over this, because I believe that Imus played the PC game when it worked for him; those are the breaks. He’s done well.

But the “rest” of my prediction is that this is a high-water mark of this nonsense. I believe there will be a sea change following this — I don’t know how it will play out, but I believe that, as Dean Esmay says, the utter silliness and pettiness of this process will make an impact and somehow get people to regain perspective on the total babyishness of this entire concept. They will talk about the “Imus incident” as a watershed. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy and sweeter bunch of arrogant sidekicks, true — do you just love the idea of an unemployed Bernie McGuirk? And better him than me. But it should not happen — not this — again.

Enjoying this? Yes I am — Don Imus is in trouble for using a wildly inappropriate description of the Rutgers women’s basketball team.

I’ve been amused but mostly annoyed by Don Imus since forever. What I love here is how he, a central cog in the Narcissistic Media complex I just wrote about, has stepped on the third rail of American media behavior: Racist terminology. Imus, a fairly moderate liberal who does not consider himself one, loves to make fun of the “Nazi” Rush Limbaugh and in general takes a pretty morally superior tone on the politics of race. He counts among his radio friends various prominent black politicians such as J.C. Watts and Harold Ford, Jr. On the other hand he has, over the years, been fairly merciless with less respectable figures, brutally parodying race-clown Al Sharpton and joking about his continued refusals to “have lunch” with Jesse Jackson, and has not toed the line on the Great Light Hope, Barack Obama. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember the insufferable Josh Wolf? He’s back on the streets, the enemy of police and the people they protect and yet another martyr for the self-absorbed press everywhere. Perhaps, if we’re fortunate, there’s a haircut out here for him. The Washington Post reports:

A San Francisco blogger who spent nearly eight months in jail for refusing to testify about an anarchists’ demonstration was released yesterday after turning over a videotape of the protest and posting it on his Web site.

Josh Wolf, 24, also answered two questions from prosecutors, after striking a deal that ends the longest contempt-of-court term ever served by someone in the U.S. media.

“I’m completely satisfied with the resolution,” Wolf said by phone from California one hour after being released. “There’s a very large problem with forcing a reporter to act as an investigator for a government prosecution. . . . It’s absolutely a victory.”

Since the video captured no violent incidents, he said, “it wasn’t worth being a martyr for no purpose.”

Yeah, that’s for sure. Did you know witnesses to a crime — like the splitting open of a cop’s head, which was what happened here — who have evidence, are transformed into “investigators for a government prosecution” if they are asked to just turn it over? No matter how inconsequential their information? After all, as the Post says, “A viewing of the video leaves unclear why Wolf fought so hard to protect it.” How about self-absorption and contempt for the society that enables him to live indefinitely — and just ending now, rent-free for half a year — as a punk slacker?

Check out his site (click at the graphic above) — he got every bouquet the journalism cult, demanding its special exemptions from participation in the society that enriches them, could throw him while cooling his heels in the joint. I don’t question whether he was acting as a “journalist” at the time — I continue to agree that journalism is something you do, not something you get get to be by virtue of some credential. But I think if you have evidence of a crime, regardless of whatever you were doing when you got it, yes, you give it to the cops. Not according to the subversive media’s view of citizenship circa 2007, however — and once again, we are reminded of why no one likes or trusts the professional media any more. The good news: With God’s help, Josh Wolf’s 15 minutes is over. Hat tip to Evan Brown.

It’s disgraceful for a man seeking highest office, I think, to talk utter rubbish. And that is utter rubbish. It’s electoral propaganda. It is simply not true. No one in his right mind who has been to Baghdad believes that story.

That’s Allen Pizzey, CBS correspondent, talking about John McCain. He may be right. But why do we care what Allen Pizzey thinks? There are three possible reasons. You may have already thought about two of them. The one I am going to raise is probably so taken for granted that perhaps we have missed it.

Now, I am not going to make the point Glenn Reynolds made during the brief John Ware flair-up earlier this week — a point which, despite the subsequent correction of the record indicating that Ware did not heckle McCain at a press conference, is still a valid one for discussion:

“Heckling at a press conference is very rude, and wouldn’t be acceptable even from an opinion journalist (I wouldn’t dream of laughing in Nancy Pelosi’s face during a press conference). That said, isn’t it better when guys like Ware let their biases hang out, rather than embedding them in reports that are ostensibly objective?”Wouldn’t it be better still if they just did an honest job of doing, you know, their jobs?

Perhaps, though I grant that there is something to be said for letting it hang out, as Fox does, rather than pretending that CNN is not Fox’s mirror image. No, that is not my observation here. Neither is this, which I have already observed, but let’s quote Neo:

John McCain was once a media darling. The last time he ran for President, long ago and far away in 2000, the press couldn’t restrain itself from slobbering over him. . . .

So, what’s happened to the budding romance? To be blunt, McCain–once so bright-eyed and cuddly–is past his pull date.

Seven subsequent years of sloshing around in DC have meant that, if elected, he’d be the oldest President to ever win. And the years have not aged him like a fine wine (kicking around in Congress rarely does). Some of his pet projects–such as the McCain-Feingold bill–have turned out rather disastrously. And now, to top it all off, he’s saddled by being perceived as a sort of Bush Lite on the war in Iraq. It must be galling to him, since there didn’t used to be that much love lost between McCain and Bush.

So as much as there is to learn from John McCain’s media woes this week, I don’t mean to pile on and suggest (a) it’s terrible that journalists aren’t objective and (b) it’s really terrible when that lack of objectivity is its own mirror-image of the love once lavished on a favorite. So what is my point? It’s this: Why do we interview, profile and even listen to… reporters… in the first place? (This would not apply to the War dustup, of course.)

The opening quote is from Allen Pizzey. He’s a reporter. Yes, as Glenn says, he and the rest should just do his job. But evidently part of his job is to be interviewed by the guy who works at the next desk over, in this case CBS’s Brian Montopoli. Pizzey got an MBA from Sir George Williams University — uh, no, not exactly Harvard Business School — in Montreal. (This was in 1969, back when, the mainstream media tells us, all the people of principle were going wild in the streets.)

Thus we see that Pizzey has no special training in international affairs, military science, political science, or even police science, but he does have a lot of experience as a reporter. That experience, however — until recent times — was supposed to be capital that was drawn upon only for purposes of enhancing the credibility and enriching the quality of his reporting. Today, however, modern self-styled “professional” journalists, the self-described Fifth Estate and, yes, if you haven’t gotten the hint, Most Narcissistic Generation, consider it appropriate to turn reporters into “analysts” — plainly writing front-page opinion columns under the guise of “deep” news writing — or just plain interview subjects, i.e., “news’ themselves. Read the rest of this entry »