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Thursday, October 23, 2008
Evil is Nichols; playing homeless
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
– I’ve walked the corridors of death row in Florida and Georgia. I’ve seen evil. It’s Brian Nichols.
– Kennesaw State College of Humanities and Social Service students play “homeless” for a week. They sleep outdoors on campus “to teach students about poverty, substance abuse, hunger, mental illness and homelessness.” If they play shot-dead for a week, does that teach them about the crime of murder?
– Declared death penalty opponent John Paul Stevens, expressing his personal opinion, criticizes the way the Georgia Supreme Court considers death penalty appeals. The 88-year-old Stevens, one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s consistent liberals, could be the first retiree if Barack Obama is elected president. If it’s John McCain, he could serve until the age of 96. Or 104 if Sarah Palin follows McCain. And please don’t call it a “high-court rebuke for Georgia.” It’s no such thing. It’s one guy’s personal opinion.
– Retired teachers may complain about the effort to eliminate automatic cost-of-living raises in favor of discretionary raises. The fact is, however, that automatic raises were never built into the funding formula. This is a case where adults, not politicians, are managing the nest egg for the next generation.
– Well, bless pat, there’s a Coke CEO willing to stand his ground against the Obesity Squad. You knew that just as soon as the tobacco wars were won, the Lifestyle Police, Obesity Squad, would be moving on the potato-chip makers and soft-drink companies. (The Thinking Right Police never allow soft drinks to be called “sodas.” We’re very stern about that, and in the example of the Lifestyle Police, humorless.) Anyway, CEO Muhtar Kent told industry leaders in Las Vegas that: “People need to understand that obesity is not about a beverage or a candy bar or a restaurant meal or a PlayStation game or about working longer hours” or, he could have said, sidewalks in suburbia. It’s about self-indulgent foodies over-eating and under-exercising.
– Barack Obama’s money drowns out John McCain’s access to the airwaves. McCain, who foolishly agreed to public financing, spent $37 million in September, leaving him with $47 million, while Obama’s September take was $150 million, leaving him with almost $134 million. McCain’s being outspent 4-1 or 5-1. And yet, Obama’s just up by 1 percentage point in the Battleground and in the Associated Press polls, though others are wider, possibly confirming that it’s risky for a candidate to leave opposition commercials unanswered.
– The Philadelphia Inquirer notes that it criticized Barack Obama for flip-flopping on public financing. “The damage has been done,” the paper editorializes, “the next president and the new Congress must commit to restoring the presidential funding system.” Fixed? Can the Titanic be fixed?
– Obama’s shake-and-bake helper, Joe Biden, is doing his part to sink the campaign, reminding voters why they’re worried about his inexperience at the helm. If Obama’s elected, he’ll be tested within six months by the bad guys on the world scene, Biden predicts… “Mark my words, it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama, like they did John Kennedy. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.” Think they’ll generate a crisis to test McCain? Me, neither.
– Hmmmm. The American Enterprise Institute is labeled “conservative,” which it is. But the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of two left-of-center think tanks, Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, is described only as “nonpartisan.”
– Kudos to Big Oil, Little Oil and the corner gas station. Most have been as quick to mark gas prices down as they were to mark them up. Even before the Angry Left could fix the problem by perp-walking a few oil executives around in orange jump-suits and chains, the marketplace has worked.
– Progress in Iraq, this one-paragraph story notes. Their government has taken security responsibilities for Babil province, making it 12 of 18 turned over. The Left no longer finds Iraq to be an important conversation. We’re winning.
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McCain news more negative
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Recently while reading an Associated Press story reporting on a campaign event where John McCain had raised questions about Barack Obama’s ties to former Weatherman radical William Ayers, I was jolted by a sentence the writer had chosen to add.
The sentence was the the AP and other news organizations had reported that Obama and Ayers were “not close.” That’s it. Flat out, an assertion by a major news organization without attribution or qualifiers that the two are not close — something the reporter or the news organizations couldn’t possibly have known to be true. The two may or may not be close, but the asserting news organizations are not the court of last resort on that question.
A study just released by the Pew Research Center documents something other researchers had found: McCain gets more negative media coverage than Obama. Pew’s study examined 2,412 campaign stories from 48 news organizations, covering the period from the end of the conventions through the final presidential debate, a period of six weeks.
The two got roughly equal amount of attention, but 59 percent of the McCain stories were “decidedly negative in nature” and only 14 percent were positive. Pew found 36 percent of the Obama stories were clearly positive, 35 percent neutral or mixed and 29 percent negative. I would add, too, that without knowing the political preferences of those who categorized the stories, it’s impossible to know how they might have classified the AP story, for example.
The message of that particular story is that McCain’s a liar or that he’s making much to do about nothing. I’d count that as positive Obama, negative McCain.
A rule of thumb about this: If you can detect a reporter’s point-of-view in a story, it’s careless editing — or editing by a like-minded person who fails to recognize the reporter’s bias. If I assert in writing about the Pew study that “Obama hasn’t exactly been fawned over by media,” a statement not attributed to the authors, is that fact or opinion? I say it’s largely opinion.
The authors say that the question of whether the media are pro-Obama is not answerable.
