A while back I said that the New York Times “sent its reporters into Wisconsin with orders to find some union members that would trash talk the public employees”. I was wrong. Turns out, as Keith Olbermann points out (yes, Keith now has a blog), that the Times was fully satisfied to settle for someone who merely said, or possibly implied, that he was a union member, even though he …well, he wasn’t. But not to worry, the Times has made it all okay by correcting its front page article in a tiny correction that does not even hint at the fact that the correction undermines the entire premise of the article. Inquiring minds want to know: How did the Times get hooked up with that particular guy?
Meanwhile, Paul Krugman also takes notice of the media’s strange inability to notice the folks on the streets when they’re not deluded right wingers.
But of course, the media has more important things to think about, like the Oscars. I don’t normally read about such stuff, but I did glance at the article in the Day and realized that even when reporting on such trivialities, the media is attracted to trivialities. Does that make them meta-trivialities?
Case in point: It seems, apparently, that Janet Jackson had it all wrong. No need to take your clothes off to get some publicity. Just use a certain four letter word at the Oscars and you guarantee yourself lots of ink, from a press corp that apparently is totally titillated by someone using the most overused word in America. Interestingly, while we here in America are protected from actually hearing the word that is not for the faint of heart (so we can obsess about it being spoken), people in the rest of the world hear it un-bleeped, survive and apparently go about their business.
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