The hour badly spent

After the election, bitter right-wingers like Mark Erbacher were quick to blame everyone for their loss except the obvious: the legacy of their own failed policies. The most obvious target would be manipulation from liberal coastal media elites. Right? Right.

The 2008 election clearly showed that the media lean heavily to the left. Even liberals must admit the mainstream media and its journalists threw objectivity and fairness aside and blatantly took the side of now President-elect Barack Obama.

According to www.telegraph.co.uk, the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs reported John McCain received substantially more negative news coverage during the campaign. The same article said the Pew Research Center, examining coverage of the last presidential debate, showed Obama’s coverage to be 36 percent positive and 29 percent negative.

Compare this to the staggering numbers of McCain: 57 percent negative to only 14 percent positive. There is some disparity between the parties; 82 percent of Republicans think journalists try to be advocates rather than neutral observers. This coincides with 56 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of unaffiliated voters concurring with their conservative counterparts.

Perhaps Obama’s positive coverage reflected a kind of campaign to which the Right was not accustomed? Perhaps McCain’s negative stories reflected the negativity of his campaign? Perhaps McCain really is the two-faced, hot-tempered scoundrel he seems to be? If you’d like to contemplate a double standard, consider how the media would have handled coverage of a candidate with a known temper problem, a candidate who talked out of both sides of his mouth and constantly went back on his pledges, a candidate that had cheated on his wife and then married into his fortune; now consider how the media would have handled such a candidate if he were black.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs studied 979 election news stories from 33 hours and 40 minutes of airtime from evening newscasts on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX stations and found stories concerning Obama and Joe Biden recieved 65 percent positive versus 35 percent negative. This was more than double that of John McCain and Sarah Palin, whose numbers were 69 percent negative and only 31 percent positive.

Journalists must remain unbiased in their coverage of the issues. Their job is to objectively report facts so individuals can decide for themselves what they choose to believe

Heh, pretty surprised that he mentioned Fox News. Anyway, it’s about time for a concern near and dear to me: a basic journalism lesson.

According to right-wing gasbags, "objective" journalism occurs when the reporter writes down what one person says, then writes down what another person says, then prints that. By this logic, the substance of a claim does not matter, and it’s not your job to actually go verify the claim; if someone simply makes the claim, you print it. Reporters who actually care about the truth, however, know the difference between journalism and stenography.

Look at what Erbacher reports. Look at the level of doublethink involved in his reasoning. His contention is not specifically with whether any story was biased, but whether a bunch of people believe stories are biased. But how do the people polled even judge bias? What’s their criteria? Just because a story is "favorable" or "unfavorable" doesn’t make bias. It may turn out that historical "facts," or material reportable conditions actually favor one over the other. That’s what a journalist is supposed to report on. "Reality." It’s too bad reality has a well-known liberal bias.

[K-State Collegian]

In Eisenhauer 016, two students had already come up with a plan.

"Let’s pull down the blinds. Dayton will think it’s darker than it really is, and cancel class," said Cherry. She and the Sexy Communist Spy went to work.

Professor Dayton walked in just as they finished up, and he did not give a fuck. "If you think you’re getting out of class because of a little power outage, you’ve got the wrong guy," he said. He rolled up the blinds, tugged his podium over to the window and started the afternoon’s lesson.

The power had gone out on campus 20 minutes prior. It affected buildings on the main campus; the Stuni but not the library, the classrooms and lecture halls but not the dorms, administrative buildings but not Lafene. It was a bright day, a sunny day; the mindset of “let’s just call it a day and head back home” had not set in, except among slackers.

"If there’s anything that K-State’s students are, it’s flexible and accommodating," said Pat Bosco, dean of student life. "They have great common sense about them, and they respond to these natural phenomena with ease." Sunlight streamed in through windows on two sides of his office.

"For me, I’m a little different. I can’t stand being without my phone," he said.

Due to the power failure, Bosco had to cancel a 1:30 lecture he was to deliver in the Little Theater on boscology — "the art of climbing through broken glass."

A lady in the finance office, having been in contact with K-State Facilities, said two squirrels got into a transformer at the Westar power station by St. Isadore’s Church, repeating an incident that had happened years ago. She didn’t want her name printed in the paper.

Another man in the office overheard her. "So we’ve got barbequed squirrel?"

"Fried squirrel," she corrected him.

At the power station by St. Isadore’s, nine guys in white hard hats stood around the transformers, fenced in by barbed wire. Insert your own Stormtroopers joke here. Two of them fiddled around with a tower of machinery that did not, in any way, resemble the Death Star II. They weren’t interested in talking to the press.

"If I were a new teacher, I’d be in trouble," said Robin Mosher, instructor in the English department editing her lesson plan in pen and ink that afternoon. Mosher has taught at K-State for 28 years.

"If the power isn’t on tomorrow, it won’t affect class at all because we have plenty of windows," she said. Technology would help her classes (sometimes she uses PowerPoint slides), but everything can also be done the old-fashioned way, she said.

Terri Engnoth, another English instructor, took her freshman expository writing class outside and handed out papers.

"It was exciting. It felt like a snow day," she said. "All of my students showed up. I couldn’t believe it."

The power came back on after several hours. Westar would not give out any information about the outtage. The Collegian would not print any information without a named source. Thanks a lot, Finance office. Everyone is hamstrung by red tape! Except the Kansas City Star, who, without naming any specific University official, scooped the K-State Collegian with this AP report late in the evening (link provided via Facebook by Princess Glitter Bunny):

MANHATTAN, Kan. | A couple of squirrels put Kansas State University in the dark for a few hours.

The Manhattan campus was without electricity for more than three hours Monday. The university says power was cut when two squirrels got into a Westar Energy transformer.

Electricity was restored around 4:30 p.m., allowing evening classes and activities to proceed.

A couple of weeks ago on The Closer (a television show I do not watch), the police chief tod Kyra Sedgwick that an LA Times reporter would be following her around for the season premier case, involving massive arson in Griffith Park (episode 44: "Controlled Burn"). Immediately Kyra protests with her sassy southern firmness; a reporter will just get in the way, muck up the case, keep the police from doing their jobs, free every rapist in jail, make all the cops look bad when they’re really hardworking, plucky, sharp and competent, et cetera.

This whole "everything would be fine if the reporter wasn’t around, but as soon as he started nosing around it thrashed our whole investigation" meme on cop shows got trite a long time ago. Fact is, we need more of this.

(1) Cops are public employees; everything they do should be accountable to the public, because the public is sort of their boss.

(2) Have you read the LA Times lately? Me either. It’s kind of awful. It doesn’t even have a metro desk. Some local something on a regular basis — not just murder and mayhem or celebrity vaginas, but something — would really do some wonders for this rag. Los Angeles has 88 municipalities (Glendale, Burbank, Santa Monica, Redondo Beach, and so on), each with city halls and courthouses and police stations, but unless something obvious happens — like a natural effing disaster — the Times lets local TV stations scoop them all over the place.

(3) Why would a reporter want to hang out with cops all day when he could stay at his desk, sipping bourbon from the "inhalers" he keeps in the top drawer on the left, just like all the real reporters around him are doing?

It’s just there’s that myth is that a single reporter has — what, days on end? — to dig into the guts of a police unit and bring down the entire system just so he can have his byline over something sensational.

The likely fact is that this overworked alcoholic will lurch in there, read some reports, see what’s happened lately that’s grisly or sexy, write it up, and call it a day.

Everyone’s happy! Except the victim, who is decidedly un-happy until she is avenged by Kyra Sedgwick the Vampire Slayer.