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]

Well. So. My playwriting class kinda disliked Laramie Project. Let’s walk through some of their issues.

First. Costumes: We agreed that everyone’s shirts looked kinda dirty. I noted that the costume designer put little logos and symbols on everyone’s grey shirts, but the thing is, the audience couldn’t really see the logos, which renders them pointless. It’s even worse when you can _kind of_ see the logos, but not clearly enough to make them out, so that they just look like dirty spots.

The uniforms and their, uhhh, uniformity, was also confusing to the class. It was confusing to me at first too. A uniform would make a speech, disappear, and another uniform would come back out. After a while I realized that the play was organized in a way that kept story arcs distinct even if characters weren’t. No one else in the class seemed to realize this. Ha ha ha, I’m more sophisticated than everyone else.

Second. Act II dragged. Yeah, they’re right with this one. After the scene with the big-ass band of angels, the other loose plot arcs felt so minor that I wasn’t even concerned with them.

Third. There was a sense that it was too preachy? In a literal sense, there were a lot of priests as characters. But my classmates were annoyed that sometimes the interviewers distracted from the monologues. Like, when talking to negative characters, the interviewers would pace and frown.

I say: so what? Were they supposed to be ‘neutral?’ And if so, why? As someone who’s done a tiny bit of journalism, my best interviews — the ones that yield the most information — are the hostile ones. Like when people feel insulted that they have to answer such a dumb question, or they feel that they’re under attack and have to articulate their positions better. But that’s all beside the point. The point is that the actors are, in fact, not journalists; they’re characters too. Their characters are _acting_ the way a gay man or woman would act confronting a haughty, adversarial religious figure. Can I get an amen?

Fourth. One student (Patrick) said he saw the Laramie Project performed, years ago, at an "International Thespians’ Conference," and that their performance "blows this one out of the water." He mentioned several times that he had been to the International Thespians Conference, from which I believe he meant to make it clear that he is a Pretentious Literary Douchebag. Every English class has one of these, and usually it’s me, but not this time I guess.

Okay, good points:

When I heard about what the play actually was — a series of monologues based on interviews — I was pretty sure it would be boring. But it’s not! Tectonic actually managed to frame some story arcs out of what information they gleaned, and they managed to make an overall story arc out of it, which was pretty rad.

The play builds a sense of "going there," of approaching something and almost arriving but not quite. Even acting out the confession feels lacking; something dire has been excised from the narrative. That something is Matthew Shepard. That, in its subtle way, is the point. He’s gone and can’t say anything, no matter how badly we want to hear from him.

I saw the dress rehearsal, obvs, and that wasn’t bad. There was a long moment, after Reggie found out she might have AIDS, when Mackenzie looked me dead in the eye. I couldn’t turn away, and she just wouldn’t. After a few moments I felt something strange. I….I think some dust got in my eye. Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, I thought her performance would have been powerful and moving without that eye contact. But with it, I felt, just for a moment, that there might actually be more to life than just martinis, girls, and guns, that I have a higher purpose, and that maybe I should live to love more deeply and fully. Then her scene was over and I had a cigarette and was back to normal. THAT WAS A CLOSE CALL.

Before I saw the second performance, the Grey Lady told me she found out how to really make a better emotional connection with her character(s). It sounded like some art-fag nonsense, but then I saw the performance a second time, and she was absolutely right! I kept hoping for her to make eye contact with me, but it’s a good thing she didn’t, because then I might have, ahem, had more dust in my eye. People would have gotten the wrong idea.

Oil companies: as evil as the sweet black gold they pump from the deep, ancient heart of our planet, or just trying to make a buck in America like the rest of us? Earlier this week, Tim Hadachek weighed in on the issue, challenging us to put down our shrill, knee-jerk griping every time gas prices creep up a couple of bucks (what do you really need that for, anyway? You’re either giving it to Big Oil or Big Farm). We should examine this in terms of the basic principles of our economic system.

Oil companies want to make as much money as possible, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Our economy works best when everyone is free to make as much profit as their skills, intelligence and resources will allow them, as long as it is done fairly.

So why do Democrats want to punish oil companies for living out one of the greatest American ideals?

On average, the largest oil companies make only about 9.7 percent more than they spend each year, slightly above average for an S&P 500 company. Many companies have much larger profit margins.

Google, for instance, operates with a profit margin of about 25 percent, according to CNN on April 29.

I’ve always been disgusted with the way Google and their hegemonic “algorithms” rip us all off every chance they get, then use their leverage to choke the competition. Look what’s happened now! We have to pay whatever price the free search engine cartels wanna stick us with. They’re basically the internet’s warmongering Ritalin dealers. Who among us can honestly go without Ritalin? But, again: greedy as Google is, I can’t really fault them just for trying to make a buck in America.

Adding new taxes on oil companies essentially is punishing them for making money. But basic economics tells us they should make money. They produce a commodity that is of limited supply and in high demand.

Why penalize a company that is willing to invest hundreds of billions of dollars to bring us energy?

Blaming oil companies for high gas prices is like blaming farmers for high food prices.

In the future, we will just outsource the functions of our government’s legislative branch to Exxon’s board of directors. We will outsource our judicial branch to the Mob. The only decision left for President Palin will be whether to waterboard the Liberals in a vat of boiling crude oil or to extradite them to a detention facility in Saudi Arabia, where Blackwater will sodomize them with WMDs.

 [Source: K-State Collegian]

In keeping with the polarized political climate of the times, the Collegian went all Lincoln-Douglas on us with a spirited dialectic of great social and political import. Joe Vossen took our orders first in "Curly fry best represents Millenials with seasoning."

    Being only a humble opinion columnist with little training or understanding in food science, I will attempt to enumerate for this journal’s readers why the true snack of the future, the tastiest tuber, is in fact curly fries. In double-blinded taste tests administered in the Union food court last week, curly fries were favored for taste by twice as many people as waffle fries (three people were involved in this study).
    Before they are fried, curly fries are coated with paprika and other seasonings (unlike waffle fries, which are merely cut and thrown unlovingly into lava-hot peanut oil) leading to a much more palatable deep-fried experience. Said one person surveyed, "These so-called waffle fries taste like salty chalk."
    French-fry aficionados will appreciate the crunchiness of the curly fry. The spiral shape of the curly fry is achieved with a special cutting tool that is either motor-driven or hand-turned. The cutting implement is set into one end of the potato and the potato rotated, creating the trademark spiral shape. The advantage, of course, is in the increased surface area achieved with the helix shape (over a waffle fry). With more precious potato in contact with delicious oil during frying, the result is a crispier, crunchier fry.

Duly noted. With "Unfailing texture deems waffle fry America’s best," Adam Phan served an elegant, well-salted rebuttal.

One cannot take the particulars of potatoes too seriously.
    To establish a hierarchy is necessary; to crown the waffle variety king of that hierarchy is obvious; to offer a defense of such a position is effortless. And why should that be? The manifest weakness of the competition? We could distract ourselves with a drawn-out discussion of third-party candidates - the road too well-traveled - but most of the lot can be summarized in the space following the semicolon of a single sentence; steak fries are mushy, shoestring fries are gritty and almost everything else is either too trivial or too ordinary.
    Curly fries do deserve their very own special rebuttal, if only for their startlingly effective frivolity. Why have so many bought into the curly cult, anyway?
    "They’re curly," the apologists lamely assert, as if novelty alone could serve a legitimate function. "They’re so spicy and peppery, so savory; how could one fail to appreciate that?"
    And what should be said about this seasoning? As is the case with tasteless little outfits like Arby’s, this so-called seasoning isn’t anything more than a crude preparation of paprika and onion powder glued onto a flash-frozen product.

    These are deliciously the best op-eds I’ve ever seen in the Collegian. Yet, as I look around, it’s pretty clear that today’s young snackers have grown tired of all the ketchup-slinging of tasty morsels as usual. It’s time for change we can believe in.
    If it was possible to merge the two sides, to sculpt and curve your matted, crispy goodness into a swervy mouthful of chain-linked yummy, then this war would have no losers. We need a fry cook who can bridge this divide and heal our fractured palate. And the healing begins with you. Heap a helping of each on the same plate. Let them mingle and dance. In your mouth. Just move the penis aside (zing!).