Barrel Strength

Over-Proof Opinion, Smoothly Aged Insight

Barrel Strength - Over-Proof Opinion, Smoothly Aged Insight

Category Archives: Media

Things I do not understand

1. Elvis Presley: I never got him. I still do not understand why the greasy drug-addicted hillbilly had the effect he did. What about Carl Perkins? Why of all the rockabilly musicians emerging in the 1950s was Presley singled out for world adulation?

2. Tattoos: Are vulgar signs of abandonment of the ideal of the body beautiful for the body distorted. They are ugly. They make one look uglier the older one gets. They indicate a propensity for hepatitis C, which was once virtually unknown outside the South Pacific Islands, and is now spreading with tattoo needles, among other needle-driven disease vectors.

3. Photographing your wife having sex with black men: I would not lend out my wife to anyone I would not trust with my chain saw, my rifle, or my wallet. In fact I do not think I would lend her out at all, both as she is not really mine to lend and because I might not like the results if I did.  Yet there seems to be a genre of home-made pornography that seems to involve wives being pictured penetrated by one or more black men, and there seems to be no lack of participants in this craze. Apart from the vulgarity of  posting photographs of the commission of group sex to the Internet, which is quite understandable in the conditions of life these days, and the possible embarrassment years later when she runs for alderman, school trustee, or member of parliament, the whole idea of letting one’s wife be fucked by others while the husband photographs the event is  detumescifying, to find a polite term. Call me a prude. I do not mind healthy people having sex. I do not mind people taking pix of same. I do not object to putting sexual stuff on the Internet, really. But I am mystified by this particular fetish.  My objection is not merely to the portrayal of it, it is to the weirdness of the act itself. Sexual tastes are beyond rational comprehension, aren’t they? Forgive me, readers, next thing you know I will be quoting Malcolm Muggeridge.After this reactionary outburst, I will sign myself in for anti-racist programming from a nearby human rights commission. But I still don’t get it.

The insufferable arrogance of Scott Pelley

Scott Pelley is the senior news anchor for CBS TV. He was recently awarded the Fred Friendly First Amendment Award from Quinnipiac University. In his acceptance speech, Pelley says that the problem with the Internet is that it is spreading gossip and  rumours, while “journalists”, such as himself, are spreading “news”.

Read about him being trashed here in PJ Media by Tom Blumer.

Pelley’s speech is here; his part begins after 14 minutes in. “Amateur journalists became digital vigilantes” after the Boston bombings by the Tsarnaev jihadists. Shame, shame!

The legacy media

An entertaining exchange occurred between Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna and a reporter for the New York Times concerning the legacy media and the alternative media- the blogosphere.

Bodissey writes:

Our view of the legacy media might be summed up this way:

1.It creates a bubble of shared assumptions, whose inhabitants remain largely unaware of those assumptions.

2.It enforces this shared uniformity through a combination of monetary/professional incentives (“You’ll never work in this town again!”) and the fear of shaming (“What you said in your article borders on racism!”). Those who step outside the boundaries may be consigned to a small ghetto of people who share similar opinions, or experience legal problems (e.g. Andrew Bolt, Ezra Levant). Some exceptions are those who are too famous and too shrewd to be suppressed, with Mark Steyn being the most obvious example.

3.It stigmatizes information obtained through sources other than those within the bubble. This is true even when the material in question is first-hand, original reporting — which is generally of higher quality than that of the legacy media.

4.Because of its immense financial resources, its protection by governments, and its virtual lock on popular awareness, practitioners in the legacy media do not have to hold themselves to high standards — in fact, the opposite is true: those outlets that hew consistently to the august high principles of journalism may not do well.The blogosphere, on the other hand, is ruthless in culling out mendacity, obfuscation, short-cuts, etc. I learned this the hard way early on in my blogging career — when you make a mistake, you get eaten alive by your readers (assuming you allow comments) and your fellow bloggers. After a while, I learned not to publish things that weren’t well-sourced, and to issue prompt and prominent corrections and retractions when I made mistakes.

 

Economic news coverage

John Taylor notes the following on his blog.

Twenty years ago this month my colleague Bob Hall and I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about how “in recent months press reporting about the economy has become so pessimistic that it has completely lost touch with reality.” (October 16, 1992)…

Today press reporting seems to have switched to the other side of reality. Compared to October 1992, economic growth is now slower, unemployment is higher, and tragically the long-term unemployment rate is twice has high. And reported economic growth has been declining rather than improving as it was in 1992. Yet, in recent months much reporting about the economy has turned so upbeat that it has again lost touch with reality…

When asked what caused the switch, I answer, facetiously, that people must have read our article, remembered it, tried to make a correction, but unintentionally overcorrected…

1992 had a Republican incumbent and 2012 has a Democrat incumbent. That is all you need to know about the news coverage.