Our media is pretty much a sad, dried up piece of dung. They sat idly by as the Bush Administration lied about intelligence and took us to war. Actually, they kind of gave Bush a wrap-around the while it was going on. They decided not to tell us about the Bush torture program for one whole year after it was uncovered. Their coverage of the current economic crisis has been woeful, to say the least. Those are just the big examples. The media is a shell of its former self and has basically become a national embarrassment. Nothing exemplifies how lame our media has become more than Liz Cheney.

Liz Cheney is the daughter of Dick Cheney. You may have possibly seen her spewing nonsense from her hate hole over the past couple of weeks because she has been invited on news program after news program to espouse torture and criticize President Obama. She is qualified, after all, because she was raised by a monster. And worst of all, she’s usually allowed to be the only guest, so her lying goes unchallenged, because our journalists are cowards and lack knowledge. Being the lone guest is considered a privilege and is reserved only for high officials and newsmakers, which she is not. She is someone’s daughter. The daughter of a man no one will defend. So, naturally, our media allows her to step up and defend dear old dad.

The media does not hold her feet over the fire and go after her father for his obvious war crimes. Instead, they allow her to go on the offensive against Obama and all things Democratic. The Cheney family plan is to attack as a defense. Our media’s complicity in this act is no different that their horrifying coverage leading up to the war. A wrong was committed, justice needs to be served and they are allowing the war criminal’s daughter to attack the president on our airwaves. A new low? It’s pretty pathetic.

The exciting thing about a democracy is that if our government won’t take the appropriate action, our media is supposed to step up and do their job. That then informs the masses and pressure is put upon the government and problems, like war criminals running about, are resolved. In this case, the war criminal’s daughter is the one running the narrative. How awesome is that?



Stick around, Pol Pot’s daughter chimes in after the break!

There’s nothing quite like the daughter of a war criminal accusing the current president of “hand-holding” terrorists and then watching as the “journalist” does not tear her a new asshole. Kudos. I’d like to note here that during Obama’s speech he backed up the use of troops in Afghanistan because terrorists are “determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can,” and re-committed to destroying terror networks. He just didn’t throw down support for anally raping boys. Dear "Journalist" here's a possible follow up question:

Liz, you claim Obama is “hand-holding” terrorists, but while your father was in office, women and children were raped by interrogators. Are you saying Obama should continue with the rape?

Imagine. The. Answer.

And it’s not like this is an isolate incident. The woman has been all over the media. Just check out what she’s been up to since May 12th.

Embarrassing. There is no excuse for having the daughter of Dick Cheney on television. None. She’s worthless and a liar.

Oh, wait. Turns out there is an awesome reason.

She’s a great guest. It’s awesome when a guest can come on and lie about her daddy's involvement in the most important issues facing our country.

FearTheReaper is a writer, actor and stand up comedian. Check back each Tuesday and Friday for more from FearTheReaper. You may also enjoy his blog, Stop All Monsters.

Will the Republican crying ever stop? It is pathetic to still have to listen to some Republican child whining about the perceived positive media treatment of Obama. It’s absolutely hysterical when you look at the facts. McCain was the media’s boy. They practically gave him rimjobs for months, until he turned into an incapable, angry old piece of shit. Then the media actually did its job. And the right wing douchebags can’t handle it.

The most amazing thing about this incessant bitching is how Bush was treated for the past eight years. As the nation's most shockingly pathetic president, Bush was hardly touched by the press for years. The man is a fucking war criminal and he was constantly given the kid glove treatment by the press. He should have been raped. By words. Seriously. The man should have been raped by words. I don’t know how that works technically, but it should have happened. Every single day.

But let’s move beyond the blatant hypocrisy and look at the actual facts. Before McCain went insanely negative and decided to lie his way to the White House, the press loved him so much they would have cleaned his dirty balls with their tongues. They were his base, according to Chris Matthews.

Aw. That’s nice. Overall, Obama received very fair media coverage.

Hmm. Not so bad, right? Sort of. Turns out the media were more negative toward Obama and positive toward McCain at the beginning, and then it turned. Maybe it started out well because of the McCain media barbeque.

Yeah, that’s some quality journalism. If Obama had held a barbeque for the media, America would have shit pure bile. But nobody said a word about Grandpa McCain grilling up some meat for the media. As a matter of fact, they loved it.

Did he tickle you on the couch?

Must have been awesome. I’m surprised they didn’t start spooning McCain to sleep at night. A flurry of positive McCain stories followed; sometimes reporters slid into a weird man love situation.

Um. Do you guys need me to leave?

Meanwhile, Obama was getting the brunt of repeated negative attacks. His trip to Europe was too much. The media feasted on his connection to Reverend Wright for months. His connection to criminal Rezko was picked through obsessively. One of his consultant’s comments on NAFTA was falsely twisted and blown out of proportion, causing him to lose big in Ohio during the primaries. His lack of flag pin wearing was talked about incessantly. Oh, and was he patriotic? Hmm, better ask the people.

And the wife was not off limits. Michelle made a gaff during a speech about whether or not she was proud to be an American and the media went apeshit. And occasionally she was called a bitch.

She must be a black militant, I mean, she went to Harvard.

The truth of what happened is that the media followed the polls.

The little baby Republicans are just upset because they don’t remember what it’s like to be on the other side. McCain dug his own grave by running the most heinous campaign I’ve ever seen. Lies, racism, more lies and focusing on bullshit points when America was on fire led to his negative media coverage. He dug his own grave. The media coverage was a reflection of the worst run campaign since the mighty Rudy Giuliani.

And the negative coverage wasn’t gone. It ebbed and flowed, like the mind of John McCain.



That big dip before the 2nd debate was when the media was bringing up the Ayers nonsense over and over. It didn’t stick, mostly because our country was in the middle of dying and people didn’t give a shit about some “terrorist” not convicted of anything 30 years ago. What they did care about was the shockingly pathetic choice of Sarah Palin, McCain’s insanely retarded choices during the beginning of the economic meltdown and his angry persona during the debates. Turns out making stupid decisions and being an asshole doesn’t lead to positive stories. While McCain was melting down and making mistakes left and right, Obama was running a smooth and smart campaign, giving the media nothing to attack.

Then McCain began began attacking the media because he was so used to being their lover. No longer were the media editing out footage of John McCain not knowing the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, as CBS had done two months earlier. Now the media were doing their jobs.

And the ensuing election result went as expected. But the right wing and other idiots can’t help but try to rewrite history. Yesterday, Time magazine’s Mark Halperin opened his dumbhole and let loose.

Oh. Let’s have an example, shall we?

Oh, shit. The story really didn’t talk about her awesome mothering skills Who says that without then pulling a hammer out of a bag and hitting himself in the head?

Huh. None of that black militant stuff? This would be due to the fact that they couldn’t find anything. And because the media and the public weren’t biting on the usual bullshit stories. Now, let’s take a look at some ideas Halperin had for McCain early in the campaign. From a list of what McCain should do to beat Obama:

That’s the guy who thinks the positive media treatment of Obama was disgusting. He’s basically Mr. Crybaby Shit Pants. The media didn’t destroy Obama using fucked up and bullshit attacks, so they didn’t do their job. The media didn’t sink to the lows they usually go to, because the nation is literally in peril and the consequences of focusing on issues that don’t matter could be huge. This election was not treated like a game, as it usually is and McCain suffered because of it. In years passed his “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” comment would have been ignored in favor of talk about Ayers. McCain was nothing short of an angry idiot during this campaign and the coverage was a refection of reality. He was a shit candidate and he got the coverage he deserved. Obama was an amazing candidate and he got the coverage he deserved. Get over it you immense babies.


FearTheReaper is a writer, actor and stand up comedian. Check back each Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday for more from FearTheReaper and read his blog, Stop All Monsters.

Pew Research has released another study and the results are not good, especially for the idiots who watch Fox News. Americans have actually managed be become a bit dumber since the last Pew poll in 1989. So much for the Interweb. The dumbest of all: Fox News viewers and people who watch network morning shows.

Pew reports that there are “substantial differences” in the knowledge levels of audiences who watch different media outlets. The smartest audiences watch The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, read major newspapers and, sadly, watch The O’Reilly Factor. The Internet, PBS, NPR and Rush Limbaugh’s show come in second. The least informed Americans mix network morning news, local news, Internet blogs and The Fox News Channel.

Some of the findings:

Men know more than women and older people are smarter than younger people. Democrats and Republicans were “equally represented” in the most knowledgeable group, but there were more Republicans than Democrats in the dumbest group. We can assume that is because of Fox News, home of the lying cunt. (I think that is their slogan.)

Anybody who follows reproductive rights news (and if you ever have sex, or plan to, you should) knows that Plan B, the much-discussed morning after pill, is the first non-barrier method of birth control that you can get over the counter. 'Course, you still need an ID to prove you're over 18—or you can get a legal adult friend to come with you—and the price varies ridiculously, from $10 at, say the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis to $54 at my local CVS. It doesn't prevent STDs, it's slightly less reliable than the regular pill, it's not a substitute for other forms of birth control, yadda yadda. But. It's a good thing regardless, now that we know we can get it.

What most people do not know, however, is how it actually works. The great Christian War on Sex (I'm copyrighting that, by the way) propagandists have successfully convinced most people that Plan B is an abortifacient, because the manufacturer's drug information says that it "may" prevent a fertilized ovum from attaching to the uterine wall.

So let me explain a few things. First, how the drug actually works. Plan B consists of two pills that contain a synthetic form of progesterone, one of the two main female hormones (the other is estrogen) that occur naturally and are used in birth control pills. Men, by the way, have progesterone too, though in lower doses. When you take Plan B—two pills twelve hours apart—you get a very large dose of progesterone that lasts for a day or two.

When a woman is pregnant, her body produces a lot of progesterone, which keeps her from ovulating—thereby preventing her from getting pregnant a second time and trying to carry them both, which would be a disaster. So progesterone prevents ovulation. Which, if you're a woman who doesn't want to get pregnant, is a pretty useful thing for it to do.

So let's say for some reason a woman who isn't on birth control finds herself with sperm floating around inside her: a condom broke, she was raped, she and her partner were sloppy and overly enthusiastic, whatever. If she's already ovulated within the last 24 hours, all she can do is cross her fingers: you can't stop something that's already happened. But if she hasn't, and is unlucky enough that she's just about to, she can take a big dose of progesterone that will stop her from popping an egg long enough for the sperm to die, and no pregnancy. Hurrah!

But, you ask, what if she's already ovulated, and the sperm luck out, and there's a zygote floating around but it hasn't yet stuck itself to the wall of the uterus? Would Plan B work then? And if it does, isn't that technically a kind of abortion?

Nope, and nope. If you've ovulated, the zygote either is or isn't going to be lucky enough to find a resting place. A lot of them don't, which is why pregnancy starts once the zygote takes root in the uterine lining. If you're not pregnant, you can't abort.

Okay, but. What if there's a zygote, and you personally see fertilization as the beginning point of life, even if it happens before pregnancy actually starts? If Plan B prevents implantation—and their own literature says they "may" do that—then that feels iffy to me.

This is the second thing that needs explaining. There is no evidence that Plan B prevents implantation. That's not a known effect of progesterone. But because science can't prove a negative—you can't prove that something doesn't happen, because if it doesn't happen, there is, by definition, no evidence—the drug company puts that little "may" in there. All "may" means is "even though we've never seen it happen, we can't prove that it doesn't." It's kind of like saying, "well, it might cause your skin to turn blue," or "it might cause you to grow a third arm," although they don't bother to say *that*, because it's not a possibility that would occur to anyone. But there is no evidence—none, zilch, nada—that Plan B prevents implantation. All it does is help you control the timing of ovulation; sort of the women's equivalent of guys thinking about baseball or their mother in order to keep from coming. For a guy, orgasm and ejaculation are the same event: for a woman, orgasm and ovulation aren't. If you're a guy, you can usually prevent the latter by controlling the former; if you're a woman, all you have to do is take a pill.


I got a lot of the details about this stuff from PZ Myers at Pharyngula: see Why the Wingnuts Hate Plan B and Plan B, Again.


Bitch_PhD writes the Bitch, Ph.D blog, may or may not still be a professor, and paid $45 for Plan B last month, but is happy to say she finally renewed her regular birth control prescription yesterday.

Sen. Barack Obama is an Illinois Democrat making a run for President. Or is he really an undercover muslim that was taught as a young boy to hate America and would send terrorists to live with you in your homes if elected. Fox News, fair and balanced, would certainly like you to at least consider the later.

Via ThinkProgress.org...

Now Fox News isn't outright saying here that Obama is an undercover, hypnotized muslim-facist sent here by the Saudis to destroy America. But they sure are saying, "Hey, it's a possibility". Also as likely, my dog is really a robot sent back in time to kill the evil secret robo-cat overlords. This is a common Fox News tactic used against it's political adversaries. John Kerry-Swiftboat ring a bell? Example, Fox's Steve Doocy even wanted to point out, maybe it's possible Obama's father was a huge Saddam Hussein fan (nevermind the fact that Obama was born in 1961, long before Saddam came to power as president of Iraq in 1979):

Next up on Fox: Does soy milk make you gay?

First the media went after Barack Obama for having a similar name to Osama Bin Laden. Then they placed Obama’s name over a picture of Bin Laden. It can’t really get worse than being called a terrorist, right? Wrong.

How about child molester?



The media sure does make a lot of mistakes with Obama…

Laura Bush has always enjoyed significant popularity as first lady, even when her husband's rating was in the toilet. Certainly she doesn't inspire the hatred and loathing that the last first lady endured, and she hasn't been above entering the political fray to shill for her husband and the Republicans when they called on her. Apparently she's busy doing the rounds again, this time on MSNBC, and blaming the good old liberal media for the miserable failure that is her husband's work in Iraq.

However, Laura Bush's statement about media coverage flies in the face of analyses showing that in fact, US media have given Iraq the kid glove treatment, santizing coverage and downplaying the true extent of the violence of carnage happening there every day. Think Progress shows that it's not just media pundits who believe this, and in fact the Iraq Study Group report said the exact same thing.

But apparently buoying her husband's political polling numbers are more important than providing the American people with real facts about what's going on in Iraq, or giving lawmakers the necessary information to craft a plan for how to proceed.

Not that this should surprise anyone. Underneath her homey exterior, Laura Bush is acting like any other political operative would under these circumstances; placing blame as far away from the true culprits as possible. The media has always been a convenient whipping boy for conservatives, why stop now?

A depressed war protester became so angry and discontent with America's invasion and post-invasion fucking up of Iraq, that he carefully planned to commit self-immolation as a form of public protest, Vietnam Buddhist monk style.

You'd think such a extreme form of protest might even make 5 minutes worth of news? Nah!! It's way more important we know who Britney is paling around with now.

This may have been a man who suffered with depression, as many who commit suicide also suffer from. But a suicide as a form of protest is still a protest. The media has always played a crucial role in a country where forward progress is usually the result of public dissent and protest. It's a true fucking shame when the media fails to do their part of the job.

At least I know Britney is doing well hanging out with Paris Hilton after her divorce.



Source: Editor and Publisher

Sean Hannity, the Fox News blowhard who seems to believe that a "fair and balanced" political analysis consists of occasionally acknowledging cohost Alan Colmes's fellating him while he spouts out conservative ideology, seems to have something of a consistency problem. His latest tirade against the liberal media concluded that the media is actively working to discourage Republican voters from going to the polls by downplaying the faults of Democratic candidates (like the Harry Reid "scandal" that has hung around the AP wire for two weeks despite the lack of anything scandalous occurring?) while highlighting the problems of Republicans. Unfortunately for Hannity, Media Matters has discovered that rather than illuminating the problem for the world to see, Hannity is actually part of the problem, as he had only two days earlier come out and said that Democrats are the ones who shouldn't vote.

So Sean Hannity, himself a part of the media, has taken to explicitly suggesting that Democrats not exercise their right to vote "for the sake of the nation" but it's the media that is suppressing Republican voters? How does that work exactly?

As Britain slowly recovers from it's most sizzling July in history, a left-leaning research group slams the media for sensationalizing climate change.

The Institute for Public Policy Research analyzed over 600 environmental news articles and described some of the coverage as being "tantamount to climate porn".

From BBC Online.

Now I've always had my suspicions about the coverage of things environmental. There's such an industry built up around telling us what a bunch of shit bags we are for using the wrong sort of aerosol and imperiling the planet. Yet many scientists think climate change is caused by natural phenomena such as sunspots and volcanic activity.

It's not as though climate change is anything new. Freak weather conditions have been freaking people out since time immemorial.

In London for instance, between the 15th and 19th centuries, there were 23 documented cases of the River Thames freezing over. This was such a novelty for Londoners that special celebratory frost fairs were held.

Ancient peoples used to offer sacrifices to weather gods to avoid unpredictable climate change and there's no mention in the bible of Noah blaming the flood on Shem's use of underarm deodorant.

Yet, if causing paroxysms of guilt can help newspaper shift units it's got to be worth filling people's heads with visions of man made weather apocalypses.

It is a foregone conclusion in the minds of many people, Republican and Democrat alike, that the media is dominated by liberals. People who look to find fault in the government, who seek to undermine presidential and congressional authority, flock to the media, which then becomes their personal mouthpiece for dissent and displeasure with whoever is in charge, or so goes the current wisdom. Why then, whenever there is a discussion in the mainstream media about national security and politics, is there an implicit assumption that Republicans have the edge in any political contest where this is an issue? Is the media merely reflecting what society already believes? Or are they just hopelessly out of touch with reality?

So why is every setback a good thing? Why should every real life failure translate into a political success, at least according to the media? The article goes on to cite a litany of public opinion polls that show just how incredibly out of step the notion of a Republican superiority on security-related issues is with people's actual thoughts on the issue. And yet we hear from the media how having the public despise Bush will benefit his congressional lapdogs when they seek reelection in the Fall. Of course, the ultimate test will be the actual election results, and maybe the media will somehow be vindicated. But on the surface at least it appears that they're bending over backwards to be extra nice to the Republican party.

Conservatives continue to spout off about the liberal media despite significant evidence to the contrary. But no self-respecting rhetorician ever took evidence to heart, and it seems to me to be the continued and relentless browbeating that the media has received since the Reagan years for its supposed liberal bias that has caused this bizarre backlash. While members of the media continue to self-identify as liberal they're also the ones who bought the Iraq/WMD connection in the buildup to the war, and awarded the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush before the votes had been counted. So perhaps it is the fear of being labeled liberal that is causing them to overcompensate and give Republicans the benefit of the doubt when they don't always deserve it.

This whole discussion would be academic if it didn't have real life consequences. While it's difficult to quantify the effect of the endless, repetitive paeans to Republican power and leadership by the media, people are obviously influenced by what they see and hear on television (if you believe that, ask yourself why companies spend billions each year on advertising.) In their zeal to appear "unbiased" in the eyes of conservative commentators (ironically, something which will never happen, because the bogeyman of the "liberal media" is far too useful to give up) journalists could be helping to shape reality in ways that benefits those same conservatives.