This day in history - July 8, 1889: The first issue of The Wall Street Journal is published

By Richard K. Barry

The Wall Street Journal is the largest newspaper in the United States by circulation and, sadly, since 2007 owned by the Rupert Murdoch news empire, which also owns the Fox News Channel among many other media entities.

In a week in which another Murdoch-owned media outlet, the British tabloid News of the World, announced that it will shut down due to despicable invasions of privacy, it seems important to remind ourselves what a cancer on the world of journalism Murdoch has been.

Despite earlier assurances from him that he would not turn the Journal into a right-wing advocacy rag, that is exactly what he has done.

And Fox News is just another "objective news source." Yeah, right.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

World's dumbest op-ed

By Carl

And considering it's published in The Wall Street Journal, that's a mighty large field to beat out! Meet Thomas Franks...

The essential point about Gates-gate, or the tempest over last week’s arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., is this: Most liberal commentary on the subject has taken race as its theme. Conservative commentators, by contrast, have furiously hit the class button.

Liberals, by and large, immediately plugged the event into their unfair-racial-profiling template, and proceeded to call for blacks and whites to “listen to each other’s narratives” and other such anodyne niceties even after it started to seem that police racism was probably not what caused the incident.

Conservatives, meanwhile, were following their own “narrative,” the one in which racism is often exaggerated and the real victim is the unassuming common man scorned by the deference-demanding “liberal elite.” Commentators on the right zeroed in on the fact that Mr. Gates is an “Ivy League big shot,” a “limousine liberal,” and a star professor at Harvard, an institution they regard with special loathing. They pointed out that Mr. Gates allegedly addressed the cop with that deathless snob phrase, “you don’t know who you’re messing with”; they reminded us that Cambridge, Mass., is home to a particularly obnoxious combination of left-wing orthodoxy and upper-class entitlement; and they boiled over Mr. Gates’s demand that the officer “beg my forgiveness.”

OK, so far, that's not a bad assessment of the situation. Although I might quibble with the terms "most," certainly the loudest and most public voices have focused on those two issues. And now, for the brain fart:

Conservatives won this round in the culture wars, not merely because most of the facts broke their way, but because their grievance is one that a certain species of liberal never seems to grasp. Whether the issue is abortion, evolution or recycling, these liberal patricians are forever astonished to discover that the professions and institutions and attitudes that they revere are seen by others as arrogance and affectation.

The, uh, facts broke their way? Honeychild, the facts most certainly broke against the arresting officer and one wonders exactly why the conservatives in this country, the alleged bastion of individual rights and freedoms, aren't taking up Gates' cause.

After all, if he had been arrested for brandishing a weapon at a police invasion of his premises and assault on both his private property and his person, it would be Ruby Ridge all over again!

Oh. Wait. Randy Weaver was white. It's different for white people shooting at Federal agents. I forgot.

The facts, Mr. Frank, are that the originating 911 call made no mention of the suspect's race, except when prompted and even then, Gates or his driver were misidentified as possibly "Hispanic" (direct quote).

And yet, somehow, "two black men (were reported)" appeared in the initial police report. This, despite the firm denial by the complainant (Lucia Whalen) that she ever mentioned the race of anyone.

Those are the facts. Furthermore, since when has insulting anyone....in other words, exercising your First Amendment right to be a jerk...been an arrestable offense? Detestable, perhaps. But it is not an arrestable offense for anyone, standing on their own property, to call a cop names.

After all, one would think they've heard a lot worse from traffic violators, yet county and town jails all across this nation are studiously empty of boneheads with quick tempers, mouthing off to the cop who stopped them for a taillight violation.

But wait! There's more from Mr. Franks!

The “elitism” narrative routinely blind-sides them, takes them by surprise again and again. There they are, feeling good about their solidarity with the coffee-growers of Guatemala, and then they find themselves on the receiving end of criticism from, say, the plumbers of Ohio.

Elitism, in this case, meaning a man who teaches at Harvard University is not entitled to the same basic Constitutional protections that, say, a limousine-riding Ph.D. columnist for the Wall Street Journal is. Especially if said teacher is uppity and black. But I digress.

But then again, limousine-riding Ph. D. columnists for the Wall Street Journal would hardly deign to share a beer with anyone, much less the house Negro at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, would they? Or is he just jealous that The Man is keeping a white man down?

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

A tipping point? When even the right-wing media exposes the lying and spinning of McCain-Palin

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Steve Benen thinks that "we've reached a tipping point." I hope he's right.

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First -- and this is the focus of Steve's post -- Fox News's Megyn Kelly, in an interview with McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds this morning, accused the McCain campaign of lying about Obama on taxes:

[Y]ou guys have suggested he’s going to raise taxes on the middle class and virtually every independent analyst who took a look at that claim said that’s not true. He’ll raise it on people making $200,000 or $250,000, but not the middle class.

Bounds, predictably, played the old Republican card about tax-raising Democrats, but Kelly, much to her credit, refused to play along.

Kelly asked if McCain has "gone too far,... stretched the truth with the voters." Obviously, he has. And even this Fox News host knows it.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is just one host. It's not like O'Reilly and Hannity, or Hume and Kristol, are calling out the McCain campaign.

**********

Second, The Wall Street Journal, hardly a bastion of pro-Democratic sentiment, has an article today on Palin's record on earmarks, exposing the truth behind the lies:

Last week, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain said his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, hadn't sought earmarks or special-interest spending from Congress, presenting her as a fiscal conservative. But state records show Gov. Palin has asked U.S. taxpayers to fund $453 million in specific Alaska projects over the past two years.

These projects include more than $130 million in federal funds that would benefit Alaska's fishing industry and an additional $9 million to help Alaska oil companies. She also has sought $4.5 million to upgrade an airport on a Bering Sea island that has a year-round population of less than 100.

Obviously, Palin isn't at all what McCain and his campaign, and she herself, are making her out to be. She's not a crusader against pork-barrel politics, nor any sort of reformer, but The Earmark Queen. And even this right-wing newspaper knows it.

But, again, let's not get ahead of ourselves. With right-leaning outlets like the Journal and the Politico exposing Palin for what she is, and exposing the lies of the McCain-Palin campaign on at least this one issue, there is more here than there is to one Fox News host talking taxes, but it will take a major shift in the media's coverage of the race for this to register with low-information voters.

Still, there is room for cautious optimism here. After all, it isn't just taxes and earmarks (although the latter really strikes at the Palin myth). The media are also covering stories like Troopergate, the rape kit business, and book banning in Wasilla, all of which expose Palin to extensive and justifiable criticism.

What is needed is more of what Kelly was doing. Much of the focus over the past couple of weeks has been on Palin, but the focus needs to shift to McCain -- on taxes, on the economy, on health care, on education, on Iraq, on global warming and the environment, on abortion, on women's issues, etc. And that means Obama and Biden forcing the shift with a concerted effort to define McCain and control the narrative. There is no guarantee that the media will abandon its free ride for McCain and its infatuation with Palin, but there are at least some encouraging signs.

Have we reached a tipping point? Maybe... just maybe.