Update: She’s fine, and back at work. Glad to see, despite the unfortunate sequence of events.
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Maureen Dowd in her Sunday and Wednesday column, plagerized a blogger. This is pretty awful – bloggers often channel the news, but rarely get credit for doing so… so outright plagerism stings… (and gets widely reported, and quickly noticed.)
The next week, she published this story panning President Obama: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/opinion/20dowd.html. It was a piece unworthy of Maureen, in my opinion, but clearly “red meat” for a certain sector of the liberal blogosphere. I read it with utter distaste, and concluded that Maureen had dug in a little deeper to placate her liberal readers – the ones most likely offended by her plagerism.
Since then, nothing. No new articles from MoDo. I’ve written here on this blog of my appreciation for Maureen, but the silence since that last essay doesn’t sit well with me. It feels like she, having not drawn the liberal applause for the manipulative piece, has dropped off the map (or been dropped?).
I hope not. I hope she is healthy, that all is well for her, and that she is still in the NYTimes employ. Here’s wishing Madame Incorrigible well, despite my recent displeasure.
For those wonderiing if there’s value to twitter – Mark posted that Louis Caldera (who authorized this picture) has resigned. Can’t find any other outlet reporting this news online…
(And actually – I’ve now posted WITH comment. But not on the picture, per se. So I’m keeping the title!
A Turning Point for Voting Rights Law – Room for Debate Blog – NYTimes.com.
The New York Times has created a blog called “Room for Debate” – in which prominant Times contributors debate various thorny issues in the news. It is a wonderful contribution to the ongoing struggle for genuinely trustworthy, nonpartisan education on various issues, and I heartily recommend it.
This issue relates to the Voting Rights Act reauthorization – and I’m posting because so far I feel myself unable to follow the argument. The argument (and therefore presumably, the law itself) seems to hinge on two separate issues, but commentators seem to address only one at a time. The first is a concern about laws that would prohibit or suppress minority (in general, black in particular) votes, and the second is a concern about districting. While I can see how they are related – they don’t seem to be the same at all – and it seems therefore that those in favor and those opposed to recertification are talking past each other.
I’ll be digging more into the issue – but if anyone has more to share on the topic, please do!
And part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another – well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine, or this or that or the other.
Today, Christopher Hayes, speaking on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, suggested that conservatives consume media in a “hall of mirrors.” The analogy is wonderful – but Chris Hayes mistakenly assumes that the “hall of mirrors” is only a conservative phenomenon.
With the decline of the daily newspaper, the continued corporatization of media (television, radio, print) and the explosion of partisan, mutually-exclusive blogospheres point to an increasingly dangerous trend for our nation.
I don’t have any wise insights or solutions – I only have an increasingly troubled spirit – our news is tainted and gathering information enough to make informed decisions is becoming MORE difficult, even in the information age – because our information is tainted with partisanship.
The Fast of ‘Ala has begun – and in keeping with the fast and the spirit of my faith, I’m going to look to abstain from politics for these Holy Days. 19 days, including today, and I will have no partisan opinions to share…. my observations will be non-partisan, and as much as possible, apolitical. I hope at the end of the Fast the fog of competing information clouds begin to lift.
It seems odd to me to think that this is even a debate, and it seems odder that the press acts as though the only legitimate criteria for sound judgment is polls. Our free press (are they still free?), with a journalistic obligation to truth-telling, and with a unique worldview born of covering national and international figures and events over time, nevertheless fails to aggressively pursue a line of discourse about John McCain’s choice of vice presidential candidate that reflects a genuine concern for the respect of office? It seems unpatriotic and a waste of the 4th amendment for the press to only report on how “popular” such a wrongheaded move is.
Well. Here’s Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic on the same subject: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2224950/33157262
Hat tip (see! I’m catching on to blog lingo! ) to Ben Smith @ Politico for the reference to Scout Tufankjian’s amazing gallary of photographs of the Obama campaign to date. The pictures are stunning, moving, hopeful. (Plus – she is in Brooklyn – a fact that earns extra props from me…even IF she’s a Red Sox fan!) Please have a look! I’m hoping to save up some pennies and buy a print.
