Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Space

Way To Go

8 Comments

Thanks for discouraging live blogging of space (and other) conferences (not to mention anything else), Keith.

[Saturday morning update]

The lesson here is that you have to be careful to delineate your editorial comments from the reportage (I usually do this with parenths, I think, though I’d have to go back and look at some from the past to be sure–I might use square brackets) when transcribing, because it is easily confused otherwise. But as I said, we shouldn’t let things like this discourage us from doing it. This is the first conference like this that I’ve missed in a while, and I really appreciate what Clark and others are doing. I’ve always wondered if what I was doing was worthwhile when I live blogged other conferences, and now I know that it definitely is. Well, at least when others do it…

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Dhimmification

1 Comment

Sam Harris has a long piece at (of all places) the Huffington Post on the unwillingness of western civilization to stand up for its own values against radical Islam. And as others have noted (and he notes himself), this is particularly ironic:

In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of the very essay you are now reading was originally commissioned by the opinion page of Washington Post and then rejected because it was deemed too critical of Islam. Please note, this essay was destined for the opinion page of the paper, which had solicited my response to the controversy over Wilders’ film. The irony of its rejection seemed entirely lost on the Post, which responded to my subsequent expression of amazement by offering to pay me a “kill fee.” I declined.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Tuskegee Libel

5 Comments

I had never heard that the Tuskegee experiment involved deliberately infecting people with syphilis. I always thought that the sin was leaving it untreated in men who already had it, so that the progression of the disease could be studied (a sin that was mitigated by the fact that at least at the beginning of the study, there was no known effective treatment, anyway).

But apparently, in the wake of Jeremiah Wright’s lunacy, several news people have bought into the nonsense that the researchers infected healthy men. I guess that there’s no libel that is too difficult for some people to believe, and even embrace, as long as it is directed against the US.

Anyway, Jonah has more (including the fact that it was a “progressive” project).

Someone should publicly, and loudly, confront Wright on this latest lie. There is a huge leap from studying men already infected, and deliberately inventing a disease and then infecting a race of people for the purpose of genocide, which is what he accuses the country of doing, with Tuskegee as a supposed existence proof.

But don’t hold your breath.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jonah has more at The Corner.