So, I’m getting ready to go the airport this morning, and I hear on the news that Helen Thomas has promisedthreatened to kill herself if Dick Cheney runs for president. As if we needed more reasons for him to run.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
It’s A Twofer!
So, I’m getting ready to go the airport this morning, and I hear on the news that Helen Thomas has promisedthreatened to kill herself if Dick Cheney runs for president. As if we needed more reasons for him to run.
Rough Week
I’ve been at meetings at NASA HQ all day (sorry, nothing particularly exciting) and I’m about to fly back to Florida for about ten hours, after which I fly to California for the afternoon, then to St. Louis for a weekend family wedding, leaving on Friday morning. Blogging is unlikely for a while…
I will leave you with this irritating vignette from the White House Press Corps, offered by Jeff Foust:
Q And how is the Mars program going?
MR. McCLELLAN: NASA can probably update you on the effort. Again, this is a long-term program, and you can sit there and smirk about it, but the President felt it was important — (laughter) — the President felt it was important to outline a clearly defined mission for NASA. And we’re all excited about today’s launch and we wish the —
Q Will he be speaking about it —
MR. McCLELLAN: Hang on — we wish the crew all the best.
Q Will he be speaking about it —
MR. McCLELLAN: NASA is working on implementing it, John. Thanks for starting out the briefing on such — (laughter.)
Wasn’t that a knee slapper?
That dumb Bush and his fantasy mission to Mars. Yuk, yuk…
McClellan didn’t handle this well. The response to the first question should have been: “To which Mars program are you referring?” (Thus offering the reporter an opportunity to be more expansive on his profound ignorance about national space policy).
After he did so, saying something like, “You know, the president’s plan to send people to Mars decades from now,” the response would be: “Well, John, how much progress would you expect this year on something that’s not going to happen for decades? Do you imagine that that’s the sum total of American space policy? Or haven’t you been paying attention? Are you opposed to the nation having a long-term vision for space exploration?”
Yeah, I know that his job is to answer questions, not ask them, but still.
What’s really annoying about this is that on one of the few times the daily White House briefing leads off with space policy questions (due obviously to yesterday’s successful launch) there can’t be an intelligent discussion about it.
Pandemic Coming?
This seems to me worth worrying about. Much more so, in fact, than shark attacks and missing girls in Aruba.
Media Bias
It was quite amusing tonight to watch “Fox News Watch,” a show supposedly based on analysis of media performance, and to see the two libs on the panel, Neil Gabler and Jane Hall, dissing Judy Miller, as apparently the traitor to the cause. I was a little disappointed that one of the two supposedly “conservative” panelists (Cal Thomas or Jim Pinkerton) didn’t call them on it, and ask them directly who they thought she was protecting, because it’s clear to me that they’re deluding themselves that she’s protecting Karl Rove.
Didn’t He Actually Read The Story?
Check out the subheadline in this story:
Action may mark end of 5-month truce
One would think that there had been no hostilities whatsoever prior to this attack, that it was just those bloodthirsty Jews ending the truce by lobbing rockets at innocent Palestinians. You know, just restarting that ol’ cycle of violence?
But the article itself says:
The military wing of Hamas, known formally as the Islamic Resistance Movement, has fired more than 100 mortar shells and rockets into Israel and Jewish settlements in Gaza in recent days, one of which killed a 22-year-old Israeli woman Thursday.
I just can’t imagine how the mind of a copy editor works who could come up with such a headline.
Didn’t He Actually Read The Story?
Check out the subheadline in this story:
Action may mark end of 5-month truce
One would think that there had been no hostilities whatsoever prior to this attack, that it was just those bloodthirsty Jews ending the truce by lobbing rockets at innocent Palestinians. You know, just restarting that ol’ cycle of violence?
But the article itself says:
The military wing of Hamas, known formally as the Islamic Resistance Movement, has fired more than 100 mortar shells and rockets into Israel and Jewish settlements in Gaza in recent days, one of which killed a 22-year-old Israeli woman Thursday.
I just can’t imagine how the mind of a copy editor works who could come up with such a headline.
Didn’t He Actually Read The Story?
Check out the subheadline in this story:
Action may mark end of 5-month truce
One would think that there had been no hostilities whatsoever prior to this attack, that it was just those bloodthirsty Jews ending the truce by lobbing rockets at innocent Palestinians. You know, just restarting that ol’ cycle of violence?
But the article itself says:
The military wing of Hamas, known formally as the Islamic Resistance Movement, has fired more than 100 mortar shells and rockets into Israel and Jewish settlements in Gaza in recent days, one of which killed a 22-year-old Israeli woman Thursday.
I just can’t imagine how the mind of a copy editor works who could come up with such a headline.
48 Killed in Lightning Strikes This Year
An average of 90 people die every year in the US in lightning strikes. Of 103 leading causes of death of 2.4 million people in the US, assault without firearms killed 5500. 1% would be 24000. If we want more people to live, we should research heart attack, cancer, stroke and so on and buy automatic electronic defibrillators. The media frenzy about terrorism induces bad public policy. We might be able to cut heart attack (acute myocardial infarction) deaths in half from 170,000 to 85,000 a year by spending a one-time $82 billion on defibrillators. That’s a one time $1 million for one life saved per year. If we completely stop all homicides not from firearms for that amount of money per year, that would be more than $16 million per life saved. Focusing just on the deaths from terrorism, it’s probably closer to $160 million per life saved.
They’re Going To Kill More Astronauts!
And of course, NASA should be embarrassed, even ashamed of itself about it. That seems to be the subtext of this media roundup by Keith Cowing about the safety panel that reported yesterday on progress in getting Shuttle ready to start flying again.
Of course, as is often the case when it comes to space (and sadly, other) reporting, it’s the media who should be embarrassed. If they had had a little more technical competence at the time, they would have pointed out that some of the CAIB recommendations were technically unrealistic, and that Sean O’Keefe was foolish to pledge to meet them all. This was, in fact, the first point at which it was becoming clear that he was the wrong man in the job. He had no reputation for being technical, but one of four conditions must have applied:
- He didn’t know that the recommendations were impractical, but assumed that because they came from smart people, they must be, and made the pledge without consultation.
- He didn’t know, but asked some of his staff, and they told him they were.
- He didn’t know, but asked and was told they weren’t, but felt politically compelled to do so anyway.
- He knew himself and did it anyway for the same reason.
I’m not sure which of the four is worse–having an administrator who made the pledge cluelessly, or one who made it knowingly, perhaps because he thought that it was important to do so to maintain public support for the agency, in the face of apparent public anxiety over killing astronauts, who are apparently more precious and irreplaceable than babes in arms. I think that it was another symptom, like the misbegotten Hubble decision, of his inability to deal with tragedies occurring on his watch.
He was a good administrator for a pre-Columbia era, but not for a post-Columbia one. And the problem is that one never knows when one era can change to the next. In this case, it happened in a few brief minutes over the skies of Texas. He remained afterward for almost two years, which was far too long, but it was a difficult situation politically–forcing him out early would have made it appear that what happened was his fault, which it really wasn’t. I’m sure that he felt that he had to see the investigation through, and then oversee the beginning of the development of the president’s new policy.
In any event, I’m heartened to see that both the safety panel (consisting of astronauts) and the new administrator are being more realistic about this now, and press carping on the issue looks foolish to me.
[Update on Thursday morning–yes, I am busy…]
Professor Reynolds has some related thoughts.