In the News

In my newspaper years, I prepared my share of advance profiles of public figures, and I know the scut work that goes into sifting through a decades-long career. In the old days it meant digging through packets of yellowed clippings in the morgue, interviewing widely, searching for those moments of controversy or surprise that revealed something interesting about the subject. How many rulings, opinions, articles, legal arguments, panel discussions, and speeches had there been in [Sotomayor's] long years of service? What bloodhound producer at Fox News had waded into this haystack to find these two choice needles?

Then I flipped to MSNBC, and lo!… they had the exact same two clips. I flipped to CNN… same clips. CBS… same clips. ABC… same clips. Parsing Sotomayor’s 30 years of public legal work, somehow every TV network had come up with precisely the same moments!           

Mark Bowden, The Atlantic October 2009

 Bowden goes on to report that the clips were dug up by a pair of conservative-minded amateurs who took it upon themselves to find the dirt, or at least what could play as dirt in a limited soundbyte, on each of Obama's six or seven potential SCOTUS nominees.  The clips, ubiquitous within hours of Sotomayor's eventual nomination, were already well-know to Michelle Malkin's followers (of whose number Desultory Eclecticism is not).  Bowden, an actual journalist, gives his take at the link above.  The most interesting angle Desultory Eclecticism can provide, however, ties in with another column in the same issue of The Atlantic.

Castigating the comedic left (forgive the tautology, and the alliteration), Christopher Hitchens picks some unfunny  half-truths from a few Al Franken books and conflates them with the broader Stewart/Colbert phenomenon.  Oh, Christopher; I disagree. The Daily Show has been chronicling the decline of television journalism/commentary (much of the best material being furnished by Fox News in its evolution since November 4, 2008 from plain wackiness to certifiable insanity), and doing a really good job of it.  I don't know if there's an army of liberal muckrakers comparable to the Sotomayor hit-squad, but wherever the goods for this juxtaposition came from, it stands as a better piece of journalistic commentary than anything Desultory Eclectism has encountered on the real news, PBS excepted:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-august-13-2009/glenn-beck-s-operation