Also from today’s Morning Jolt:

Like a Crazy Ex, Rolling Stone Desperately Hoping You’ll Pay Attention to Them Again

Look, we get it. It’s tough to run a print magazine, particularly if a magazine thinks of itself as a journal of cultural trends that entice and excite young people. Kids don’t read print anymore. People pass by the newsstand and don’t give it a second glance, their eyes pulled away by the latest starlet half-naked and pouting on the cover of Maxim. And if a publication’s editors start feeling financial pressure and a sense of declining relevance to the conversation they seek to influence, they can get desperate, resorting to shock headlines and a sneering tone . . . as we’ve seen:

  

 

But Rolling Stone editors knew what they were doing by putting the Little Brother Bomber on the cover. They were getting the news world to talk about a magazine that had in past months become largely indistinguishable from Entertainment Weekly: Johnny Depp in full Tonto regalia, comedian Louis C. K., Mad Men lead actor Jon Hamm, Seth Rogan and his co-stars of This Is the End.

And in using the soft-focus, Dylan-esque image of Little Brother Bomber on the cover, they scrambled some of our usual political lines. The editor of ThinkProgress says the image makes the bomber look like Jim Morrison.

And some complaints are coming from on high:

Former White House National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor expressed concern on Wednesday about Rolling Stone magazine putting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on its cover, tweeting that “A disaffected US kid could see this and think terrorist are afforded rock star status.”

The same image once appeared on the cover of the New York Times; objections seem to primarily revolve around the fact that Rolling Stone almost only features celebrities on its covers — most recently Johnny Depp — and thus this image would put an accused terrorist into that category, of someone to be celebrated.

Bingo. A traditional newsweekly could have run that image with the headline, “Into the Mind of a Killer” or something similar, with little objection. The New Republic recalls Time magazine covers featuring Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden.

But this is the cover of Rolling Stone, where we’re used to seeing Janet Jackson’s cleavage, or Angelina Jolie’s cleavage, or Katy Perry’s cleavage, or Shakira’s cleavage, or . . . where was I going with this? Ah, yes! For most of the past decades, Rolling Stone covers have fit into three categories 1) celebrity cleavage 2) here’s a singer or band who is very hot at the moment and whose image will instantly date this magazine 3) “Isn’t Obama awesome!”

There really isn’t a strong tradition of “here’s a detailed look into the face of evil” cover pieces.

Let’s also note that the cover’s text doesn’t help matters, either.

How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by His Family, Fell Into Radical Islam and Became a Monster

To their credit, the editors label him a monster. But “failed by his family” seems to suggest his actions aren’t entirely his responsibility, and “fell into radical Islam” is a strangely passive way of describing the choice to commit murder. It’s not a pothole.

Also . . . had Rolling Stone editors personally known any of the victims, would they have made the same choice?

Apparently Rolling Stone editors are comfortable writing off Boston from their circulation area:

Pharmacy chain CVS has announced it will not sell copies of next week’s Rolling Stone featuring suspected Boston terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover.

“As a company with deep roots in New England and a strong presence in Boston, we believe this is the right decision out of respect for the victims of the attack and their loved ones,” the company said in a statement.

The cover, which was teased late Tuesday night, has incited a flurry of controversy, with Rolling Stone’s website being bombarded with complaints and a Facebook page started to boycott to the music magazine. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick have both criticized the cover as in poor taste.

Here’s Erik Wemple, a usually fair-minded reporter and blogger on the media beat for the Washington Post:

*This is good journalism, as the photo depicts the same Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that The Post and the New York Times — and others — depicted in deeply reported pieces. That is, a regular, good guy with friends, interests and activities — a “joker,” even.

*Showing this alleged bomber in his full humanity makes him appear even more menacing.

*Some are saying that Rolling Stone is exploiting this image — this story — for commercial gain. Well, Rolling Stone is a magazine. It exploits all its stories for commercial gain, some more effectively than others.

. . . I’ll leave the last word to two of the victims:

Brothers J.P. and Paul Norden of Stoneham each lost a leg in the attacks and they let the magazine know how they feel in this long Facebook post Wednesday morning.

Here you go Rolling Stones; if you required a cover and wanted marathon related, one would assume that you would have promoted a nation of continued healing, provided American heroes and encouraged moving forward. This is just one of several available shots that would have made sense if you were looking for togetherness.

Instead, your irresponsible behavior did more to tear open wounds and insult victims, survivors and families that have been slowly healing and accepting the horrendous acts of terrorism. There is a very long road that awaits the involved victims and your magazine ripped at the hearts in an instance and cut at the deepest levels and for what, “To increase sales of a magazine that usually is worthy of music celebrities.” Well, Rolling Stones, you just reclaimed your 15 minutes of fame, we only hope, it lasts only fifteen minutes.

What you did yesterday with your incredibly poor decision, was weaken extreme good that has been built from unimaginable evil.

Well, we are here to remind you that we are 2 BROTHERS 1 NATION. . . . Standing Boston Strong. . . . and no room for magazines intended on highlighting evil, hate and death.

Today, we take a step over that magazine and hold our heads up high and ask our supporters to do the same and to also ignore the sensationalism perpetrated by RS.

From the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt:

Why Are the News Networks Serving Us Round-the-Clock Coverage of the Zimmerman Trial?

Yesterday morning, I tuned in to Daily Rundown . . . and found most of the show’s opening was consumed by George Zimmerman trial discussion, and soon pre-empted by live trial coverage. I had been scheduled to appear on The Lead with Jake Tapper as part of their roundtable today . . . and was told Monday evening that they’re likely to be pre-empted by live trial coverage this afternoon.

Egypt’s got a widespread, increasingly violent uprising — Turkey and Brazil, too, the death toll in Syria just hit six figures, the Obamacare implementation train wreck continues, and we get nonstop coverage of every witless witness in this case.

Monday, CNN “accidentally” showed viewers defendant George Zimmerman’s Social Security number, which spurred righteous rant from Allahpundit:

. . . the excuse will be that it was an accident, that they were caught by surprise when unredacted personal information was shown in court. Maybe. They know not to air images of the jurors, they know not to air grisly photos of the crime scene, but apparently they don’t know that sometimes police reports with people’s vital info are shown onscreen in court during trials.

Here’s the thing: Even if this shot is accidental, the only reason the proceedings are on TV to begin with is because the media’s obsessed with the idea that Zimmerman committed a racial atrocity and must be punished for it. Trials typically don’t get saturation coverage because the facts are interesting and tragic and there’s a legit dispute as to whether the prosecution’s or defense’s story of what happened is true. They get saturation coverage because there’s an obvious innocent victim/diabolical defendant dynamic that the media’s interested in.

From the beginning, with the Times pushing its “white Hispanic” description of Zimmerman, the press has strained hard to make the Trayvon Martin shooting a passion play about whites treating black life cheaply in modern, post-civil rights America. As terrible as the prosecution’s witnesses have been thus far, there is no scenario — zero — in which most of the press concludes that acquittal on the murder charge is just rather than unjust. Zimmerman must be guilty, morally if not legally. Progress demands it. Against that backdrop, why be surprised that CNN would show his social security number onscreen? The cameras are there because the press has issued its verdict. Intentional or not, this is part of the sentencing phase.

When some future PhD candidate is doing his dissertation on the total collapse of American news gathering and journalism in the twenty-first century, they’ll cite the coverage of this murder a lot. You recall the egregious “editing” of the defendant’s 911 call:

NBC News has completed the internal investigation into the edited tape of George Zimmerman’s 911 call, which was aired on Today. The network admitted an “error” and apologized to viewers.

The edited call was aired on Today, but was aired repeatedly — including during MSNBC segments about the Trayvon Martin case. NBC’s audio made it seem as though Zimmerman voluntarily offered that Martin looked suspicious because he was black. The unedited audio, The Hollywood Reporter notes, “reveals that Zimmerman didn’t mention Martin’s race until the 911 operator asked him, ‘Is he white, black or Hispanic?’”

This March 2012 article from the Poynter Institute for journalism detailed and verified what seemed odd about the initial coverage of the case — i.e., all of the photos of the 17-year-old shooting victim made him look like he wasn’t old enough to go to high school.

Since the shooting of Trayvon Martin became national news, two photos have come to define the emotionally and racially charged narrative.

News organizations initially had just a few photos of Martin to choose from, and just one of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman who shot and killed him. More recent photos have emerged lately, but a month after the shooting, the narrative already has been established.

This is the most recognized image of Trayvon Martin, although it’s several years old. (Associated Press)

“The challenge we have is a lot of folks are getting a very surface view from the photos,” said Orlando Sentinel photo editor Tom Burton. “Photos can be used to get people emotionally involved and we need to be careful. It’s a concern if we had more of a choice, but we are limited by availability.”

The dominant photo of Martin shows him 13 or 14 years old, wearing a red Hollister T-shirt. Other photos, none of them recent, depict a young Martin in a youth football uniform, holding a baby and posing with a snowboard. He is the picture of innocence.

The most common photo of Zimmerman is a 2005 police mugshot. He is 22 in the photo, which was taken after he was arrested for assaulting an officer. (The charges were dropped.) He looks unhappy, if not angry.

The contrast — the two photos are often published side by side — has led to criticism that news media have tilted the story in favor of the 17-year-old victim and against the 28-year-old man who shot him.

“The images used are clearly prejudicial to both men,” said Kenny Irby, Poynter’s senior faculty for visual journalism and diversity. “If those are the repeating images, then we continually reinforce prejudice and negative emotions. We never get to appreciate the life experience or further context of either individual.”

You and I don’t really know what happened that night down in Florida. We may think we know, based on what we have seen and read, but ultimately, the trial is to determine whether a crime was committed. Yet since the shooting garnered national headlines, we have seen Americans on every social network furiously insisting that they knew what had happened, and that Zimmerman is guilty of murder, or that he is guilty of nothing more than deadly self-defense as a dangerous young man viciously attacked him. It’s an unfortunate, deadly circumstance that would seem to have limited ramifications for us, and yet the media treats it as if it is some sort of defining story of the ages, with deep meaning and revelations about the true soul of America.

Like the Paula Deen controversy, this is a he-said, he-said dispute that we’re supposed to line up and take sides over, screaming at each other with absolute certainty about facts that we cannot possibly know.

What’s the point of this coverage, media? What do you hope to illuminate by turning this case into the biggest trial since O. J. Simpson? If Allahpundit’s cynical assessment is wrong, how do the editorial directors of these large journalism institutions explain their coverage?

The first Morning Jolt of the week looks at two dramatic developments in Syria, some big decisions coming down the line from the Supreme Court, and then this observation…

How Tragic Events Turn Into Partisan Foodfights, Faster Than Ever Before

Let’s examine a familiar pattern in news stories…

Something awful and shocking happens: A madman shoots up a kindergarten classroom.  Two jihadist wannabes blow up the Boston Marathon. A tornado tears apart an Oklahoma City suburb. A group of jihadists in the United Kingdom behead a soldier leaving his barracks and then bark tirades to the passersby, hands dripping with blood.

Some of those horrific incidents tie into some sort of policy debate, but for most people, that’s something to be addressed some time after a tragedy, not in the immediate moments after the news breaks. But almost immediately, people begin citing the horrible event as proof that their political worldview has been vindicated once again. Some writers seem to specialize in their ability to take a terrible event and have the first op-ed on an editor’s desk, tying the shocking event to their preexisting policy preferences. David Sirota may be the champion of this:

April 16: “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.”

May 16: “The Texas fertilizer plant explosion reveals that lax regulations are far more dangerous than any form of terrorism.”

May 21: “Anyone regret slashing National Weather Service budget now? With GOP-backed cuts to forecasting agency, experts warn future storms will go undetected and more lives lost.”

When people die suddenly and terribly, and an editorial page editor needs a column to argue it’s ultimately the fault of Republicans, Sirota’s always there to step up.

These horrible events are all distinct and separate, but they hit us with big questions – i.e., how could this happen? Where was/is God? Why must the innocent suffer, and why must we live in a world where evil exists and can strike us without warning? Should the sudden death of others remind us to live each day like it’s our last? How can you make long-term plans for the future, knowing that tragedy could strike at any time? Do we, or does any society, sufficiently thank and appreciate and honor those who risk and lose their lives in efforts to protect the rest of us?

Those are tough questions.  The political questions are pretty easy by comparison – and I suspect some people eagerly turn to them after something terrible happens, because it’s almost calming to turn one’s attention to bashing the familiar scapegoat of the political opposition. We can’t do anything to un-do the actions of jihadists, tornadoes, or a kindergarten gunman, but boy, can we tell the world how angry we are about the political opposition, who we’re certain is really to blame for the terrible event.

Almost immediately after a terrible event – sometimes while they’re still going on – we find someone throwing a political argument at us – sometimes some random yokel on Twitter, sometimes a semi-professional blame-thrower like Sirota.  Naturally, the public square is full of people who hate leaving any argument or attack unanswered. Before you know it, just as you’re getting your head around some sudden tragedy or abomination, you look up and your Twitter feed has become a food-fight of competing “how dare you!” shrieks.

This phenomenon is problematic for a lot of reasons. One big one is that each time this happens, the public debate becomes a little less focused on the terrible event – “X” -  and a little more on what somebody said about “X.” Perhaps this is my cynicism showing, but I’m no longer surprised that people say terrible and stupid things after awful events. I’m starting to get skeptical about the need to treat obnoxious post-tragedy comments as newsworthy. Half of these are cries for attention, anyway.

Recently a conservative blogger pointed out some cretin attempting to raise money, making light of the death of a figure that many on the Right respect. Some folks wanted to blog more about this cretin and denounce him and call him out for his outrageously vile behavior, etc. Of course, the cretin wanted attention, and it’s quite likely that his ultimate desire is precisely to get a bunch of conservative bloggers talking about how terrible he is – because that will bring his fundraising effort to the attention of more people. I would define vindication as his pathetic fundraising effort dying a quiet death – a reminder that no one wants to give him money to continue being obnoxious, no one really cares what he says or thinks, and that in the grand scheme of things, he doesn’t really matter.

How widely could we get a “don’t feed the trolls” policy adopted?

The first Morning Jolt of the week offers a look at complaints about the White House Correspondents Dinner, some truly jaw-dropping statistics about the increasing rate of gun sales in this country, and then these thoughts on what I learned, and shared, at last week’s conference in Orlando:

Spreading Our Ideas in the Era of Drug-Dealer Journalism

Things I learned at the Heritage Foundation’s Resource Bank and the Franklin Center’s Future of Media discussions this past week in Orlando:

• According to Anton Vuljaj, political advertising strategist from Google, YouTube’s search engine is the second-most used search engine on the web, after Google.
• Direct mail brings in $36 million per year for the Heritage Foundation.
• One of the big problems with modern groups that promise get-out-the-vote efforts is that they blur the line between voter contact and voter interaction — i.e., a robocall, a door hanger, an e-mail all count as voter contact, but the voter may or may not even look at them. The best get-out-the-vote groups aim for actual interaction with the voter, via phone or best of all, in-person by knocking on doors.
• No Obama campaign offices in Ohio shut down completely between 2008 and 2012. Are any of the Romney offices still open?

Here’s an abbreviated version of the talk I gave on the panel, “Leading Voices in Conservative Journalism (Who Were Available)”:

Andrew Malcolm just observed that we’re no longer in the “Pharmacist Era of Journalism” — where an authority figure stands above you and gives you what experts have decided you need to know. Perhaps we’re in the “Drug-Dealer Era of Journalism” — where you may not completely know or entirely trust the source who’s giving you what you want to know, but it gives you a rush, and you’ll probably be coming back for more later.

Most of us in the world of conservative journalism are now aiming to reach that chunk of web users that go onto Facebook and never come off. Predicting which pieces, visuals, and ideas go viral remains a crapshoot. My graphic on foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority being spared by the sequester was viewed 334,000 times. I’ve had other ones that I thought were just as good get 1,000 views or so.

A good chunk of the Facebook-only audience is relatively apolitical, which is a way of saying we’re trying to offer political news and arguments and ideas to people who fundamentally aren’t that interested in policy and politics. We’re facing the challenge of trying to reach a new audience while continuing to serve a very good, loyal audience that is interested in what we do.

My favorite example of handling the loyal audience/new audience divide badly is when NBC decided they wanted to get more women to watch the Olympics, and thus large swaths of their prime-time Olympics coverage were devoted to documentary-style features about the hardships that the athletes had overcome — a seemingly endless cavalcade of relatives with cancer, or car accidents, or brutal injuries, or their dogs getting sick, or the Starbucks barista getting their drink order wrong — suddenly, every athlete’s life was like a country-western song. And the usual audience for the Olympics asked, with greater levels of irritation, “Hey, weren’t we supposed to be watching some actual athletic competitions? Wasn’t some skier supposed to be falling down a mountain by now?”

So while we need to be embracing social media and providing our news stories and arguments and ideas in ways that are more bite-sized, I have this nagging fear that we might lose, or perhaps slightly devalue, some of what we’re here to do. There is no such thing as investigative tweeting. A Facebook graphic is two sentences at most, a picture, and perhaps a hashtag. Theoretically, you can use Tweets and Facebook graphics as bait, designed to bring people to the long-form, meatier pieces, but I wonder how many people retweet a headline without actually clicking through to the story.

I’m a writer. I like long-form journalism. I like a good Fisking, where you dismantle a lousy argument by going through it line by line and exposing every falsehood or illogical conclusion. And I hope we can figure out a good balance that does all of the important work, the hard work, the work that takes time and resources — with the work that is fun and funny and quick and spreads quickly but that ultimately doesn’t stick with you.

Finally, here’s a section of the Jolt that was heavily shaped by last night’s Twitter discussion of Kermit Gosnell coverage — or how rare that coverage is:

Why Is One of the Most Horrific Crimes in Recent Memory Getting Almost No Press Coverage?

If you need to get up to speed on the Kermit Gosnell story, here’s a good place to start.

A doctor whose abortion clinic was a filthy, foul-smelling “house of horrors” that was overlooked by regulators for years was charged Wednesday with murder, accused of delivering seven babies alive and then using scissors to kill them.

Hundreds of other babies likely died in the squalid clinic that Dr. Kermit Gosnell ran from 1979 to 2010, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams said at a news conference.

“My comprehension of the English language can’t adequately describe the barbaric nature of Dr. Gosnell,” he added.

It’s utterly, utterly horrible; I won’t blame you if you can’t read that story any further.

However, you may be surprised at how little you’ve heard  about this story so far. Seth Mandel lays out the utterly unforgivable decision-making on the part of the national media so far:

You may not have heard much about Gosnell’s case. That’s because the mainstream press has chosen by and large to ignore it. There is no area of American politics in which the press is more activist or biased or unethical than social issues, the so-called culture wars. And the culture of permissive abortion they favor has consequences, which they would rather not look squarely at, thank you very much. The liberal commentator Kirsten Powers has written a tremendous op-ed in USA Today on Gosnell and the media blackout. Powers writes of the gruesome admissions that Gosnell’s former employees are making in court, some of which amount to “literally a beheading” and other stomach-turning descriptions. On the media’s refusal to inform the public, Powers writes:

A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segment on Meet the Press meant to foment outrage over an anti-abortion rights law in some backward red state.

The Washington Post has not published original reporting on this during the trial and The New York Times saw fit to run one original story on A-17 on the trial’s first day. They’ve been silent ever since, despite headline-worthy testimony . . .

You don’t have to oppose abortion rights to find late-term abortion abhorrent or to find the Gosnell trial eminently newsworthy. This is not about being “pro-choice” or “pro-life.” It’s about basic human rights.

The media should be ashamed beyond description for this behavior. The American left should come to terms with what it means to talk about a human life as if it were a parasite, or merely a clump of cells. And they should most certainly stop lecturing the rest of us on compassion, on pity, on social obligation, on morality.

The Washington Post health-policy reporter, Sarah Kliff explains to Mollie Hemingway, “I cover policy for the Washington Post, not local crime, hence why I wrote about all the policy issues you mention.”

Except that a lot of “local crime” stories become national policy or politics issues, or at the very least get national coverage. Last night on Twitter I went on a tear: Trayvon Martin, the Cambridge police arresting Henry Louis Gates, O. J. Simpson, the Unabomber, Jeffrey Dahmer, Casey Anthony, D. B. Cooper, Bernie Madoff, Son of Sam, JonBenet Ramsey, Andrea Yates, David Koresh & the Waco compound, Amy Fisher . . . Heck, all of the gun massacres that drive our periodic discussions of gun laws are technically “local crime” stories.

You can argue about the importance of all of the crime stories listed above, but the point is that a lot of “local crime stories” become big national stories. You’d think Doctor Baby-in-a-Blender would make the cut.

Josh Greenman, editorial-page editor of the New York Daily News:

I humbly suggest: Whether you support abortion rights or oppose them, read the Kermit Gosnell coverage with clear eyes. It is wrenching.

Ace shouts what we all know is really going on here:

This story exposes fault lines between Democrats, who are by political necessity abortion absolutists, and Independents, who may lean somewhat pro-choice but sure the hell aren’t on board for infanticide. But to report this story at all would put the Democrats in the difficult position of angering its an element of its hardcore single-issue leftist coalition, or alienating independents.

Thus, the media — which just “wants to report the facts” and “takes no positions on policy questions” and which has no partisan leaning at all — simply doesn’t report the story at all.

After all, if the public hears of it, they may make The Wrong Decisions.

You don’t trust children with matches and you don’t trust the American public with information. It’s that simple.

From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt:

When It Comes to the U.S. Media, the Vatican Might as Well Be Speaking in Latin

Dear mainstream media: No, you were never going to get a liberal Pope.

You don’t have to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to figure out what the U.S. media thinks are most important issues before the Pope:

Francis’ ascension, however, will not be without its controversies. Francis firmly opposes abortion, same-sex marriage, and contraception, the last being a particularly significant position as the Church continues to expand in Africa, where contraception is seen as a vital tool to limit the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Was there any Cardinal in the mix who, upon assuming the Papacy, would step out onto the balcony, and declare, “Oh, hey, abortion, homosexuality and contraception are cool now”?

A couple times a year, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne writes a column that says basically, “the Vatican has a big problem, because lots of American Catholics don’t agree with the Pope.” It never seems to cross his mind that each Pope and the Vatican collectively don’t really care that lots of American Catholics don’t agree with them. Or, more specifically, they would like American Catholics to agree with them, but they’re not willing to change what they teach as right and wrong based upon what the Gallup organization says American Catholics think. They think they get that material from the Man Upstairs. You may or may not agree with that assessment of Divine leadership, but the point is that the Pope and the Cardinals believe it, and they’re not going to be talked out of it by some pundit.

This is an institution that weathered the storms of the schism with the Orthodox and the Protestant Reformation. They’re not going to suddenly abandon their positions in the face of criticism from Chris Matthews or Andrew Sullivan.

Dave Weigel: “Just a hunch here, but based on headlines it seems like members of the media are more liberal than Catholic church leaders.”

Peggy Noonan calls it like it is:

Right now every idiot in town feels free to tell the church to get hopping, and they do it in a new way, with a baldness that occasionally borders on the insulting. Whatever their faith or lack of it they feel free to critique loudly and in depth, to the degree they are capable of depth. I have been critical of the church over the sex scandals for longer than a decade. Here’s one column—but I write of it because I love it and seek to see it healthy, growing and vital as it brings Christ into the world. Some of the church’s critics don’t seem to be operating from affection and respect but something else, or some things else.

When critics mean to be constructive, they bring an air of due esteem and occasional sadness to their criticisms, and offer informed and thoughtful suggestions as to ways the old church might right itself. They might even note, with an air of gratitude free of crowd-pleasing sanctimony, that critics must, in fairness, speak of those parts of the church that most famously work—the schools that teach America’s immigrants, the charities, the long embrace of the most vulnerable—and outweigh a whole world of immediate criticisms.

But when they just prattle on with their indignant words—gender, celibacy, irrelevant—well, they’re probably not trying to be constructive. One might say they’re being vulgar, ignorant and destructive, spoiled too. They think they’re brave, or outspoken, or something. They don’t have enough insight into themselves to notice they’d never presume to instruct other great faiths. It doesn’t cross their minds that if they were as dismissive about some of those faiths they’d have to hire private security guards.

If your beef with the Catholic Church is the role it gives women, well . . . there’s another big global faith with about a billion adherents that you may want to examine, too. I mean, whatever you think of the role of nuns, they are allowed to drive themselves, you know.

In the midweek edition of the Morning Jolt, a look at Obama tipping his hand on what he really wants out of the immigration debate out in Nevada, Massachusetts Democrats get ready to replace John Kerry, and then this bit of thinking about the GOP’s image . . .

Adding New Cultural Indicators to the Republican Brand Image

Since Election Night, the cry on the Right has been, “culture, culture, culture.” And we’re probably going to get a bunch of good ideas and a bunch of bad ideas coming out of this new focus.

I’ve talked in the past about Obama as a ubiquitous pop-cultural phenomenon, and looking back to Obama’s rise in 2007-2008, perhaps we ought to look closer at his coverage in the non-political media than in the political media. Because we’ve had a lot of black politicians before, a lot of liberal politicians before, and a lot of charismatic politicians before, but clearly Obama managed to achieve a level of public adoration (deification?) unique in modern political history.

In the end, maybe the institutions that we consider the MSM were less relevant to Obama’s rise than the glowing coverage of him in places like Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, Men’s Vogue, Fast Company, Men’s Health and so on. (We can put put Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, and the New Yorker in the quasi-political magazine category.)

Think about Obama’s embrace of Jay-Z and Beyoncé. There are a lot of Americans, particularly young Americans, who have no real interest in, say, how federal stimulus money gets spent. But they’re sure as heck interested in Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Almost every politician before Obama wouldn’t have touched Jay-Z with a ten-foot pole. One look at the lyrics of “Girls, Girls, Girls” (you’ve been warned, it depicts the rapper assessing and categorizing his harem by ethnic stereotype) and they would run screaming from any stage with Jay-Z. But Obama assessed, correctly, that the “cool” factor of having an association with Jay-Z would overwhelm any complaints about Obama’s de facto association with or approval of the seedier side of the life depicted by the hip-hop star.

So along comes Obama, and he’s worlds apart even from what we had seen nominated by the Democrats in recent cycles, like Al Gore and John Kerry. He’s black, he’s urban, he’s young, he’s only recently wealthy and tells tales of financial woes as recent as 2000. He can sound like a preacher when he needs to (listening to Jeremiah Wright all those years) but also is the kind of politician your average outspoken atheist could warmly embrace. As a result, you have large swaths of a not-usually-terribly-engaged, not-usually-terribly-interested voting public gravitating to him: African-Americans, obviously, but also young voters, urban voters . . . they look at him and see a cultural figure who reflects themselves, not merely a political figure.

What cultural markers is the Republican brand associated with? Two things come to mind, the aspects of life that Obama said rural Pennsylvanians cling to, guns and religion. And those are pretty good ones; the country is full of people who take religion seriously and there are a lot of people who enjoy their right to own a firearm, for reasons ranging from hunting to sport shooting to collecting to self-defense. But as we’ve seen, that’s not enough to get a majority of the popular vote or 270 electoral votes, and there are some pretty big swaths of the country – mostly the West Coast and Northeast – where those indicators either don’t help us or work against us.

So, thinking of new cultural traits the GOP could attempt to adopt as some of their trademarks, just off the top of my head…

Foodies? There are a lot of folks who are passionately interested in food, in a way they just weren’t a generation ago. (See Vic Matus’ great article from a while back on the rise of celebrity chefs.) Why can’t the GOP be the Foodie Party, the one that fights moronic dietary laws like Bloomberg’s ban on 32 ounce sodas, California’s idiotic foie gras ban, the ludicrous talk of the Food and Drug Administration putting even more stringent regulations on raw milk cheeses on top of the existing ones. (For Pete’s sake, slap a warning label on it letting people know about the risk of raw milk cheeses.) We ought to be standing up to the Nanny State, and making the case that grown adults who we entrust with a right to vote, a right to own a gun, and a right to speak their minds ought to have the right to eat whatever they want.

College-Age Drinkers: Propose lowering the drinking age to 18, on the argument that you’ll see less binge drinking on college campuses if 18, 19 and 20-year-olds can just go into a bar or restaurant and order a beer. If you’re really worried about lowering the drinking age across the board, make it legal for those between 18 and 21 to consume alcohol in a licensed establishment, so that a bartender or server could cut them off if there are signs of dangerous intoxication.

I guarantee this would make the College Republicans a heck of a lot more popular on campus. Speaking of which…

Wasteful college spending: Turn the highest-paid university presidents in America into the new villains of our economy, hiking tuition and letting standards slide while they take home ever-bigger paychecks and wildly generous payouts upon retirement. How soft are the Democrats on this issue? They ran the highest-paid university president in America (more than $3 million in a year) for Senate in Nebraska last year. At least the companies run by greedy CEOs are forced to compete in the marketplace; universities can keep going under bad management by sucking up government aid, forced tuition hikes, and alumni donations for a long while.

Isn’t it time to bring a salary cap to university administrators?

Joe Scarborough: “Entertainment moguls do not have an absolute right to glorify murder while spreading mayhem in young minds across America.”

So can anyone point to movies, television shows, video games, etc., that explicitly glorify and/or endorse murder, as opposed to depicting it? (This is aside from the rather important question of whether any particular piece of media spurred a person to commit a violent act.)

Sure, there are lots of movies, television shows, video games, etc., that depict murders, and there are quite a few in which the protagonist or hero murders others. But there are very, very few in which the protagonist murders “innocent” people and is still supposed to be seen as heroic by the audience. Our cultural sensibilities – even in godless, hedonistic, depraved Hollywood – won’t allow us to see the intentional killing of innocent people as consistent with a heroic character.*

I asked on Twitter for examples of movies in which murder was not merely depicted, but celebrated and glorified.

The first suggestion was the television series “Dexter”, which I admit I haven’t watched. The knew the protagonist was “a serial killer who targets other serial killers who have evaded the police,” but apparently he has killed innocent people to cover up his crimes.

(I think some of the later portrayals of Hannibal Lecter may best fit the description of  “glamorizing” an irredeemable, indisputably evil and murderous character as a hero, and may be the best example of Hollywood’s creative class reaching a total moral inversion. But I’m skeptical that either of the little-watched 2001 film “Hannibal” or the 2007 film “Hannibal Rising” are guilty of any crime to our society beyond fleecing gullible film-goers.)

Another person nominated the Charles Bronson “Death Wish” films, but I think that’s perhaps a perfect example of the “moral context” I’m talking about: Charles Bronson seems to shoot every mugger in late-1970s New York City after his wife is murdered and his daughter is raped. We can argue whether the muggers he encounters deserve to be shot for their actions, but Bronson’s character’s violent acts are only in response to those who threaten him or others.

Others suggested mob movies, but even there most of the portrayals (The Godfather series, HBO’s “The Sopranos”) often depict the strange code of honor among the mobsters, in that they’re not supposed to kill “civilians” (those not in the mob) and a common plot is the gangsters hoping to avoid an all-out gang war.

Some pointed to the “Call of Duty” video game franchise, although they started out as a World War Two combat game and have moved on modern or slightly futuristic settings. In those, the player is playing the role of a soldier and the antagonists are ultra-nationalist Russians and Middle East radicals. I fail to see how modern portrayals of good soldiers killing evil men is somehow more psychologically dangerous to view than, say, John Wayne or Clint Eastwood movies.

What kind of depictions of violence in media spur “mayhem in young minds”? The Star Wars movies? G.I. Joe? Transformers? Ben 10?

Lurking behind these arguments of “glorifying violence” is the matter of taste and sensibility; some works linger upon the terrible deeds of their villains to emphasize their moral degeneracy. Some audiences can appreciate it as part of the context of the story, others can’t. Very few people believe that the media they choose to consume is the type that manufactures murderers; it’s the television shows, movies, and video games of other people that ought to be banned for the good of society.

Of course, some depictions of violence will be inappropriate for young viewers; that’s why we have movie, game, and television ratings and parental discretion is advised. But I think Scarborough is attacking a foe that doesn’t really exist. There is no “In the Mouth of Madness“-style piece of work that we can identify as the trigger of murderous rampages. The world would be an easier place to live in if we could find those works and ban them.

Unfortunately, as we look at the shooters of Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tuscon, and Newtown, we see intense mental problems in which any one of a wide variety of factors could have spurred the decision to slaughter others.

We’re fools if we decide to empower government to limit the creative arts depending upon what they think will cause a murderous rampage in disturbed minds already inclined to lashing out in that manner. It would make as much sense as banning dogs because David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” killer, believed that his neighbor’s dog was telling him to kill young women.

And while some might argue that self-censorship is a better option, I don’t want our storytellers in any medium limiting their work by thinking, “what will the murderously disturbed take away from it?”

(*I suppose I should specify “intentional”; one of the funnier bits of dialogue in Kevin Smith’s movie “Clerks” is speculation about the civilian contractors killed in “Star Wars” when the Rebels blow up the Death Star.)

In the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt . . . sent along to the editors at the usual time, and reaching readers a bit later under our new distribution system (we’re working on it) . . .

A Bold New Form of Media Bias

In light of the Washington Post basing its front-page headline on a survey with an astonishingly small sample and an astonishingly high margin of error, it is good to sum up what we’ve seen from the press in recent weeks.

ONE: For about eight days, the Obama administration told the public that their best assessment of the murder of our ambassador in Libya and three other Americans was that it was the result of a spontaneous protest against a tape mocking Islam on YouTube. This explanation sounded funny from the beginning — even in a place like Benghazi, who brings rocket-propelled grenades and mortars to a protest? — and it seemed surprising that so many in the administration, including U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, seemed to dismiss the idea that a terror attack against American targets on September 11 was a serious possibility. Subsequent reports have revealed astonishingly insufficient security for a site with American lives and American intelligence. The administration’s sustained focus on the YouTube tape seemed to make little sense, outside of a desire to deflect from the continued pervasiveness of anti-American rage in the Middle East and signs of a resurgent al-Qaeda, themes that greatly complicate the argument of the Obama campaign. As of Friday, 17 days after the attack, the FBI had still not reached the consulate site to conduct a forensic investigation.

To their credit, certain places like CNN and ABC News have pursued this story with more vigor than their critics acknowledge.

On a related note, violent protests and threats of violence against American embassies continue, barely mentioned or acknowledged by most venues of the U.S. press. I guess it isn’t newsworthy until someone dies again.

TWO: Univision, a Spanish-language channel, has done an in-depth, detailed, long-form television journalism about the “Fast and Furious” program, showcasing that the violence from the “walked” guns was much worse than previously claimed by the government, and demonstrating the cost in human lives in searing images. (Moe Lane talks a bit about it here.) This report is much more vivid, detailed, and outraged than anything from almost all of the U.S. media, which accepted an inspector general’s report that claimed that repeated warnings and information kept coming up from the field agents but somehow mysteriously never reached the Attorney General. The report claimed that both Acting Deputy Attorney General Grindler and Counsel to the Attorney General and Deputy Chief of Staff Wilkinson were informed about the connection between the firearms found at the scene of fatal shootings and Operation Fast and Furious, but neither believed “the information was sufficiently important to alert the Attorney General about it.”

THREE: With unemployment above 8 percent for forty-four straight months and GDP slowing to 1.25 percent, BuzzFeed declares “one of the central mysteries of 2012” is “How did we stop focusing on the economy?”

FOUR: Day after day, our troops in Afghanistan are targeted and killed by the Afghan troops they are supposed to be training. This barely merits more than periodic brief mentions in the national press. As Walter Russell Mead puts it:

If George W. Bush were president now, and had ordered the surge and was responsible for the strategic decisions taken and not taken in Afghanistan over the last four years, the mainstream press would be rubbing our noses in his miserable failures and inexcusable blunders 24/7. The New York Times and the Washington Post would be treating us to pictures of every fallen soldier. The PBS Newshour would feature nightly post-mortems on “America’s failed strategies in the Afghan War” and every arm-chair strategist in America would be filling the op-ed pages with the brilliant 20/20 hindsight ideas that our pathetic, clueless, failed president was too dumb and too cocky to have had.

Ace of Spades observed something we’re seeing in this cycle that is different even from the hope-and-change euphoria of Obama’s 2008 coverage:

Let me explain why this is different than previous bias.

Previously, the press has been both biased in a partisan way and an in an ideological way, but usually the partisanship was driven by ideology. As you may have noticed, the press are great fans of gay marriage and abortion, and they shape their coverage to put the best possible face on these positions, and the worst possible face on opponents. (To the extent they feature contrary voices at all.)

That’s bias, of course. We’ve gotten used to that.

But in the Benghazi debacle, there is no possible ideological grounding to explain their bias.There is, I trust, no ideological movement that advocates for intelligence failures and the deaths of good-guy diplomats. There is no ideological movement in favor of reckless incompetence bordering on malice in providing security for consulates abroad (which, as a legal matter, are considered US territory).

There is no ideological movement — or at least there was not before — championing the government’s right to lie to the public about its failures in order to avoid accountability.

There is no room here where one can say, “Ah well, they can’t help but be pulled a bit to the left by their own beliefs.” Because no one champions the right of government to let people be murdered and then lie about it.

This isn’t ideological bias, then. This is pure advocacy for a political party. Obama’s embarrassment is not an ideological issue — or should not be. I hope we can all agree that a president should attend security briefings — especially as 9/11 approaches — and provide adequate warning and security for US government personnel. I hope we can all agree that the government does not suddenly gain a Right To Shamelessly Lie about its failures, simply because it finds it politically advantageous to do so.

But, as Nina Totenberg’s chuckle indicates, the press now in fact believes exactly these things — so long as the president we’re talking about is Democrat, and Obama in particular.

Gallup polls Americans on what they think of news coverage in newspapers, TV, and radio, and the result is not surprising:

Americans’ distrust in the media hit a new high this year, with 60 percent saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.

(I know, you’re wondering how in the world 40 percent of Americans could possibly have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of “trust and confidence in the news media to report the news accurately and fairly.”)

What is perhaps even less surprising is that only 26 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of independents have a “great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media. Yet 58 percent of Democrats have a “great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media.

Now, in the Jolt and elsewhere, we’ve marveled at how much of the “big breaking news” has had little or no significant impact on the tracking polls. Gallup’s survey result confirms our suspicions — a larger chunk of the electorate isn’t really paying attention:

Americans are less likely this year to be paying close attention to news about national politics than they were in 2008. The 39% who say they are paying close attention is up from last year — when Americans were paying a high level of attention compared with other non-election years — but down from 43% in September 2008.

What’s really fascinating is that even though you and I can go through a newspaper or watch a couple of hours of the cable networks and pick out examples of coverage that we find laughably or infuriatingly one-sided . . . we’re apparently the ones paying closest attention:

Despite their record-low trust in media, Republicans are the partisan group most likely to be paying close attention to news about national politics, with the 48% who are doing so similar to the 50 percent in 2008 and up significantly from 38 percent in 2004.

Stop complaining about right-of-center viewers and readers calling you biased, mainstream television, radio, and print reporters. Right now, the folks throwing things at their television and fuming about your liberal bias are the biggest chunk of your audience.

From the first Morning Jolt of convention week . . .

Coming This Week: Democrats Behaving Badly!

Massachusetts Democratic-party Chairman John Walsh, discussing GOP Sen. Scott Brown at a breakfast meeting Monday: “He’s a regular guy. I mean, he spent a couple million dollars folding towels on TV to prove he’s an honorary girl. We appreciate that.” This was a reference to a television ad of Brown’s, in which he is seen folding laundry.

Finally, an actual example of the war on women!

“In the excitement of getting the convention underway and getting the message out about how important it is to reelect President Obama and elect Elizabeth Warren, I made a statement about Scott Brown that I regret, “ Walsh said. “I apologize for that remark.”

Well, that’s probably just those reckless Massachusetts Democrats shooting their mouths off. I’m sure those California Democrats are much more level-headed . . . oh, wait . . .

Reuters: “A top California Democratic official on Monday compared Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan to Nazi Germany’s infamous propagandist Joseph Goebbels, drawing rebukes from both parties the day before the Democratic Party’s nominating convention formally begins.”

Ryan told “a bold-faced lie and he doesn’t care that it was a lie. That was Goebbels, the big lie,” Burton told reporters.

“That obviously doesn’t reflect the views of the campaign,” said Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt. “That doesn’t have any place in the political discourse in Charlotte.”

“I get where Burton is coming from,” tweets Josh Barro. “This morning, a flight attendant told me she was out of Diet Coke and I compared her to Goebbels. It happens.”

Which would you rather have? A media that is so biased against your side of the aisle that they jump up and down and scream bloody murder over any error or potential error, or a media that is so in the tank for your side that your party’s leaders have grown completely complacent, to the point of reckless, in their public comments?

Before you say you’d prefer bodyguard-style media coverage, keep in mind that with that approach, you end up with leaders like Vice President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. I mean… the cream doesn’t exactly rise to the top in that scenario, does it?

Obviously, I’m not a Democrat, but if I were, I’d like to think I would want to be led by the likes of Virginia Sens. Mark Warner and Jim Webb, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, maybe former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.

So one cheer for media bias: It helps Republicans weed out the weakest links . . . sometimes.

In the midweek edition of the Morning Jolt, I share a behind-the-scenes look at Fox News Channel’s “The Five” and “Hannity,” as well as the latest Democrats to bail on their convention this summer. Also, a bit of talk about television:

Aaron Sorkin’s ‘Newsroom’ Is As Bad as You Would Expect, In Exactly the Ways You Would Expect

So I caught the new HBO series “Newsroom.”

I’m sure that a lot of readers will roll their eyes and say, “snotty Hollywood liberal elitist,” and . . . yeah. Yeah, he is. But sometimes Sorkin’s political passions dissipate a bit and he creates actually entertaining films and television shows – I’d put “Sports Night” and Charlie Wilson’s War as among his best, and when he can bring himself to put the polemics aside, and just focus on the characters interacting as people, his work can be quite entertaining.

This is not one of those times. “Newsroom” is pretty uniformly insufferable, but it’s particularly frustrating because you can see flickers and glimmers of a better show in there.

Jake Tapper of ABC News reviewed the show for The New Republic, and offers a very fair critique:

The fact, then, that the show begins in 2010—at the height of the Tea Party’s fervor—is no accident; it’s what enables the show’s didacticism. Sorkin’s intent is to show how events of recent memory could have been covered better by the media if journalists had only had the courage. Some of Sorkin’s lessons are well-taken. We see McAvoy under pressure from his bosses to confirm, or at least repeat, the false NPR report that Representative Gabrielle Giffords had been killed. Those scenes ring true, as do others in which ratings pressures are discussed.

But more often than not, Sorkin simply demonstrates his own confusion about what ails journalism. He begins with the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. One of McAvoy’s producers has expert inside sources at BP and Halliburton, so ACN’s “News Night” leads with the story as a tale of environmental disaster, corporate sloth, and government impotence. Meanwhile every other network—bereft of such information—is myopically focused on the fire on the oil rig and the deaths of eleven workers. But citing the BP oil spill is a curious way to charge journalistic malpractice: By my recollection, that was a story the media covered fairly aggressively and responsibly.

I think this is one of the things that grated on me the most; “Newsroom” is clearly Sorkin’s lecture to everyone working in journalism today about how they ought to do their jobs. Except that Sorkin’s perfect fictional journalists are — at least in the pilot episode — working with ludicrously unrealistic perfect inside sources. One producer has both a sister who works for Halliburton and a college roommate who works for BP, and literally within minutes of the explosion, they’re calling the producer to tell him all kinds of derogatory inside information about their bosses — including why the explosion occurred and remarkably foresighted explanations of why all of the initial efforts to cut off the spill probably won’t work. A time-travel storyline would have been more plausible.

One: This has never happened in journalism. Two: Both of these people apparently want to lose their jobs, as they’ve decided to leak information that’s extremely damaging to their employers to a journalist who is their brother/former college roommate. You figure any whistleblower would call a reporter they didn’t know personally in order to hide their tracks.

Then there’s the fact that the show is written from the perspective of two years’ worth of hindsight. In fact, almost all of the facts that the Sorkin Squad uncovers literally within hours of the explosion are from Sorkin’s own research, gathered and written by real-life reporters weeks and months after the disaster began. The show’s creator is railing at journalists, asking why they can’t be as smart as he is, citing their actual work, and is oblivious to the irony.

Oh, and during the broadcast, they show video footage of the burning oil rig labeled, “Baton Rouge, Louisiana.” Baton Rouge is not on the ocean. For a show that’s all about journalists getting it right and the importance of the truth and so on, it’s an appalling error.

I figure this is what happens when CIA employees watch (most) spy movies, law enforcement personnel watch cop movies, lawyers watch legal dramas, doctors watch medical dramas, and folks in the military watch war movies: Ninnies in Hollywood who have never done what you do create a wildly unrealistic portrayal, that make the job look easy and suggest to the public that the people they see doing the jobs in real life are some sort of underachieving disappointment. (And yes, this has real-world consequences; think of the “CSI effect.”) Apparently Sorkin hung around on the set of Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” as research for this show. Hey, Sorkin, work the seafood beat for the Boston Globe for a while, or work sixty hours a week covering every floor vote in the House of Representatives for a year — you know, the kind of work less conducive to cocaine addicts than, say, playwriting — and see if you think better quality journalism is just a matter of “deciding to do better.”

So what’s the glimmer of a better show in Newsroom? For starters, as Tantaros mentioned on The Five, newsrooms are pretty fun places to work, if you can deal with stress, deadlines, and the occasional meltdown. The news business attracts its own share of . . . odd, often smart characters, often working in this business because they fit in nowhere else. It’s a good setting for a dramatic series, or a comedy series, or both. Things are always happening, there’s always the ticking clock of the deadline, mistakes are made, good work is done . . . the plots write themselves and the inspiration is fresh every morning, provided by the world itself?

Could you imagine a reality series following the Breitbart crew?

I’ve had a variation of this Greg Gutfeld rant brewing in my head for a while now . . . he calls it the “Oh, never mind then” compromise. (Emily Litella!) I had been contemplating the term “strategic amnesia.”

After a horrific shooting in Tucson, Arizona, where the perpetrator has no known connection to any coherent political argument, Obama calls for a better, more civil public discourse in America, a “new tone” . . . and then Democrats in Congress label their opponents Nazis and “demons,” Scott Walker is labeled Hitler, Joe Biden concurs with a House Democrat that the opposition is acting like terrorists . . .

Civility matters! Hyperbolic, angry rhetoric is creating a culture of hate and violence! . . . Wait, never mind.

“War on women”? Forgotten when a $1 million check from Bill Maher arrives, or when Hustler magazine does awful things to S. E. Cupp.

The horrific deprivations of Bain Capital? They only apply to Mitt Romney, off running the Salt Lake Olympics at that time; the Obama bundler who was actually running Bain at the time is not relevant, we’re told.

Democrats tout and celebrate a column that asserts that because the rate of increase in the annual deficits has grown only modestly, the Obama “spending binge never happened” — as if a decline in a rate of increase is the same as a decline in actual spending; we’ve had four years of $1 trillion deficits in our history (even adjusted for inflation); 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Wisconsin Democrats and their union allies rise up in fury against Governor Scott Walker over public-sector unions’ bargaining rights . . . and then drop the issue once the polls indicate it doesn’t resonate with the public.

Issues rise, get magazine covers, and lead off news hours, and then, once facts arise that contradict the narrative . . . they disappear with a quick shake. (Ironic how many folks in the media laugh at Mitt Romney by comparing him to an Etch-a-Sketch.) Last week, there were quite a few developments in the Trayvon Martin case that complicated the narrative of an innocent teen shot by a dangerous, armed, self-appointed neighborhood watchdog. MSNBC’s prime time, which went wall-to-wall Martin coverage a few weeks ago, didn’t mention any of it.

Facts and issues pop up, and then evaporate into the media ether before we can grab them. I’m sure most folks in mainstream-media institutions roll their eyes when Rush Limbaugh or others call them the “drive-by” media, but it’s easy to get the sense that articles are written, talking points are issued, and speeches are given just to get certain words in a headline — say, “MASSACRE” and “ROMNEY’S FAITH” — hoping the proper subconscious impression will be left with the low-information voters.

Ah, those low-information voters, the oblivious kings of our political system. They’re the remaining demographic in this close election, and so we’re destined to endure six months of everyone in the political world desperately attempting to persuade people who don’t pay attention to the news, politics, or government, who are astoundingly uninformed about news, politics, and government, who really don’t care about news, politics, or government, and who will have as much say about who the next president is as you or I.

Our media culture and campaign-coverage environment somehow manage to feel repetitive and yet riddled with attention-deficit disorder simultaneously.

Dear management of the New York Times,

I hope you’re proud.

Mr. Blow may attempt to delete that Tweet, but it can, for now, be found here. Of course, this is the Internet. Nothing ever goes away completely.

One of your columnists hears a comment he does not like, from a Mormon presidential candidate, and responds, “Stick that in your magic underwear.”

(Lest you are unfamiliar with this particular practice of the Mormon faith, see here.)

We just witnessed ESPN firing an employee for using the phrase “chink in the armor” in a headline about the New York Knicks’ Jeremy Lin. While no one could prove a desire to mock Lin’s ethnic heritage, and the employee expressed great regret for what he insisted was an unthinking lapse, it was deemed unacceptable even as an honest mistake. Regardless of what one thinks of ESPN’s reaction, one is left to marvel at the contrast before us. Would the New York Times find it acceptable if one of their columnists chose to mock Muslim religious practices? Jewish faith practices?

But mocking some religions is okay? Doesn’t run afoul of any standards of the paper?

Hmm.

Ace writes what is probably the definitive blog post on the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t party affiliation in stories about political scandals.