Showing posts with label Rachel Maddow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rachel Maddow. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Bloggers in Pajamas

Gotta love it when Rachel stands up for our rights:


I've had a rocky relationship with my pajamas this week. Yesterday I could not escape them. This morning is likewise proving difficult in the separation department. I got all excited this summer when the mono passed and I obtained something approximating an adult sleep schedule, but alas, once the temperature drops it would appear that my body reverts to teenager, "give me sleep all the time or I will make you miserable" mode.

This is a self-parking car.
This is a really beautiful Katha Pollitt poem.
These are Dennis Kucinich's Articles of Impeachment, which may seem like sour grapes now, but wouldn't it be great if our congress actually insisted on accountability...

Monday, October 13, 2008

Marry me, Maddow

Go and watch this video immediately. The important part starts about 3 minutes in.

What Maddow hits on here is one of the biggest media fallacies of our time: that fair reporting means reporting equal blame and legitimacy. That our media, rather than serving truth, serves balance. That a holocaust denier can sit onstage with a credentialed historian and be given equal footing not only by the visual, but by every framing device of the journalist, even though one account is demonstrably wrong. The way it's been leaping out at me recently is this weird assertion by journalists that identifying / decrying racist rhetoric is a sin (!) on the same order as employing racist tactics. As if "crying racism" or "playing the gender card" was a valid accusation in the first place... but in cases where racism or sexism is clearly present in an objective evaluation, that demanding that someone answer for that racism / sexism is a smear and a piece of nasty politics. Absolutely ridiculous.

Maddow hits on a hundred more fallacies of current Republican rhetoric -- that rabble rousing is the same as civil discussion, that coded racism is not racism, that caution and thought are cowardice. In passionate advocacy of an ideology close to my heart, she defends the playful and sarcastic handling of sensitive issues as legitimate, and rejects categorizing it as negative or divisive. She's basically the shit. Thank you, thank you, thank you Rachel.