Juan and NPR

I've been thinking for a long time that Juan Williams had ceased to contribute anything of value to NPR, so I'm not sorry to see him go. He never seemed to be fully prepared and kept offering ill-supported conclusions. But, as Ezra describes so well, NPR erred in the way they let him go.

Ahem

Haven't there been some revelations about Imam Rauf's nefarious connections that you want to share, Michael?  I rely on you for such news, so I was disappointed to have to get it from Jon Stewart.

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The Parent Company Trap
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I think maybe NOW I'm opposed to the building of the mosque because of its frightening connections to Fox News.

Stewart doesn't begrudge the "sensitivity" issue. Otherwise, he makes perfect sense as usual.

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Fox is not delicious

Frankly, my side of the political spectrum is not really doing my bidding or satisfying my wishes, so I have little appetite for criticizing the right. But this ridiculous cable situation we have in our house, where we've got Fox News but not MSNBC, and the knowledge that countless others out there have this "family" cable package offered by Comcast and so are fed the Fox News diet (perhaps without realizing they're being deprived of another viewpoint), is enough for me to spare a smidgeon of emotional outrage on the nonsense that is Fox "News".

From the American Prospect:

We didn't need a lesson in how good the right is in kicking up these dust storms, because they've done it so many times before. It's a very simple formula: take some incident or person who can embody something you want people to believe about the left (elitists, scary black people, etc.); put it into heavy rotation on Fox and conservative radio; immediately begin screaming that the liberal mainstream media are ignoring this vital story; watch while the mainstream media pick up the story to prove they really aren't liberal. Rinse, repeat. It works pretty much every time.

Comcast's role in delivering audience to Fox News

I've just discovered something unsettling.

We intended to downgrade our Comcast cable TV service for the summer, from the ridiculously priced $80/month package (with gazillions of channels, but no HBO etc)  to their $10/mo plan that would give us decent reception, but no cable channels.  I called to make the service change and the customer service person explained that if we made that change, our internet service would increase by $10 and oh-by-the-way we offer a $20/month "family" cable package that would include lots of channels, though not all that we have been getting.  In other words, for the same amount we were willing to pay for zero cable channels, we could have a bunch of cable channels.  She rattled off the list of channels that I didn't pay much attention to since we were prepared to not have any.

Here's the strangest thing:  the "family" cable package includes Fox News Channel, but does not include MSNBC.  This gives me a new perspective on audience numbers for cable news shows.

As you may already know, Glenn Beck is a tool

I'm pretty sure that no one here is a Glenn Beck fan. So enjoy laughing at The Daily Show outing Beck's douchebaggery. (Sorry I can't embed. The code is flawed.)