Day: 7/30/2010

White House May Cancel Wall Street Journal

Posted by on July 30, 2010 at 6:13 pm. 1 Comments :

Rupert Murdoch has been constructing his pay walls as a means to squeeze more revenue from his newspapers. By most accounts it is failing as viewership declines on the web sites of his newspaper properties.

In response to this failure Murdoch has doubled-down on greed by jacking up the price for news clipping services, including the one used by the White House. Politico reports that the Wall Street Journal will raise its fees by half a million dollars. The White House responded by saying…

“Obviously, we’re not paying $500,000. This is taxpayer money,” the official said. “We have no idea how we’re going to handle this. We may have to drop [The Journal].”

Considering the fact that anyone in the White House could subscribe to the Journal for $140.00 a year, this seems like a remarkably shortsighted and stupid policy. What’s more, it could motivate the White House to favor other news outlets, for interviews and other media releases, whose bundled clippings they can receive at a reasonable rate. Why would they want to deal with the Journal if their access to the stories was more difficult to obtain and dissemination might be restricted?

There is a stench of desperation about this. Murdoch has not made a successful business decision in years. The Fox Business Network is floundering; MySpace is almost invisible; the pay wall has not been adopted by peers; even the Wall Street Journal purchase resulted in staggering losses. Without Avatar and Fox News, News Corp would be a basket case. And Fox News has been losing viewers as well.

Now that the Journal is writing off some major clients like the President, it may just be a matter of time before they fall of their own bloated weight. I wonder where people like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity would go if there were no Fox News to coddle them?

Fox News Has Not Earned A Front Row Seat

Posted by on July 30, 2010 at 10:25 am. 8 Comments :

The White House Correspondent’s Association is deciding this weekend what news agency will get the seat in the White House Press Briefing Room that was vacated by Helen Thomas. One of those seeking the seat is Fox News.

The timing of this could not be more significant. Coming on the heels of Fox’s disgraceful promotion of Andrew Breitbart’s phony video that accused an honorable woman of being a racist, how could the WHCA even entertain the notion of giving a front row seat of honor to Fox? This latest embarrassment just serves to remind people of past disgraceful acts on the part of Fox News: the smearing of Van Jones; the lies about ACORN; the fabricated controversy over the New Black Panthers; the list goes on.

Fox News is NOT news. It is a blatantly partisan operation that promotes the interests of the Republican Party and conservative ideology. Giving this seat to Fox after they have so recently demonstrated how undeserving they are would be a slap in the face to journalists who work hard to uphold the ethics that their profession requires.

Credo has a petition to the WHCA urging them to give the seat to National Public Radio. NPR has been working this beat for 40 years (compared to 14 for Fox), and they serve an audience that is almost 14 times larger than Fox. Please sign the petition ASAP and let the WHCA know that we do not want Fox to be rewarded for their dishonesty.

Glenn Beck Uncovers Homer Simpson’s Clandestine Plot

Posted by on July 30, 2010 at 3:08 am. 7 Comments :

Comrade Homer SimpsonWith the myriad enemies that America is facing in this tumultuous age of terrorism, leave it to Glenn Beck to investigate and unveil one of the most dastardly schemes ever perpetrated on our unsuspecting nation. Only someone with the delusional paranoia of Beck could have discovered this lurking danger. Thank God for Beck’s dementia, for without it we would all be doomed.

Beck: Before the 1960s, these were the shows on television. This was Father Knows Best. Can you even imagine a show named that? This is My Three Sons. Ward Cleaver, Leave It To Beaver. The role of father was strong, but now — I mean, I hate to be my grandfather and say, “We didn’t even have Rice Krispies back then” — but look at the difference.

This was before these guys [the Weather Underground] showed up. Now look at our culture. [The Simpsons] is the funniest show ever written on television. I love this show. But dad’s a schlub.

That’s right! The Weather Underground conspired to turn dads into schlubs. Never mind the fact that on programs like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver the dad, just as likely as not, was portrayed as dense or over-reacting to some family crisis. He was frequently bailed out by the mom or some innocent revelation of the child. And set aside Beck’s inability to come up with program names that reflect the strength (i.e. dominance) of the father figure, like maybe King of Queens or My Wife and Kids.

All of that is just a distraction from the hidden truth of the Weather Underground’s blueprint for destroying the family unit and demeaning fatherhood. For half a century this cabal has laid dormant, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. At the center of this sleeper cell is the craven visage of Homer Simpson, a villain thrust upon us by the execrable Rupert Murdoch and Fox. Thanks to Beck we can now see that this deceptively lovable goofball is actually a treacherously effective functionary of a secular-socialist revolution that aims to impose a brutal dictatorship and enslave us all.

However, Comrade Homer didn’t count on Beck exposing his plan. And now that the veil has been lifted, there is still time resist the looming tyranny. So rise up America. Rise up and cast off the shackles that Homer and his legion of Marxists would bind unto you. Reject tyranny. Reject Fox and Murdoch. Live free or eat my shorts!