The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Fear and Loathing: ‘Kazika the Mad Jap’ Could Not Be Reached for Comment

Posted on | March 20, 2016 | 120 Comments

Here’s a headline:

What Happens to Journalists When No One
Wants to Print Their Words Anymore?
As newsrooms disappear, veteran older reporters
are being forced from the profession.
That’s bad for journalism — and democracy.

Please shut up. Nobody feels sorry for you, and probably nobody should. The idea that people are entitled to be employed in whatever field they choose to pursue, and that once they get hired, they then have a “right” to keep that job — that is what’s bad for democracy.

Newspapers were my life for more than 20 years. Deadline after deadline after deadline — from 1986 to 2008, that’s what it was about. From the day I talked myself into a job as a $4.50-an-hour staff writer at a tiny weekly in Austell, Georgia, until the day I quit the Washington Times after a decade as assistant national editor and Culture page editor, my life was all about deadlines. It was a job I loved except for when I hated it, but one scam I never bought into was the lofty illusion cherished by the Professional Journalism types who insisted that the rotten pay and miserable working conditions of the typical newspaper reporter were justified because we were doing What’s Good For Democracy.

Bovine excrement.

We were doing what was good for the advertisers and the publisher, and any benefit to Democracy was strictly incidental. Long before the Internet made it possible to have “metrics,” as they say, of reader interest, I realized that there was a disconnect between (a) the average journalist’s conception of his job, and (b) what most readers actually wanted to read. Two or three decades ago, there was a lot of puffy nonsense — the kind of stuff you’d read in Columbia Journalism Review or the monthly American Society of News Editors (ASNE) bulletin — about “community service” and “investigative journalism” and so forth, all of which amounted to your mother telling you to eat your broccoli.

Every major metro daily in the country was piling manpower into the kind of five-part “investigative” series (or “enterprise journalism”) cynics used to call “Pulitzer bait.” This always seemed to involve a pet liberal crusade — racism, environmentalism, homelessness, etc. — that would appeal to the sensibilities of the Professional Journalism types who think of their jobs as What’s Good For Democracy: “Eat your broccoli.”

Supply, Demand and Lunatic Gibberish

OK, so what if the readers didn’t want broccoli? What if what they wanted was, y’know, actual news? Or sports — which was my gig for about five years, and I don’t mean to brag, but I was good at it. Developing reader loyalty requires thinking: What does the reader want to read?

Hunter S. Thompson understood this completely:

There was a time, about ten years ago, when I could write like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for. And none of the people I wrote about seemed to give a hoot in hell what kind of lunatic gibberish I wrote about them, just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence…. At one point, in Florida, I was writing variations on the same demented themes for three competing papers at the same time, under three different names. I was a sports columnist for one paper in the morning, sports editor for another in the afternoon, and at night I worked for a pro wrestling promoter, writing incredibly twisted “press releases” that I would plant, the next day, in both papers.
It was a wonderful gig, in retrospect, and at times I wish I could go back to it — just punch a big hatpin through my frontal lobes and maybe regain that happy lost innocence that enabled me to write, without the slightest twinge of conscience, things like: “The entire Fort Walton Beach police force is gripped in a state of fear this week; all leaves have been canceled and Chief Bloor is said to be drilling his men for an Emergency Alert situation on Friday and Saturday nights — because those are the nights when ‘Kazika, The Mad Jap,’ a 440-pound sadist from the vile slums of Hiroshima, is scheduled to make his first — and no doubt his last — appearance in Fish-head Auditorium. Local wrestling impressario Lionel Olay is known to have spoken privately with Chief Bloor, urging him to have ‘every available officer’ on duty at ringside this weekend, because of the Mad Jap’s legendary temper and his invariably savage reaction to racial insults. Last week, in Detroit, Kazika ran amok and tore the spleens out of three ringside spectators, one of whom allegedly called him a ‘yellow devil.'”
“Kazika,” as I recall, was a big, half-bright Cuban who once played third-string tackle for Florida State University in Tallahassee, about 100 miles away — but on the fish-head circuit he had no trouble passing for a dangerous Jap strangler, and I soon learned that pro wrestling fans don’t give a fuck anyway.

This is exactly right. Action, Color, Speed, Violence — write something the reader enjoys reading. He wants personalities and action, and your job is to find Kazika the Mad Jap, the star of the show. In Gordon County, Georgia, circa 1990, this might have been Timmy Star, power forward for Fairmount High, but in Rome, Georgia, circa 1993, it was a Floyd County commissioner who fought a tooth-and-nail battle over local sales taxes. All that ridiculous Pulitzer-bait eat-your-broccoli five-part-series crap that the ASNE bulletin and the Columbia Journalism Review took so seriously? Readers generally hated that stuff, and I didn’t blame them.

Does anyone remember Bill Kovach? He was Washington bureau chief for the New York Times before the idiots in charge at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution hired Kovach to turn their paper into . . .

Well, broccoli. Because broccoli’s Good for Democracy.

Kovach spent two years as editor and damned near ruined the Atlanta papers with his pretentious (but Pulitzer Prize-winning) ideas about publishing broccoli journalism. During his tenure, Kovach not only alienated many readers, he also lost sight of the fact that in Atlanta, the business community expects the local newspaper to act as a publicity agent. Atlanta was famous during the Civil Rights era as “The City Too Busy to Hate,” because civic leaders recognized that racial conflict was bad for business. Cynics observed that, in truth, Atlanta was The City Too Greedy to Care. If Jim Crow was good for business, Atlanta would be segregated, and if Jim Crow proved to be a net liability, Atlanta would integrate peaceably, but either way, what the Chamber of Commerce wanted, the Chamber of Commerce got. Labels like “liberal”and “conservative” didn’t have a damned thing to do with these entirely pragmatic and self-interested calculations. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, the only color that really matters in Atlanta is green.

Well, Mr. Kovach didn’t quite understand this worldview, and he managed to piss off the Chamber of Commerce, and in November 1988, he “resigned,” officially, but everyone knew it was more like he got pushed out the door, and there ensued all kinds of hand-wringing and moaning from the Good for Democracy types.

This drew a sarcastic retort from the newspaper’s most popular columnist, Lewis Grizzard, who wrote that the paper would be better off without Kovach, “with apologies to those who enjoy exhaustive series on what’s doing in Africa.” Grizzard’s jab was aimed at Kovach’s nutty idea that because (a) Atlanta had a large black population, therefore (b) the paper should have lots of coverage of news in Africa. This was deemed an enlightened and sophisticated attitude by the Good for Democracy crowd, or you might view it as condescending and vaguely racist.

Many white Southerners are of Scots-Irish ancestry, but Kovach didn’t start filling the pages of the Atlanta papers with daily updates from Belfast or Edinburgh. No, if the IRA set off a bomb, the paper would run a four-paragraph item from the Associated Press on page A7, and otherwise the only news from the ancestral homeland was the sports-page coverage of the British Open at the Royal St. Andrews.

Identity politics and liberal notions of “diversity” have so polluted the journalism racket that now even the sports pages are full of “social justice.” If there is a gay outfielder playing for some AA farm team anywhere in America, all he has to do is send an email to Sports Illustrated and they’ll run a 6,000-word feature about his courageous struggle against homophobia in Dubuque or Albuquerque or wherever.

Whether or not broccoli journalism is Good for Democracy, it’s not good for journalism, because people get tired of being told what to think.

A newsroom is not a pulpit, and editors are not theologians, and if you want to preach a sermon by disguising it as a five-part investigative series about homelessness or whatever, you might eventually find yourself preaching to an empty church, because readers are not entirely stupid. Your pretentious attitude as Our Moral Superiors™ is tiresome and obnoxious, and people won’t pay money to be treated like third-graders being scolded by their teacher. But I digress . . .

Blame Al Gore, Because Why Not?

When Bill Kovach decided circa 1987 that the Atlanta papers needed a bureau in Nairobi, he could afford to do it, because the paper was making a handsome profit from advertising revenue. The fact that advertising ultimately paid the bills — the source of revenue, whereas the salaries of the newsroom staff were an expense — was an aspect of journalism that a lot of Good for Democracy types never really figured out. Bottom-line considerations were far from the minds of most people in our nation’s newsrooms 25 years ago, before Al Gore invented the Internet, and then some guy named Matt Drudge became America’s Editor-in-Chief.

Oh, the pages and pages of classified ads — help wanted, real estate, used cars, whatever — that were once such a magnificent revenue generator for newspaper publishers. Oh, the display ads from department stores, and the full-color advertising inserts stuffed inside that thick Sunday paper. Nearly all gone now — gone with the wind, along with the fat profit margins that allowed Bill Kovach the luxury of force-feeding readers in Atlanta their journalistic broccoli about the famine in Sudan. Gone, those glory days when newsrooms were so crowded, and every major metropolitan paper had an “investigative journalism” team of a half-dozen hotshots whose bylines rarely appeared in print except on those tedious five-part series written for the eyes of the Pulitzer Prize judges.

Yeah, once upon a time, every newspaper in every state capital in America — from Tallahassee to Juneau, from Augusta, Maine, to Honolulu, Hawaii — had its own local crew of would-be Woodward and Bernsteins who believed they were producing journalism that was Good for Democracy.

Gone! All gone now! And nobody gives a damn, except crybabies like Dale Maharidge, the journalism professor at Columbia University who wrote that idiotic headline: “What Happens to Journalists When No One Wants to Print Their Words Anymore?” Oh, the AFL-CIO to the rescue!

As digital journalism finds its place in the new-media landscape, helped by a crop of new web-only publications, younger journalists are beginning to demand the kind of work protections, decent wages and newsroom solidarity that many of their older counterparts once enjoyed. In the past year, workers have voted to unionize at Gawker, Vice, Salon and ThinkProgress, affiliating with the Writers Guild of America East, AFL-CIO. In January,The Huffington Post’s management voluntarily recognized the WGAE to represent 262 employees. The union negotiates “compensation, benefits, and job security” for its members.

Isn’t that nice? The “workers . . . voted to unionize at Gawker,” which just got hit with a $115 million judgment after former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan sued them for publishing a sex video of him. Delicious irony.

“Kazika the Mad Jap” could not be reached for comment.

Is my blog Good for Democracy? Probably not, but please remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!




 

UPDATE: Welcome, Vox Day readers!

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers! And, yes, Hunter S. Thompson had a very low opinion of journalism professors:

In the context of journalism, here, we are dealing with a new kind of “lead” — the Symbiotic Trapezoid Quote. The Columbia Journalism Review will never sanction it; at least not until the current editor dies of brain syphilis, and probably not even then.
What?
Do we have a libel suit on our hands?
Probably not, I think, because nobody in his right mind would take a thing like that seriously — and especially not that gang of senile hags who run the Columbia Journalism Review, who have gone to considerable lengths in every issue during the past year or so to stress, very heavily, that nothing I say should be taken seriously.
“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” George Bernard Shaw said that, for good or ill, and I only mention it here because I’m getting goddamn tired of being screeched at by waterheads. Professors are a sour lot, in general, but professors of journalism are especially rancid in their outlook because they have to wake up every morning and be reminded once again of a world they’ll never know.

The Great Shark Hunt, p. 286.

UPDATE III: Linked at American Power — thanks! — and now a thread at Memeorandum.

UPDATE IV: Linked by Larwyn at Director Blue — thanks!

 


Category: Fear. Loathing., Journalism, Media Bias

Comments

120 Responses to “Fear and Loathing: ‘Kazika the Mad Jap’ Could Not Be Reached for Comment”

  1. Instapundit » Blog Archive » STACY MCCAIN: The Columbia University School of Journalism is Decadent and Depraved. “Hunter S. Th…
    March 20th, 2016 @ 10:16 pm

    […] MCCAIN: The Columbia University School of Journalism is Decadent and Depraved. “Hunter S. Thompson understood this […]

  2. greatUnknown
    March 20th, 2016 @ 10:42 pm

    This article is correct, brutally so, in most respects. It errs in one: the proper expression is taurine excrement. There is a difference.

  3. Robert Burke
    March 20th, 2016 @ 11:03 pm

    Defund the Global Progressive Agenda at Columbia Journalism. Replace tax funded pedagogy with economical Western Enlightenment.

    Rinse and repeat at all Journalism Schools, especially at Southern California University and at the University of Nevada Reno. It would save the Republic.

    Do this in Japan, Kenya, the U.K., Russia, India and Mexico. Don’t forget Canada. Especially do this in France and the EU.

  4. gingerhead2
    March 20th, 2016 @ 11:10 pm

    Journalism has been on a downhill slide since H. L. Mencken was unavailable through the Baltimore Sun.

  5. Silver Scholar
    March 20th, 2016 @ 11:11 pm

    I live outside Louisville, and can affirm the rapid decline in the C-J’s quality. Many would say it’s quality fell when Gannett took over, but the decline made a sharp dip in 2008 when the recession hit, and they axed some of the popular columnist and canceled beloved sections, like the weekly book reviews. Now it’s even worse, as Dana said, with whole sections replaced by USAToday (which itself is pretty bad.) And other sections have been seriously clipped. Now the Sunday editorial section has been reduced to a single broadsheet, four pages total, usually with one, overlong “broccoli” [love this term! :)] guest editorial, two or three letters to the editors, and now, kids LARPing as journalists.

    I graduated from a high-ranked journalism school in the late 1990s and briefly worked in the business. I remember my professors telling us, “Don’t worry, this Internet news thing will never catch on. They said radio and TV would kill papers, they didn’t, and neither will the Internet.” One actually said, “You honestly think somebody is going to carry a computer around when he has a newspaper that can fit in his pocket?”

    I do grieve for my old business, but I know they did it to themselves.

  6. Terenc Blakely
    March 20th, 2016 @ 11:22 pm

    Of course the solution is for journalism to be nationalized. Think of all the benefits; a living wage, lifetime employment regardless of ability, the status of being the ‘official’ news and getting rid of those low-life internet blogs. Of course it would help if our new government bureaucracy had a catchy name to attract the prols…. how about the ‘Ministry of Truth’?

  7. Patrick Carroll
    March 21st, 2016 @ 12:00 am

    Can’t we get some H-1Bs in to do the journalism racket?

    I’m sure they’d be just as good, for one-tenth the cost.

  8. Lee Reynolds
    March 21st, 2016 @ 12:04 am

    Ever (try to) watch Fox news? All of the ads seem to target old people. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Fox is leading in the ratings precisely because its core audience are the people who still get their news from TV. Everyone else is looking at the computer or their phone.

  9. Rob Miller
    March 21st, 2016 @ 12:11 am

    Outstanding Stacey!

  10. Stacy McCain Brings the Dirty Truth About Modern American Journalism - Daily Pundit
    March 21st, 2016 @ 12:32 am

    […] Fear and Loathing: ‘Kazika the Mad Jap’ Could Not Be Reached for Comment : The Other McCain […]

  11. Jack
    March 21st, 2016 @ 12:45 am

    I’ve been part of the media (print/radio/online, with a few TV appearances thrown in) for 40 years. I’ve worked for the world’s largest wire service, two major magazines and the wesbite of one of the big three networks (I got out of the journalistic trainwreck and now work for a major sports league, my first love, as a writer/editor).

    Mr. McCain’s “broccoli” theory rings true; it meshes with a co-worker’s “cheeseburger” theory that readers like “cheeseburgers” and that it’s up to us to make the best one possible rather than focusing on other stuff (the “broccoli”).

    Frankly, if you took the sports section, the comics/crossword/Jumble/restaurant reviews, etc. out of a newspaper, no one would read it. I used to see dozens of people reading newspapers on the train; today, I’m often the only one.

    And don;t get me started on the age factor. You’ll have to work hard to find a newspaper reader under 30 (maybe under 40).

    Also, The vast majority of readers are nowhere near the vast majority of journalists (who are increasingly far to the left). The success of Fox News and the tire fires at CNN and MSNBC (and the monetary struggles at most newspapers) are living proof.

    Craigslist, which decimated classified ads in newspapers, has also done tremendous damage to newpapers. So has the fact that advertisers can find out with a few clicks exactly how many people are seeing their online ads, as opposed to newspaper ads that are ignored far more often than not..

    Journalism is a business, no matter what your teachers at college and the elites in the field try to tell you. It has the potential to do enormous good, bur readers and viewers want to see articles about things that interest them not what publishers/editors/snotty journalists think they need to know. People want the best cheeseburger they can get; maybe after they get that, they’ll agree to eat some broccoli.

  12. Fail Burton
    March 21st, 2016 @ 1:29 am

    “In 1935 Lorimer put the (Ladies’ Home) Journal under the editorship of the husband-and-wife team that rescued it, Bruce and Beatrice Blackmar Gould… The Goulds, without forsaking the home-service features which formed the backbone of the women’s magazines, nevertheless insisted that ‘a woman’s world is a good deal broader than the kitchen.’ They gave the Journal some of the freshness and frankness it had had under Bok. In 1937, in article and in short story, they revived the campaign against venereal disease that Bok had waged thirty-two years earlier. They discussed birth control, and they ran articles about the sexual problems of teen-agers. They polled their readers on just causes of divorce, and in their columns they counseled the unhappily wed. Public health, mental illness, alcoholism, slum clearance, American architecture—they gave their readers articles about such subjects, along with Henry Stimson’s memoirs, Joseph Stilwell’s diary, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s autobiography. They inaugurated a seemingly interminable series on ‘How America Lives’ in which they reported on the home lives, domestic problems, budgets, and similar personal affairs of ‘typical’ American families. The Journal responded to their touch. In 1941 the company took full-page advertisements in metropolitan newspapers to trumpet the Journal’s circulation of 4,000,000, a record held previously by only the Reader’s Digest. In 1955 it still led all other women’s magazines with a circulation of 4,970,000; the closest to it was McCall’s with 4,641,000. Nor could other women’s magazines pace it in advertising volume. In 1947, its peak year, it grossed $25,627,000 in advertising, more than the combined grosses of its competitors Good Housekeeping and McCall’s.” – Theodore Peterson, Magazines of the 20th Century (1956)

  13. Wombat_socho
    March 21st, 2016 @ 1:54 am

    $115 million…and the punitive damages phase is THIS week. 😀

  14. Dana
    March 21st, 2016 @ 5:05 am

    All that I have to do is hit [CTRL][F][U]

  15. NeoWayland
    March 21st, 2016 @ 6:19 am

    Hmm, that makes sense.

    Fox News wasn’t available on my cable system until well after 9-11. I couldn’t tell you when because by that time I wasn’t watching TV news.

    I am old fashioned enough to prefer reading my news. I read very fast, so I actually prefer the long analysis stuff because I can whip through it. But very few write like that anymore. It’s all about Twitter or (shudder) podcasts.

    The thing about podcasts is that they’re like broadcast commentary. Even if there’s good information there somewhere, you’re locked into a block of time with a lot of fluff. I can’t stand it for more than a few minutes at a time.

  16. robertstacymccain
    March 21st, 2016 @ 6:37 am

    When I was in Georgia, I used to joke with friends in the newsroom that if the publisher ever found a way to outsource our work to gangs of Mexicans, we’d all be out of a job. Our publisher was a fine fellow, Burgett Mooney III, but he wasn’t in the newspaper business to lose money.

  17. robertstacymccain
    March 21st, 2016 @ 6:50 am

    My editor, who was also the owner of the paper at the ancient age of 30, raised his eyebrows at the number of girls. gymnastics articles and photos I submitted.

    Indeed, it would be a terrible thing to hand a young man a camera, a notebook and a press pass, and tell him to go out covering girls gymnastics, or swimming, or track or basketball, or some other sport where young women ran around in shorts. A dreadful business, journalism, and I strongly disapprove of such things.

  18. TC_LeatherPenguin
    March 21st, 2016 @ 7:23 am

    MUGGER UBER ALLES!!!

  19. gunga
    March 21st, 2016 @ 7:26 am

    Ditto

  20. Dana
    March 21st, 2016 @ 7:43 am

    Fox is leading the ratings because their anchorbabes have better legs and wear shorter skirts than the wenches on CNN.

  21. Dana
    March 21st, 2016 @ 7:47 am

    Broccoli is good, as long as it isn’t destroyed by a bad cook.

  22. Dana
    March 21st, 2016 @ 7:49 am

    Alas! for the journalists! They never seemed to realized, until being bitchslapped by reality, that capitalism and journalism are inseparable.

  23. Dana
    March 21st, 2016 @ 7:49 am

    OMG, I used the word “bitchslapped,” which is thoroughly sexist! I hereby denounce myself, in the strongest possible terms!

  24. Dana
    March 21st, 2016 @ 7:53 am

    Well, of course there are homosexual baseball players! Haven’t you ever heard of the difference between pitchers and catchers, and there are plenty of players who believe they’ll do better as switch hitters.

  25. Dana
    March 21st, 2016 @ 7:56 am

    Old Russian saying: ??? ??? ??????? ???????? ? ?????? , ? ??? ??????? ?????? ? ????????? .

  26. Fail Burton
    March 21st, 2016 @ 8:44 am

    One very simple paradigm which has been lost in all this is the fact that in the old days it took enormous effort, organization and money to get anything to the general public. Printing and distribution alone separated the pros from the public.

    That’s all gone now. If you also subtract from that equation the general public’s ability to appreciate a good essay writer or journalist from a bad one, the whole thing comes tumbling down.

    Even access to foreign countries no longer acts as a separator. An unprecedented number of people now speak English globally. They live right on the scene and can communicate instantly.

    It is the digital age which is responsible for this more than any other single factor. Complicated organizational barriers are still the key to monopoly and even those forms, e.g. TV, film, are being eroded by podcasts and increasingly sophisticated camera and editing software accessible to the general public.

  27. texlovera
    March 21st, 2016 @ 8:55 am

    Well put all around, Stacy.

    SB Nation is one of the absolute worst when it comes to pushing SJW crap, in particular the entire “gay athlete” scam. They had nonstop 24/7 Michael Sam articles for at least 6 months. And their new “cause of the moment”? Concern trolling Atlanta over the religious freedom bill.

    Of course, they’re a Vox property, and therefore, by definition, craptacular…

  28. werewife
    March 21st, 2016 @ 9:10 am

    I like to call them “the eneMedia.”

  29. VoteOutIncumbents
    March 21st, 2016 @ 10:51 am

    With DVRs the little TV I watch anymore is time shifted…and I NEVER watch a commercial. Thanks technology.

  30. skeets11
    March 21st, 2016 @ 11:21 am

    McCain is glossing over quite a bit with this analysis. Sure, a lot of the coverage was self serving, but it had a more general
    purpose. It educated people.

    The Internet has helped create a generation of people who have no idea what is going on outside of the small world in which they are interested. A person can find all the news if they want, it’s there, but that’s not what happens.

    In the old days the reader was forced to flip pages to find something of particular interest so the reader had no choice but to see the other news that was going on. The reader might not have been interested in starving Ethiopians or the Iran-Iraq War, but by skimming the headline at least they knew it was happening and general knowledge about the world we inhabit is important.

    In addition, some of those five-part series were helpful. If Flint, Mich. had a better newspaper the world might have found out about the lead poisoning sooner.

    Today when people can search Google News for Bruce Jenner, Trump or something specific they miss out on all the other news and I think don’t think that is good for democracy.

  31. Quartermaster
    March 21st, 2016 @ 12:35 pm

    Putin is taking care of Russia. Pretty soon the only Journos there will be printing the party line.

  32. Quartermaster
    March 21st, 2016 @ 12:38 pm

    Unless that’s your assignment. In which case, you would grit your teeth and do your duty to society.

  33. Quartermaster
    March 21st, 2016 @ 12:39 pm

    $115 million!

  34. Quartermaster
    March 21st, 2016 @ 12:40 pm

    Broccoli is horrid no matter who cooks it.

  35. Dana
    March 21st, 2016 @ 2:00 pm

    My darling bride, of 36 years, 10 months and 2 days, can do broccoli excellently. She does many things excellently.

  36. Dana
    March 21st, 2016 @ 2:01 pm

    Oh, the sacrifices journalists must make for their craft!

  37. Dana
    March 21st, 2016 @ 2:05 pm

    Your comment would have been much better were there evidence that people were better educated on world events before the internet. That hardly seemed to be the case.

  38. Are old journalists mostly stupid? – Adam Piggott
    March 21st, 2016 @ 4:18 pm

    […] A lot of journalists are crying lately. They’re upset that they don’t have jobs anymore as they believe that they were entitled to those jobs for ever and a day. Experienced and prescient journalists who long ago made the transition to the internet have gone on record telling them to FOAD. […]

  39. Finrod Felagund
    March 21st, 2016 @ 5:44 pm

    Except that’s been changing lately. Cruz supporters have been turning off Fox News and watching CNN because CNN has been more fair to Cruz than Fox.

  40. Charles G. Hill
    March 21st, 2016 @ 8:26 pm

    As distinguished from, say, Keokuk, which is merely funny, as one would expect from a name which is half K’s. (Obligatory baseball reference: Roger Maris played for the Keokuk Kernels in 1954.)

  41. Joseph Fein
    March 21st, 2016 @ 9:36 pm

    RS,

    Look at how Jay Rosen jumps back and insults rather then answer questions:

    http://pressthink.org/2016/03/depends-on-your-point-of-view-are-weasel-words-for-political-journalists-this-has-to-stop/#comment-131138

  42. Wombat_socho
    March 21st, 2016 @ 9:52 pm

    Only to fail twice as hard on Saturday nights. :v

  43. Finrod Felagund
    March 21st, 2016 @ 10:11 pm

    Another $25 million in punitive damages.

  44. Joe Joe
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 1:58 am

    😀

  45. LawanaDWatkins
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 7:47 am

    “my .friend’s mate Is getting 98$. HOURLY. on the internet.”….

    two days ago new Mc.Laren. F1 bought after earning 18,512$,,,this was my previous month’s paycheck ,and-a little over, 17k$ Last month ..3-5 h/r of work a days ..with extra open doors & weekly. paychecks.. it’s realy the easiest work I have ever Do.. I Joined This 7 months ago and now making over 87$, p/h.Learn. More right Here!oi1135????? http://GlobalSuperEmploymentVacanciesReportsHour/GetPaid/98$hourly…. .?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:::::!oi1135….

  46. Dana
    March 22nd, 2016 @ 6:40 pm

    Pete Rose, the MLB all time hits leader and three-time batting champion, was a switch hitter, as was Mickey Mantle, who won the hitting triple crown (Batting average, home runs and RBIs) in 1956. Those guys did pretty good on Saturday nights!

  47. Watcher of Weasels » Our Watcher’s Council Nominations – Man Crush Edition
    March 23rd, 2016 @ 7:26 pm

    […] Other McCain – Fear and Loathing: ‘Kazika the Mad Jap’ Could Not Be Reached for Comment submitted by The […]

  48. Watchers Council Nominations – If You're Left
    March 23rd, 2016 @ 7:42 pm

    […] Other McCain – Fear and Loathing: ‘Kazika the Mad Jap’ Could Not Be Reached for Comment submitted by The […]

  49. Watcher’s Council Nominations for 03-23-16 | Stately McDaniel Manor
    March 23rd, 2016 @ 7:45 pm

    […] Other McCain – Fear and Loathing: ‘Kazika the Mad Jap’ Could Not Be Reached for Comment  Submitted by The […]

  50. The Razor » Blog Archive » Council Submissions: March 23, 2016
    March 23rd, 2016 @ 8:45 pm

    […] Other McCain – Fear and Loathing: ‘Kazika the Mad Jap’ Could Not Be Reached for Comment submitted by The […]