Salon.com > Media http://www.salon.com Mon, 28 May 2012 15:05:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Luke Russert, nepotist prince http://www.salon.com/2012/05/24/luke_russert_nepotist_prince/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/24/luke_russert_nepotist_prince/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 15:35:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12926399 Tim Russert was not the unalloyed saint of tough journalism that his celebrators describe in posthumous tributes, but he was at least a classic American success story, of the sort that we still enjoy pretending is common: Blue-collar kid from Rust Belt town becomes enormously successful thanks largely to brains and hard work. The story of Luke Russert, alas, is a much more common one in American life: No-account kid of successful person has more success thrust upon him.

Pretty much immediately upon the death of his father, Luke Russert inexplicably had a full-time broadcasting job, supplanting his part-time broadcasting job co-hosting a satellite radio sports talk show with James Carville. (That was a real thing that actually existed. Can you imagine a human who would want to listen to that?)

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/24/luke_russert_nepotist_prince/feed/ 33 Coverup at Washington Times http://www.salon.com/2012/05/17/coverup_at_washington_times/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/17/coverup_at_washington_times/#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 23:10:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12922228 During his long career, Arnaud de Borchgrave, a one-time Newsweek correspondent and editor, has earned his share of laurels. Fellow journalist Theodore H. White has called him one of “America's great foreign correspondents.” “In a job that requires bluff and bravado, he has outrun the best of them," Esquire gushed in a lengthy profile, which is quoted in de Borchgrave’s official bio. Along the way, he has also racked up some fancy titles, including director of the transnational threats project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

These days, though, de Borchgrave is involved in some less praiseworthy pursuits. Alongside his other activities, the veteran newsman is a columnist for the Washington Times, the influential conservative broadsheet, where he once served as editor in chief. And in a handful of columns over the last year he has lifted passages verbatim, or nearly verbatim, from the Internet and other sources, without attribution — a fact the Washington Times' leadership tried to sweep under the rug, according to insiders at the paper.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/17/coverup_at_washington_times/feed/ 17 Secrets of the New Yorker cover http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/secrets_of_the_new_yorker_cover/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/secrets_of_the_new_yorker_cover/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12918609 ImprintFrançoise Mouly, the New Yorker’s art editor since 1993, doesn’t have normal relationships with the artists who draw the magazine's covers. “Think of me as your priest,” she told one of them. Mouly, who co-founded the avant-garde comics anthology RAW with her husband, Art Spiegelman, asks the artists she works with—Barry Blitt, Christoph Niemann, Ana Juan, R. Crumb—not to hold back anything in their cover sketches. If that means the occasional pedophilia gag or Holocaust joke finds its way to her desk, she's fine with that. Tasteless humor and failed setups are an essential part of the process. “Sometimes something is too provocative or too sexist or too racist,” Mouly says, “but it will inspire a line of thinking that will help develop an image that is publishable.”

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/secrets_of_the_new_yorker_cover/feed/ 4 Two stupid lies the right spread this week http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/two_stupid_lies_the_right_spread_this_week/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/two_stupid_lies_the_right_spread_this_week/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:57:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12911251 Did you hear about the new law in Egypt that the Muslim Brotherhood supported that allowed people to have sex with dead women? It was on all the blogs yesterday. "Hard to come up with a more apt image of the Arab Spring than an aroused Islamist rogering a corpse," wrote Mark Steyn. It's hard to come up with a more apt image of the state of contemporary Islamophobia than Mark Steyn furiously pondering the image of "an aroused Islamist rogering a corpse."

So, it's not a real thing. There's no such law or even any evidence that anyone proposed said law, and even if someone had proposed such a law, there is not even a remote possibility that the Egyptian Parliament would consider it. It's total bullshit. It's the Daily Mail overhyping a story Al-Arabiya took from a newspaper opinion column written by a dedicated Hosni Mubarak supporter.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/two_stupid_lies_the_right_spread_this_week/feed/ 28 Matt Drudge’s rescue mission http://www.salon.com/2012/04/26/matt_drudges_rescue_mission/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/26/matt_drudges_rescue_mission/#comments Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12909857 D.C.’s conservative newspaper, the Washington Times, has long been mocked for its crazy owner, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. When he isn't busy performing mass weddings, the billionaire Moon has been underwriting the money-losing paper -- which, at a high point, once earned the personal praise of Ronald Reagan. Recently, however, the Times has struggled, not just because of the usual industry woes, but also because of infighting among the 92-year-old Moon’s heirs. Thankfully, the Times has had a helping hand from another famous right-wing eccentric: Matt Drudge.

For the past year, Drudge has provided the Washington Times with, on average, 46 percent of its monthly traffic. In November of 2011, the Drudge Report sent 4.7 million visitors to the Washington Times website, or 57 percent of all the Times’ traffic that month. By comparison, just 820,000 visitors actually accessed the Times through its homepage that November. (These numbers come from the Times’ internal Google Analytics statistics, which Salon obtained.)

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/26/matt_drudges_rescue_mission/feed/ 4 Backstage at the Final Four http://www.salon.com/2012/04/15/backstage_at_the_final_four/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/15/backstage_at_the_final_four/#comments Sun, 15 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12860081 It’s around 11 a.m. the day before the 2012 Final Four begins at the New Orleans Superdome, and fans of Ohio State, Kansas, Kentucky and Louisville are teeming along both sides of Canal Street, some with Mardi Gras beads in school colors. There’s friendly trash-talk as they duck in and out of shops glutted with Big Easy-themed Final Four T-shirts, hats, glassware. In the lobby of the Marriott, the media hotel, fans gawk at famous college coaches in track suits -- and there goes CBS color announcer Bill Raftery, who could pass for any silver-haired businessman in a suit, except he’s Bill Raftery, famous for shouting “Strokin’ a little nylon!” (when the ball swishes through the net) and “The kiss!” (a successful bank-shot). Former Ohio State All-American Jim Jackson greets Buckeye fans, and as I ride up the escalator to get my media credential, down comes Missouri coach Frank Haith, the national coach of the year.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/15/backstage_at_the_final_four/feed/ 5 David Cameron’s fun American vacation marred by more phone-hacking arrests http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/david_camerons_fun_american_vacation_marred_by_more_phone_hacking_arrests/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/david_camerons_fun_american_vacation_marred_by_more_phone_hacking_arrests/#comments Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:55:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12675671 Insecure countries are known to lock up unsavory elements when international guests are expected, so it should not have been a terrible shock to see that the U.K.'s Metropolitan Police had arrested former News Corp. executive Rebekah Brooks and her horse-training husband, Charlie, yesterday, a few short months before the opening ceremonies of the London Olympic Games. The Brookses are now, apparently, back on the streets, having made bail.

The Brookses were arrested, along with four others, "on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice." This was the second time Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the Sun and the now-shuttered News of the World, had been arrested -- the last time it was for conspiring to intercept communications, or "phone hacking" -- and this arrest suggests that News International's extensive efforts to cover up their unethical practices may end up damaging the company just as much as the unethical practices did.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/david_camerons_fun_american_vacation_marred_by_more_phone_hacking_arrests/feed/ 9 The Breitbart media http://www.salon.com/2012/03/05/the_breitbart_media/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/05/the_breitbart_media/#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12472371 Andrew Breitbart's fingerprints are all over the majority of the partisan political Internet. The Blaze, the Daily Caller, Huffington Post, even Politico: They'd all look quite different without his influence. There was already Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes and Matt Drudge himself, but Breitbart was a phenomenon of the Internet age, and would not have thrived before the Web helped to destabilize the traditional press.

He intuitively understood how the media work even if he needed to invent a grand conspiracy to explain the motivations of its primary actors. He knew that if the press felt it had missed a major story from an unexpected source, it would quickly rush to be the first to publicize further material from that source in the future. He learned this from Matt Drudge, who really did become the de facto "assignment editor" of the political press following his publication of Michael Isikoff's axed Lewinsky story. The parallel right-wing press has been in existence for years, and the early conservative blogosphere organized itself around blogs from people like Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds, but Breitbart was an expert in forcing their obsessions into the "mainstream."

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/05/the_breitbart_media/feed/ 75 The hypocrisy of Wall Street “capitalism” http://www.salon.com/2012/03/01/the_hypocrisy_of_wall_street_capitalism/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/01/the_hypocrisy_of_wall_street_capitalism/#comments Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:16:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12461291 The phrase “Wall Street” is evocative in American culture. For generations, it has referred to the showcase of American capitalism: our financial services system that ensured the efficient use of funds by channeling capital to its most productive use. Indeed, the governing ethos in America is that Wall Street is the heart and soul of our capitalist economy.

As I have written before, capitalism involves four basic principles: absolute responsibility for anything and everything that happens to your company (i.e. total accountability), equal justice under the law, compensation based on the real value created for society, and competition, which involves failure and what is often called creative destruction.

The CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, has repeatedly touted the success of his efforts and disparaged critics. Earlier this week he compared compensation in the banking industry to the struggling media world, suggesting that the banking industry was far more successful. In speaking to journalists, according to Bloomberg, he noted, “Worse than that, you don’t even make any money… [while] we make a lot of money.”

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/01/the_hypocrisy_of_wall_street_capitalism/feed/ 22 Times public editor asks if newspaper should correct lies http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/times_public_editor_asks_if_newspaper_should_correct_lies/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/times_public_editor_asks_if_newspaper_should_correct_lies/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:17:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12119601 Should the New York Times -- America's "newspaper of record" -- print the truth? That is the question posed by the paper's "public editor," in a very funny blog post today.

Public editor Arthur Brisbane would like to know if it is professionally appropriate for an objective journalist to "take sides" by noting that someone lied. When you read the newspaper, would you like it to contain "facts"?

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

In Brisbane's formulation, when a reporter corrects a falsehood made by a source or public figure, that reporter is a "truth vigilante," because he or she took the truth into his or her own hands, before some slick fast-talking lawyer got the lie out of truth-jail on a technicality. (Hand in your truth-badge and truth-gun, New York Times! You're getting too close! That untrue assertion has major connections at City Hall!)

Another line: "Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?" Haha what? Probably?

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/times_public_editor_asks_if_newspaper_should_correct_lies/feed/ 67 Bill Keller writes newest, dumbest Biden-Clinton 2012 swap piece http://www.salon.com/2012/01/09/bill_keller_writes_newest_dumbest_biden_clinton_2012_swap_piece/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/09/bill_keller_writes_newest_dumbest_biden_clinton_2012_swap_piece/#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:59:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12001311 Bill Keller, a bad opinion columnist, has written a bad opinion column. It is about how Barack Obama will replace Vice President Joe Biden on the 2012 ticket with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a thing that will not actually happen.

The former New York Times editor has lately been celebrating his return to writing by fearlessly tackling hacky column ideas already exhausted by everyone who was writing bad opinion columns during Keller's tenure as a person with an actually important job. Having offered his own takes on classics like "The Huffington Post isn't as good as a real newspaper" and "Twitter is dumb," Keller today tries the old "running mate switcharoo" scenario.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/09/bill_keller_writes_newest_dumbest_biden_clinton_2012_swap_piece/feed/ 26 The right spins the Santorum surge http://www.salon.com/2012/01/04/the_right_spins_the_santorum_surge/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/04/the_right_spins_the_santorum_surge/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:56:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=11865681 Rick Santorum's not-quite-victory in Iowa last night was unlikely but also sort of inevitable -- he was "next in line," and Ron Paul was doomed by the portions of his platform that aren't horrible -- and now we get to watch the anti-Romney conservatives pretend they've always liked ol' Rick, the True Conservative, the only credible standard-bearer, an electable, decent man who isn't a Washington insider.

(If Glenn Beck, for example, could trust "the reins of power" in any current GOP candidate, it would apparently be Rick Santorum.)

Some are wise enough to bemoan the entire remaining slate, though they of course blame outsiders, and not the actual rank-and-file of their own movement. Jim Geraghty hates Iowa, and says the kooky results (Ron Paul!!!) can be blamed on the lack of a Democratic primary sending unreliable "independents" -- presumably baked out of their minds -- to GOP caucuses to spoil the entire campaign.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/04/the_right_spins_the_santorum_surge/feed/ 23 Washington Post introduces incredibly useless new way to follow 2012 buzz http://www.salon.com/2012/01/03/washington_post_introduces_incredibly_useless_new_way_to_follow_2012_buzz/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/03/washington_post_introduces_incredibly_useless_new_way_to_follow_2012_buzz/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=11798861 The Washington Post's new "MentionMachine" tool explains in its introductory post precisely what is wrong with it. The "candidate trend app" simply maps Twitter mentions of candidates and then ranks them. Here the Post attempts to make this sound useful:

When Texas Gov. Rick Perry declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination Aug. 13, the same day as the Ames Straw Poll, those watching social streams could have rightfully assumed he had won the Iowa contest. Twitter exploded with Perry mentions, even though he didn’t participate in the straw poll, while the winner, Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), drew far less attention. Social media was the writing on the wall. Perry would soon trend up in polls, surpassing Bachmann and the rest of the field. Twitter was the early — scratch that — Twitter was the real-time warning system.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/03/washington_post_introduces_incredibly_useless_new_way_to_follow_2012_buzz/feed/ 5 Professional fact-checking about as broken as professional journalism http://www.salon.com/2011/12/20/professional_fact_checking_about_as_broken_as_professional_journalism/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/20/professional_fact_checking_about_as_broken_as_professional_journalism/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 23:10:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10709551 If I were to, say, swipe your grandfather's copy of "See, I Told You So" by Rush Limbaugh from his den, and then mail him a gift card good for a portion of the price of an Amazon Kindle, I think your grandfather would be well within his rights to call me a thief and possibly a communist. Politifact disagrees, apparently, as Democrats have been accused of telling the "lie of the year" for arguing that a vote to replace Medicare with a private voucher system does not constitute voting to "end" the program. The government program that would be replaced with a private voucher system. Replacing a thing with something else no longer constitutes getting rid of that thing. FYI.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/20/professional_fact_checking_about_as_broken_as_professional_journalism/feed/ 37 Piers Morgan plays dumb in UK media inquiry http://www.salon.com/2011/12/20/piers_morgan_plays_dumb_in_uk_media_inquiry/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/20/piers_morgan_plays_dumb_in_uk_media_inquiry/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:40:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10701171 Minor British media personality host Piers Morgan was called to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, the British government's ongoing inquiry into the occasionally criminal newsgathering practices of the British tabloid press. Morgan appeared via satellite from the United States, where he is inexplicably employed as a talk show host by CNN.

Morgan edited the Daily Mirror, a competitor to Rupert Murdoch's News of the World and the Sun, from 1995-2004, when he was sacked for printing fake photographs and a hoax story on the front page of the paper. No one alleges that phone-hacking was as widespread at Morgan's Mirror as it was at the News Corp. papers, but Morgan has written of listening to a voice-mail message left by Paul McCartney on his ex-wife Heather Mills' phone, and said, in past statements, that basically "everyone" in the British press listened to celebrity voice mails.

The Guardian helpfully liveblogged Morgan's entire appearance. Asked why the Mirror employed private detectives, Morgan played dumb:

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/20/piers_morgan_plays_dumb_in_uk_media_inquiry/feed/ 9 Hack List Alums: Where Are They Now? http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/hack_list_alums_where_are_they_now/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/hack_list_alums_where_are_they_now/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:20:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10318731 You can think of these guys as retired from the Hack List (like a Hall of Fame) or as simply to dull to rip into at length for a second time, but these 2010 Hack List veterans did not actually improve their game in 2011.

Pat Caddell (Last year: Number 27.)

The fake Democratic pollster is repeating himself, and somehow it just gets dumber every time.

Jonah Goldberg (Last year: Number 7.)

In March Jonah Goldberg literally wrote "meh" instead of rebutting an argument, in his nationally syndicated political column.

Thomas Friedman (Last year: Number 3.)

Thomas Friedman continued to, domestically, demand a centrist third party that acted exactly like our current centrist Democratic party. But his best work, as always, concerned foreign lands. What other columnist would have the balls to go to the scene of a popular revolution and "quote" a native pleading with the wise American columnist to explain what he thinks is going on in her country?

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/hack_list_alums_where_are_they_now/feed/ 16 1. Mark Halperin http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/1_mark_halperin/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/1_mark_halperin/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10435641 What more is there to say about Mark Halperin? He certainly hasn't gotten any better since last year, when a panel of experts (me) named him the world's second biggest hack. He's still wrong about everything. He's still shallow and predictable. He's still both fixated solely on the horse race and also uniquely bad at analyzing the horse race.

Halperin spent 2011 gearing up for the presidential elections by parroting transparently lame spin from Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, insisting that Palin was really going to run for president and taking Trump's farcical vanity "campaign" seriously as anything other than a time-wasting stunt. He still takes Mark Penn seriously as a wise campaign sage and not an amoral grifter. And he got in trouble for calling President Obama a "dick" on "Morning Joe," because the president criticized the GOP at a press conference. (This after Halperin spends years writing columns calling him a weak-willed wimp, because he is a Democrat.) The worst thing was not that he called the president a dick, it was that the president hadn't even been dickish. (Well, the worst thing was the whole "Morning Joe" team giggling like stoned teenagers that Halperin said a bad word.) Halperin is so dedicated to being wrong about everything that, upon his return to the airwaves, he actually made a point of mentioning that, had he been on TV during his suspension, he would've been wrong about something. Plus he did a "Morning Joe" appearance from an airplane bathroom which is surely illegal.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/1_mark_halperin/feed/ 35 2. Jennifer Rubin http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/2_jennifer_rubin/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/2_jennifer_rubin/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10349801 The Washington Post had a big problem. It failed, twice, at hiring a proper "Conservative blogger," a commodity every newspaper website needs. Its first hire was a plagiarist, and then it accidentally hired a reporter who wasn't conservative enough. The third time, it got someone directly from the neocon Weekly Standard Commentary, ensuring her bona fides. The only problem with Jennifer Rubin as a "conservative blogger," though, is that while she's most definitely a Republican, she doesn't seem invested in any conservative issues, bar foreign policy. And by foreign policy, I mean a fanatical hatred of Arabs and Muslims accompanied by constant fear-mongering about the jihadist menace and regular accusations of anti-Semitism (and tacit support for terrorism) levied against anyone slightly critical of Israeli government policies or remotely sympathetic to Palestinians.

So, good work, Washington Post editors, you have finally provided some "balance" for your newspaper's many left-wing Palestinian voices, like ... Mary Worth?

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/2_jennifer_rubin/feed/ 18 3. Bernard-Henri Levy http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/3_bernard_henri_levy/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/3_bernard_henri_levy/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10435581 One upside to America's frothing populist hatred of intellectuals is that we don't produce many Bernard-Henri Lévys. Unfortunately, we tend to take other nations' tedious, fame-seeking big thinkers far too seriously. I think our magazine editors are seduced by accents -- it's the only explanation for why they keep trying to sell us "BHL" and Niall Ferguson.

So BHL, the famous and wealthy French philosopher, gets assigned to travel across America for the Atlantic, and produces the laundry list of clichés you'd expect: We're all fat and religious and we worship the flag and baseball.

BHL the intrepid reporter writes a book on the killing of Daniel Pearl, and it's rife with errors and prejudice.

He's prospered in intellectual circles despite his tragic inability to button a shirt in part because he's a successful businessman, born into wealth and friends with the French corporate elite. He writes with the self-assuredness of someone quite convinced of his brilliance, and that self-assurance perhaps explains why he so regularly makes shit up and gets shit wrong.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/3_bernard_henri_levy/feed/ 17 4. Erin Burnett http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/4_erin_burnett/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/4_erin_burnett/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:01:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10350311 Erin Burnett was a perfect fit at CNBC, a business news network that interprets its mission as reporting for business leaders and the finance industry and not on them. A former Goldman Sachs analyst who also did a stint at Citigroup (business journalism might be worse than political reporting when it comes to team-switching and fraternizing among "sources" and "journalists"), Burnett epitomizes the CNBC worldview, where the ideal business journalist is a levelheaded interpreter of the omniscient market and ally of the wise men who've been enriched by it. Making the switch to being a news program host for us regular folk, on CNN, has not been without a couple of hitches for Ms. Burnett. Turns out, regular people don't naturally perceive CEOs and bankers as heroic figures, especially in the midst of a mass employment and consumer debt crisis that the wealthy have escaped unscathed.

Burnett, despite her youth, is a relic of a bygone age. She embodies '90s "market populism," to use Thomas Frank's phrase, now still surviving on our airwaves as a zombie idea. The idea of America as a mass "shareholder society" is a sick joke in a nation currently sharply divided between struggling debtors and bailed-out creditors, but the dream is popular enough among the well-off professionals in charge of our news networks that CNN pinned its prime-time hopes on Burnett appealing to a mass audience. (If ratings are any indication, it’s not working.)

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/4_erin_burnett/feed/ 36