BlatherWatch

OPEN THREAD: bronchial journalism

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We're suffering a stubborn bout of bronchitis, and haven't much creative treachery in us at the moment. Please excuse as we recover: should be up to speed in a few days

When will KUOW get on the bus?

The Takeaway, starts today on New York's WNYC with veteran NPR and NBC journalist John Hockenberry and co-host, Adaora Udoji, formerly of CNN.

The show, from Public Radio International, will strive to counter the staid feel and taped interviews of NPR’s venerable Morning Edition.

The New York Times wrote Sunday, "Public radio is drawing its largest audience ever, some 28 million listeners nationwide each week. But if it’s a golden era, you wouldn’t know it from the frenetic activity to remake the genre."

Activity, if you want to call it that, ain't so frenetic around here with local public stations, KUOW, and KPLU. The Takeaway will be heard in NY, Boston and Baltimore, and presumably will be available to all; but we doubt we'll be hearing it any time soon except by podcast or livestream -- despite the local stations run ME simultaneously in the the same market.

KUOW, with all their resources, cash reserves, and penny-pinching; enjoying 2nd or 3rd place in the market every book, doesn't seem much interested in investing in the future that the rest of public radio is clamoring for. 

BlatherMunch10: we ate the whole thing

Whew. We just lay there for a while as the waitstaff hauled off the rubble. I remember the old custom -- the dictate almost -- from old novels and 1940's movies of sharing a cigarette with your lover after sex. And some of us did it back then despite we didn't actually smoke. Similarly, I craved a cigarette after this romp; we looked shyly at each other 'round the table as if we'd just shared something passionate, and physically intimate, which, of course, we had.

Monday last, after staving off the pangs all day with bitter tea, and Altoids, The World's Tiniest Architect and I hastened to First Hill's Lark.

It was the 2008 Whole Beast Dinner, Lark's third annual celebration of butter and pork blood. While there were actually three beasts (a pig, and 2 lambs) there were parts of the whole we never got to eat -- we must say, we didn't miss them, and might, actually have eaten some parts that were left unidentified. "What you don't know, won't hurt you," I said later to the Architect. "Where were those testicles and eyebrows I wondered -- in the meat balls?"

This ain't badminton, dep't: self-inflicted confusion; reprehensible journalism

Rush Limbaugh: Democrat riots in the streets.

Paul Krugman: Self-inflicted Confusion

Floyd Brown: will he willie horton obama?

Never one to be affraid [sic] of stereotypes, I am proud to be a Patriotic, Christian, Conservative. The four pillars of my life are Faith, Family, Flag and Freedom. My hero is Ronald Reagan. I even started riding horses because of his admonishment: “the best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse.”

Floyd Brown is back.

We know Floyd Brown. If you don't, you will know him by his works.

Among many slimier attributes, (which we'll get to) he's a Tacoman, a gigantic tub of scum, and a one-time KVI talk host, and filled-in just last week on the Christian kulturkampf of Kirby & Co., on KVI, "Thee talk station" (m-f, 5-9a).

Brown is seminal in the right-wing tactics of the modern political era, and heroic in backroom Republican circles.

He's in the news again because he's made and is distributing an inflammatory teevee ad airing in North Carolina that blames Barack Obama for international terrorism and Chicago gang murders.

Will mccain answer questions about his pastor? ... or is the question: will he be asked any?

John McCain, 71, is in New Orleans today, and we wonder if the adoring media will ask him about his pastor, Christian Zionist, Reverend John Hagee, the fanatical owner/operator of Cornerstone, a megachurch in the Texas Hill Country.

Hagee is a fat televangelist who claims to be God's Armageddon mouthpiece against The Gay, the Catholics, and the sinners, e.g.,everyone else who's not a Christian exactly like him.

Although McCain actually solicited his endorsement, no Pastor Wright-style wall-to-wall-coverage has arisen. Could it be because the national press corps have sleep-overs and bring his favorite donuts (with sprinkles) after the codgerly Senator slaps them when they misbehave?

It's another example of how religion is once again screwing with our political process, and we wonder if McCain's pandering to the religious right (whom we all know he despises) will ever come back to bite him.

MSNBC simulcast starts today on rachel maddow show

TV talking heads simulcast on talk radio? Why hasn't anybody thought of that before?

Starting today, KPTK will air the Air America nightly simulcast of Race for The White House. MSNBC’s newest primetime program as the first hour of Air America's Rachel Maddow Show (m-f,  3-4p) which recently went to three hours to accommodate the groundbreaking simulcasting. 

Adding the radio to teevee, live stream and podcast platforms is pretty smart, we'd say. It gives the show exposure to the afternoon drive crowd -- on the west coast anyway. (Closest thing we can think of as precedent is Meet the Press rerun on KIRO (Sundays 9-10a).

It also proves Billo Reilly's thesis that the evil NBC is in bed with the far-left AAR in order to subvert the U.S. of A., and take away your birthday.

Fisher annual meeting: there will be blood.

Major New York investors in Seattle's Fisher Communications say they'll fight a plan by the company to issue more than a million additional shares of stock, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal.

Their opposition sets the stage for a shoot-out at Fisher Communications' annual shareholders meeting April 30 in Seattle.

It's more trouble for CEO Colleen Brown who's shepherded the company into a series of financial cowpatties for the last few years. (photo: Colleen Brown, not as smart as she looks)

Fisher (KOMOTV, KOMO radio, KVI) says the new shares would be a compensation package for executives and key employees.The"equity incentive" stock program would equal about 12 percent of Fisher's stock valued at more than $30 million.

The investors say it would water down the value of their stock.

Tony snow forsakes fox news for cnn

He's as facile a liar as you'll ever meet, as he brilliantly demonstrated as Bush's White House press secretary, and a few years as a radio talk host running interference for Bush's wartime dissembling and bungling.

Tony Snow shocked the partisans at Fox News, Monday hiring on with CNN as a conservative commentator beginning... Monday.

"Others around here apparently knew about this, but I was truly amazed," said our Fox News guy in New York. We'd heard he was considering going back to a new version of his radio show for Fox Radio. This really caught me off guard."

Talk radio: do you have the stones to admit you were punked?

Can right-wing tools like Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Dori Monson, Michael Medved, Glenn Beck even acknowledge that their so-called war coverage and commentary has been so severely compromised?

What are we talking about?

Sunday's New York Times took a little of the complex out of the military-industrial complex with David Barstow's lengthy, detailed exposure of how Bush and Rumsfeld's Pentagon used retired generals to serve as "objective" media military analysts while actually carrying administration's rosy interpretations of a failing war effort to talk radio, cable blab-shows and thenews outlets they work for.

(For an interactive overview, click here. Read the whole piece here.)

Even more despicable is how these alleged military heroes we've seen every day since 9-11 on teevee or on the radio have used the influence and access gained by playing in this farce.

These are the fat-assed militarists who accused the rest of us of dispatriotism, cut-and-run mentality, and not supporting the troops. In these documents we see all that patriotically correct self-righteousness is actually a collection of bullet-points they picked up from a Secretary of the Defense losing a war he never should have got into.