The Nature of Things

Already the 2016 presidential campaign is well under way which has had me thinking back to the last campaign in 2011-12 and how the media covered it.  There is a strong belief among conservatives that the mainstream media is always against them and that the way they write and talk about things is invariably slanted toward the left. An actual review of that coverage in 2011 told quite a different story. I suspect a similar review conducted in 2015 would show much the same thing.  For example, that well-known "liberal" media outlet The New York Times has yet to write a positive news story about Hillary Clinton. Indeed, one could make a pretty strong argument that, for whatever reasons, the paper has engaged in a vendetta against her. At the same time, the Times generally seems to be straining to report positive things about the Republican candidates. I wrote the following post on October 17, 2011 after the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism release...

The January ratings for the thirty top television news shows have been announced and, once again, unsurprisingly, Fox News dominates the ratings . The first thirteen shows listed are Fox entries. The inevitable conclusion is that most of the people in this country whose prime source for news is television get their news from Fox. Moreover, at least two scientific studies have revealed that Fox viewers are less well informed about current events than those who get their news from other sources. That explains a lot about our society and its dumbing down. Rupert Murdoch has a lot to answer for. I don't watch Fox and so perhaps I'm not the best judge, but from what I read about the various shows, I believe that perhaps the worst offender of all may be Fox and Friends , the show that rates number 13 in the top 30, just above the first MSNBC entry to appear on the list, The Rachel Maddow Show , which I do watch. My impression is that Fox and Friends routinely and shamelessly distor...

There's another rant that I need to get off my chest before I leave the subject of pundits. All year long we've been hearing from these looney tunes, tone-deaf guys and gals about how this election year will be come-uppance for incumbents. You see, according to them, Americans are mad as hell at incumbents and they are not going to take it any more. This will be the year when they throw the bums out and bring in new blood, according to the narrative of the punditocracy. Especially new tea party blood. The pundits really, really love the tea party, because it says and does outrageous things and gives them fluff with which to fill up their 24-hour news cycle. So what has been the record so far of incumbents in this year of "throwing the bums out"? Well, roughly 99% of them have won their races. Only about four have gone down to defeat and two of those were turncoats who had switched party in mid-stream - one from Republican to Democratic and one from Democratic t...

NASA is out with another report on the climate. Their data on the earth's temperature show that the last 12-month period is the warmest on record . In addition, April 2010 was the hottest April on record and March 2010 was the hottest March on record. Furthermore, taken together, January, February and March this year set records as the hottest of that three-month period on record. NASA now predicts that a new record 12-month global temperature will almost certainly be set in 2010. This has all happened, or is happening, in spite of the "moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance." So, during this period, there has been reduced solar irradiance which should have meant that the earth would be cooler. Instead, we've recorded the hottest temperatures on record. Gee, I wonder how that could have possibly happened? But...but, 1998 was cooler. And all those purloined emails from scientists in England - didn't they prove that the data was dodgy and t...