The Nature of Things

It's a well-known fact, constantly reiterated by right-wingers, that the traditional media (newspapers, magazines, network television) in this country are strongly pro-liberal. Except that, like so many other well-known facts parroted by the right-wingers, this, too, is a lie.  Now, someone has actually quantified exactly how false it is. The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released a study delineating the media's coverage of the Republican candidates for president versus coverage of President Obama over the last five months.  Can you guess which one received the most negative coverage? It turns out that Obama has received the most consistently negative press of any of the presidential candidates, with negative assessments outweighing positive ones by almost four to one.  Again, this is not Rush Limbaugh we are talking about here.  This is the New York Times , Washington Post , CBS News, etc. Pew found that only 9 percent of the ...

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has released its report that measures the happiness of its member countries .  The report is titled "How's Life?" and it used surveys to measure eleven specific aspects of life that are believed to contribute to individuals' feelings of overall well-being. Among the factors measured in the surveys were such things as income, jobs, housing, health, clean environment, safe neighborhoods, and work-life balance.  While income proved to be an important factor, less obvious aspects of life, including health, safe neighborhoods, and clean environments proved extremely important, also. Here, then, is a countdown of what the OECD found to be the ten happiest countries in the world. 10. Austria 9.   United Kingdom 8.   China 7.   Sweden 6.   Norway 5.   Netherlands 4.   Indonesia 3.   Japan 2.   Iceland 1.   Denmark Interestingly, seven of the ten are European countries and four of th...