Bloggasm

When you follow politics enough, you begin to pick out news pieces and rhetoric which have absolutely no substance whatsoever, things that are nothing but white noise. Let me show you an example– in which not only has the news source just wasted about sixty seconds of your time, but the person quoted in the source is nothing but a political pawn who has absolutely nothing to say at all: Feminist Camille Paglia Attacks Liberal Media

Camille Paglia, the famed, feminist social critic that calls herself a Democrat, gave an interview to The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, recently (hat tip to Radio Equalizer) in which she attacked a wide array of American media icons. For instance, she stated that the writing of The New York Times was, “‘Upper middle class comfortable elitist liberalism.’”

She then blamed a lot of the left’s difficulties on Hollywood: “‘It’s the reason my party, the Democratic Party, is in such bad shape. It’s because of the insularity and the arrogance of those views.’”

Ok, first let’s establish the news organization’s subtitle: “Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias.”

Pundits on both sides love to do this. They pick someone from the opposite side that criticizes his or her own political bias and uses this as anecdotal evidence to support one theory: “Even [insert person with political bias here] is criticizing his own party.” And since there are literally thousands of prominent political figures on each side, it’s not hard to find someone to do this. It’s one of those logical black-holes that every pundit loves and refuses to let go of.

Now, let’s get into the meat (or lack thereof) of her statements:

Katie Couric: (Laughs) “I was on that show once. Katie Couric is such a little hypocrite.” She says it’s amazing that “in America, you would consider a person without the slightest news experience to occupy the chair of Walter Cronkite! Apparently that is what is going to happen at CBS.”

WTF? Does anyone even understand what she’s trying to say here? If you do, let me know.

What do you think about Al Franken, Camille? “‘Good lord! I want to fall asleep. Narcolepsy.’”

Good job, you have now successfully broken down Al Franken and gave extensive analysis of his failures in radio rather than giving a banal fourth-grade level insult!

“Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity do great radio, Paglia says.

So let me get this straight. You just got done bitching about the liberal bias in media and instead you praise two incredibly conservative nutjobs who continually bash feminists, are incredibly unfair to their opposing guests and call-ins by screaming over them, and get caught on a daily basis lying? That’s great radio?

Is anybody else perhaps wondering if either these quotes are completely false or are taken entirely out of context? Of course there’s no way to know, both the article I link to and the article they link to are just full of random quotes from her without any attempt at cohesiveness or filling in any sort of background for the interview.

So who is this Camille Paglia? Here’s a wikipedia article on her. It turns out that she’s not really a mainstream feminist at all, making her the traditional conservative scape-goat. Gee, think they could have mentioned that in the article.

So let’s see: another extremely biased news source interviewing an extremely biased person in order to prove a bias in the media. Yep, business as usual.