Wednesday, April 20, 2005

You're Just a Grown-up


"Daddy, how does the moon stay up there in the sky," asked my three-year-old son Greg last night during our tucking in ceremonies. Because I took too long to come up with an answer, he followed that query with another. "Does it have sticky stuff on it?" Before I could answer that one, five-year-old Jonathan asked me, "Daddy, do you miss being a kid?" I told Jonathan that in some ways I still am a kid. Greg was having none of that. "Dad, you're just a grown up."

The Anti-business Business Editor

Al Lewis, Business Editor of the Denver Post, ironically makes his living incessantly finding ways to portray businesses in the worst light possible! So it was only natural that he would journey to New York City to be granted a twenty minute interview with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who has built a political career using the press to convict CEOs of large American businesses before they are ever tried in a court of law. Read the interview in today's Denver Post, if you want to learn how to lob softball questions to powerful politicians. Then, read yesterday's article in the Wall Street Journal by William J. Holstein, which suggests that Mr. Spitzer himself may have some serious ethical problems.

Monday, April 18, 2005

Who Can We Turn To Now?

Above is the title of a Denver Post story today http://www.thedenverpost.com by its media critic, Joanne Ostrow. The subtitle is, "As trusted anchors depart, who will be the next voice of God?" The latter reference is to Walter Cronkite, who has, since his retirement, revealed his extreme left bias on subject after subject. Media people like Ostrow, perhaps because they shared his biases, fell for the myth that Cronkite was objective.

Ostrow slams Bill O'Reilly as "the anti-Cronkite, famous for his abrasiveness and subjectivity." Abrasive and subjective? Yes, but what Ostrow misses is the fact that people find O'Reilly credible precisely because he openly uses commentary to takes stands, clearly labeling his statements as commentary, while allowing the other side to present its views. Cronkite, on the other hand, pretended to be objective, while actually slanting the news to fit his biases. If we had had world-wide blogging then, as we do now, perhaps the media would not have gotten away with their slanted coverage of the Viet Nam war, and perhaps the Vietnamese would not now be living enslaved in a totalitarian state.