Tag: Media

I had a rare and perhaps unprecedented experience on Monday morning at the tail end of a three-day visit to see my sister's family (including two nephews and a niece). I taught a two year old to describe The Scorpions' legendary hit "Rock You Like a Hurricane" as "epic butt rock."

Oh wait. I do crap like that all the time.

What I do not often do is watch any of The Today Show. You know, the Matt Lauer thing. They presented an investigative exposé on an issue that I must admit had not previously been salient to me: retailers re-selling underwear that has been returned (potentially used) by customers. While this seems pretty vile, it is not exactly America's most pressing problem – although I should try telling that to someone who gets crabs and enough yeast to open a Pinkberry from a pre-worn thong.

What struck me about this footage is not the shock value or relevance of the subject but the fact that a fluff factory like The Today Show actually did some pretty good investigative journalism here. They discussed, documented, confronted, and reported. If the lightweights on a morning show can do it, surely the hard news folks at the networks are capable of doing so as well.

It is often tempting to blame the lack of useful journalism among the mainstream media on a lack of brainpower or the failure of journalism schools to teach useful skills. But the problem is simply a lack of interest in doing real investigative reporting on political or economic issues. They'll do exposés on dirty thongs and answer the tough questions like "What is the best value in shampoos for normal to dry hair?" but they take a pass on the heavy lifting. An investigation of Victoria's Secret retail practices could easily be an investigation of the Dickensian third world sweatboxes at which their products are made. But it isn't. In-depth reports on toy fads or ridiculous moral panics (Rainbow parties! Back-masked Judas Priest lyrics! The piggy flu!) could easily be reports about the Air Force's reprehensible practice of using automated drones to hunt and kill Pakistani terrorists civilians. But it isn't.

I'm not sure which is more pathetic: a media that lacks the ability to do its job or one that lacks the interest. Yet ultimately viewers of The Today Show and anything else on TV bear responsibility. Hard news is inversely related to ratings, so we are locked in a downward spiral of more garbage fueling the desire to see more garbage.

Bill Kristol, defrocked New York Times columnist and mainstream media outcast who is still good enough for Murdoch, sayeth the following on something called Special Report with Bret Baier last week:

Look the data’s pretty clear in general that the offshore drilling of oil has become incredibly quite safe, not perfectly safe, but compared to other ways of getting energy, quite safe compared to the mining of coal for example, and very environmentally clean, except when there is a disaster like this spill, but Exxon Valdez was much bigger.

Read that five or six times. Those of you who do not jam knives into both eyes after the third reading should rejoin us for the next paragraph.

When the spill first happened I noted to anyone within earshot that the "drill, baby, drill" mouthbreathers were amusingly silent.

I should have known better. That silence was actually golden and I would soon be yearning for it.
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And now I am. Kristol's breathtakingly stupid comment actually manages to make a slogan as asinine as "drill, baby, drill" sound like Olivier delivering the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. Kristol, as usual, led the way for the right wing punditry. His comment was like the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics. Soon we would have:

First, God made idiots. That was for practice. When He was convinced that He achieved perfection, He made Fox News contributors.

I don't often do the Glenn Reynolds-style "Here's something someone else wrote – read the whole thing heh" posts but I've had the urge to reproduce a particular story in full. It will be difficult to explain the period between 9/12/2001 and the 2004 Election to future generations. It's sort of like the Red Scare or any other political-moral panic; you had to live through it to understand the extent to which the mass public bought into things that look patently stupid, even quaint, in hindsight.

The following is a Wall Street Journal editorial (from the board, not a single author) from 10/15/2001, right on the heels of one of the most fascinating news stories of our lifetime: the anthrax letter attacks on major media outlets and the offices of Pat Leahy and Tom Daschle. The fascinating thing, in my opinion, is the extent to which the incident dominated the news cycle for about 3 months and then completely disappeared. When it was finally resolved many years after the fact, not one media outlet or political figure offered a mea culpa for what they said and did during the initial hysteria. Consider the following (with a couple of my bolds; original here):

The usual government and media suspects are advising Americans not to "panic" amid the latest anthrax mailings, and of course that's right. The risks to any single person are small enough that it makes little sense to stockpile Cipro or buy a gas mask. But we hope all the cautionary words don't deflect attention from the genuinely scary prospect here: State sponsorship.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft says it is "premature" to declare any link among the three anthrax mailings to three different American states, or any one of them to the September 11 attacks. And, yes, it is possible that three copycats decided, independently, that now was the time to airmail the anthrax they had somehow stockpiled for just such a terror occasion.

But it's not very likely. The more rational hypothesis is that these were organized acts of terror, and that the anthrax wasn't produced in random basements.

Several circumstantial links to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network are already known. Some of the World Trade Center hijackers, including suspected ringleader Mohamed Atta, visited an airfield near the site of the Boca Raton, Florida, anthrax mailings.

The anthrax package sent to a Microsoft office in Reno, Nevada, was mailed from Malaysia, another al Qaeda haunt. One of the September 11 hijackers, Khaled Almihdhar, visited Malaysia earlier this year, appearing in a surveillance tape with another suspected associate of bin Laden. The terrorist's followers also met in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, in January 2000 as part of the plot to bomb the USS Cole in Yemen later the same year.

As for the package sent to NBC in New York, it was postmarked on September 18 from Trenton, New Jersey. That state, especially Jersey City, was the home of the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993, a plot also linked to bin Laden associates.

More generally, as Dick Cheney said last Friday on PBS's "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," "We know that [bin Laden] has over the years tried to acquire weapons of mass destruction, both biological and chemical weapons." Mr. Cheney added that the U.S. has obtained "copies of the manuals" that al Qaeda "actually used to train people" in how "to deploy and use these kinds of substances."

Which brings us to who might have supplied bin Laden's gang. The likeliest answer is some government. Growing your own anthrax isn't difficult but turning it into a useful weapon is. Terrorist bands have in the past tried to use anthrax as a weapon, notably in Japan, but failed. Liquid anthrax is useless for terror and keeping airborne anthrax spores in the proper form to kill isn't easy.

The U.S. cases have apparently all involved a powdered form of the disease. And this weekend's left-wing British Guardian newspaper cites intelligence sources as saying that, "Making powder needs repeated washings in huge centrifuges, followed by intensive drying, which requires sealed environments. The technology would cost millions." Bin Laden couldn't be doing all this in Afghan caves.

The leading supplier suspect has to be Iraq. Saddam Hussein used weapons-grade anthrax against his own Kurdish population with lousy results, before turning to more efficiently lethal chemical weapons. U.S. intelligence sources believe Saddam has stockpiled thousands of pounds of biological agents, including anthrax. U.S. officials let Saddam know during the Gulf War that if he used such agents against U.S. forces he would get a destructive response.

But that doesn't mean he, or his agents, might not want to unleash the weapon from a deniable distance, or via third parties. His anti-American animus hasn't lessened since his Gulf defeat. And Czech government sources have reported that Atta, the hijacking mastermind, met at least once with Iraqi diplomat Ahmad Samir Al-Ani in Prague.

We rehearse all this because the best defense against anthrax attacks isn't passing out Cipro to every American. It is to go on relentless offense against the terrorist sources. In this sense the anthrax scare has boomeranged on the terrorists. American public support for the bombing in Afghanistan has actually risen since the first anthrax reports.

Ending this war won't end terror, of course. Saddam or no, others will want to use anthrax or the like, and even after this week we still believe the greatest threat is nuclear terrorism. Americans are simply going to have to live from now on with a certain level of risk. The good news is that most Americans have been doing precisely that, with 110,000 showing up at Michigan Stadium as usual this autumn weekend.

New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani put it well the other day when he said that Americans should begin to behave the way the British did during the London blitz: Cope with the danger when it appears but otherwise go cheerfully about your lives. Meanwhile, the government has to do everything possible to destroy the anthrax threat at its state-sponsored source.

And that, son, was what 2001 and 2002 were like.
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This passed for an argument – and a good one, one that originated from and was persuasive at the highest levels of the media and government. Of course the editorial board was right about the "state sponsorship" part.
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The perpetrator was an old white American guy – not a Muslim terrorist, not an ex-KGB mercenary, not the Animal Liberation Front – working for the Department of Defense at Fort Detrick, where he had unrestricted access to the good shit. That the eventual outcome of this situation could have received so little attention in the media (and that the public could be so disinterested in demanding an explanation) is nothing short of amazing.

You'd think they would feel guilty enough to offer a "Whoops! Ha ha, we really screwed the family dog on that whole anthrax incident we used to amplify the Iraq War drumbeat. Turns out it was an American! Isn't that weird?" story. Instead they assumed we forgot about it and proceeded to do likewise.
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Two weeks ago I saw this story on the front page of CNN's website and, for reasons that are not clear to me in hindsight, I wasted five minutes of my life reading it. It is typical human interest fare about the escalating violence in Mexico, with drug cartels shooting each other and innocent bystanders in droves while the police are (apparently) powerless to maintain order. The CNN piece focuses not on the social, economic, and political causes of the escalating violence but on a pair of poster children – two bright college-aged men gunned down in the crossfire.

I guess that's more appealing than talking about the PRI, NAFTA, and the voracious appetite of yuppies and their children for illegal drugs in the United States.

What strikes me about this story is…well, here are a few non-consecutive quotes. Let's see if anything looks odd.

"The Mexican government expresses its most deeply felt condolences to the families," the Interior Ministry said in a release on its Web page.

Separated in death, the two young men seemed inseparable in life. A Facebook page that demands justice for the slayings shows more than 30 photos of the young men and offers a snapshot of lives fully lived even at a tender age.

Mercado, an athlete, is shown working out on the rings at a gymnastics club and winning a medal and a trophy in track and field competition, where he was a pole-vaulter.

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Another photo shows him kneeling between two German shepherds. He's wearing a cap, blue jeans and a T-shirt and has a bemused look on his face.

Arredondo seemed more the social one, with photos of him with his arm around a young woman at what seems to be a party. Another photo shows him posing with a World Cup trophy display.

At least two Facebook pages are devoted to them: "Rest in Peace Jorge Antonio Mercado Alonso and Javier Francisco Arredondo" has more than 12,600 fans; "Javier Arredondo and Jorge Mercado – JUSTICIA! JUSTICE!" has more than 4,700 members.

Combined with the last 1/4 of the story, which consists of quoting posts on a Facebook wall, this story creates the distinct impression that the "reporter's" research consisted of looking at Facebook for a couple of minutes. He also thoughtfully visited a government website and cut-and-pasted a quote from a Minister. Nice work, Scoop McGee.

We are seeing more and more of this lamentable practice. Newspaper and TV news stories about things reporters found on Facebook. Stories in which the sources are Facebook status updates (or Twitter posts). References to Facebook to support grand generalizations about social phenomena. Mentions of how many fans such-and-such organization or politician have on Facebook. In fact, just watch the news on TV and see how long it takes before Facebook is mentioned.

You need not set aside a lot of time for this experiment.

A stunning 89% of journalists told a GWU survey in January that they do story research on blogs, twitter, Facebook, and lesser social networking sites. The hottest job in the media industry is apparently "social media coordinator." Wolf Blitzer (and everyone else on CNN, possibly under threat of execution) ends every segment with a painfully awkward reminder to viewers to check out his Tweets on CNN.com. The mainstream media have an apparent love affair on their hands.

Is this reporting? Five French journalists holed up in a farmhouse in February without telephones or general internet access – their only means of communication were Twitter and Facebook. This stunt/experiment showed both the power of social networking doodads to keep them relatively well informed while also emphasizing the severe limitations. It underscores the point that social media are just another set of tools for communication. In the hands of a lazy industry, however, they're becoming more of a crutch than a tool. Developing ideas for new stories, doing research, getting quotes, and double-checking sources all mean the same thing now: check Twitter, dick around on Facebook for a while. Given that today's reporters are little more than stenographers – "Fact checking? What's that?" – this really is the logical next step. An industry this lazy can't help but take the path of least resistance, so we have a lot more quotes from Facebook walls to which we can look forward in the coming years.

As a general rule, I am not supposed to laugh at things students say unless he or she is trying to be funny. Even when a student says something ridiculous – "How often did kings come up for re-election in the British system?" – it is unacceptable for the nominal authority figure in the classroom to bring him or her shame and humiliation by openly laughing in their face.

That said, I laughed at a student last week. I couldn't help it. Stuff was funny.

The student in question self-identified as a Republican and voiced concern about the apparent popularity of Sarah Palin in his party. He spoke quite negatively about her and expressed dismay about her lofty status among the party faithful. This touched on one of the course themes, perception and reality in politics, so I responded by asking what caused him to conclude that she was wildly popular among Republicans. He said, "Well, whenever I'm watching Fox News they just go on and on about her, and everything they say is positive."

The class laughed. I laughed. Not a lot, but more than I should have (i.

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e., more than zero). The student did not realize she was on the Fox payroll to the tune of several million dollars – Didn't that get a lot of publicity? Am I incorrect to think this might be common knowledge? – but we turned it into a fairly useful discussion about one of the maxims of public opinion in the age of electronic media: the loudest voices don't necessarily represent the greatest numbers of people. And I hate to bring them up two days in a row, but there is no better example of this right now than the Teabaggers. The early returns on Election 2010 underscore its status as a fringe movement. Prior to 1968, McGovern-Fraser, and the advent of primaries, the major parties nominated presidential candidates at the conventions. Amidst the back room dealings and corrupt bargains made among the delegates, powerful state and local party bosses would promise to "deliver" areas under their control if they got their way, i.e. "If you nominate ______ I can deliver California in November.

" Right now it's quite apparent that for all their demands of the establishment GOP, Tea Party USA can't deliver shit.

The success of Teabaggers in electing the candidates they anoint is meager at best, "totally non-existent" at worst (hat tip TS). From the Doug Hoffman fiasco in the NY-23 special election to the 2010 primaries, Tea Partiers have become the Washington Generals of contemporary elections. In my home state of Illinois, evil "RINO" Senate candidate Matt Kirk destroyed Teabagger Patrick Hughes for the Republican Senate nomination while Adam Andrzejewski parlayed endorsements from Rush Limbaugh, Erick Erickson of RedState.com, and every Teabagger alive into a fabulous 5th-place finish in the gubernatorial primary. Out of six candidates. If you ever question Rush Limbaugh's exaggerated sense of self-importance, just remember that his weighty name virtually guarantees you a top-5 finish in a field of six candidates in a Republican primary. The results were no better in Texas – Texas, for crap's sake – where Teabaggers failed spectacularly in their primary challenges of Governor Rick Perry and nearly a dozen House members. Not one came within 30 points of winning.

The media have latched onto the Tea Parties for their own self-serving reasons. The conservative media love them because the crowds of yokels satisfy the American right's desperate need for a veneer of working-class authenticity. The liberal and centrist media love the rallies because they are a petting zoo of deformed, barely literate freaks at which viewers will enjoy laughing. Regardless of how or why the media cynically exploit Teabaggers, the fact remains that there simply aren't that many of them. The fractured, incoherent movement is only "sweeping across America" or "a grassroots uprising" in the minds of people who think that wishing will make it so.

One of the good things about traveling is being exposed to the inevitable Fox News broadcast in the lobby during breakfast. I'm convinced that about a third of Fox's ratings "audience" is derived from bars, hotels, and retail establishments required, either by contract or courtesy of the ideological biases of the proprietor, to broadcast its unique brand of reality to helpless customers. Given that I was in South Carolina, the odds of watching something other than Fox and Friends during breakfast were about as good as my odds of winning Powerball.

Fox and Friends is special. If you've ever wanted to watch three spray-tan mannequins with gummy worm lips exchange "witty" "banter" about Hannity's talking points for the day, this is as close as you're going to get. Unsurprisingly, their deep concern for free speech and the tone of our public discourse was piqued by the recent incident at UC-Irvine in which Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was shouted down by the Muslim Student Union. What a bunch of uncivilized brown people. Can you imagine such behavior in a public forum?

I mean, aside from the people Fox has been hailing as the Great Patriots of America for the last year.

The best job in Rupert Murdoch's media empire has to be the Guy Who Rationalizes Obvious Hypocrisy. I mean, even the average shit-for-brains who watches Fox and Friends and listens to Neal Boortz is going to have some cognitive dissonance (despite being unable to spell or define either of those words). Either interrupting a public speaker by screaming at them is Patriotic or it is undemocratic and reprehensible. Can someone please rationalize how this is acceptable behavior among some (white) people and not among other (dark) people?

Hellz yeah we can.

"In the past year, Ambassador, we've seen a lot of, 'vocal' meetings with the town halls and the Tea Parties and stuff like that. That, that's spontaneous. You know. Whereas this, it appears as if…the Muslim Student Union out there, they had coordinated it."

So that's it. If it's "spontaneous" – i.e. if you have absolutely no control over your emotions and can't help lashing out in murderously uninformed rage at anyone who says something with which you disagree – you're golden. If said interruption is planned or coordinated in advance you're the enemy of free speech. Good thing teabagger meetings are neither planned nor coordinated in advance, nor are any agreed-upon talking points disseminated among a group of people who couldn't possibly construct their own ideas.

Thanks, Fox and Friends. You made what passes for breakfast at a Hampton Inn in Conway, SC downright nutritious, at least for my brain. No word yet from the Friends on that other "controversy" from the UC system. Funny, that.

Media coverage of disasters on television is formulaic. Consider hurricane coverage, for example. The cycle is well-established: start with shots of empty grocery store shelves (time to stock up!) and people boarding up windows. Throw in an interview with idiots who plan to "tough it out." Lots of cutaways to the storm-addled reporter giving important updates ("It's really windy, Bob! Back to you!") while getting pelted with 80 mph rain. After the storm serve up the oh-the-humanity destruction footage. And complete the cycle with a day of footage of and moral panic about looting. Gotta have the looting. There is no better indication of the class biases and motives of the mainstream media than its obsession with looting during times of unspeakable human tragedy.

It sure didn't take the cable news networks to move beyond the human suffering frame in Haiti to get to the important question: is the property OK? Matthew L. directed me to this piece about the media's obsession with the possibility that people might be taking things for which they did not pay. It is stunning how they can't connect the stories they run from one minute to the next; they leap from food shortages and international aid not getting through to the people of Haiti to tales of civil disorder and looting. Well, if people have no food or shelter they're probably going to take whatever they can find, right? This isn't a Sunday afternoon on Long Island. It's a country that was impoverished to begin with and it is in complete ruins. A little "looting" may be understandable given the circumstances. But God forbid the media get hold of footage of looters taking non-essentials (TVs and DVDs instead of food and medicine). Their contempt becomes almost too much to bear; it takes all the strength they can muster to refrain from saying, "Typical. Just typical. Stupid nig…Whoops, we're still on the air, aren't we?" over the footage.

The linked story goes to some lengths to justify the intent of the apparent looters – maybe the man taking fabric from a demolished store needs it to shelter his family from the sun. Maybe the people taking food have starving children. That line of argument is futile for two reasons. First, we'll never know the motives of the people we are observing. Second, who gives a shit? Whether these people are taking food from the rubble or breaking into an undamaged mall to steal cell phones, looting is about 37th on the list of Haiti's most important problems at the moment. The news is now full of stories of police shooting looters on sight (implicitly condoning the idea that every crime becomes a capital offense, no trial required, during a disaster). Is this a wise allocation of resources? There were still survivors in the rubble a week ago, not to mention tens of thousands of corpses ready to rot and kill more people with disease. I can think of a few things the police could be doing other than chasing looters. How is this a priority?

It becomes a priority when the media and governments from the so-called First World impose their twisted worldview on people who have just lost everything. Americans would rather be dead than have someone (black and poor) take their stuff. Isn't that what this kind of coverage is about? A lot of our voyeuristic obsession with disaster coverage is the implicit "This could happen to me" dynamic – but in the American context, "this" refers less to the natural disaster than to the horrifying prospect of life without our shit. Ironically, projecting that materialism onto the people of the poorest country in the hemisphere makes a lot less sense than the looting we see.

It is an inerrant fact that anything billed as "The conservative take on / version of _________" is going to be hilariously, perhaps even spectacularly, shit. The Half-Hour News Hour. Conservapedia. Qube TV. Pajamas Media. Conservative punk bands. Michael Steele. Take your pick, as they all have in common that special is-this-serious quality that, frankly, liberals can't do. And they all follow the same pattern: they make a lot of noise, the real media pay them a disproportionate amount of attention lest they be accused of "bias", and then the product in question quietly dies when the gawkers and snickering hipsters have disappeared.

When I first heard that Tucker Carlson was at long last establishing a presence on the internet – in related news, he has finally acquired a touch-tone phone – I assumed that he would fade seamlessly into the cacophony of screeching that is the wingnut underbelly of our electronic discourse. But he aimed high with The Daily Caller, billed modestly as the Conservative Answer to Huffington Post. I'm sure I've seen more underwhelming things but none spring to mind at the moment.

Short of a Flash banner at the top proclaiming "LOOK, WE ARE SIMPLY OUT OF IDEAS" the entire thing could not reek more of complete creative bankruptcy.
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From the instantly forgettable name – I guess "Tucker's Website" and "The Daily Internet Site" were already taken – to the "1997 called, it wants its web design back" layout, it is a case study in the inherent flaw in asking a bunch of College Republicans to come up with something slick and cutting edge. Their big roll-out event was a "Welcome to the internet!" courtesy piece by Arianna Huffington and a pair of columns from Andrew Breitbart (whose ghastly Breitbart.

tv now has competition in the race to the bottom of the cultural barrel) and Rep. Pete Sessions.

Awesome.

Here's the best part: it has a full-time paid staff of 21. Unless Carlson is trying to set a new speed record for pissing through Koch Foundation money, I cannot conceive of a way that this thing will come close to breaking even.

At a per-employee cost of, say, -0k (counting all of the expenses beyond salary) I give this thing about six months before Phyllis Schlafly gets tired of flushing money down the toilet and the site goes the way of Google Answers.
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The puzzling thing – and from the right's perspective, the sad thing – is that this is not a wholly untenable idea. It could work. There have been successes in the past marketing a higher-end conservative product, something slightly less stupid than Michelle Malkin and Free Republic. But this, to put it charitably, is just more of the same shit.

What original content they offer is like the site itself – lame and uninspired. If Carlson thinks that the expense of this monstrosity is going to be subsidized by the public's insatiable desire to read the "diary" of S.E. "I've been to Rio. It's AWESOME." Cupp he is more ignorant of this newfangled internet thingy than we can imagine.

The key to anything financial – investing, opening a business, playing blackjack in Vegas – is to determine in advance exactly how much money one is willing to lose and adhering to that decision fastidiously. This wisdom is accepted across all ideologies. It is important because pride takes over once failure sets in, and individuals are apt to hold out hope for a successful turnaround well past the point of reason. You've seen people in casinos pour more and more money into "turning around" a bad night and recouping losses. We've seen successful businesspeople open a new retail outlet or create a new brand that fails; unwilling to wear the shame of failure they pour resources into it until, inevitably, the entire business empire collapses. You've seen investors (or perhaps you were that investor) ride a stock down to zero while desperately insisting that a turnaround is imminent. Without limiting your losses, they tend to be…well, unlimited.

So…about Fox Business Network. On one hand you have to be impressed with Rupert Murdoch's sheer willingness to shovel good money after bad. On the other we have to start questioning the one part of his persona that has heretofore been unquestioned – his business acumen. Say what we will about the man, he is a businessman and he knows how to make money (mostly by identifying the lowest common denominator, undercutting it by 50%, and making it louder). Until now, that is. Because FBN can't possibly be making enough money to pay my rent let alone its overhead.

How bad is it? Well…

True story: 2009 was a terrific year for ginandtacos.com. I started the year happily averaging 800-1000 hits daily and ended it close to 3500. Or as I prefer to call it, 10% of the daily nationwide audience of Fox Business Network. Seriously. They are averaging fewer than the 35,000 daily viewers necessary to be included in Nielsen ratings. So a network owned by one of the world's most powerful media entities, with daily operating costs that surely run to tens of thousands of dollars if not more, is achieving a grand total of ten times – at most – the audience of gin-and-frickin'-tacos. Total operating cost: $9 month. Eat it, Rupert.

It turns out that people interested in financial media are out to make money, not to hear cheerleading for a single ideological viewpoint. They want to know how to make a buck off Obama & Co., not to hear extended harangues about why everything he does is Evil. And I don't think the people in charge have the slightest idea of how little the intended audience wants to hear financial advice from idiots like S.E. Cupp, Sean Hannity, Jenna Lee, and Neil Cavuto. Their lineup makes Jim Cramer look like Keynes and Megan McArdle look like…someone who should probably be on FBN.

Is it going to drag down the entire NewsCorp empire? Doubtful. Its interests are diverse and many of them are very profitable. But at this point FBN is little more than an a vanity press for Murdoch. It is an expensive hobby, the kind into which we pour vast sums of money simply because we enjoy it, not because it makes any financial sense to do so. Most old white guys golf, buy Porsches, or collect rare something-or-others. Either FBN is Murdoch's version of a stamp collection or the amount of money he is comfortable losing on this "investment" was not determined in advance, hence we are watching pride and stubbornness take over.

Someone who wanted to be one heartbeat away from the presidency – and who fully intends to run for the top spot directly in 2012 – wrote the following:

Arrogant&Naive2say man overpwers nature. … Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng

As you no doubt can guess, this message is from the Gov. Quitter's "Twitter" feed. Yes, Sarah Palin is stupid but this type of communication is all too common on Twitter (if you want to gouge your eyes out, try taking a glance at some famous athletes' Twitter posts – it's about what you'd expect, only 1000 times worse). And that is why Twitter is going to be the final nail in the coffin of whatever remains of our collective writing skills.

I have a 6 year-old cell phone. It's ancient by the standards of cell phone technology. I send text messages on a plain numeric keypad; no fancy QWERTY keyboard for me. And I never fail to take the time to write out each word and use punctuation. The marginal cost of doing so is about 20% of whatever time you'd spend writing unreadable gibberish that sounds like a hyperactive tween emailing her friends about Twilight. And for people who have newfangled phones with keyboards it can't take any additional effort at all to write like a literate English speaker. Argue all you want – there is no justification for this level of stupidity. Unless one's typing skills are 4 WPM, it simply does not take any more time to type "will continue to see changes" in place of "will cont 2 c chnges."

Look again at Palin's message. When did it become acceptable to communicate like this? What kind of idiot would make such a thing public? Maybe other public figures avoid being this blatantly retarded but it doesn't take much time in the Twitterverse to understand that "ur" is a perfectly acceptable substitute for "your," punctuation is optional and may be used at random, and numbers may substitute for words or portions thereof.

If you think this doesn't matter and I'm just being a crank, let's wait a few more years until we can see the results of long-term studies of the effects of text messaging among adolescents on their adult writing skills. We can barely write as it is, and now the world is being swept by a medium that encourages, if not openly demands, illiterate drivel as an acceptable substitute for English. I'm not the first person to point at technological developments and say "This is the harbinger of our doom! The end is nigh!" and the track record of people who so claim is not good. But the effect these new forms of communication are having on our ability to use the old ones correctly is real and significant.

Take a stand. Do your part, however small, to send the message (see what I did there?) that this kind of shit is not acceptable. Let your acquaintances know that typing something on a cell phone is not a blanket excuse to sound retarded. I don't care if you're texting, emailing, tweeting, blogging, writing a letter, or scratching an SOS into the side of a coconut shell, there. is. no. excuse. for talking like this. None. Our time is not so precious that the millisecond saved by replacing "for" with "4" can be justified. It takes just a few moments more to say something correctly than to say it incorrectly. And if something isn't worth a few seconds to say correctly I would question whether it is worth saying at all.