Thursday, April 27, 2006
Only You Can Prevent Spiraling Dumbitude
There's a link at Eschaton this afternoon to a funny story at Hotline. It's the transcript from a White House briefing today, in which Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post tries to find out if it's White House policy that every TV set in the White House must be tuned to Fox News. You may enjoy the spectacle of outgoing Press Secretary Scott McClellan talking a lot and saying nothing, for one of the last times.
We can't really do anything about the existence of Fox News, and if it was like Pravda before, it's going to be more so with the ascension of Tony Snow to Press Secretary. But we can take little steps to limit its hegemony--like asking if you can tune to something else when you see it on a public TV. I also program it out of the channel lineup on hotel TVs whenever possible, which seems like the least any of us can do to raise the collective IQ of the American citizenry.
This blog is now going on hiatus until Monday, unless our occasional guest poster Tom Herbst, the Sage of Pennsylvania, decides to check in. (We haven't heard anything from Tom for quite a while, either in the blog entries or the comments, so I am hoping that this mention will smoke him out.)
There's a link at Eschaton this afternoon to a funny story at Hotline. It's the transcript from a White House briefing today, in which Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post tries to find out if it's White House policy that every TV set in the White House must be tuned to Fox News. You may enjoy the spectacle of outgoing Press Secretary Scott McClellan talking a lot and saying nothing, for one of the last times.
We can't really do anything about the existence of Fox News, and if it was like Pravda before, it's going to be more so with the ascension of Tony Snow to Press Secretary. But we can take little steps to limit its hegemony--like asking if you can tune to something else when you see it on a public TV. I also program it out of the channel lineup on hotel TVs whenever possible, which seems like the least any of us can do to raise the collective IQ of the American citizenry.
This blog is now going on hiatus until Monday, unless our occasional guest poster Tom Herbst, the Sage of Pennsylvania, decides to check in. (We haven't heard anything from Tom for quite a while, either in the blog entries or the comments, so I am hoping that this mention will smoke him out.)
