Free Republic

How Cool Is Franken? by Eric Alterman Not only does Al Franken’s hard-fought victory give Democrats a magical 60 seats, it gives the Senate its first genuinely funny ex-comedian. Eric Alterman shares memories of his friend and former neighbor. Senator Franken? As long as it has taken, it’s still pretty hard to believe my friend and former neighbor is due to be sworn in early next week. He’ll be “Senator Franken” to the press and the lobbyists, and “my distinguished colleague” to the rest of that esteemed body. But as for the rest of us, I think we can safely...

From a non-Jew, it would smack of anti-semitism. From Eric Alterman? You be the judge. The author of the Altercations column at Media Matters has a running complaint: Rick Klein, editor of The Note at ABC News, pays too much respect to the writings of other Jewish pundits. Jennifer Rubin, one of the chief bloggers at Commentary's "Contentions" blog, was Alterman's first target, in his August 1 column [emphasis added throughout]: "I realize I may be the only person in the world to care about this, and I only care a tiny bit, but what does Commentary's Jennifer Rubin have...

What do neocons and their media mouthpieces fear most about Obama's stance on Israel? Probably, it is his honesty. During the past few months a small group of neoconservative Jews, many of whom hold key positions in the world of official Jewish institutions, have been working to undermine the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama with a series of carefully planted character assassinations and deliberately misleading innuendo. I noticed this trend when Debra Feuer, a counsel for the American Jewish Committee, sent a confidential memo to her counterparts at other organizations criticizing Obama's views on the Middle East, Iran and Syria...

On the front lines of the culture wars, where explosive salvos are fired routinely, accuracy is a requirement. Arguments cannot be won with major misstatements of fact. This is lost on Eric Alterman. In his new book “Why We’re Liberals,” he takes up the controversy generated by Hollywood, but only to malign and mischaracterize. Alterman decries "the hysterical language conservatives routinely employ when pontificating about Hollywood." His first example of a hysterical conservative is... me. Horror of horrors. I’m attacked because I’ve ridiculed "political dilettantes" and "leftist celebrities" whose qualifications as political advisers "include starring in Hello Dolly and The...

Eric Alterman’s new book on Why We're Liberals isn’t just plagued with errors, it makes wild charges, like attacking conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, suggesting she was anti-Semitic for cheering on the movie The Passion of the Christ. In a chapter about how conservatives mock the elites, when they themselves are rich and pampered, Alterman wrote about conservatives: "In Ingraham’s case, as in many others, one detects a strain of anti-Semitism in her insistent elite-bashing." From pages 173-74: In observing the members of the conservative elite denouncing "elitists, it can be difficult to tell your players without the proverbial scorecard. For...

It's just a coincidence that the essay "Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore?" by the impresario of The Wire, David Simon, appeared in the Washington Post the same day news broke of the top editor of the Los Angeles Times having been forced out over a refusal to make further budget cuts. Virtually every major magazine...has eloquently bemoaned the state of contemporary newspapering. And the departure of James O'Shea from the LA Times marks the fourth time in less than three years that either the top editor or the publisher has "quit" rather than make budget cuts demanded by...

On the Republican side the news this week was all about Fred Thompson... As the only candidate who is acceptable to conservatives, acceptable to moderates, admired by the media and potentially saleable to independents - he knows how to act - he is also the only candidate on the Republican side who can win... I was of two minds about the whole Rudy thing until last Sunday when I was on a Creative Coalition panel with Ed Rollins, who ran Ronald Reagan's campaigns among about a zillion others, and he reminded me that while it's actually possible that the Republicans...

That Al Gore's 2000 presidential candidacy was treated unconscionably by most members of the mainstream media is not really arguable by sentient beings. The very idea that a candidate like George W. Bush — extremist, incompetent, unprepared for office, addicted to cronyism and incapable of admitting even the simplest human error — could have been held by so many reporters to be a better choice for President than the two-time Vice President, Senator, Representative and environment and nuclear weapons expert, to say nothing of his central role in the Clinton Administration's successful two-term presidency, would be laughable were its consequences...

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (CNN ) – Columnist and author Eric Alterman was arrested Sunday night inside the debate spin room and charged with criminal trespass after police say he refused repeated orders to leave.

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- A top U.S. Democratic congressman met a leader of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's most powerful rival, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, U.S. officials and the Islamist group said Saturday. Visiting House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer met with the head of the Muslim Brotherhood's parliamentary bloc, Mohammed Saad el-Katatni, twice on Thursday -- once at the parliament building and then at the home of the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, said Brotherhood spokesman Hamdi Hassan. U.S. Embassy spokesman John Berry would confirm only that Hoyer, who represents Maryland, met with el-Katatni at U.S. Ambassador Francis Ricciardone's home at a...

How out there on the left wing is Eric Alterman? MSNBC, the network of Keith Olbermann, he who has accused Pres. Bush of fascism and called for his impeachment - fired him, presumably for being too extreme.But not to worry, Alterman's column, 'Altercation,' was promptly picked up by David Brock's Media Matters. For my sins I recently subscribed to the column's email list. Reading through this evening's edition, one thing emerges: Eric Alterman is one angry guy. In the course of one mere column, Alterman vents his bile in these diverse directions: "This notion of a leftist alliance with Islamic...

NEW YORK Eric Alterman, perhaps the first writer to get a blog on a mainstream national news site, has been dismissed after 10 years by MSNBC.com. "P.S., I’m Fired," he heads an email to others in the media. His blog, Altercation, however, will be picked up by the liberal site Media Matters. He will also become a senior fellow there. Alterman has also been a longtime columnist at The Nation magazine. He teaches at City University of New York. "I was hired before the 1996 launch by both the website and the cable station, and while the latter association ended...

The following is a response I received from Eric Alterman of MSNBC.com regarding a thread that got pulled recently which bashed the president. Maybe some of you will want to respond to Mr. Alterman. I asked: Why not ask me or all my friends and family and all the members of Free Republic.com for our opinions? His reply: because my guess is you're all idiots, but thanks

At a recent conference on the Clinton Administration at Hofstra University, ex-press secretary Jake Siewart made a point that had previously eluded me: It was during the early days of Clinton's presidency that the democratization of instant information made the insider press corps obsolete. To retain their importance and self-regard, these journalists had to invent a new function for themselves, and they did: interpreting, not reporting, the news. But instead of doing the hard work of researching the historical, economic, sociological and political contexts of a given story and then finding a way to explain these in lay terms, they...

After chugging down a rancid carton of Air America Brand milk, well past its sell-by date, MSNBC's Eric Alterman concludes we're the network's real problem. Hope he didn't give them all of his lunch money. MSNBC NewsYes, it's a right-wing conspiracy to silence the "progressive" alternative, led by yours truly, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. It couldn't have anything to do with $875,000 in shady taxpayer grant transfers from a Bronx-based community nonprofit, to the liberal network and resulting city investigation, right? Or that we proved (after producing a signed, notarized document) Al Franken knew about...

John Kerry had a complaint: ...that voters can't hear Democrats above the roar of the GOP spin machine. The right, he groused, is far more effective than the left at making itself heard. To peddle their ideas, Republicans and conservatives have assembled an elaborate communication network, one that relies on the likes of "Cato and Heritage and Grover Norquist"... to make sure its messages get plenty of attention.... ...[The] complaint makes it clear that the paranoid style in American politics is alive and well. Thirty years ago, it was Richard Nixon who fumed at the media and compiled an enemies...

By Siva: Siva Vaidhyanathan We are all too familiar with the frontal assaults that the Bush administration has launched against science, truth, and rationality. Bush has stacked advisory boards with ideologues, screened scientific appointees for political affiliations, declared academic expertise in areas such as environmental damage and global warming to be tantamount to a "conflict of interest," pushed lies on federal Web sites claiming that there is a link between abortions and cancer, here, spread more lies about the ways people can spread HIV, and had his henchmen threaten scientists who protest these acts with retribution. Meanwhile, federal policy continues...

read a stunning recent commentary by author and pundit Eric Alterman on the British Muslim Council's decision to boycott the ceremony commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The reason given for the boycott was that the commemoration of Nazi death camp victims did not include the Palestinian victims of Israeli "genocide." [snip]On his blog at MSNBC.com, Alterman sneered at critics of the boycott. "I'm a Jew, but I don't expect Arabs to pay tribute to my people's suffering while Jews, in the form of Israel and its supporters -- and in this I include myself -- are...

I am really tired of the implicit assumption in almost all MSM reporting that “evangelicals” and other (non-Moslem, of course) religious fundamentalists are more “moral” than the rest of us. Since when did we secularists (religious and otherwise) cede the definition of morality to them? If you ask me, it’s pretty damn “immoral” to discriminate against gays and working women, or to force a thirteen year old girl who has been raped by her father to give birth to that child. What’s more, I don’t find a literal reading of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, to be a very...

...Ms. Roy has just been awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.... Ms. Roy made an appeal to people to "become the Iraqi resistance," adding that activists "need to understand that Iraq is engaging in the frontlines of empire and we have to throw our weight behind the Iraqi resistance." Now it cannot have escaped Ms. Roy's attention that the "resistance" of which she speaks -- and which she exhorts the world to "become" -- kills innocent Iraqis daily, by bomb, by gun and by cutlass. Beheading people -- Iraqi and Western, Muslim and infidel -- is the macabre signature of this...

(Apologies about the MSNBC full posting instead of excerpt and a link, which got this pulled ) More 'them' than 'us' (Still) A Land of Hopes and Dreams Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the “reality-based community” say or believe about anything...

In an effort to galvanize the message Kerry wants to deliver in the time remaining, he convened a powerful roster of journalists and columnists in the New York City apartment of Al Franken last Thursday. The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge. The crowd I joined in Franken’s living room was comprised of: Al Franken and his wife Franni; Rick Hertzberg, senior editor for the New Yorker; David Remnick, editor for the New Yorker; Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time Magazine; Howard...

I'm in a rental car with Al Franken, and we're driving across New Hampshire on the Sunday before the nation's first primary, heading to a John Edwards rally. The Democrats are in a kooky mood following the sudden collapse of Howard Dean in Iowa, and Franken -- comedian, celebrity, scourge -- is spending two days in the state not in any official capacity but as a sort of good-will representative from the party's satiric wing. He is not, as you might think from the outrageous trappings of his comedy, an extreme lefty but rather a devout party man, one who...

It was quite a scene: a packed university auditorium, an expectant buzz, and an august panel assembled to ponder the momentous issues raised in a guerrilla documentary. No, not "Fahrenheit 911" but "Outfoxed," a movie aimed at the conservative "echo chamber" of the Fox News Network. Eric Alterman, the Nation writer, introduced left-wing all-stars such as Arianna Huffington, John Podesta and Paul Starr to the noisy students and other Manhattanites who had gathered at the New School for the movie's premiere. In the audience was Al Franken, who at one point, responding to a quip onstage, yelled out that Fox...

Frustrated liberals, angry at having to spend an entire week watching the nation pay tribute to the man they derided alternately as "an amiable dunce" and a heartless autocrat, are now claiming that Bill Clinton was actually a more popular president than Ronald Reagan. "In truth, Ronald Reagan was never as popular as he is being presented to be with Americans," writes Slate Magazine's Eric Alterman. "As president, [he] was never even as popular as Bill Clinton during the period of Clinton’s impeachment," argues the disgruntled Democrat. For evidence, Alterman cites a Gallup poll that tracks approval ratings for...

It may have the ring of cliché, but America's next presidential election will be among the most crucial events in contemporary history. Rarely in the modern era has the world seen such unchecked power exercised so ignorantly, arrogantly and with such profoundly counterproductive results as the Bush Administration's bait-and-switch invasion of Iraq. As Al Gore told an audience at NYU recently, "The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States." The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Gore noted, has...

Eric Alterman and Mark Green, The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America  (New York: Viking, 2004). George Bush drives the Left crazy. They hate the way he speaks. They hate his cowboy image. They hate his religious convictions. And they hate his moral clarity (anyone who can tell the difference between good and evil is, according to the Left, ignorant).  The Left hates Bush so much that they have now produced dozens of anti-Bush books, from David Corn’s The Lies of George W. Bush to Paul Krugman’s The Great Unraveling. One of the latest efforts is Eric Alterman’s...

Wow. I just finished watching Eric Alterman self destruct on The Daily Show. It was an amazing performance. One that even made the liberal Jon Stewart go, "WHAAAA?" Let's see, where to start? Oh yes. "American talk radio has less diversity than Stalin's Soviet Union." This comes as a surprise to those of us who were unaware there is a vast AM archipelago in America. What an absolutely inane comparison. Then we learn that the media HATED Gore, and was biased towards Bush because they thought Gore would be boring to cover. As a result, they were responsible for the...

Did anyone just see the "First Up" segment of DM tonight? He was interviewing uberliberal Eric Alterman who wrote "What Liberal Media?" and "The Book on Bush: How Bush (mis)leads America"...EA was giving short, smart aleck answers to Dennis' questions...Dennis said, something like, "Well, if you don't want to talk about that, what DO you want to talk about?"Eric began bashing the President's truthfulness and saying 12 years ago the Pentagon was giving Saddam poisonous gas to gas his own people. Dennis at one point muttered, "Let's get this (bleep) segment over with..." because Eric was not acknowledging any counter...

Perhaps you've heard that the New York Times fired a stringer named Jay Blotcher because he'd been a member of the anti-AIDS advocacy group ACT UP nearly fourteen years ago. Perhaps you've heard that ACT UP founder and fiery gay playwright Larry Kramer complained to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. of "McCarthy-type blacklisting." Perhaps you're aware that although ACT UP did, way back when, single out the Times for what Kramer termed its "unconscionable refusal to write about us in any but the most hateful of ways, and for so long, and for your wretched, shameful early lack of coverage of...

I sat between this incredible guy who had been on death row for eighteen years before being freed by the Innocence Project at Medill Journalism school (the winner of this year’s $100K Puffin/Nation prize) and Joe Wilson, winner of this year’s Ron Ridenhour prize. I asked Joe why Powell had turned out to be such a wimp—failing to use any of his prized credibility to put the breaks on his lying colleagues, and instead telling all those falsehoods at the UN and convincing a boatload of gullible reporters of a whole mess of stuff that just ain’t so. Wilson—whose speech...

Bush Lies, Media Swallows Print this article E-mail this article Write to the editors he more things change... Roughly ten years ago, I celebrated the criminal indictment of Elliott Abrams for lying to Congress by writing an Op-Ed in the New York Times on the increasing acceptance of official deception. (I was just starting my dissertation on the topic back then.) The piece got bogged down, however, when an editor refused to allow me even to imply that then-President Bush was also lying to the country. I noted that such reticence made the entire exercise feel a bit absurd. He...

Amazing but true, the far-right media machine has successfully held CBS entertainment to a higher standard of truth regarding the docudrama, “The Reagans” than the news media manages to hold the Bush administration regarding the war in Iraq. The ability of these would-be censors to “work the refs” on the issue of the CBS movie, “The Reagans” is truly impressive. Setting a new standard for accuracy in TV docudramas - something that never troubled them, for instance, when a network had to invent a voice of morality in the Reagan White House for an Ollie North biopic based on Guts And Glory: The...

September 11 is often said to be the defining moment in the Bush presidency, even of modern history. How strange, therefore, that Bush's behavior that morning--along with that of his Administration--is almost never examined in any detail. This is all the more incredible when one considers the fact that 9/11 is among the most exhaustively chronicled days in human history and Bush among its most heavily covered individuals. No less odd has been the media's willingness to let the many inconsistencies in White House stories pass unexamined. They seem content instead to let Showtime tell the story, Leni Riefenstahl-style. That...

We [journalists] reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful. If that is what makes us liberals so be it, just as long as . . . we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism. -- I hope we all get along as we go along. I expect that occasionally we will have some differences of opinion. I expect to be provocative. After more than 60 years as a journalist, I...

If you want to date the beginning of conservative domination of the opinion media, you could do worse than to pick Election Day 1964. That's when Richard Mellon Scaife, later joined by many others, figured out that it was pointless for wealthy conservatives to pour money into the coffers of conservative candidates like Barry Goldwater without first investing in their own form of media through which to communicate their ideas. The multibillion-dollar conservative investment helped to create much of the media world in which we wallow today. Liberals are now grappling with a problem not unlike that facing the far...

Proof Through Repetition and the "Liberal Bias" of the U.S. Media: A Review of Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? By NEIL H. BUCHANAN ---- Friday, June 20, 2003 Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? (Basic Books 2003) Can it ever be pointless to publish a well-written book? Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? is a nice piece of work. It combines uncompromising passion with sardonic humor, careful research, and incisive prose. Alterman makes a solid case that the legendary left-wing bias of the big-time American media is a myth. That so many people believe that myth is a testament to nothing more...

Is anyone fooled by claims that the media aren't liberal? If you listen to a growing chorus of liberals and leftists, you might think that one of America's biggest problems today is, hold onto your hats, "conservative media bias." When Al Gore announced he wouldn't run for president, he complained about the right-wing media. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is so convinced that the media are conservative he always puts "liberal media" in quotation marks to convey their mythical, unicorn-like quality. "Sooner or later, I think we're all going to have to acknowledge that the myth of the liberal...

Is liberal media bias a myth?Pat Buchanan June 16, 2003 "What Liberal Media?" blared the monster headline atop the full-page ad in The New York Times. Its author was Eric Alterman of The Nation, who has a book out of the same title. There was a touch of irony in Alterman's choosing the Times to place an ad declaring liberal bias to be a "myth." For that paper has lately been embroiled in the greatest scandal in its history, the Jayson Blair affair, caused by its almost blind devotion to liberalism's god of "diversity" in the newsroom. And, as a...

(Language in this article may be offensive to some readers) Washington (CNSNews.com) - The author of a book denying the existence of a liberal media in America declared that the right wing media "machine" is now so powerful that it acts as "a steamroller" of liberal ideals. Eric Alterman - author of What Liberal Media? - appeared at a workshop called "Reversing the Right's Hold on the Media" on the final day of the three-day "Take Back America" conference sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future, which states as its goal pushing the Democratic party to the left. Alterman said...

(Language in this article may be offensive to some readers) Washington (CNSNews.com) - The author of a book denying the existence of a liberal media in America declared that the right wing media "machine" is now so powerful that it acts as "a steamroller" of liberal ideals. Eric Alterman - author of What Liberal Media? - appeared at a workshop called "Reversing the Right's Hold on the Media" on the final day of the three-day "Take Back America" conference sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future, which states as its goal pushing the Democratic party to the left. Alterman said...

he author of a book denying the existence of a liberal media in America declared that the right wing media "machine" is now so powerful that it acts as "a steamroller" of liberal ideals. Eric Alterman - author of What Liberal Media? - appeared at a workshop called "Reversing the Right's Hold on the Media" on the final day of the three-day "Take Back America" conference sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future, which states as its goal pushing the Democratic party to the left.

Clinton Assigns BlameAnd, no, it’s not his fault.By Kevin M. Cherry, a writer living in Alexandria, Va..November 8, 2001 11:30 a.m.   n a speech at Georgetown University, President Bill Clinton blamed, in part, the United States for the terrorist attacks of September 11. Speaking to a group of about 1,000 students, the former president said that our nation is "paying a price" for slavery and for its treatment of the "significant number of native Americans" who "were dispossessed and killed."Osama bin Laden certainly has given no indication that he was concerned about the American sin of slavery —...

But here’s a funny Blair column by Nikki Finke. Oh, and here’s Boehlert’s take buried beneath, you guessed it, another review of the ”The Matrix” or whatever this one’s called. It’s not that Blair’s not important; he is, particularly when compared to ”The Matrix.” But let’s keep a sense of proportion. George W. Bush deliberately misled the country to launch an unnecessary war that will embroil this country in what could be decades of chaos, mayhem and murder, and cost us hundreds of billions and quite possibly trillions, while destroying the nation’s fiscal health in the process. And Bush’s silly...

May 8, 2003 / 1:35 PM ET WHO’S US? WHO’S THEM? I don’t exactly know what I think about Iran right now. And it’s far from clear what the best path to pursue with North Korea is either. But I do know that George W. Bush’s policy of alleged “moral clarity” — either you are with us or you are with the (nonexistent) “axis of evil” — is in a shambles and has made dealing with both threats far more difficult than it need be. In the first place, vis-à-vis Iran, one day we cooperate with its government; one day...

May 7, 2003 / 12:49 PM ET ‘THIS IS THE LAND OF PEACE, JUSTICE AND NO MERCY’ Remember Afghanistan? Remember bin Laden? I didn’t think so. What is this, Day 600 or so of him both “running and hiding” contrary to official predictions. And speaking of Afghanistan, we don’t seem to be doing much about putting together the country we blew up — I mean the first one. And again, contrary to the consistent propaganda beat of the right and the SCLM, this is a terribly stingy nation. Center for Global Development and Foreign Policy magazine have created the first...

<p>It must have seemed like a good idea. Typical of most liberals, slamming any conservative must seem like a good idea.</p> <p>In Newsweek today, Alter spilled the beans on conservative morals guru, William Bennett.</p> <p>Bennett has been GAMBLING. Can you believe it, GAMBLING. I doubt it was a well-kept secret. Alter must have thought it would present Bennett as a complete hypocrite. After all, Bennett is a morals guru.</p>

Stop the Presses by Eric AltermanBush Goes AWOL [from the May 5, 2003 issue] One of the many maddening feats of this Administration is that in choosing to fight the war on terror by going to war with Iraq, George W. Bush has inspired new terrorist threats to the United States--according to the official testimony of his own CIA--where none existed. At the same time, he purposely starves those localities and institutions on which the complex and expensive task of terrorist protection ultimately falls. The Economist compares New York City to Atlas, bearing the weight of the world on...

April 10, 2003, 7:45 a.m.Hall of ShameMedia recriminations after VB Day.By NR Staff o many pundits, pols, and, yes, celebs, said so many wrong — and downright silly — things about the war in Iraq, prewar. We knew that back then, but now that Baghdad has effectively been liberated by the U.S.-lead Coalition, we provide a handy snapshot of what was said by some of those who should be looking down and making their apologies. Included here are Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews, and Barry McCaffrey, the latter one of the retired-general second guessers Vice President Dick Cheney dubbed “embedded...

MIDI - CABARET He has been snippy and all out of sorts…at Bush he's really p*ssed Poor Eric Alterman needs a new gynecologist He has had migraines and he has had cramps…oh, why must these pains persist Poor Eric Alterman needs a new gynecologist Out of control…he's an a-hole He writes his B.S. in the Nation…Eric needs new medication Down on his kneepads when Clinton would call…he'd say "If you insist" Poor Eric Alterman needs a new gynecologist Out of control…he's an a-hole He writes his B.S. in the Nation…Eric needs new medication Girly man Eric warns FReepers they'll...