Just in case you were wondering whether weekly news magazines still serve any purpose, the answer is no. Go read this epic post, from Hemant Mehta, documenting the perfidy of Joe Klein in a recent Time magazine cover story. Klein, if you are not familiar with him, has long been one of the hackiest of hack journalists. He pops up occasionally as a talking head on cable news shows, but he has never, not even by accident, said anything interesting or insightful during his appearances. Anyway, after reading Mehta's post, go read Dale McGowan's essay in the Washington Post.
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Oh, the weekly newsmagazines still serve a purpose. They are for disseminating propaganda, not news.
It's like the Soviet era, with its two newspapers called Pravda ("Truth") and Izvestiya ("News"). Thus the standard saying, "There is no news in the truth, and no truth in the news."
Yeah, Herman Mehta does a great job documenting American anti-atheism propaganda. As a non-American I never comment, but he makes me wonder if the Netherlands need a counterpart.
They make great bathroom reading. Especially when the roll runs out.
I read the WP article which contains this bit:
“A Virginia Tech professor and atheist writing as “Mapantsula” offered an elegant and moving reply [to Dinesh D’Souza] at Daily Kos, describing in detail his own involvement in the collective healing that followed that day. He also noted that there were certainly atheists and secular humanists among the first responders, the counselors, the surgeons, and the generous givers who rose to the challenge of that tragedy, helping to put that violated community back together as best they could.”
The above has a hyperlink (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2007/04/23/an-atheist-prof…) which leads to the Daily Kos where this “elegant and moving reply” was posted (at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/04/19/325304/-An-atheist-at-Virginia…) but Mapantsula’s reply is gone, removed. The site says
“ERROR!
The error was:
This diary has been deleted.
Hostname: web4.dailykos.com
Time: 2013-07-03T19:26:03”
I’ve submitted a request to Daily Kos to explain how this was deleted; no reply yet.
sean s.
From the Daily Kos Support Staff:
"Indeed, the error message is correct; it was deleted by the author."
Unfortunate. I wonder why...
sean s.
I am somewhat surprised that the Daily Kos gives authors such unlimited control over comment deletion. That's a shame, one would hope that they'd exercise some sort of editorial oversight. Still, I'm guessing its a resource issue (they don't have enough to do it) rather than laziness or approval.
The Nation, although very slanted, is extremely informative for a weekly publication.
The question of "are weekly commentary mags good for anything" is important, if we leave aside the medium being used, or the frequency of publication.
I am fortunate to be fed the New York Times weekly Review of Books (in a part of the world distant from New York).
I am constantly struck with the idea that, no much I may disagree with the viewpoint of the reviewer, I am glad that some organisation thinks it worthwhile to put their name and reputation behind the publication.
This tells us nothing about the reasoning behind Time or Newsweek or their editorial policies. But perhaps it does tell us that we should value considered commentary in any medium, even when we disagree with it.
Knowing one's enemy is as important, or perhaps more important, than knowing one's friends.