Category: Media & Culture

Media & Culture

The MSM has embarrassed itself to a near-fatal degree

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Quote of the Day for Friday, August 31st, 2012: Who better than J. E. Dyer to inspire me to rekindle my moribund blog, in a blog post entitled Are the American voters idiots?, which ultimately tackles several of my favorite hobby horses: There were so many reasons to know in advance that Obama would be a poor president.  Yet many of the voters were taken in by the media hype surrounding Obama.  The president’s associations and recorded statements were played down.  The record was there for a number of investigative authors to find, from Mi...

Media & Culture

Teens don’t even have an authority to rebel against

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Quote of the Day for April Fools’ Day, 2011: Townhall.com columnist Kathryn Lopez, writing last week on the appalling apparel that dominates the American teen girl’s consumer environment: Two generations, in other words, are feeling the pain of the feminism that has wreaked havoc on the sexes, leaving us with a boundary-free horizon where teens don’t even have an authority to rebel against. I grabbed this quote not because I thought the article was all that interesting, but because Lopez nails a tremendously important point here about the repercuss...

Media & Culture

An article that was never worth dying for

Posted on by John W Gillis / 1 Comment

Quote of the Day for Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011: From a New York Times article, published on Boston.com, from four Times’ reporters who had just been released from several days of captivity in the loony bin of wartime Libya, relaying some of the details of their ordeal, including this moment of realization that their Libyan driver had likely been killed by the soldiers who’d captured them: From the pickup, Lynsey saw a body lying next to our car, one arm outstretched. We still don’t know whether that was Mohammed. We fear it was, though his body has yet...

Media & Culture

A Masters in Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da?

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

So, a Canadian woman, Mary-Lu Zahalan-Kennedy, has earned the world’s first graduate degree in Beatles music. Is there any possibility left that the worldwide university system retains so much as a shred of its former dignity and gravitas – or relevance? Mike Brocken, founder and leader of the Beatles MA at Liverpool Hope University, said the postgraduate degree makes Zahalan-Kennedy a member of a select group of popular music experts. "Mary-Lu now joins an internationally recognized group of scholars of Popular Music Studies who are able to offer f...

Media & Culture

Such dangerous behavior could be triggered by any number of future public events

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Quote of the Day for Monday, January 17th, 2011: Call it a parting shot (!) on the Great Tucson Media Meltdown of 2011. This is former Washington Times Editor in Chief, Tony Blankley, commenting over at National Review Online: Because even though the Tucson shooting did not cause the media irresponsibility — this time — continued media misreporting and bias is now so ingrained that such dangerous behavior could be triggered by any number of future public events. Now is the time for us all to pause, and consider how the working members of the media can li...

Media & Culture

Almost 1,700 people had clicked that they “like” “General Rachid Ammar President”

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Quote of the Day for Sunday, January 16, 2011: From the New York Times’ World News desk, in an article on the evolving – or devolving – political situation in Tunisia, following the sudden departure of long-entrenched President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali: On Saturday afternoon, there were some signs that General Ammar himself may now have an eye on politics. On Facebook, a staging ground of the street revolt, almost 1,700 people had clicked that they “like” a Web page named “General Rachid Ammar President” and emblazoned with his official photographs. While...

Media & Culture

Our whole society shares this stupidity

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Quote of the Day for January 3rd, 2011: John Sommerville, from an article in the October 1991 issue of First Things, entitled: Why the News Makes Us Dumb:  The News can’t be fixed. There is something about daily publication, all by itself, that distorts reality. That is why the addiction to News that so many of us share has brought on a kind of stupidity. Our whole society shares this stupidity, and so we have a hard time recognizing it. Catching up on some blog reading I missed last week, I noticed that Joe Carter had penned a piece at FirstT...

Media & Culture

Public Health Leaders Should Be Carefully Scrutinized

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Quote of the Day for Sunday, November 5th, 2010: Matthew Hanley over at The Catholic Thing on Thursday, commenting on the public reaction to Pope Benedict’s recent statement on condom use in the Peter Seewald book, in a post entitled Misrepresenting Benedict’s Bravery: The New York Times tells us the pope’s words, in the newly published book Light of the World, were received with “glee from clerics and health workers in Africa, where the AIDS problem is worst.” The pope as anachronistic obstacle to global health has long been a fashionable narrative. But...

Media & Culture

What Liberal Bias?

Posted on by John W Gillis / 1 Comment

I saw something on TV last night that was just too funny to pass up. When I got home from teaching CCD, my wife had the TV on, watching a nice 60 Minutes character piece on an Afghan vet who is being awarded the Medal of Honor, and I milled around to watch it. Then Andy Rooney came on. Rooney started complaining about a recent Gallup poll showing pretty broad dissatisfaction with President Obama and his performance. Rooney contrarily said he had gone and asked nine of his friends what they thought, and they all thought Obama was doing a terrific job. Wel...

Media & Culture

Jonathan Sperry and the Messaging of Faith

Posted on by John W Gillis / 4 Comments

I took the family to see The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry last weekend. This is an independent “family” movie by Christian director Rich Christiano, with an explicitly Christian message and worldview. The movie had been vigorously promoted locally by some good friends of mine, who were obviously excited to see something in the theater that was not only not antithetical to Christianity, but which explicitly promotes Christian faith. I understand the urge to try to gain a foothold for decency in all kinds of public arenas, but I had a hard time getting excit...