Posts tagged: News Media

Shake Weight + Newscast = Disaster

By , May 11, 2011 2:00 am

I can appreciate a good sex joke (and by “good,” I mean immature and slightly rude), but not when watching a newscast.

This is a clip from the KTLA morning news program in Los Angeles about a Shake Weight class (I’m not kidding). The segment is so inappropriate, on so many levels, in so many instances, I couldn’t look away.

Jokes are fine, but not this television train wreck. Just give me the news.

Brace yourself.

H/t: TVSpy

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Don’t Blame The Internet

By , May 6, 2011 2:30 pm

If you read or watch the news with any sort of regularity, you’d think there is evil lurking all over the Internet ready to kill you.

In just a few minutes on Google I found two “Facebook killers” (here and here), a “Facebook shooting,” a “MySpace murder trial” and a “Twitter murder.” Then, of course, there is the “Craigslist Killer.”

Now, it’s Match.com’s turn to be associated with a crime.

The dating site will now screen its members against the National Sex Offender Registry. This is after a California woman, Carole Markin, alleges she was sexually assaulted by a man she met on the dating site. Here are some of the facts of the case from CNN/HLN:

Markin claims she met a man named Alan Wurtzel, who according to the lawsuit has a record of “six separate convictions for sexual battery” in Los Angeles County alone.

She told HLN that Wurtzel forced her to perform sexual acts on him, at her residence, while they were on their second date.

Markin said afterward, “I looked up his name (on the computer) and I saw that he had a bad past.”

An attorney for Wurtzel, in a statement sent to HLN, said her client and Markin engaged in consensual, romantic contact together and then, “Eight days later she inexplicably called police.”

The civil class action lawsuit against Match says the dating site failed, “to undertake a basic screening process that disqualifies from membership anyone who has a documented history of sexual assault.”

First, let me say that this woman is not to be blamed at all for what allegedly happened. Her attacker is to blame.

But I don’t think Match is to blame either.

In an interview on “Good Morning America,” titled “Match.com Assault Victim Speaks Out,” Markin said, “I just didn’t expect that there would be somebody with a criminal background on the service… When you’ve met nice successful men previously on the same site, you just don’t assume the worst.”

A stranger is a stranger no matter where you meet them. And you can’t blame the website or bar or library where you meet someone if they say one thing, but turn out to be something else.

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Taking A Stand Against The Royal Wedding

By , April 28, 2011 9:34 pm

Despite all the media hype and coverage of the Royal Wedding between Prince William and Catherine Middleton, I’m not going to get up in the middle of the night to watch it. I’ll watch the clips later, at a reasonable Eastern Daylight Time (emphasis on daylight). I’m interested, but not wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night interested.

I bring up my moderate interest in the wedding because of the very extreme ways people are reacting to the wedding. There is the news media who are going over the top with coverage. It’ll be interesting to see if they’ll feel it was worth the expense and effort when it’s all over.

But then there are the folks at the other end of the interest spectrum. Not the people who shrug off this real-life over-the-top reality show like they would shrug off a made-for-TV over-the-top reality show. This is anger. Check out Lawrence O’Donnell on “The Last Word:”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

First: The TV networks “obviously would have been on the side of the British” in the Revolutionary War. Huh? And second: The “British Crown has spilled more blood around the world and caused more oppression and suffering in the world than any other regime still standing”? History should never be forgotten, but why is O’Donnell still fighting a war we won over two centuries ago against a country that is one of America’s closest allies?

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Rep. Chris Lee In A 3-Hour Flash Scandal

By , February 11, 2011 8:23 pm

Guest post for Jazz Guns Apple Pie

Representative Chris Lee (R-N.Y.) resigned from the House of Representatives this week following an email flirtation with a woman he met after responding to an ad in the “Women Seeking Men” section of Craigslist. Sadly for him, the woman also knows how to use Google to look up people’s names, and how to send emails to Gawker.

See the Gawker reporter who broke the story.

And while it’s remarkable what 24 hours can do to damage the life of a politician with high libido, low impulse control and a camera phone, I want to – instead – look at one particular sentence that the Washington Post wrote in their article covering the incident:

“The familiar cycles of a Washington sex scandal were compressed into a blur of tweets and news alerts.”

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Journalists Who Put Themselves “Out There”

By , October 27, 2010 3:02 pm

Juan Williams joins the ranks of Helen Thomas, Octavia Nasr and Rick Sanchez who were fired or resigned from their respective news organizations for expressing their opinion. As you probably know, Williams was fired by NPR for his remarks on “The O’Reilly Factor” in which he expressed his feelings about seeing people in “Muslim garb” when he gets on a plane. “I get worried. I get nervous,” he said.

Here’s the entire interview.

Thomas, Nasr, Sanchez and Williams were let go for expressing personal opinions in informal settings or places where they were the interview subjects. Because they put themselves in positions where the public was looking for the them to offer insight, perspective and a bit of their personality, their opining put them in positions to get in trouble with their employers.

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What Did We Learn From The “Ground Zero Mosque” Debate?

By , August 24, 2010 10:39 pm
Sandor John speaks to a crowd of protesters during a rally held to support the proposed Muslim cultural center and mosque that would be built near the World Trade Center site in New York August 22, 2010. Supporters and opponents of a proposed Muslim cultural center and mosque near the World Trade Center site rallied in downtown Manhattan on Sunday, kept blocks apart by a heavy police presence. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi (UNITED STATES - Tags: RELIGION POLITICS SOCIETY CIVIL UNREST IMAGES OF THE DAY)

The heat and level of the debate over the proposed “Ground Zero Mosque” – that isn’t at Ground Zero and is more community center than mosque – has lowered and will probably stay low for some time. Protests were held on Sunday with supporters and opponents of the space that is now known as Park51. Everyone has chimed in on the issue: Obama, Palin, Newt, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg (whose speech on the subject was powerful), and everyone else with an opinion or an election to win.

With the media and the public’s short attention spans, there are other things to report on – the egg recall, the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, plus whatever else comes up – and there seems to be nothing more to move the Park51 story forward. There’s not much left for talking-heads or politicians to dissect on cable news.

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