Comments on Expressio Unius: You know your bias is obvious when...

Hey 9:53, That's sort of the point of the blog. ...

2009-04-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

Hey 9:53,

That's sort of the point of the blog. Don't go to Chuck E. Cheese's and complain that there are too many screaming kids.

Unfortunately there are insufferable pedants in bo...

2009-04-15T22:41:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately there are insufferable pedants in both parties.

oy vey. republicans with too much time on their ha...

2009-04-15T21:53:00.000-07:00

oy vey. republicans with too much time on their hands. is there anything worse in life?

Like I said, I don't think your reading is implaus...

2009-04-15T20:11:00.000-07:00

Like I said, I don't think your reading is implausible. We'll have to ask the author(s) in order to figure out what the real primary joke is, and I suspect they'd say you should laugh at whatever you find funny. But if they absolutely had to pick one, I have a good feeling they'd say it's more Obama-tethered than media-tethered.

First, it's a lot more topical than a generic the-media-is-out-of-touch joke, and the Onion does a pretty good job staying topical. Second, the picture caption -- which I think is useful to figure out what the central theme of the story is -- is more Obama-related than media-related. And third, the passages you cite are ambiguous with regard to their target (that is, the lack of publication could be related *either* to Obama or the media).

Additionally, though this isn't determinative, the people I've seen linking the article (on Facebook and Gchat) have all seemed to indicate that they understand the story in the same Obama-is-the-target way.

In any event, I'm not sure it matters. I laughed heartily at the article, and that was, beyond a doubt, the author's intent.

Look, the article works on a number of levels, one...

2009-04-15T19:12:00.000-07:00

Look, the article works on a number of levels, one of which is lampooning the named news organizations for their pro-Obama slant. My original point, which is entirely correct (and, I might add, carefully stated) was that this lampooning was a minor aspect of the article.

Tuco, you and WT have to explain the following paragraph: "So far, the president's double-homicide has not been covered by any major news outlets. The only two mentions of the heinous tragedy have been a 100-word blurb on the Associated Press wire and an obituary on page E7 of this week's edition of the Lake County Examiner."

The question provoked by this paragraph is, of course: WHY? Why haven't any news organizations covered an incredibly famous and powerful president's brutal murder of two innocent citizens? In the hypothetical world of the article, this is the central absurdity.

Imagine the hypothetical response from, say, Fox News: "We at Fox News are saddened to hear of President Obama's bloody slaying of a Washington couple, but do not find it newsworthy. This is more of the same from an administration that has consistently disregarded family-values for the twelve weeks since inauguration. But we do hope that this represents a change in the president's anti-gun agenda." Etc, across the political spectrum.

A perfect example is the quote from the "independent" political pundit: "Why was our president ritualistically dismembering the corpses of his prey when he should have been working on a new tax proposal for small businesses? I, for one, am outraged." What's the joke here? That he's not actually outraged. That he's a political hack.

The central exaggeration, then, is that the media as a whole has lost all sense of moral responsibility, NOT that the liberal media is pro-Obama.

-js

It seems that somebody would have to almost willfu...

2009-04-15T17:39:00.000-07:00

It seems that somebody would have to almost willfully turn a blind eye to the article to read it the way you have js.

It's not unintentional that the authors picked media outlets that are perceived as having a "liberal bias," or at least being the "most liberal" in their respective fields. I mean, the didn't pick U.S. News and World Report or the Economist for magazines, they picked Newsweek. They didn't pick ABC, NBC, or FOX for a network, they picked CBS.

To further buttress wt's point: the article explains how reporters are focused on Obama's unique upbringing rather than the details of the murder, even going so far as to wonder aloud whether "murder is cool" now that Obama has done it.

In order for your reading of the article to be correct, the authors would have just have to had randomly chosen the various liberal MSM publications AND would have chosen to randomly select Obama as the subject of a news story, as opposed to any other event that could demonstrate "the media's general cluelessness and insularity."

That's a lot of coincidences.

That's not an implausible reading of the article, ...

2009-04-15T17:21:00.000-07:00

That's not an implausible reading of the article, but I don't think that's *the* joke, to the extent we can identify what the primary intent of the humor is.

See the caption under the article's photo:

"Associated Press reporters investigate any possible gym training regimens the president might have used to get into peak physical condition for the murders."

I think it's clearly lampooning how blindly obsessed with Obama the media is, so much so that the true story about the brutal, brutal homicides is merely in the backdrop.

Not to ruin the article by analyzing it, but I did...

2009-04-15T17:14:00.000-07:00

Not to ruin the article by analyzing it, but I didn't read it as being primarily about bias in favor of Obama, but about the media's general cluelessness and insularity. I mean, I think main joke is that the piece itself is a process story about an insane and horrific crime. The quotes from the reporters play a role in that, and of course by not reporting the Obama double murder, they are doing something that favors Obama. But in the world of article, I think those reporters would have similarly absurd, insular approaches to every story, not just the ones bad for Obama.

Properly understood, the media bias is a minor aspect of the joke.

-js