Vidal vituperates over WFB’s dead body

 A seriously good counter-balance to the recent lionizing of William F. Buckley today posted over on Truthdig by Gore Vidal.  Vidal calls him out, as the closet case hater that WFB was.

…a most hysterical queen (WFB), much admired by a media that takes everyone at his own evaluation of himself as they did with Capote

And

Buckley was a world-class American liar on the far right who would tell any lie he thought he could get away with. Years of ass-kissing famous people in the press and elsewhere had given him, he felt, a sort of license to libelously slander those hated liberals who, from time to time, smoked him out as I did in Chicago, when I defended the young people in Grant Park by denying that they were Nazis and that the only “pro- or crypto-Nazi” I could think of was himself.

Read the full article, Gore’s main subject of attack “…is a corrupt press whose roots are in mendacious news (sic) magazines like Time and Newsweek, aided by tabloids that manufacture fictional stories about actual people. This mingling of opinion and fiction has undone a media never devoted to truth. Hence, the ease with which the Republican smear-machine goes into action when they realize that yet again the party’s permanent unpopularity with the American people will cause them defeat unless they smear individually those who question the junk that the media has put into so many heads.”

Worth the “Time” so to speak.

MSM downplaying hate-crimes

An important feature article by William Butte in today’s Florida Sun-Sentinel calls out the mainstream media on under-reporting of anti-gay hate crimes as heinous as that of the Matthew Shepard case.  Recall the Larry King story as first reported – it took over a week before stories revealed that the 14 year old suffered from frequent taunts of classmates with no intervention from the school.  Standard schoolyard bullying?  Try toxic atmosphere leading to depression, suicide, or as in the case of King a classmate who feels so superior he can shoot a queer in the back of the head.

Students at several school shootings — including Columbine, for example — admitted they’d taunted their killer classmates as gay, though this was rarely mentioned by mainstream media.

If the media paid more attention to King’s murder and the homophobia behavior that permeates our public schools, perhaps there’d be a public outcry here in the Sunshine State against the Legislature’s removal from the proposed Safe School bill language that addresses harassment of GLBT students.

Off-campus, gay-related hate crimes continue to pollute our society, yet go almost unseen by national media. One year ago in Polk County, 25-year-old Ryan Skipper was abducted and stabbed 20 times before he died; 19-year-old Steen Keith Fenrich of New York was murdered by his stepfather, who wrote an anti-gay, racist slur on his skull; and 3-year-old Ronnie Paris of Tampa died of child abuse at the hands of a father who feared his baby might become gay.

This under-reporting negatively affects the LGBTQ community in that the wider straight community, even those friendly to gay rights, but who don’t monitor gay media sources, don’t see how widespread anti-gay crime still is.  And that makes the remarks of such people as Sally Kern even more damning.

Iraq War fading from view?

Have you noticed a drop in coverage on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan lately?  You’re not imagining things.  Reports that would have made the front page or the opening of the Nightly News a year ago don’t necessarily “make the fold” anymore.  Economic news, closer to home, trumps Iraq in viewer and reader pull now.  A sense that things are “going better”  contributes to a decline in interest in the details.

In fact, the three broadcast networks’ nightly newscasts devoted more than 4,100 minutes to Iraq in 2003 and 3,000 in 2004, before leveling off at about 2,000 a year, according to Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the broadcasts and posts detailed breakdowns at tyndallreport.com. By the last months of 2007, he said, the broadcasts were spending half as much time on Iraq as earlier in the year.

Complete report from the NYT here.

And based on the recent Pew Center research report finding that public interest in the war has declined markedly, the Democrats cannot count on this being a decisive issue for the election.

Still, the economy could be a factor in the Dems favor as long as people can afford gas to get to the polls.