Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.
Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012
After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.
We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.
Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.
I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.
Thank you very much.
Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I had quit watching Olberman - I don't like flame throwers on the right or left. I had seen him change over the last couple of years and I think some of his personal problems probably had affected him. I still watch Maddow and I like Lawrence O'Donnel but I never did like Ed Schultz when he was on the radio and never watched his TV show.
ReplyDeleteThat said with Comcast taking over I suspect by the 2012 election we will see an attempt to FOXify MSNBC even if it loses money. The people at GE may be conservative but the Comcast folks are wingnuts.
I am another who had quit watching Olbermann, although I enjoyed him greatly for some time. I dislike demagoguery, no matter which side is engaging in it, and Olbermann had deteriorated to dishonest discourse and misrepresentation of facts as a regular means of pursuing his point on quite a regular basis.
ReplyDelete"Pay to spray" for instance, was an exercise in falsehood that went on for almost two weeks, and his distortion of fact regarding the child with terminal cancer for whom the insurance company would not povide experimental treatment was shameful. They had already provided two treatments that were not technically covered by insurance and Olbermann actually used that as ammunition against them.
Olbermann did not do journalism, he engaged in vendettas.
I have never watched Ed Shultz. I watched Maddow for about a week and decided I could not stomach her endless clowning and trivialization. I am watching O'Donnell and think he might be quite decent.