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.


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Wednesday, June 6, 2012

There's Gambling Going On Here?

Commentary By Ron Beasley



Dylan Byers at Politico is shocked that there was partisan coverage of the Walker recall election on the cable "news" networks.



If ever there was a political event to lay bare the partisan ideologies of the cable news media, the Wisconsin recall was it.


MSNBC was blatantly rooting for Tom Barrett to defeat Gov. Scott Walker, even sending union champion Ed Schultz to cover an event with no apologies for the dog he has in the fight. (Earlier tonight, Chris Matthews even told Schultz that if he wasn't an MSNBC host, he could be head of the AFL-CIO.) When it became clear that Barrett would lose, Schultz looked almost teary eyed. Not long after, the network's contributors immediately began suggesting that this was, in fact, good news for Obama � who, after all, hadn't even set foot in Wisconsin � and began attacking Mitt Romney.


Meanwhile, Fox News was blatantly rooting for Gov. Scott Walker, and the moment it became clear that Walker might win, host Sean Hannity called it "a repudiation of big unions," which did "everything they could do to demonize Scott Walker." Guest Hugh Hewitt then predicted that, five months from now, Romney would follow Walker just "as Reagan followed Thatcher." Fox's Greta Van Susteren later hosted what amounted to a victory celebration for the Republicans.


Given such blatantly partisan coverage, it was absolutely impossible to watch either network and gain any clear understanding of the actual significance of the event, much less what effect it would actually have on the 2012 presidential election.



Please - this is a surprise?  Have you watched any cable "news" in the last 12 years?  Cable 'News" is not news - it's talk radio on a flat screen.  



3 comments:

  1. In MSNBC's defense, more effort is putting in to getting actual facts once in a while.
    Yes, they're biased and liberal, but so is reality...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Earl
    I think the same can be said for liberal talk radio - Thom Hartman comes to mind but not Ed Shultz.
    John
    Thanks for the clip, I should have done a search for that myself.

    ReplyDelete