Clive Davis

SLANT

Following up yesterday's post on Fox News' audience, a snippet about the predilections of America's fourth estate:

On the Hugh Hewitt radio show, former Washington Post reporter Tom Edsall ballparked the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in newsrooms as "15–25 to 1."

Tom Edsall is a liberal, by the way. I once spent a pre-Thanksgiving evening with him when we were both at Hoover for the week as media fellows, and found him to be a very pleasant guy. Another quote from the same interview:

And I agree that whatever you want to call it, mainstream media, presents itself as unbiased, when in fact, there are built into it, many biases, and they are overwhelmingly to the left.

And there's this exchange:

HH: A proposition. The reason talk radio exploded, followed by Fox News, followed by the centre-right blogosphere, is that because folks like you have been the dominant voice in American media for a long time, and you’re a pretty thoroughgoing, Democratic-favouring, agenda journalist for the left, and you’ve been the senior political reporter of the Washington Post for a very long time. And people didn’t trust your news product…not you, personally, but the accumulation of you, throughout the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and they got sick and tired of being spoon-fed liberal dross, and they went to the radio when an alternative product came along.

TE: To a certain degree, I agree with that.

Now, it goes without saying that right-wing journalists can be just as biased (although in my experience they're more likely to be aware that The Other Side exists). But the sheer weight of numbers makes a difference to what goes into the headlines. Surely?

THE ETHER IS CROWDED

Like Stephen, I was unaware that Bryan Appleyard had started a blog. One for the reading-list, along with Open University.

All these disembodied voices talking to each other... Neo, who's been in Washington for a Pajamas Media bash, reflects on what's like to come face-to face:

I find it an extraordinary experience to meet people backwards: that is, to meet their minds first and their bodies second. You get to know people in a totally different way as, day after day, you read what they are thinking without ever having met them in the flesh.

HELL ON WHEELS

Yesterday was the first time in a while that I’ve driven in the West End. A dark and drizzly night, as the Mills & Boon people might say. What a relief that I managed not to hit any cyclists.

Not for want of trying on their part. Lots of them with no lights, or bulbs that wouldn't even past muster on a Christmas tree. Almost everyone dressed in dark clothes; only a few with reflective arm bands or trimmings. One hurtled past me as I was parking and gave me an earful because I hadn’t seen him when I signalled (at some length). Well, why should I have seen him if he was an invisible object travelling at speed on a gloomy evening?

As it happens, I cycle every day – outside London on quiet-ish, semi-rural roads - and now that I’ve got a new bike, replacing my second-hand penny-farthing, I’m becoming quite fanatical about it. There’ve been a couple of near-misses lately, but – touch wood – nothing serious so far. And I’ve only just bought a helmet, because I’ve always been one of those idiots who say, "I’ve been cycling for years without having an accident, so why should I..?" Yet even I wouldn’t think of trying to ride at night in London without immersing myself in fluorescent lime-green emulsion.

OK, there should be cycle lanes everywhere. But there aren’t. So how do we deal with that?  What I saw last night was what the two-wheel cognoscenti call "aggressive cycling". Maybe it does make sense if you're trying to fight your way through traffic every day. But I won’t be convinced it works until I read about an innocent Audi being run over by an absent-minded mountain bike.

THE GREAT VELOSO

Someone always says "Caetano who?" whenever I write anything on Brazilian music. So, for the uninitiated, here he is in Almodovar's film, Hable Con Ella.

PS: No, he's not singing in Portuguese this time.  On his greatest album - one of the very few masterpieces to come my way in the last two decades - you get English and Italian too. Sorry, I know I keep plugging it - but it really is that special.

THOSE BASTARDS WHO RUN HALLIBURTON - A BALLET IN FOUR ACTS

Former New Yorker critic Arlene Croce - no friend of "victim art" - spills the beans on the dance Mafia:

Choreographers mix dance with politics because it is the only way to get attention. And get grants too, probably. The importance of a work is equated with the nobility of the sentiment it expresses. I've stopped attending dance attractions because the last thing I want to see is dancers wasting their time on some high-minded godawful piece of choreography. I don't want to be told about Iraq or Bush or Katrina by someone younger and dumber than I am.

Back to the subject of Mozart, opera and sacrilege, a neat response from Ann Althouse [Via Instapundit]:

Now that some Muslims have made it painfully obvious that religion-taunting is not an easy game anymore, abandoning it expresses fear, not respect for religion. And continuing to disrespect the religions that don't lash back only highlights that cowardice. Poor transgressive rebel artists! How are they to shock the middle class anymore?

PARTY MANNERS

"DON'T call the hostess six times a week in the run-up to the event, just to tell her that you’re not sure if you can make it or not.... A check-list of advice from Jackie Danicki. We're due to have lunch next week, so I'll be on my best behaviour.

NEW ALBUM BY A GHOST BAND

I've been listening to that slightly eerie "collaboration" between Ray Charles and the Basie band. So has John L. Waters:

And yet... it sounds pretty good. Despite knowing it's the result of long hours hunched over a computer, it actually sounds like Ray Charles ad libbing and emoting with a powerful jazz band at his elbows. In Busted you hear him yelp encouragement to the guys (some of them not yet conceived)...

Technology shows us that once something is possible, someone does it. So what delights and horrors are in store? Jim Morrison and Love? Nick Drake and the Wurzels?

Sinatra's Duets II album was another example. Not bad at all, really, although his voice was in less than ideal shape. Best track: that beautiful intro by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme (yes, them) on Where Or When?

EVIL FOX NEWS

Peggy Noonan on the big bad wolf:

One can't exaggerate how large Fox looms in the liberal imagination. They see it as huge and mighty and credit it with almost mythical powers...It is odd that they are so spooked. In October America is set to become a nation of 300 million. What a big country. Fox News's average evening prime-time viewership is less than two million. Its average daytime is less than a million. And if my mail is an indication, they're already Republicans.

Worth reading the rest of the column, about what was lost when the the old media consensus was shattered by new technology. It hasn't all been for the better:

I spoke with a network producer a few weeks ago, an old warhorse who was trying to explain his frustration at the current ratings race. He wrestled around the subject, and I cut with rude words to what I thought he was saying. "You mean it's gone from the dictatorship of a liberal elite to the dictatorship of the retarded."

Yes, he said. And it's not progress.

When liberals miss something in the media, that's what they should be missing. Not a unity that never existed but standards that were high. When conservatives say there's nothing to miss, they're wrong.

BOMBS NOT RUNNING ON TIME

Is the Iranian nuclear programme falling behind schedule because of technical problems? Good news, if true. Why don't we really mess them up, and send them a team of experts from Virgin Trains?

NOTEBOOK

German mortar bombs were exploding in the middle of a small square only a hundred yards from Security Headquarters. Here I saw an ugly sight: a British officer  interrogating an Italian civilian, and repeatedly hitting him about the head with a chair; treatment which the Italian, his face a mask of blood, suffered with stoicism. At the end of the interrogation, which had not been considered successful, the officer called in a private of the Hampshires and asked him in a pleasant, conversational sort of manner, "Would you like to take this man away, and shoot him?" The private’s reply was to spit on his hands, and say, "I don’t mind if I do, sir." The most revolting episode I have seen since joining the forces.

Norman Lewis, Naples ’44.