Mr. Maxwell:
Your column today again demonstrates your dislike for Obama. You
aver the press beats up on Hillary and treats Obama like the “Second Coming.”
You cite the Center for Media Affairs as confirming that the press mistreats Hillary and yada, yada, yada.
You started on this anti-Obama tack when he announced for office. You said that he should wait his turn. Wiser political heads told him, "Jump when the opening is there. It may never come again."
That after Bush anybody can advise a person to wait to run for president for any reason at all is absurd. Bush makes possible an orangutan’s running for president with nobody’s having a right to demur.
I wrote you then and rebuked you. I confirm that rebuke today when your cover your dislike for the beauteous Obama with the old press bias kitsch.
Let’s straighten out your thinking on this bias charge. The press maintains the forlorn fallacy that it is unbiased to make itself sound extraordinary. Whether the press is too dumb to know it’s blowing smoke or whether it aims to rev up its purity spin to impress the masses one does not know.
But the press or anybody can’t be unbiased.
Study after study shows that being nonbiased is not possible. The fancy term is that the claim is an epistemological fallacy.
Data enter a person’s ear and comes out the other ear shaped by the back roads, cul-de-sacs, and curlicues of the alembic of that person’s
particular psyche. In other words, it comes out biased.
In the second place reporters’ output is biased to conform to biases of their bosses so as to keep their jobs. Anybody who hasn't figured this out better never try for a reporter job. The whole paper's reflecting the boss's bias explains how a paper gets the reputation of being either liberal or conservative. That reputation comes from the boss’s bias reflected throughout the paper’s echo of this boss bias.
A second consideration in your accusation of press bias against Hillary is that a whole lot of people hate her. She never can get above the 50th percentile in approval ratings. The press is not a separate entity. It’s a piece of the continent, a part of the main. So its treatment of Hillary is coincident with the national psyche.
Your caterwauling about press bias against Hillary is cover for your jealousy of Obama. You are pea green with envy because Obama is pretty, and you’re not. You were not fortunate enough to come from a gene pool with a father as black as night and a mother as white as milk. Is it any wonder that magical gene pool produced a movie star? .
Get over it, Mr. Maxwell, and deal with things about which you have control—or should have. A former college teacher and long-time columnist should have control over the correct use of punctuation for example.
You don’t. Here are examples from your Obama-hating column:
If Clinton had not raised the issue and if Saturday Night Live had not spoofed journalists for fawning over Sen. Barack Obama, like puppies licking their owners' mouths, the charge of bias probably would have remained a mere wink-and-nod charade.
The prepositional phrase “like puppies…mouths” is restrictive. It does not describe a situation in which journalists fawned over Clinton like cats licking their owners’ mouths but like “puppies…mouths.” Leave the comma off after “Obama.” Keep the one after “mouths" for the end of an introductory adverbial clause.
The gap in good press widened since the New Hampshire primary, with Clinton dropping to 47 percent positive comments and Obama holding steady at 83 percent positive.
The comma after “primary” cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase with its occupying the usual syntactical position at the end of the clause. “Clinton” should be “Clinton’s”: possessive before the gerund. “Obama’s,” not “Obama”: possessive before the gerund.
I had a tussle argument with the editor of the North American Oxford English Dictionary on this point and bested him. I sent this colloquy to the linguistics department at Oxford so that the supercilious members of that body in their rump-sprung tweeds and noses in the air will rag the American editor when they have their next transatlantic conference (Grammargrinch.blogspot.com).
The most surprising finding, at least to me, was the pervasive bias in coverage of the two candidates' foreign policy.
“At least for me” is a restrictive adverbial phrase. You do not speak of "at least for anybody" but "at least for me." So you need that particular restrictive prepositional phrase to identify whom you are talking about.
Rarely have I seen a story about Obama's influence-peddling pal from Chicago, Tony Rezko, on the front page.
Since you hate Obama as much as you do, you should treat “Tony Rezko” as a restrictive appositive with no commas, implying that Obama has more than one influence-peddling pal from Chicago. Then you can go on to call him “Barack Hussein Obama” and mention that he takes his oath of elected office on the Koran and eats cous cous for breakfast.
Promiscuous use of the comma has been waning for four hundred years. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is good on this phenomenon. One would think that since the press is eager to get rid of the comma in items in a series, it would be eager to abandon overusing other commas. But that is not the case. The press continues to overuse commas as do you in the above examples.
When you feel an urge to stick pins in the darling Obama, haul out Fowler as your breviary to distance the green-eyed monster. Your soul and your punctuation will be the better for this chaste use of time.
lee drury de cesare
Grammargrinch.blogspot.com
TampaBayGrammargrinch.blogspot.com
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