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Media
July 18, 2006
Cut the Crap. Leave the Shit
George Bush casually snacked on a roll while chatting with Tony Blair. He talked trash about Kofi Annan, displayed a terrifyingly unnuanced view of world politics, and, yes, expressed his opinion that Syria should tell Hezbollah fighters to "stop doing this shit." It's the expletive that has garnered most media attention. In a departure from their usual circumlocutions, almost every major media outlet in the U.S. and abroad carried the offending Bush quote in full, though some in the US felt compelled to asterisk the "i" in "shit" or to let the readers fill in the blanks after the initial "s."
Media
July 12, 2006
Sports Illustrated Buttheads
Sports Illustrated columnists don't demonstrate much compassion for Marco Materazzi. In his column excusing French captain Zinedine Zidane for his infamous World Cup chest header against Materazzi, Dr. Z—who seems to think violence is an acceptable form of backlash—doesn't even bother to learn Materazzi's name (or that of any other player besides Zidane, for that matter). Phil Taylor claims that Materazzi deserves equal scorn for his actions, since whatever he said to make the Great Man go off must have been really terrible.
Media
July 12, 2006
Quoting Nick Denton
Over at Slate, media critic Jack Shafer compiles a long list of reasons why the press loves to quote Gawker Media boss Nick Denton. Shafer hypothesizes that many reporters wish they were as free as Denton and his bloggers to write whatever they wish, and thus they write about the Gawker empire instead. He also claims that Denton uses the press to hype his product, and that Denton uses his many negative statements about the blogging business to build credibility with reporters. One idea that Shafer only glances upon, though, is that Denton plays the blog skeptic to the press in order to discourage competitors.
Media
July 7, 2006
'A Deliriously Stupid Romantic Time-Travel Drama'
In this week's edition of Blurb Racket—the Gelf feature in which we take a close look at those critic blurbs that are a fixture of ads for movies—see breakdowns of blurbs for Superman Returns, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Cars, and more. This week's Bogus Blurb of the Week comes in an ad for The Devil Wears Prada:
Sports
June 29, 2006
Rolando and Renaldo
The NBA draft is over, and now it's time for every columnist worth his salt to make fun of the Knicks and Isiah Thomas. In particular, many writers have criticized the drafting of Renaldo Balkman, a relatively unknown forward from South Carolina who impressed scouts during workouts. But Balkman was projected in most mock drafts as a second-round pick at best, so when Thomas selected him with the Knicks' first pick (of two) in the first round, he was basically chumming the editorial waters. But what to write?
Media
June 25, 2006
Homophobic Managers and "Gutless" Media
When news breaks that contains profanity, it's always interesting to see how different media outlets cover it. (For example, Gelf compared how news outlets dealt with Robert Novak's outburst on CNN's Inside Politics, certain censored-by-TV Rolling Stones lyrics, and the title of an Ibsen-themed show.) So when Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen called Jay Mariotti, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist and a regular on ESPN's Around the Horn, "a piece of shit" and a "fucking fag" after Mariotti wrote a column questioning Guillen's sanity, Gelf decided to check out how some popular news sites handled it.
Media
June 23, 2006
Let's Not Forget Meetro's Name
Metro, Top 10 on Gelf's list of free daily New York newspapers, ran an article last week about the late Army Spec. Marlon Bustamante, killed in Iraq, on the occasion of a street corner in Queens being named in his honor. (The New York Daily News also covered the story.) The Metro article, entitled "Let's not forget his name," spelled Mr. Bustamante's name, at various times, "Bustamante," "Bastamante," "Busamante," and "Bustamonte," the last in this quote from the late soldier's brother, Carlos: "Let's not forget his name—Marlon Bustamonte. He didn't have to die, but he died for this country."
Media
June 20, 2006
The Ghana-Israel Connection
In this week's special World Cup edition of Zooming In, Gelf's quasi-weekly roundup of undercovered local stories from around the world: An inappropriate Swedish booty call; a Brazilian soccer diaspora; and more Togo drama. One of our favorites deals with an Israeli flag appearance in the Ghana-Czech Republic game.
Media
June 12, 2006
Of Brangelina and Husni
People—the magazine—paid millions of dollars for exclusive rights to the Brangelina baby pictures, only to have some of those photos leaked onto Gawker and a few other celebrity blogs days before it went to press. This is the subject of a hard-hitting article in the New York Times, which asks, "But did the Internet publication of the pictures really undermine People's publicity plan?" Let's go to the experts.
Media
June 2, 2006
It's Like Raine on Your Spelling Bee
Ursprache is, according to Wikipedia, a protolanguage: either "a language that preceded a certain set of given languages," or "a system of communication during a stage in glottogony that may not yet be properly called a language." It is also the word spelled last night by 13-year-old Katharine Close to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. And it also seems to describe the system of communication used by the New York Daily News. For surely if it were using an actual language, the newspaper wouldn't misspell the crucial word of a spelling-bee article.
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