Archive | August 5, 2011

John King Explains Why He Is Not a Real Journalist

John King

When a man jumped the White House fence on August 2nd and was taken down by the Secret Service, John King’s program was already broadcasting live from the location. King commented:

Now you see, if you are ever thinking about this, the inevitable result if you hop that fence. … One of the things we don’t like to do is give too much coverage to this – if it is a political stunt, it would encourage somebody else to do it. So we’re going to turn away from this for now and come back to our coverage. … You never know what happens if you come down here. But the Secret Service, as always, performing quickly and admirably to bring it to a close.

He later told Don Lemon:

We usually don’t give these things any coverage, Don, because political stunts can happen, people trying to make a political statement, who want to be on television, jump the fence. Because we were on live television, from the White House, what had happened – we did show it.


Magic When We’re Together

Melissa Harris-Perry, poli sci prof at Tulane, explains to Rachel Maddow:

Leviathan

When your government is a free and fair democratically-elected-in-regular-elections government, then it’s not some scary thing outside of you. It is you. It is, in fact, that we, by being together in communal space, we say: okay, look, there are these community assets, air, water, land, national defense. And we know that individually we always have short time horizons. Not malicious or bad or evil – we can only see so far, only see our own good; so we come together in government – freely elected, not all governments – that say: look, we will protect our common good, our inner child that can’t speak for itself. Our job as a government is to protect that, and so government regulations, particularly federal government regulations, are precisely the interest groups that these sorts of common interests are to have.

So let me get this straight. We’re a bunch of self-centered, short-sighted individuals. And government isn’t something different from us; it’s just us. And yet government decisions are not similarly self-centered and short-sighted. Gee, I wish she’d explain what the mechanism is.


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