David Boaz makes an excellent point about media coverage of President Obama’s health care proposal:

The media tendency to refer to the defeat of a big-government scheme as “failure” reflects a possibly unconscious bias toward government action.

Well put. Why not make it conscious, then? Call it truth in advertising.

An objective media would be nice. But we are unlikely to ever see such a thing. Even the very best reporters are human. And humans are biased. Different people are biased in different ways,…

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CNNMoney.com ran a story today about some of the jobs saved or created by the stimulus package. “A civil engineer, Sara Kelley owes her job to President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package,” it begins. Five other short vignettes follow, each with a name and a face that we can see and identify with. All six are thankful to the stimulus for helping them get through these troubled times.

All of these people clearly benefited from the stimulus package. But where did their…

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Apple's 1984 "Big Brother" ad

An article over at Ad Age brings up an angle on the whole auto industry bailout probably not considered much before.  The fact that a yet-to-be-appointed “car czar” will have control over a multibillion dollar advertising budget for the big three.  Under the guise of “oversight,” this would effectively “Create World’s Most Powerful Marketing Exec[utive].”  

The draft rescue plan for Detroit sent to the White House by Congress yesterday calls for the appointment of a “car czar”…

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Veteran journalist and editor Andrew Sullivan pens a love letter to the his favorite literary format, the blog:

No columnist or reporter or novelist will have his minute shifts or constant small contradictions exposed as mercilessly as a blogger’s are. A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to…

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