Bill Maher and class are not synonymous
In the past I’ve taken some shots at Glen Beck, and for good reason. However, I don’t think there’s a chance he’d ever be considered to appear on This Week. This Week is supposed to be a show where level-headed adults discuss current events, which is why it’s so puzzling to me that ABC decided to book Bill Maher as a participant in the round-table.
On HBO it’s okay for Maher to indulge his ignorant generalizations about Republicans or his misinformed ideas about Brazil’s oil usage, but This Week is the real world. You have to give credit to Maher. It takes a great deal of effort to come off less sensible than Al Sharpton.
Mickey Edwards has an op-ed in The Atlantic titled “On Discovering Bill Maher” that is hilarious because Edwards had never heard of listened to Maher until he was on This Week. Here are some of Edwards’ observations about Maher’s idiotic remarks:
I had actually been watching something else on television (a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald), but switched in time to watch Mr. Maher’s performance. I’m glad I did. Had I not done so, I would have continued to be among those blissfully unaware of what a dolt he is, of how hateful and venomous and destructive of civility and intelligent discourse he is.
And so the villain of this piece is? Not Mr. Maher: he is, sadly, what he is, and that is all he is, and (my heart goes out to him) that is probably all he will ever be; one can only do one’s best with whatever limited capacities one has. But George Will, Matthew Dowd, Al Sharpton, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, agree with them or not, have a proper place at the grown-up table; one can only wonder what the producers at ABC were thinking when they moved this character to a table at which the likes of George Stephanopoulos, Cokie Roberts, Cokie Roberts, and Sam Donaldson once sat.
A link to the video can be seen here. The look on Maher’s face when George Will asked for clarification about Brazil’s use of oil was hilarious. That’s the type of “real time” that’s missing from Maher’s show on HBO. Hopefully ABC realized that this dolt should not be allowed around adults.
Michael Kinsley of The Atlantic has one theory as to why newspapers are dying like the dinosaurs. Kinsley blames length. Here’s a part of his article entitled “Cut the Story.”
One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory.
This is something I completely agree with. In today’s information age long copy makes my eyes hurt. If I want to read something longer than a page I’ll pick up a magazine, but certainly not a newspaper. One huge mistake many journalists make is that blogs are the same as newspapers. The moment I see a blog with tons of copy I run for the hills. There are too many well written blogs out there that get to the point.
I’m sure there’s a niche out there somewhere for really long blogs, but there’s a niche for everything. The average American doesn’t have time to read a long entry. What I love about blogs is that information is summarized in a very easy-to-read fashion. It allows me to read tons of different sites on tons of different topics.
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