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...Everybody's got one....
Another Fein Mess
AF Stone’s Monthly
Jan -Feb. 2017
These are the Times of L.A.
3-27 A report that a video shows a fracas with a Trump supporter. Actually it's film footage. A video is a constructed piece. How about “video footage?”
NO DATE ON PAGE. Idiots, punks, “gang members” or tempted teens vandalized a MIA Viet Nam memorial again. The newspaper keeps giving “them” ink, and then others try to top the previous jerks. Quit reporting on it. It has no political meaning. Just jerks.
3-29 Jill Filopovic cites a photo of a room full of men at the White House and sees a bunch of people conspiring against all women, “ensconced
in their misogynistic world.” A picture speaks volumes to tilted people..
4-2 An art dealer taking 100% for his fees is on trial. That’s interesting, but must they jam“former Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz” in the first graph? The guy’s not even working.
4-4 TV personality fired at Fox news over “complaints” No charges verified. Shouldn’t riskless accusations be ignored till proven?
“In much of official Washington” Cathleen Decker writes, a Tulare congressman’s name “prompts dismissive shakes of the head.”
"Much? How much? Head count, please?
4-10 An author criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, so she “faces student backlash.”
Who cares? Students are in school. What books do they write?
“Why men” kill big animals is the hed, but Anima Khan, a woman one must presume, ignores women who hunt. All things being equal - as they are! - women are just as eager to shoot big beasts. Makes either sex feel powerful. We all need it, don’t we? Humans are getting even for all the lions that ate us back in Africa!
Sonaiya Kelley, sensing sexism in the movie biz, cites talking to a man in a studio lobby, who then goes in to a meeting with a bigshot. She says she’s been “in the industry for 13 years,” while that guy was in it for five. (What happened to seniority in art?) Maybe he knows someone, or is related. Or has special talents. All kinds of reasons for one person to succeed where another doesn’t. Her credentials beyond pouting are not established.
Not only does Mark B. Barabak lead a story about Kansas politics with a ref to Dorothy’s red slippers, but he slips it in again two graphs down.
Has this ever been done before? Aside from the million other times.
4-11 Writing about Werner Herzog, Joe Donnelly cites a car accident in which Joaquin Phoenix went upside down in “a Dodge Challenger, if the story is to be believed.” Huh? Car snobbery? Challengers don’t flip? He could afford something better? Wha?
Jenny Javits: Alabama guv - “dubbed ‘The Luv Guv” by certain sections of the Atlanta media.” What is this newspaper enthusiasm for “is being
called” or “known to insiders as”? Why do desk-bound keyboard-pounders snicker and ridicule? (The air is clear, but LA is still full of smug.)
4-18 Paige St. John, characterizing “protestors” (again, hooded and masked, not ID’d or interviewed) who beat up Trump supporters with the phrase “Testosterone poisoning on both sides,” leaves the LAT wide open, bound in fact, to characterize future female fraca as “menstrual mayhem” by “vaginal vigilantes.” I want to see it. I demand it. Sexist sow.
NO DATE ON PAGE I guess David Ng is a brahmin, OPENING a story concerning plans for future Adam Sandler movies with “His lowbrow comedies have earned him few fans among connoisseurs of serious cinema.” Nobody wants your ’tude, Dave. It’s No Good.
4-20 Diana Marcum and Veronica Rocha thunder about the sad status of Fresno, known apparently solely for its murder rate. Since
the victims and the killer of a recent one were of different races, they proclaim on high (are they?) that the crime was, itself, magnified not just by writers but “because of the national flashpoints it touched on” - racism, terrorism, Muslims. Did anyone in Fresno realize the enormity of these things that Big City writers crow about to fit to their “narrative”? Their ride to Fresno must have been swift on their high horse.
4-22 Business. Bill O’Reilly’s troubles fueled by nothing more than hearsay were powered by clatter on “social media,” crows the olden typeset medium, as if internet blather was new and valid. Is it still 1997?
4-23 “Students decry (any) tuition hike” should go into next year’s journalism textbooks, replacing “Dog bites man.”
4-25 Chuck McNulty likes a play that re-creates “a raucous night in the annals of second-wave feminism.” There are numbered waves?
Quarter page about shooting at nightclub in Cincinnati: photo of the club’s sign. Eyewitness quotes. Whose needs this in L.A?
4-28 Sarah Parvini or Veronica Rocha noted, of a LONG report on a fire, that “smoke wafted through the air where the fire had burned.”
Is that news or an excuse to uses ‘waft’? Also, “A pile of scorched wood smoldered.” It didn’t get up and dance?
NO DATE ON PAGE Mikael Wood is no outlier: he disdains John Mayer. So why does the paper send anyone to review the guy? Wood gets his
rocks off (hurling them) with “slick” band (Mikey, you like clumsy bands?), stylish (as an insult), high-end sneakers (What’s on your feet, Woodman?), “erstwhile heartthrob” (at least he had a go at it, Mike!), self-exiled after “a run of negative publicity that made him look like a
jerk” (You got a mirror?), his flameout from “talking way too much” about sex (gives crits the willies), he’s still “the oily rapscallion we once knew.”
Yep, everyone still knows his name. Crits burn.
4-29 Front page (!) story about a champeen craps shooter (!!) in Las Vegas seems a pitch for casino ads. Looks like fun— you might win, too!
New Yawk, New YAWK Times
3-23 Henry Fountain’s report on thin ice at the North Pole leads to …a quote from an ice foundation that the loss of ice is an indication of
ice loss, and that projected disappearance of sea ice in summers could occur by 2030, but others say longer. Hard facts next week?
Liam Stack writes that “it was unclear on Wensday evening” whether suspects in a child’s death had lawyers." It" was clear, you didn't get it.
3-26 Big diamond discovered in Africa. Jaime Yaya Barry fans the excitement noting “People on social media have been abuzz.”
Jaime, those are the people who DON’T have jobs at the NY Times.
3-31 Jim Dwyer. Ivory sales, Elephants ”are thought by some to mourn the death of” others. “Are thought?” By some? Everything is thought.
Name something not.
The huge hed “Let Me Count The Ways” gave me a momentary pause. I thought it was a paean to the wonderful, achingly good Peter De Vries book of that name. Sad for me it was about a movie soon “Streaming On Netflix.” DeVries is forgotten (and the old movie of his book stinks).
4-6 Jon Pareles really has a grasp of stereotypes citing a new comedian who mocks late '60s musicians “particularly those who
were clustered around Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles and living a hippie dream of self-expression and self-indulgence, amid vintage
guitars and well-equipped studio hideaways.” I’m sure he missed a cliche, though not for the lack of trying. (Vintage means "of a year." )
4-08 Has there always been a Wealth Matters category? It seems classically puerile, but echoes the other, curent “Matters,”
4-09 Neil Gunzlinger takes no chances poking fun at Barney, the children’s tv show character, calling him “polarizing,” saying “someone” started an “I Hate Barney” group and that “parents” bitched and moaned” about him. As no national sourcing is offered, clearly he cites weasels of his acquaintance for this scattershot vomit. Barney was fine for the little ones. I pity his oh-so-ironic kids.
4-10 Big-play update from Sheila M. Eldred, Serge F. Kovaleski, and Ben Sisario that, still, no one knows where Prince got the drugs that killed him. Front-page of Arts.
4-16 Krista Burton, a lesbian, writes that upon arriving in Chicago in 2010, her friends unloaded their U-Haul = “yes, cliches are fun” - never revealing the cliche. Maybe a grrrrl thing.
4-17 Brooks Barnes went to the Sony self-adulation convention in Las Vegas and learned they are very high on next fall’s productions. “Film Lineup raises Hopes At Sony Studio.” Not an ad, no, not at all.
4-18 New Prince death info/speculation by two reporters. His death is a gift that keeps on giving, reporters space.
4-20 Jonah Engel Bromwich writing about an asteroid that veered closer to earth than most, bypasses science and respect when he asides “that some enthusiasts have nicknamed The Rock after actor Dwayne Johnson.” Puerile.
4-28 Daniel Victor considers a Fox guy who went on sudden vacation, saying that his joke was “highly scrutinized,” without explaining. The crime was saying he liked the way Ivanka spoke into the mike. Schreyers tumbled from treetops saying this was an oral sex remark, when in fact he and a couple of newswomen were commenting on the first lady’s radiolike vocal tone.
Life is impossible in this nattering world.
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