Outstanding article in today's New York Times Magazine about "The No-Stats All-Star." Great stuff.

(Via Ezra Klein.)

Bob Somerby can be long-winded at time, but it's useful because he's combating a media that repeats false memes, over and over and over again, until people think they're true. He therefore repeats his debunking of them in his inimitable style, but this paragraph is as succinct a discussion of why cable news isn't "news" as I've seen in a while.

From Friday, talking about how the plane crash in Buffalo pushed everything off the cable channels from Thursday night through Friday:

Pseudo-discussion occurs each night; we saw this again last evening when a passenger plane crashed in Buffalo. On cable, all other discussion was wiped from the map. That circumstance continued this morning, and the reason for it is clear: No other discussion had been occurring; it had all been pseudo, right from the start. As soon as pictures of flames could be shown, other discussions were dropped, like a rock. Grateful pundits launched a new pseudo-discussion. But this one, at least, came with pictures.

My standard joke about the OKC TV newscasts is "We'd like to have brought you news from the state capitol about the bill just passed by the legislature to imprison people who are not evangelical Christians, but that helicopter shot of the kitten in the tree took all our time. Stay tuned for Inside Edition!"