Sunday Open Thread [2.5.12]

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It is Super Bowl Sunday and many of you are tending to the food and drinks (and fine tuning the color calibrations on your TVs) that you'll serve at your parties this evening. In case you've a few lazy minutes today to catch up on some reading, the theme of this Open Thread is The Media.

In Which We Find the Media as Broken as the Republican Party

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I wish I could stop being stunned at how badly our MSM can be in telling the public about the issues of the day. But I'm seeing more and more criticism of the coverage of this issue that I wonder if we aren't looking at a point somewhere in the next weeks or months where our media does some of the sheepish navel gazing that followed when it became really plain that the Iraq War was done on a very large bed of lies that the media did little (except for the McClatchy organization) to try to check up on.

Farewell — Bob Herbert’s Last NYT Column

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Bob Herbert has spent years writing about lives and challenges of those increasingly voiceless and often invisible in our society.   He has been a fiercely moral voice writing about the immorality of torture, killing, institutional injustice against the poor, or working people or minorities -- always making the case that you can't be a great nation by demonizing and dehumanizing those who aren't so fortunate.  There is alot to commend about his career -- I probably remember best his writing against torture and his dogged effort to not let the people of Tulia targeted by law enforcement out of control get out of our sight.