This week on the podcast, new minted CNN Chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper stops by to discuss his new book The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor as well as the politics of covering…politics. Then, our old friend Bill Kristol joins for a bracing conversation about no less than the future of the party and the conservative movement. Nothing like a little light conversation for your earbuds.

Music from this week’s episode:

The Ricochet Podcast opening theme was composed and produced by James Lileks.

EJHill is the cure for whatever ails us.

Get a free audio book on us. Go to AudiblePodcast.com/Ricochet

 

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  1. Profile Photo Inactive
    @Astonishing
    Blue Yeti:  . . . I will take the unpopular stance and argue that we have less bias in the media today because we have more choice. Because of Fox News, Daily Caller, Washington Examiner, etc, we have a choice as to where we buy our news. The MSM has less and less influence every day.

    This is somewhat true. But the emergence of Fox News and other alternatives seems to have allowed the MSM to think they are thereby licensed to be even more insidiously biased than previously.

    So while the MSM outlets are more left-biased than ever before, they assert a pretense of objectivity, all the while bashing Fox for being right-biased, when the truth is that Fox is more objective in its news programming and claims no pretense of objectivity in its opinion programming.

    The ultimate result is, notwithstanding Fox et al, the propaganda needle has moved leftward.

    • #61
  2. Profile Photo Member
    @CBToderakaMamaToad

    Also, The Children of Hurin was released in 2007 by Tolkien’s son Christopher, who also released The Silmarillion in 1977, with writing help from Guy Gavriel Kay, after his father’s death in 1973 from his notes etc.

    • #62
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    @CBToderakaMamaToad

    I don’t watch a lot of TV, but during the Benghazi debacle, I saw a video clip [edit: video clip link] of Jake Tapper reporting on the fact that, weeks after the event, the “FBI investigative team” hadn’t even headed out to Benghazi. He seemed outraged that we were being led on by the Administration’s repeated insistence that we all needed to wait until the “investigations” were completed. George Stephanopolous, one of the most despicable human beings in the history of mankind, closed the segment with the comment, “Wow, it’s rough that things there in Benghazi are still so volatile.” Which was not Tapper’s point at all — but Stephanopolous the Spinmeister blunted the whole reporting.

    That’s the kind of thing Tapper is up against. I believe he is an honorable man, and his book Outpost is an incredible story that I, for one, am thankful he wanted to tell.

    He’s not a conservative, but I wish him well at CNN. 

    • #63
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    @NickStuart

    Having attended four military Basic Training graduations (4 children) and studied the program that lists where the airmen and soldiers are from, my observation based on that sample is that while there is a geographic spread of where they’re from, there is a very definite Red State weight.

    • #64
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    @NickStuart

    Stipulating for sake of argument Tapper is “one of the best” of the MSM pack, he still wears the jacket of letting Benghazi slip from the public consciousness.

    Maybe 30 years from now he or someone will write a tell-all memoir and we’ll find out who sent Susan Rice out to lie about the video, why the rapid response team was made to stand down, &tc. Otherwise I doubt the truth will ever come out.

    • #65
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    @NickStuart

    For James, from the grooveyard of forgotten favorites:

    Soon you’ll attain the stability you strive forin the only way that it’s grantedin a place among the fossils of our time. In loyalty to their kindthey cannot tolerate our minds.In loyalty to our kindwe cannot tolerate their obstruction. Crown of Creation — Jefferson Airplane (apparently lifted from a 1955 sci fi book The Chrysalids by John Wyndham)
    • #66
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    @Grendel

    Besides being anti-Semitic and homophobic, Chuck Hagel is a baby-killing, hooch-burning, genital-shocking monster from a modern horde of Genghis Khan.  Just ask John Kerry.

    • #67
  8. Profile Photo Member
    @Franco

    Nick

    Probably their best song. The bass line by Jack Cassidy is awesome, too.

    • #68
  9. Profile Photo Member
    @CBToderakaMamaToad
    Nick Stuart: Stipulating for sake of argument Tapper is “one of the best” of the MSM pack, he still wears the jacket of letting Benghazi slip from the public consciousness.

    Tapper really did try hard to make the facts about Benghazi more widely known, but he was only one reporter at ABC, and as I tried to show above, even when he did a hard-hitting news story on it (link is to the video news story 9/27), the immediate spin blunted his news and made it totally yesterday even before he was done speaking. So I don’t agree that jacket fits Tapper — he was an employee, not the boss. He sought to make the truth heard.

    • #69
  10. Profile Photo Member
    @

    The Children of Hurin likely won’t be made into a movie by Peter Jackson any time soon, in fact. Christopher Tolkien, JRR’s literary executor was really unhappy with what Jackson has done so far and it seems unlikely he’ll sell the movie rights to any of his father’s other works.

    “They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25,” Christopher says regretfully. “And it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film.”

    Yeah, don’t bet on any more movies.

    • #70
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