How to understand the press

Here's how to keep all that political news in perspective...

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand The New York Times . They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country, if they could find the time -- and if they didn't have to leave Southern California to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a poor job of it, thank you very much.

7. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated..

8. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.

9. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is read by people who want only the score of the Cardinals game. They drink Budweiser, Budweiser, and wait a minute -- what was the question?

10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided of course, that they are not Republicans.

11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

12. The Seattle Times is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something to wrap it in.

13. The Dallas Morning News is read because Texans need something to set their guns on when cleaning them.

(Thanks, Lainey)

Coincidence? You decide.

William A. Jacobson, associate clinical professor at Cornell Law School, raises an interesting point about the press and about George Stephanopoulos in particular. Stephanopoulos is an ABC correspondent and former communications director for Bill Clinton.

Remember when George Stephanopoulos, at the New Hampshire Republican debate on January 7, brought up and harped on whether the candidates thought states could ban contraception? 

Everyone, at least on our side of the aisle, shook their heads in disbelief as to why Stephanopoulos was bringing up the issue. There was no active controversy over contraception, it wasn’t in the news, and there were far more pressing political issues, yet what seemed like an eternity of debate time was devoted to the subject at the insistence of Stephanopoulos. 

It was, shall we say, something out of left field.

Watch the video.

It's pretty clear to me that Steph has an agenda.

Well what do you know, about a month later the Obama administration proposes administrative rules under Obamacare which would require free contraception be provided even by religious institutions which oppose contraception on religious grounds. 

It’s almost as if Stephanopoulos got the memo first. Unless, of course, you believe in coincidences.

The Newt Gingrich speaks, and he seems to be aware of what's going on. Watch.

Our fearless writers

"To maintain the illusion that they are part of some kind of radical underground, intellectuals must practise a deceit. They can never admit to their audience that fear of violent reprisals, ostracism or crippling financial penalties keeps them away from subjects that ought to concern them - and their fellow citizens.

"Although it is impossible to count the books authors have abandoned, radical Islam is probably the greatest cause of self-censorship in the West today. When Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed a fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, censorship took the form of outright bans. Frightened publishers would not touch David Caute's novel satirising the Islamist reaction to The Satanic Verses, for instance. They ran away from histories and plays about the crisis as well because they did not want a repeat of the terror Rushdie and his publishers at Penguin had experienced.

"Such overt censorship continues. In 2008, Random House in New York pulled The Jewel of Medina - a slightly syrupy and wholly inoffensive historical romance about Muhammad's child bride Aisha - after a neurotic professor claimed that it was 'explosive stuff ... a national security issue'. Most of the censorship religious violence inspires, however, is self-censorship. Writers put down their pens and turn to other subjects rather than risk a confrontation. So thoroughgoing is the evasion that when Grayson Perry, who produced what Catholics would consider to be blasphemous images of the Virgin Mary, said what everyone knew to be true in 2007, the media treated his candour as news. 'The reason I have not gone all out attacking Islamism in my art,' said Perry, 'is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.'"

-- Nick Cohen