Pun Salad

• I enjoy looking at rhetorical trickery, little phrase-turns designed to guide readers or listeners to desired attitudes. Today, Patterico detects a couple pretty good ones in the LATimes. Here's trick one:

  … whenever one [politician] criticizes another, there are two ways to characterize what's happening. If you think the criticism may be valid, you will refer to the criticism passively, and discuss the "mounting criticism" of the [politician] being criticized. But if you don't like the criticism, then you will refer to the criticism as an "attack."

  The LA Times article is about Karl Rove. Before you click the link, try to guess whether Rove is "under attack", or if he's instead embroiled in a "growing controversy."

  Trick two concerns the "(some|many|critics) say" locution:

  The use of phraseologies like "many say" lends the opinions a certain weight, suggesting that they are held by a number of potentially unbiased folks out there. The opinions expressed by "some" or by "critics" tend to be reported uncritically and sympathetically. Meanwhile, when interviewees say things that support a conservative position, they tend to be labeled as representatives of a particular cause, politician, or branch of government, so their bias is always clear.

  So: try to guess what "some" say about Karl Rove.

• Some say the LA Times would do well to peruse Wikipedia's article on avoiding weasel words, which is a hoot. But, in the Wikipedia spirit, they'll also want to check the (illustrated!) article urging them to embrace weasel words. Why?

  It may be claimed without evidence that some neuroscientists claim that every time you learn a new fact, you must necessarily forget some other fact in order to make room for the new fact to fit inside your head. (Admittedly, neuroscientists who subscribe to this theory invariably cannot recall why they believe it, and if you try to explain to them why the theory is flawed, they will run from the room while shrieking loudly, lest your teachings cause them to forget their happiest childhood memory.)

  So the LA Times is really doing its readers a service, saving their brains from being cluttered up by unnecessary facts.

• OK, so your brain is free of clutter; now go check out 17 Things You Should Stop Doing in order to spend your time more productively. They're remarkably easy on web-surfing. (Via BBSpot.)

What are the chances I have anything unusually insightful or interesting to say about Don Imus that the interested reader hasn't already seen elsewhere?

I think the interested reader already knows the answer to that question: somewhere between slim and none.

I have resolved, however, to hereinafter pronounce 'Imus' as if it rhymed with 'Camus'. That'll teach him.

Anyway: what l'affaire Imus—say it as if you were making fun of French people—brought to mind was this line from Draft Blogger Code of Conduct:

[We reserve the right to change these standards at any time with no notice.]

I.e., "standards" that are flexible enough to justify the retroactive condemnation (or not) of just about any borderline expression, should it be found convenient and propitious to do so (or not). Imus is (or, I guess, was) a shock jock, and driving the discussion up to and beyond the line of decency and good taste is part of the job description for those folks. As others have noted, boorish in-your-face offensiveness is rife in our culture. When one of the practitioners is taken down so suddenly and completely from his multi-million-dollar gig, it's hard for us spectators to do anything but wonder at the arbitrariness of it all.

So the arbitrariness is interesting, but so is the unpredictability. It would be a mistake to portray the destruction of Imus as the result of a well-oiled plan executed with movie-plot precision. The folks who kicked off this particular firestorm, Media Matters, are preening and gloating, waving the severed head of Imus to the screaming mob. But their full time job is demanding the takedown of any media personality displaying less than devout fealty to the lefty gospel. They name their targets beyond Imus: Gibson, Limbaugh, Smerconish, O'Reilly, Savage, Boortz, Beck.

If this were really a fiendishly clever lefty plot, those other guys would be long-gone as well. But sometimes these manufactured outragefests work, other times they just fizzle. Nobody knows why. (Or, as William Goldman famously remarked in a slightly different context: "Nobody knows anything.")

It's also irresistible to compare the (considerably less discussed) recent disparate treatment of Her Royal Perkiness, another multi-million-dollar CBS employee, Katie Couric. She recently began one of her "Notebook" episodes ("a daily essay by the anchor that appears in video and audio form on CBS News's Web site, among other places") with:

I still remember when I first got my library card.

… but it turned out that a considerable amount of her essay was lifted from a previous-month's article in the Wall Street Journal by Jeffrey Zaslow.

Plagiarism is a pretty hefty sin even at CBS, at least when you're unlucky enough to be caught. But—you may have noticed—Katie wasn't fired. One of her producers was fired: one of the people who actually write Katie's first-person "Notebook" was deemed the responsible party.

Now, Couric-criticism isn't absent. Virginia Postrel is suitably contemptuous about the business-as-usual phoniness. And Timothy Noah at Slate found it interesting enough to write about (in stopped-clock mode). But in comparison to the Imus Nor'easter, the Couric thing is a brief shower; she'll be on the job for the foreseeable future. (Nothing at all, of course, from Media Matters.)

It's tempting to ask: where's the outrage? How many times does Katie need to be revealed as a glib, empty-headed phony, employed by a joke news organization, before she's sent packing, and CBS "News" is forced to hire some actually competent, honest journalists? But … then I realized that I was being silly to expect that such a thing might ever happen.

Because we reserve the right to change our standards at any time with no notice.