| So Much for Compassion: Leftist Trashes NIU After NIU Shooting
Here's one media bias everyone accepts (and expects): showing compassion and sympathy for a community after a horrifying mass murder, such as the killings at Northern Illinois University. The leftist website Alternet proved the exception to the rule, printing a bizarre article by an author named Mark Ames that trashed NIU as a mediocre school for mediocre students, and suggested that the "flat" plains of Middle America could make anyone shoot up a school or a post office. The headline was: Northern Ill. University: Was the Killer Crazy, or the Campus Hopeless? Bracket this massacre as the work of a lunatic on drugs, and you miss the chance to consider the horrors of life in middle America. Ames granted that the killer, Stephen Kazmierczak, was a loser -- if we grade on a curve for the depressing Midwest: "Let's assume he's at least partly right: Kazmierczak probably was a loser, by the standards of Midwestern American winners." Ames trolled the message boards of college students looking for people trashing NIU, which he summarized: "What you find is an enormous amount of anger and regret -- the sort of regret you'd expect from a middle-aged Willy Loman looking back on a wasted life." After Ames circulated several hate-NIU notes, he concluded that perhaps the college in some way earned the massacre with its mediocrity: If you're wondering why Kazmierczak transferred out of NIU to the University of Illinois-Champaign last spring, this might help explain it; if you're wondering, as many bloggers have, why he'd come back and shoot up NIU rather than his current university, these sentiments are at least worth considering.
Wisconsin Sports Spectacular
This just in, the Bucks are horrible. They lost to the Knicks and Clippers at home, yet the coach still tries to sell us on the fact that they can miraculously turn this around after the all star break. He keeps using the P word that ends with layoffs. I can't in good conscience put that word together in this blog when talking about the Bucks. This is what happens when you have a lame duck GM, much less an idiot lame duck GM. The Bucks need a complete overhaul from ownership to the floor. I'd love to see Mark Attanasio or somebody like him make the Senator an offer he can't refuse. Keep Yi, ditch everybody else from Bogut to Redd. Maybe keep Royal Ivey...JOKING!!! Tomorrow night the Badgers play at Indiana. That is going to be a tough game and I'm actually expecting a loss. Anything can happen, but I'm not going to hold my breath the way they've been in the last 3 weeks.
Controversy Over Northwestern Journo Dean's 'Unnamed Sources'
The dean of journalism at Northwestern University seems to have gotten himself in a bit of a sticky wicket, as it were. Apparently, John Lavine, the dean of the Medill School of Journalism, has been indulging in the use of unattributed and unnamed sources in his columns for the Medill alumni magazine and 16 NU journo instructors aren't very happy about it. Not only are they not happy about it, but according to the Chicago Tribune they are demanding that the dean prove that he didn't make his quotes up out of whole cloth. You know the journalist's favorite source, don't you? It's the "unnamed source," the "anonymous quote" and the famed "deep throat" sources that journalists make out to be "protecting" from discovery. This sort of source has a long history in the kind of journalism of whistleblowers or muckrakers that have been increasingly popular since Watergate.
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