Arkansas Media

Stuff from Around Arkansas, Jan. 5 (Updated! Twice!!)

Oh, come now, you didn't think I was going to let this image slip off the front page, did you?
Oh, come on now, you didn't actually think I would let this image slip off the front page, did you?

Media Madness: Sharp piece from Michael Tilley about lame, stupid, out-of-touch “Top Ten Stories of 2008” list from the AP. I agree. They don’t even touch on the Tina Sherman nude cell phone photos case, which obsessed me all of Arkansas for weeks. (The City Wire)

Job Hopping: Big jobs announcement in North Little Rock today. It reportedly will have something to do with “mini-trucks,” which I presume to mean those Tonka toys we had when we were kids. Those were awesome. (Arkansas Times)

Brummett Gets Chummy: Columnist John Brummett offers praise to his bureau colleague David Sanders by noting how much he loathes him. A regular Dale Carnegie, this Brummett guy is. (Brummett’s blog)

Update: So it’s been pointed out to me that the link in item #3 goes nowhere, or at least to an Arkansas News Bureau page with no meaningful content. I thought maybe I’d put the wrong link in there, but now I don’t see the Brummett hit piece on Sanders on the site at all. Hm. It’s like it disappeared or something. This leads to only one logical conclusion: The Internet is broken!

But fear not! The Arkansas Project, recognizing that nothing on the web ever need really disappear, has salvaged Brummett’s sneering assessment of his colleague’s work for posterity, and you can read it all below after the jump, because I am, as ever, your go-to guy, baby.

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Update II: So I’m considering a new tagline for The Arkansas Project: “Inappropriate, gratuitous and altogether tacky.” I think it really captures the essence of this blog with a certain concise elegance, don’t you?

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Please note that this is the FIRST version that Brummett posted yesterday, before he went back and softened the criticism, and before it disappeared entirely today, so this is the unfiltered brew. Whew, I thought it had been lost to the sands of time. I’m a hero!:

Collegiality run amok (missing John Brummett blog post, as excavated and curated by The Arkansas Project)
Posted on 04 January 2009

To my own extraordinary surprise, I’d like to say a word for the right-wing pundit of our bureau, David Sanders.

I disagree with his every word, his very essence, practically, and, well, am not exactly covered up in personal fondness for him. Or he me, I suspect, and say proudly. But he serves our bureau by giving us reasonably vigorous and topical right-wing viewpoints on state issues.

Let’s face it, at risk to modesty: Brantley and I dominate the Arkansas punditry, me in pragmatic moderation and Max in unyielding liberalism. So somebody needs to represent the pitiable right. Sanders consistently is more relevant and interesting than, say, the right-wing columnists in the Little Rock daily.

Faint praise? I guess so. But read those guys today. Well, start out to read them. I wouldn’t ask anyone to make it all the way through. It’ll make you appreciate Sanders. Well, appreciate is probably the wrong word. Rendered less ill by him — how about that?

Plus: Sanders’ AETN show called Unconventional Wisdom, which I was once on enjoyably, is not nearly as bad at sounds like it would be.


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12 thoughts on “Stuff from Around Arkansas, Jan. 5 (Updated! Twice!!)

  • Bill from Sheridan

    Is it just me or does Brummett come across as pompous gas bag. I’m glad to know that he “dominates” Arkansas’ punditry. Brummett hasn’t been an interesting read since Steve Clark was Attorney General. Plus, how could anyone take him seriously when he claims he writes from a perspective of “pragmatic moderation”?

    Brummett is an unpaid operative for the Democratic Party of Arkansas. The only time Brummett ever faults the Democrats in Arkansas is when their leadership caves to a business special interest group. And when he does that he usually couches his complaint to say that the Democrats’ caving was politically shrewd.

    Brummett is a hack and everyone in Arkansas but John Brummett seems to know it.

    Reply
  • And by that logic Sanders is not??????

    Reply
  • David Kinkade

    I’ll have no more of this talk, boys. I’ll have you know that the biggest, most terriblest hack in Arkansas media is ME, and I would kindly thank you not to lump me in with those characters.
    D.

    Reply
  • Of course. What was I thinking. I know that logic has no place around here.

    Ok. Back playing Tetris on my Gameboy.

    Reply
  • Fourche River Rex

    “Brantley and I dominate the Arkansas punditry, me in pragmatic moderation and Max in unyielding liberalism.”

    Brummett claiming to be a moderate, as compared to Brantley, would be like John Wayne Gacy saying, “I’m really not that evil compared to Hitler.”

    Reply
  • Everyone seems to be missing the most important point to today’s “Stuff from Around Arkansas” update — the not Tina Sherman photo is back on top! I mean geez, every time I see that picture of not Tina Sherman I start to think there might really be something to this global warming stuff. Whew doggie, it’s gettin’ hot in here!

    Reply
  • I know you guys already said it but Brummett dominates “the Arkansas punditry” with “pragmatic moderation” – really? It is funny how liberals always have someone more liberal than themselves to compare themselves to proving they are in fact a moderate. I wonder what liberal Max compares himself to make this point.

    Reply
  • The new tagline is okay as long as doesn’t take away space from the not Tina Sherman pictures.

    Reply
  • Bill from Sheridan

    BR549,

    Sanders is a conseravtive. He makes no bones about it, nor does he hide that he is a Republican. Brummett isn’t a moderate he claims, and he isn’t objective either. Every election season his opinion columns serve as talking points for the Democratic candidates on the ballot.

    Reply
  • There are no liberals in Arkansas. “Liberal” here would be defined as “center” in the rest of the world.

    In Arkansas:
    “Liberal” = anyone to the left of Rush
    “Center” = Rush
    “Conservative” = Those people who protest against gays at soldier’s funerals.

    Reply
  • “Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative”—Kurt Vonnegut
    D.

    Reply
  • I fail to see how Brummett is a whacko liberal as you claim. Give me an example.

    I think he fits the left of center mold. And your point of his column being talking points for the Dem Candidates, makes my point. The Dem candidates we have here in AR are just left of center. Moderates.

    Boo-yah! thanks for reading.

    on another note. Did anyone notice that Bud Jackson was just on CNN following Roland Burris around when he was denied creds to be seated in the Senate?

    ol’ Bud. Loves to stir shit up.

    Reply

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