The Mackerel Wrapper

A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.

Monday, October 06, 2008

COMM: As Rome burns, Nero fiddles?

From Monday's news --

Jake Tapper, senior national correspondent for ABC News, had a column on GOP candidate Sarah Palin's latest attack on Democrat Barack Obama on a day the Dow-Jones stock market index fell below 10,000 points. The head:

As Dow Plummets, McCain Campaign Highlights Palin's Attacking Obama on Ayers

Analyst Joe Klein of Time magazine has an opinion piece dismissing the New York Times story Palin was riffing off of as a "nothingburger." Klein has a reliably Democratic slant on things ... one that goes back to when he covered President Bill Clinton's campaigns during the 1990s ... and nothing really new to say about Bill Ayers, the radical Palin was referring to, but "nothingburger" is a word that deserves to live. I got 4,270 hits when I did a Google search on it, and the Urban Dictionary defines it as "something lame, dead-end, a dud, insignificant; especially something with high expectations that turns out to be average, pathetic, or overhyped."
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About Me

Springfield (Ill.), United States
I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.