Jeff Jarvis takes a break from his crusade to save Howard Stern to rip a strip from Oprah.

Hypocrite. Oprah: You can’t act as if you don’t bear considerable responsibility for this. You brought sex to afternoon TV. Now I don’t think you should be fined for that and I don’t think you should be taken off the air for that; I just don’t watch you. But you’re doing nothing different from Howard Stern — except getting away with it. So cut your holier-than-thou disapproval of sex on the rest of TV. You are the Queen of Trash.

Jeff doesn’t mention her greater and more destructive hand in creating the “Culture of Victimhood”.
It began with countless shows about child abuse, especially child sexual abuse. The same juicy and shocking details, cloaked in weepy concern and repackaged as “public service”. The biggest fallacy of the time was cultivated by Oprah – “Children never lie about these things”.
Well, they do, and they did, and largely because of the myths that Oprah and her copycats fostered, innocent people – child care workers, parents, neighbors – were smeared, accused and jailed because it wasn’t appropriate to question the veracity of a child. Then we got countless more Oprah shows educating the mainstream about “repressed memory” – and more broken families and lives ruined, based on false accusations and true-believer therapists.
Victimhood was good for ratings. Child abuse. Spouse abuse. Substance abuse. Date rape. Disease of the Week. Oprah shifted gears effortlessly, from trash talk to trash thought, creating an afternoon sisterhood of victims and transforming unproven and sometimes ludicrous theories into mainstream “fact”. And the over-riding message – no one was ever personally responsible. There was always an underlying excuse. Someone else was always to blame – a monster in the past, an uncaring parent, a teacher who bullied. Society. History. Cultism. Racism. Sexism.
Now, we have an entire generation suffering the effects of “Oprahism”, and wonder why so many “dysfunctional” North Americans blame everyone but themselves.

Via Pol:Spy this – “Columnist criticizes foreign correspondents’ coverage of “boy bomb’ story; they respond

Gentlemen of the press: Peter Dudzik of German television ARD, Dietmar Schuman of German television ZDF, Jorg Bremer of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, Gilles Paris of the French Le Monde, Patrick Saint-Paul of Le Figaro, our dear Charles Enderlin of France 2 television, Ms. Emma Hurd of Sky TV, Steve Farrell of the Times of London:
You are all respectable journalists who represent important news organizations. Colleagues.
Maybe one of you knows why, by Thursday morning, none of you had bothered to report to your millions of viewers or readers the story of the boy Abdullah Koran, 10 or 12, who was sent to carry an explosive charge through an IDF roadblock for five shekels by Palestinian “freedom fighters”? Is there no public interest in that story? Does it not have interesting details?
How is it, Ms. Hurd of Sky TV, that when the first missile fell on Gaza your network went into a ‘live” broadcast in prime time for about seven whole minutes (a television eternity), without having current footage (it showed Palestinian pedestrians), but passed over the story of the Palestinian child bomber? How do you explain the nearly complete disregard of the French media for that story? (I understand the Spaniards, who did report the story briefly; they had 200 terror victims to bury). The French news agency devoted a sentence and a half to it at the margins of something, while stressing it was a story whose credibility was problematic.
Well, gentlemen, it is not the credibility of the story that is problematic. It is your credibility that is problematic. The IDF roadblocks are a serious, distasteful reality. They should be covered and reported and so you do. As do we. Ask Gideon Levy. But the other side doesn’t have B’Tselem and Gideons. It has people who take a 10- year-old boy and send him with five shekels and a backpack full of explosives over to our side. To fully understand the roadblocks, from both sides, you have to report that. If you don’t report it, you are fooling your public and yourselves. If I had the authority here, you would all be on the plane on the way home. That might be the reason I do not have the authority here. Have a nice day.

Read the “responses”.

David Frum reviews the Clarke book causing this week’s furor.

Still, there are things that can be learned from the book. One is that for all the praise that Clarke pours on Bill Clinton personally, he presents an absolutely damning account of the terrorism record of the Clinton administration. Time and time again, he and his team agree that a course of action is vital – up to and including air raids against the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan (air raids not cruise missile raids – cruise missiles are slow and gave the Pakistanis time to tip off al Qaeda that the bombs were coming). And nothing happens. Either the bureaucracy refuses to carry out the order or the military drags its feets or (most typically) President Clinton rules out courses of action that carry any risk at all.