Guy Chamberlin

Wan'dale chose Nebraska, where he became the single favorite tool in nationally heralded coach Scott Frost's offense two years running. Whether he was over-used or misused, Wan'dale's skills were on televised display every week, and promoted by every announcer covering the games. His NFL prospects have always been sketchy, but it's hard to imagine another team putting his talents on display like Nebraska did. Also hard to imagine he gets those touches with a better stable of talent. So from a football POV, it's hard to say Wan'dale made the wrong choice coming to Nebraska. His family should have been happy for him. But if I'm his mom watching Wan'dale getting hung out to dry on high passes on crossing routes, I'm gonna want him home for his own safety.

I'm going to need to see regular updates on how much time Wan'dale is actually spending with his mother.

Obviously Osborne ran a scheme that only a handful of teams employed, and borrowed its basics from Barry Switzer, but if you wanted an identity for Nebraska's offense and defense, it started with treating your down linemen as skill players. And with those guys in place, every other skill player was going to look a lot better. Nebraska won in the trenches. That was its identity.

In fairness to Offensive Identity, we run an offense very similar to those employed by the most successful teams in football. We just don't run it very well.

At year three they are a roster full of Frost recruits presumed to be better than Riley's leftovers. The transfers would all be chosen by Frost for immediate impact. Offense looks to be the bigger issue. Greg Bell left in a snit. Washington had character issues. Adrian Martinez has devolved from Heisman hopeful to constant QB controversy. JD Speilman had two years with Frost and was about to become the most prolific receiver in Nebraska history when he left. Frost apparently had no receiver or running back on the roster as good as Wan'dale Robinson, and now won't have him for his senior season. Cam Jurgens has two years running of high snaps that are huge liabilities and remain uncorrected. We have a whole thread of exciting Frost recruiting successes than never or rarely made the field. After three years, the Mike Riley's Bare Cupboard excuse loses a lot of steam. Can you name a Nebraska running back you're excited to see next year? I can't. First time in 50 years I can say that. Nice thing about reduced expectations is that I'm really, really open to being surprised next year.

My point: while he may be just guy, he was our best just guy. Our best guy in our coach's third year, who had the offense built around him despite being just guy. It doesn't hurt to lose him as much as it hurts that he was our best guy. And he wanted to leave. If the players we have couldn't outplay Wan'dale this season, I'm not sure why they would next season. But who knows. It's a vacuum. Someone will step up. I think. I just don't like s#!tting on players in order to pretend there's not a player development problem here. Recruits who have other choices are that much more likely to avoid Nebraska.

It works the other way, too. Guys who wouldn't see the field on other teams get to be the stars at Nebraska. And they still want to leave. Sorry, but this is a bad look for the program.

What's the deal with Kansas? Every time I check the Coronavirus Tracker, Kansas is way up there in cases and deaths, well ahead of much more populous states. I don't see any news stories mentioning this like they did the Dakotas. Does Nebraska media cover or explain the Kansas surge?

It plummeted to 52 degrees yesterday and I had to wear a light jacket to walk the dog. Although it did warm up enough for me to tie the jacket around my waist. But I will guarantee that our Northern California house is colder than your house in Nebraska, because there's nothing but single pane windows, zero insulation walls, and drafty garages to preserve the chill. The central heating just laughs at me. I wear a light jacket inside, too

If you're trying to discredit the credentials of Bill Kristol by pointing out his complicity in previously horrible Republican policies, you join many stalwart Progressives. You're moral consistency is appreciated, comrade. Either that or you're trying to dilute criticism of Trump with a passive/aggressive distraction. ( i.e. your memory is fine. You know exactly who Kristol is. You're on a first name basis with the man, after all.)

Economics shows that the cost of doing business in California is largely influenced by free market supply and demand. Taxes are definitely a consideration. Regulations less so, especially in tech. The main reason for relocating from California is the high housing costs that require you to pay higher employer salaries. Those high costs continue to be driven by the number of people who want to live in California. For 30 years they've sounded the death knell for California as business flees for cheaper pastures, but at the end of the day the state is still thriving, the sixth largest economy in the world, a diversified global leader in tech, agriculture, entertainment, and aerospace, generating the huge surpluses that make up for the whiny teat-sucking Red States. Believe me, California is far from idyllic. But for every citizen or company that abandons it, there's somebody to replace them. And when those next generation companies flee to other states, they still hire next generation employees who value social justice and community as much or more as their salary (that's a fact.) It's really a better model for living and shouldn't frighten you. Democrats still like money, and they're very good at earning it. Tell you what: I'll take the four bluest of blue states: California, New York, Illinois and Washington. You can have the remaining 46: including the low tax, regulation-hating, business-on-a-platter states and we'll see how the free market money flows. We can wait a couple years for Texas to join the party.

It would suggest the evolution to a business-friendly socially liberal America. Not such a bad place to be.

If big tech companies keep abandoning costly California for business friendly Texas, they could turn Texas blue in an election cycle or two.

Uhm....the people who made the bar graph and explained their methodology also went to the trouble of providing context and analysis. They understand this better than you or I and I think they were hoping people genuinely wanted to learn something. I think they chose the horse racing analogy because it's something even a child would understand: being the front runner generates a positive storyline, falling behind generates a negative storyline. In close races with lots of ebbs and flows it's no doubt harder to gauge. Gaffes, misstatements, and scandals always get play. If you're talking about Donald Trump, who broke all kinds of precedents, the media hated him. He's an unprincipled liar who attacks anyone who questions him -- which is what the free media is supposed to do. For many of us, the media showed too much restraint in calling him out,. Trump enjoyed a celebrity bias that gave him a huge advantage. If you'd like, I can make a bar graph that proves it.

You shared the article with the group,. Is it just because you liked their bar graph?

They taught me to read the whole article, digest the context, and appreciate the conclusions drawn by the authors themselves. To my original point: initial press coverage of McCain, and it appears Palin, was generally positive until it became less so, driven by the candidate's actions and polling sentiment rather than media bias. See the boldfaced section for a handy summation that puts your bar graph and "whopping difference" comment in perspective. Much of the increased attention for McCain derived from actions by the senator himself, actions that, in the end, generated mostly negative assessments. In many ways, the arc of the media narrative during this phase of the 2008 general election might be best described as a drama in which John McCain has acted and Barack Obama has reacted. As for Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, her coverage had an up and down trajectory, moving from quite positive, to very negative, to more mixed. What drove that tone toward a more unfavorable light was probing her public record and her encounters with the press. Little of her trouble came from coverage of her personal traits or family issues. In the end, she also received less than half the coverage of either presidential nominee, though about triple that of her vice presidential counterpart, Joe Biden. The findings suggest that, in the end, Palin’s portrayal in the press was not the major factor hurting McCain. Her coverage, while tilting negative, was far more positive than her running mate’s. These are some of the findings of the study, which examined 2,412 campaign stories from 48 news outlets, during six critical weeks of the general election phase from the end of the conventions through the final presidential debate. Tone was examined on a subset of this sample, 857 stories from 43 outlets, those campaign stories that were focused on one of the candidates. Marion Just of Wellesley College served as a consultant on the study. The Project is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Among the findings: Coverage of Obama began in the negative after the conventions, but the tone switched with the changing direction of the polls. The most positive stories about him were those that were most political—the ones focused on polling, the electoral map, and tactics. For McCain, coverage began positively, but turned sharply negative with McCain’s reaction to the crisis in the financial markets. As he took increasingly bolder steps to try and reverse the direction of the polls, the coverage only worsened. Attempts to turn the dialogue away from the economy through attacks on Obama’s character did hurt Obama’s media coverage, but McCain’s was even more negative. Coverage of Palin, in the end, was more negative than positive. In all, 39% of Palin stories carried a negative tone, while 28% were positive, and 33% were neutral. Contrary to what some suggested, little of the coverage was about Palin’s personal life (5%). Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden was nearly the invisible man. His had just one large moment, the vice presidential debate, which also offered his only positive or neutral contribution. Aside from that week, the limited coverage he did receive was far more negative than Palin’s, and nearly as negative as McCain’s. The economy was hardly a singular lens through which the media perceived the race. Though it was the No. 1 campaign topic overall, five out of the six weeks other topics were bigger, and in the end it accounted for not much more of the campaign newshole (18%) than assessments of the candidates in the four debates (17%). Horse race reporting, once again, made up the majority of coverage, but less so than earlier in the contest or than in previous elections. Since the conventions ended, 53% of the newshole studied has focused on political matters, particularly tactics, strategy and polling. That is more than twice as much as the coverage focused on policy (20%). This focus on tactics and horse race grew in the last three weeks as both campaigns became more negative in their rhetoric. Tone is an elusive and yet unavoidable question when examining the role of the news media. Who got better coverage, and why? To examine tone, the Project takes a particularly cautious and conservative approach. Unlike some researchers, we examine not just whether assertions in stories are positive or negative, but also whether they are inherently neutral. This, we believe, provides a much clearer and fairer sense of the tone of coverage than ignoring those balanced or mixed evaluations. Second, we do not simply tally up all the evaluative assertions in stories and compile them into a single pile to measure. Journalists and audiences think about press coverage in stories or segments. They ask themselves, is this story positive or negative or neutral? Hence the Project measures coverage by story, and for a story to be deemed as having a negative or positive tone, it must be clearly so, not a close call: for example, the negative assertions in a story must outweigh positive assertions by a margin of at least 1.5 to 1 for that story to be deemed negative. One question likely to be posed is whether these findings provide evidence that the news media are pro-Obama. Is there some element in these numbers that reflects a rooting by journalists for Obama and against McCain, unconscious or otherwise? The data do not provide conclusive answers. They do offer a strong suggestion that winning in politics begat winning coverage, thanks in part to the relentless tendency of the press to frame its coverage of national elections as running narratives about the relative position of the candidates in the polls and internal tactical maneuvering to alter those positions. Obama’s coverage was negative in tone when he was dropping in the polls, and became positive when he began to rise, and it was just so for McCain as well. Nor are these numbers different than what we have seen before. Obama’s numbers are similar to what we saw for John Kerry four years ago as he began rising in the polls, and McCain’s numbers are almost identical to what we saw eight years ago for Democrat Al Gore. What the findings also reveal is the reinforcing—rather than press-generated—effects of media. We see a repeating pattern here in which the press first offers a stenographic account of candidate rhetoric and behavior, while also on the watch for misstatements and gaffes. Then, in a secondary reaction, it measures the political impact of what it has reported. This is magnified in particular during presidential races by the prevalence of polling and especially daily tracking. While this echo effect exists in all press coverage, it is far more intense in presidential elections, with the explosion of daily tracking polls, state polls, poll aggregation sites and the 24-hour cable debate over their implications. Even coverage of the candidate’s policy positions and rhetoric, our reading of these stories suggest, was tied to horse race and took on its cast. Pagination

Yes. It's a very thorough and well-considered dive. If you bothered to read it, you'd come away knowing that initial coverage of Obama was more negative, but became more positive as he rose in the polls. Initial coverage of McCain was more positive, but became more negative with his responses to the ongoing economic crisis. The negative stats you cite are almost entirely from the period from the conventions through the last debates, and reflect what Pew analysts call "horse race" metrics: positive and negative coverage linked to who is perceived as the front-runner and who is falling behind as cited by the polls, not opinions. It looks like I was wrong about Sarah Palin tainting the coverage of McCain. According to this helpful link you provided, Sarah Palin enjoyed more positive media coverage than negative, and compiled far more positive coverage than Joe Biden, who was rarely covered at all. Funny how you can read this kind of deep contextual dive and come away with "whopping difference." But I'm guessing your mind was already made up. I was of course responding to your post about the press loving McCain until he ran for President, and then hating him. While you can't attach numbers to that, the anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise.

McCain was well-liked by the press during his Presidential campaign, and enjoyed friendly relations that extended to The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live. Mike Huckabee, too The media had pretty good relations with Rudy Guliani back then. I don't think they ever warmed up to Mitt Romney, The same press gently elevated Barack Obama at the expense of Hillary Clinton. They really didn't care for the Clinton circus. If you'll recall, the rightwing media never liked John McCain and was agitating for anyone else. McCain lost a lot of respect from most intelligent people when he chose Sarah Palin. By and large, did the national media prefer Barack Obama over McCain/Palin, swayed by the historical importance of the U.S. electing its first Black president? Sure. Why not?

That still leaves over 150 Republicans in House and Senate who voted to validate Trump's fraudulent claims. They are exactly as complicit as the mob that ignored the rule of law in order to placate an insane President.

fwiw.....investigative journalists have painstakingly chronicled Donald Trump's dishonesty and debunked untold conspiracy theories, and it hasn't mattered a lick to the millions of people who prefer to believe the manufactured myths.

For 40 years, Donald Trump got all the coverage he wanted from mainstream media because he was a spotlight whore and the media considered him a good albeit lightweight story. When he launched his birther takedown of Barack Obama in 2011, the mainstream media gave him far more positive attention than he deserved. When he segued to a Presidential run in 2015, they continued to give him far more coverage than any other candidate, precisely because he was a celebrity. I think the media turned on Trump only when they realized the narcissistic jackhole would be making decisions that affected everyone's lives.

What's happened in the last 20 years has been a profit model that replaces expensive boots on the ground reporting with relatively cheap talking heads. Competing 24/7 news channels changed everything. Some of that's on us. We really do consume the Good Guy/Bad Guy s#!t. But that's cable television. Forget about it. There's been plenty of outstanding reporting going on in print publications and their digital channels, and frankly Twitter out-reported CNN, MSNBC, and FOX all day Wednesday. It's a bit chaotic at the moment, but if you avoid the temptation to post breaking news before vetting it, there's a lot of truth out there.

I've been a journalist. Went to the J-School at UNL. Journalism 101 is that you get multiple sides to a story from the most authoritative source who will talk to you. Because these sources are so valuable, you can't afford to piss them off by willfully misrepresenting them. Once you have their side of the story, you vet the claims through research, sometimes consulting less-partisan experts on the given subject. When a passionate quote doesn't align with a verifiable fact, you're obliged to report it. There may be two sides to a story, but that doesn't mean they are equal. That's why you're a reporter, not a stenographer. Journalists tend to be well-educated, genuinely curious, and obsessed with getting inside information. If a majority of people in this profession lean in one direction, chances are it's closer to the truth.

The problem is people who believe that Rachel Maddow is the left's equivalent to Sean Hannity. The left's equivalent to Sean Hannity is a bi-polar street prophet raging on a Berkeley street corner. When it comes to extremism, the far right has a far more mainstream voice than the far left. If you've ever spent any time with the far left, you know they loath Maddow and MSNBC. What we're calling the more mainstream right is a lot farther right than it used to be, and today's mainstream Democrats could have passed themselves off as Republicans in decades past. If we're talking straight up factual reporting, the facts are biased towards the liberal POV in most cases. That millions of Americans believe the stolen election conspiracy theory suggest rightwing media still prevails without the facts. Scary s#!t. Bias has always been there, but Trump really ups the ante. There are so many reasons to hate and distrust this President, and the most damning evidence is coming from former supporters who confirm his dangerous incompetence. So the anti-Trump "bias" is shared by people with the best inside information, but half of them don't say anything in public to protect themselves and their political affiliation. In two weeks the Presidents enablers will magically transform into people with grave reservations about Donald Trump. They will translate those grave reservations into book deals, and go on liberal media to promote them. Does the mainstream media simultaneously protect Biden? Perhaps more than good journalists should? Yeah. They probably do. Proceed with caution.