HE’S NOT HEAVY, HE’S MY BLOGWATCH: No time for real blogwatch, but here’re some random links. More posting presently. (And this time I mean it…)

Brink Lindsey: Death in Africa.

This site is interesting–esp. if you read Tunku Varadarajan a lot, which I do–but Virginia Postrel makes some good points about its omissions (and those of the New York Times). And speaking of media bias/labeling, here’s a monster post from Zonitics on the subject. I will repeat my incessant claim: Labeling various people “conservative” or “liberal” isn’t a big deal. Any claims of media bias are more firmly based on far more subjective criteria. I know that’s also less convincing to people than the kind of analysis you can do with charts and graphs, but bias reveals itself in a newspaper’s approach to an issue, not in its labeling. For two reasons: 1) Labeling discrepancies are easy to catch, and newspapers want to look unbiased; and 2) Right-wing folk have been complaining about labeling discrepancies for two decades now. I can’t think of a similar left-wing complaint about the major media that would be as easy to fix as labeling. (If someone can, feel free to email me.) Possible counterargument: The Washington Post ranks as least-biased about labeling, according to Zonitics, and also feels more balanced than the WSJ or NYT. (Note that “balanced” does not mean “accurate”! It just means that opposing stances on controversial issues are given more or less equal play.) Oh, and I don’t mean this to detract from the value of the time and effort Zonitics and Geoffrey Nunberg spent on this stuff–I need people who do real research, off of which I can bounce my ideas.

And here are some YalePundits.

Oh, and this is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. Via Shamed.