That It Matters Is the Problem

TW:...not that they make the comments. So Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson have made ridiculous statements relative to Haiti. Their sentiments are neither new nor surprising. Why should folks expect anything different? That folks respect either of them speaks to the deficiencies of their followers more than anything else.

We Have Different Version Of "Variety"

From Ms. Palin on her upcoming media tour for her "book" via Sullivan:
"An interview with Oprah Winfrey is already scheduled, and I’m also hoping to have the opportunity to talk with Bill O’Reilly, Barbara Walters, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Dennis Miller, Tammy Bruce, and others, including local Alaska personalities Bob & Mark and Eddie Burke. (Variety is the spice of life!)," - Sarah Palin.

TW: That quote frames nicely the parallel universe in which about 20-25% of our country inhabits. That list is "variety"- two celebrity interviewers, 31 flavors of right wing propagandists, and zero folks who would actually ask a journalistically challenging question. The echo chambers live on.

Stewart Is On the Case

For Fox Sake!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

TW: Have been going lite on Stewart recently but that only makes its that much better when we feature another classic.

For instance, I love Cal Thomas truly one of the biggest douche bags ever and has been for the twenty years at least I have seen him defile our media.

I repeat myself but I respect Fox's business model of creating a resounding and reassuring echo chamber for a certain minority of Americans. My only beefs with Fox are when I see allegedly intelligent innocents treating as something different (i.e. an actual news organization attempting to be relatively unbiased). Or when some asshole at my health club turns it on in front of me within my range of vision...that aggravates the shit out of me and has risked violent confrontation.

The Decline Of the Wall Street Journal

TW: Tom Ricks nailed the WSJ philosophy a couple of weeks ago:
From Tom Ricks at Foreign Policy:"...Having toiled at the low pay but high morale WSJ for 17 years in my well-spent youth, I can say that the view we held on the news-gathering side of the organization was that the newspaper's business formula was brilliant -- the news side told American business what it needed to hear, while the edit page told American business what it wanted to hear."

TW: But now that Rupert Murdoch (aka owner of Fox and numerous rags in the UK and Australia) has purchased the WSJ he is employing a tried and true strategy- sensationalist headlines. Sex, conflict and bias sell regardless of the venue.

From Felix Salmon at Reuters:

"...Along the top was the headline “Bankers Face Sweeping Curbs on Pay” — something which occasioned Justin Fox to note that “in the pre-Murdoch era that would have been a 600-word story on page A24, headlined ‘Fed Mulls Pay Guidelines’.”

Underneath that headline was the biggest front-page story: “U.S. Missile U-Turn Roils Allies”. Except there was nothing in the story to indicate that any allies were roiled at all. The online story now has the headline “Allies React to U.S. Missile U-Turn”, along with a formal correction of the old headline.

...The WSJ is now being edited by a man who cut his teeth in the fiercely competitive Australian and UK markets, where front-page stories drive newsstand sales and newsstand sales drive profits. Sweeping curbs on pay and roiled allies make for great headlines, and mean that readers are that much more likely to shell out $2 for the paper

...The WSJ doesn’t need to do this, but Murdoch does: it’s in his blood. A Murdoch paper without punchy headlines which grab you by the throat is pretty much a contradiction in terms. Readers of the WSJ will have to get used to trusting the stories more than the headlines..."

The Circular Morass That Is Our Media

TW: Have posted often on the bias in media, not so much towards the left or right but towards profits. Profits come from viewership, what drives viewership? Sensation, conflict, titillation.

Back when MSM was new, relatively small, and dominated by monopolies (CBS, NBC, UPI, AP one or two local newspapers, etc.), there was a code of relative neutrality and quality that permeated. Understand MSM radio/TV are new since the 1930's and 1950's respectively and really had brief periods of domination of about 30 years each (10 of those overlapping in the '50s).

Since the advent of cable and the internet, the media beast has become a circular beast sated primarily by its own self-generated sensation, conflict and titillation. These things are always evolving just because the current environment appears dire does not mean it will never get better (then again it could get even worse).

From Ezra Klein at WaPo:
"...it's in the competitive pressures to drift toward sensationalism and hot stories. A smear like "death panels" emerges and catches fire because it's fundamentally interesting. You could write a great thriller, or film a poignant drama, about death panels. Not so about health insurance exchanges. That said, the New York Times would probably never mention the lie if given the opportunity. But after it hits talk radio and explodes onto cable news and rips through the blogosphere, it stops being a lie and begins being a story. And though you can refuse to cover a lie, you can't refuse to cover a story. Nor is it even obvious you should. After all, if you don't correct the record, who will?

The problem is that "The Media" is a big beast with a lot of component parts. Some of those parts are respectable and sober. Others aren't. But if the legs run somewhere, the head follows whether it wants to or not. That would be fine if the head commanded the legs. But it's generally the other way around.

The central conflict of interest in the media is that the same institution that's supposed to follow the conversation is also responsible for creating the conversation. That contradiction can be elided so long as everyone in the game is playing by the same rules. And for a brief period, when the "objective" institutions were the only major outlets, that worked out fine.

But with the rise of partisan and sensationalizing mediums like talk radio and cable news and the blogosphere, half of the outlets are now consciously creating the conversation that the other half are following. But the objective institutions haven't responded to this in any obvious way. They just get caught following a manipulated conversation, and so being part of the manipulation, part of the machine that focuses on cynical lies like the death panels rather than policy specifics like the exchanges. That's not the fault of an individual reporter, though. It's structural, and it requires a structural response."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/08/more_on_reporting_the_lies.html

Your Quacks Are Worse Than Mine

"I think that the Democrats have got more crazies than the Republicans do"
-- Liz Cheney July 21. 2009

TW: The left has crazies for sure but there is one massive difference. We do not put them forward as the public face of our party. This is not immaterial it is fundamental. Equivalence in this instance is false and misleading.

Folks like Liz Cheney who appears like clockwork on network television not only refuse to distance themselves from whacky crap like "birther" fantasies but rather when confronted with issue try to tie it to a nebulous attack line that Obama "refuses to defend America" (why is unclear although the implied meaning is that he is not "real American enough").

Yes modern media (i.e. the internet and youtube) allow the whackos broader exposure. The antidote though is simple, public distancing of mainstream politicians from the fringe. This is the element missing from the Republican party. To their detriment and ours.

From Washington Monthly:
"...Limbaugh, of course, is obsessed...The absurd Birther bill in Congress continues to pick up support from right-wing lawmakers, including Rep. John Campbell (R) of California, who appeared on MSNBC's "Hardball" yesterday to defend the proposal. (Chris Matthews held up the birth certificate on screen before telling Campbell, "What you're doing is appeasing the nutcases.... [Y]ou're verifying the paranoia out there.")

...Liz Cheney...was on CNN again this week. This time, she told Larry King that the Birthers' efforts are Obama's fault. Asked if she believes this nonsense, Cheney said:

"I think that the Democrats have got more crazies than the Republicans do. But setting that aside, I think that -- you know, one of the reasons I think you see people so concerned about this, I think that, you know, this issue is people are uncomfortable with having, for the first time ever, I think, a president who seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas. [...]

"I'm saying that people are fundamentally uncomfortable, I think, increasingly uncomfortable with an American president who seems to be afraid to defend America."

...As for the larger issue, whether they realize it or not, Birthers are probably doing themselves far more harm than good. Sure, they're ginning up some excitement among confused activists who don't know better, but they're also making it seem as if the president's most aggressive detractors are stark raving mad.

Michael Medved, a leading far-right voice, recently referred to the Birthers as "the worst enemy of the conservative movement." He added, "It makes us look weird. It makes us look crazy. It makes us look demented. It makes us look sick, troubled, and not suitable for civilized company."
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_07/019176.php

The Dangers Of Living In an Echo Chamber: Red State As an Alternative State

TW: As Mark Sanford's political career blew up today I would point you to the following as an exhibit of blind obedience to ideological politicians whilst slamming around within your own echo chamber. Below was from Erick Erickson at the Red State blog, a place where that 20% or so of the electorate hangs out to be fed unadulterated Fox-like, right-wing propaganda.

At a minimum Dems know winkies are a powerful challenge for male politicians we are a bit more cynical on this front.

UPDATE: Mr. Erickson wrote a follow-up here...net net being a governor, Sanford probably did not have access to a proper bible study group to make him see the error of his sinning...give me a fugging break.

From Red State blog:
"The Lessons of Mark Sanford’s Hike
Posted by Erick Erickson
Tuesday, June 23rd at 10:23AM EDT 80 Comments

First, we need to be clear on the facts — not the media speculation:

Sanford did tell his staff and family where he was going.

Because he was traveling without a security detail, it was in his best interests that no one knew he was gone.

His political enemies — Republicans at that — ginned up the media story.

When confronted by a pestering media, things went downhill.

Again though, at all times there was no doubt that Sanford’s staff and family knew where he was.

Now, here is all you need to know about this whole entire story — the reaction from the erstwhile Republicans angry at Sanford for not being a fiscal squish and from the media all go back to their core belief that without Sanford manning the barricades of government at all times, the government will collapse and people will starve, die, and forget how to read and write.

That’s it.

But that did not happen. Life in South Carolina went on. The world did not end. Government did not go off the rails. That the media and politicians would react as they did says more about their world view than anything else.

It is refreshing that Mark Sanford is secure enough in himself and the people of South Carolina that he does not view himself as an indispensable man."

Glenn Greenwald On the Role Of Media

TW: Another Economist interview, this one with Glenn Greenwald an author and journalist. He touches upon some themes we hit upon here often on media but provides new stuff related "reporting". Again media bias is not so much left/right but towards the pursuit of ratings/profits. Conflict builds ratings, simplicity builds ratings, media stars build ratings. These are realities none of which have much to do with actual reporting, unbiased or otherwise.

From Economist:
DIA: In your demolition of Jeffrey Rosen (at TNR), you made much of a phoney distinction that's often raised, between "reporting" and "blogging". Is there a better distinction, that might be used helpfully to distinguish between what reporters do and what bloggers do?

Mr Greenwald: I have genuine respect for real reporting—things like what Dana Priest did in exposing CIA black sites and conditions at Walter Reed, or what Charlie Savage did in exposing George Bush's abuse of signing statements to circumvent the law. That's real reporting—finding out the truth, documenting facts, exposing deceit and secrecy by government officials and others with power.

But what establishment journalists typically call "reporting" is nothing of the sort. Often—as was the case with Jeffrey Rosen—it's nothing more than rank gossip-mongering or worthless (or worse) stenography. They speak with politically powerful people and simply write down what they say, uncritically passing it on without bothering to scrutinise if it's true or not. That practice is far worse when the people whose comments they're uncritically amplifying are granted anonymity, because then there's no accountability. That's the Judy Miller practice of journalism which—despite her ignominious reputation—is still the predominant method of what they call "reporting". That's not blogging or reporting: it's just mindless servitude to those in power.

At this point, the distinction between "reporting" and "blogging" has eroded quite a bit. I think the one meaningful distinction is that bloggers are willing to engage in explicit activism—working to defeat certain policies or politicians, writing in pursuit of some political-value system—whereas reporters still maintain the pretense that they are pursuing facts without any bias or political agenda.

DIA: Do you see the media as being tilted towards the left or the right?

Mr Greenwald: The predominant bias of the media isn't really best understood as left or right as much as it is loyalty to power. Journalism ought to be the opposite: it ought to be adversarial to power. But for many reasons—the fact that media stars are now very highly-paid celebrities; they work for the largest corporations which rely on their relationship with the government; they are desperate for access to and favourable treatment from political figures; they see themselves as part of the New York/Washington power elite—they empathise with and are a part of the establishment far more than they are adverse to it.

In general, that translates into a right-wing bias, in that conservatives are generally more geared to serving and glorifying elite institutions and the power that inheres in them. And the alliance that formed in the 1990s between media stars and right-wing operatives, who single-handedly fed the Clinton/Lewinksy scandal, still persists. But I think the overwhelming media bias is far more about serving and revering political power than it is about liberalism or conservatism.

DIA: Do you think that the media markets will organise themselves in such a way as to support the kind of reporting that a self-respecting democracy needs? (It seems obvious that they won't support the kind we have now, but will they support something good enough—or better?)

Mr Greenwald: I'm actually rather optimistic about the potential of technologies—principally the internet and all of its accompanying features—to enable real reporting even as newspapers die. The ability to access information is so much greater now, the resources required to obtain that information and to build an audience are so much less, that everything really is rapidly democratising. Financial models are being developed to support new forms of journalism and I think that will continue."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/06/seven_questions_for_glenn_gree.cfm

How Soon We Forget (cont.)

TW: This is the stuff that drives me batshit crazy. One, you have CNBC presenting only one side of an argument led by a Larry Kudlow/Arthur Laffer acolyte, Dennis Kneale, and his panelists. Two, they are headed down the path of Regulation=BAD, Wall Street And Unfettered Capitalism=Good. The world is just not that simple. As evidenced by our freaking economy just about imploding last fall (and it is still very stressed), yet the same acolytes who got us there are back to beating their same old tired drums of Regulation=BAD, Wall Street And Unfettered Capitalism=Good.

Wall Street can be good and it can be bad like the rest of us hence the need for nuance.

The Chamber of Commerce is about one thing, monied interests. It is the ultimate conservative (small c) entity. They oppose any and all regulation and government intervention until of course they need their asses pulled out of the fire like last fall. There is nothing wrong with folks like the Chamber pursuing their own interests but to hear a panelist describe them as "in the trenches doing real business" as if no one else does "real business" makes me want to puke. They are spending $100MM to make sure no reform takes place and no measures are taken to reduce the chances of another "Great Collapse of 2008" occurs. Your grandchildren will be reading about 2008 as a seminal economic event but these folks want to turn the page as if nothing happened.

From Economist:
"...This comment, though, from a CNBC panel on the Chamber of Commerce's new "pro-capitalism" ad campaign, is of the sillier New Deal revisionism.

'We've seen this movie before. During the Great Depression, FDR put in place the New Deal, and while it did a lot of good, there were massive tax hikes, there was onerous regulation and it killed the animal spirits of the economy.'

This is foolish on several levels. "Animal spirits" was, of course, the phrase John Keynes coined to describe why consumers put aside doubts "as a healthy man puts aside the expectation of death". You can say a lot about the White House's plans, but you can't say it's tamping down confidence or rejecting Keynsianism. And if the spirits were "killed", why hasn't America spent the ensuing 75 years wracked by depression? This gets at why the Chamber's prospective $100m campaign doesn't make much sense. Who's in the mood right now for rote defenses of capitalism and rote attacks on the New Deal?

The CNBC host wraps this segment by grumbling that "it's almost an oxymoron: regulation and smart", which explains why he buys his meat from the black market instead of in grocery stores. "

Creating an Alternative Reality

TW: The recent shootings create plenty of opportunity for demagoguery from the left. I will not head down the path of extrapolating the behavior of depraved individuals other than to say if one can isolate their behavior to "individuals" then presumably much "jihadist" behavior can as well, no? Or if not then why not them but the far-right wingers yes?

My point though relates to Fox News and more broadly the right-wing cocoon perpetuated by Fox and others. Charles Krauthammer received an award the other night from Rupert Murdoch for "political commentary" excellence, in his acceptance Krauthammer made remarks which were taken out of context I thought by progressives. Many quoted the part about "alternative reality" as if Krauthammer was critical of Fox, in truth he was being complementary. Here is a longer quotation:

"In that respect, there should be a special award for Fox News. Fox has done a great service to the American polity -- single-handedly breaking up the intellectual and ideological monopoly that for decades exerted hegemony (to use a favorite lefty cliche) over the broadcast media.

"I said some years ago that the genius of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes was to have discovered a niche market in American broadcasting -- half the American people. The reason Fox News has thrived and grown is because it offers a vibrant and honest alternative to those who could not abide yet another day of the news delivered to them beneath layer after layer of often undisguised liberalism.

"What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality."

Putting aside alleged lefty bias in the media to which Krauthammer refers (a huge canard from my perspective but that is for another day), I think Krauthammer is spot on that Fox and others are enabling an alternative reality. A very harmful and wrong-headed alternative reality. The truth is a pliable concept when folks are built up to be respectable sources of information then begin perpetuate ignorance and illogic, their viewers are lead down the path towards ignorance and illogic. A network that features absolute crackpots like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and then backstops them with "fair and balanced" Orwellian journalism from the likes of Krauthammer and Bill Kristol and Neil Cavuto the world gets topsy-turvy where up is down and down is up. Shepard Smith makes unsurprising comment and gets pilloried. Glenn Beck manages to turn a Nazi walking into a Holocaust museum and shooting an African-American guard into a left-wing conspiracy. Who are "they" anyway?

Exhibit A:
When anybody on Fox leaves the rails they are pilloried. Shepard Smith states an obvious point and gets this and this treatment.


Exhibit B:
Glenn Beck of course is the poster child for a certain segment of the right-wing:

The Echo Chamber Rattles On

(click on image to enlarge)

TW: Here is a screen grab from earlier today on Fox Nation. Fox Nation is an on-line site created ostensibly to compete with "lefty" equivalents. But Fox Nation is so biased that it is almost satire for righty media. Today's headlines could be shortened to:

"Obama does not like the US, Obama still might be Muslim who likes Iran more than Israel, Sotomayor is a Latina power gal, and yippee lets talk about 2012 Republican POTUS nominees"

Down in the "culture" section they were still talking about Joe the Plumber and lamenting a judge who decreed no reading the bible in kindergarten.

I actually hit the site a few times a week. If Fox Nation were my primary news source I would be quite depressed and very concerned about the future as well. Again I respect Fox's need to generate profits, but one should be if not wary at least well-aware of such blatant bias.

Daily Kos is very biased in favor of progressive causes but Kos is not meant to be mainstream media.

Obama As Fascist...Umm I Don't Think So

"You’ve got to be careful using the term ‘economic fascism’ in the right way, so it doesn’t come off as extreme.”
—Saul Anzus, former Michigan Republican Party chairman, quoted by John Harwood in today’s Times. [tw: you may vaguely recall Anzus, he was one of the team of "all-star" candidates for the Republican national committee chairmanship won by Mike Steele]

TW: Apparently some on the right are attempting to label Obama (and his cohorts) as fascists. Democrat, liberal, socialist, radical, terrorist and Muslim have not worked so they are attempting a bit of jujitsu as fascist is typically used pejoratively by those on the left describing the right not vice versa. So what is a fascist exactly, it is one of those words oft used with far more connotations than well-understood and/or accepted definitions. I turned to Wikipedia:

From Wikipedia:
"Fascism is a radical, authoritarian, and nationalist political ideology.[1][2][3][4] Fascists advocate the creation of a single-party state.[5] Fascists believe that nations and races are in perpetual conflict whereby only the strong can survive by being healthy, vital, and by asserting themselves in combat against the weak.[6] Fascist governments forbid and suppress criticism and opposition to the government and the fascist movement.[7] Fascism opposes class conflict and blames capitalist liberal democracies for creating class conflict and in turn blames communists for exploiting class conflict.[8] Fascists reject the individualism and self-interest of laissez-faire capitalism.[9] Many fascist leaders have claimed to support a "Third Way" in economic policy, which they believed superior to both the rampant individualism of unrestrained capitalism and the severe control of state communism.[10][11] This was to be achieved by a form of government control over business and labor (called "the corporate state" by Mussolini).[12] Some call this corporatism[13] while some others do not use the term corporatism to describe the fascist economic arrangement.[14]
Following the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II and the publicity surrounding the atrocities committed during the period of fascist governments, the term fascist has been used as a pejorative word.[15]"

TW: There is much going on this the above definitions which is why those who wish to taint others with the odor of fascism are able to so do frequently with at least some degree of accuracy. By focusing on the "economic" angle Anzus et al. are presumably reacting to Obama's aggressive policies to address the Great Contraction via financial bailouts etc. Obama's policies have also been described as corporatist (a whole other definitional alley but very roughly a concept associated with picking private industry winners and losers) in particular related to the recent actions towards the automakers.

Without digressing into the validity of those assertions, I would merely point one to the other aspects of the fascist definition- nationalism, suppression of dissent, single party state, paranoid fear of communism (or perhaps terrorism) etc. which I would think would be hard to pin on Obama et al.

Those who use the fascist label almost always do so pejoratively to recall Mussolini, Franco and most aggressively Hitler. I believe those associations with Obama are a touch challenging as well. Back to the drawing board Saul.

Ya Think....

TW: I do not begrudge Fox New's business model of pursuing profits by taking an unbashed right-wing slant to their programming. I merely get frustrated when friends and acquaintances get sucked into the Orwellian propaganda from Fox that it is in anyway "fair and balanced". Just understand and appreciate what it is (and no ABC, CBS, NBC are not the left-wing equivalents).

From Economist:
"[quoting Media Matters]

'Fox News has provided attendance and organizing information for the events on air and online dozens of times. You name it, they’ve likely done it. Fox has offered viewers and readers such vital organizing information as protest dates and locations and addresses of Web sites where people can learn more. It has even posted information and publicity material for the events on its own Web site. Tea-party planners are now using the planned attendance of Fox News hosts to promote their protests and listing Fox News contributors as “Tea Party Sponsor[s]” on their Web site.'

Fox has even hired a gonzo motivational speaker who dresses up as Tom Paine, and who recently asked his supporters to mail bags of tea to Congress (the "suspicious items" are removed in the mail room), to promote the events on the air. There's something unseemly about a network using the public airwaves to call for revolution, especially when that network spent George Bush's presidency as, more or less, an arm of the state. (It was the only network to break away from 2009 inauguration coverage to run Mr Bush's speech upon arriving home to Texas for his retirement.) But this might just be one future of American journalism, partisan and proudly so, the way that the earliest newspapers backed one party or another. The Tea Party protesters might have to drop their pretense of being "grassroots", but only for now. Later, this will be the norm."

That Darn Conservative Media Bias

TW: I have mentioned before my firm belief that media is biased not ideologically but towards whatever means generates the most profit. This piece contradicts me suggesting the Republicans have enjoyed the favorable bias. I would say at a minimum it supports the notion that the Republicans are just very good a crying wolf about alleged liberal bias.

From Bloomington Herald Times:
"[Researchers at Indiana University have concluded] that network television news coverage from 1992-2004 favored Republicans over Democrats.

The Republican advantage has been demonstrated before, by different researchers over different time periods, despite the constant howling about a liberal media bias.

What the Indiana University telecommunications professors have done is look at “the microdetail of news broadcasts"
...“There is absolutely no doubt the Republicans are brilliant in handling images,” Grabe said. “I don’t know if the Democrats just suffer from low metabolism or what precisely it is, but they’re not as aggressive and not as smart about image handling.”

The researchers examined 62 hours of major network news broadcasts during the presidential campaigns of 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004. Instead of simply measuring the volume of time spent on candidate coverage, they looked at the camera angles, shot lengths, who had the last say and other positive and negative components of visual imagery — television’s stock in trade.

They documented straight-on camera shots (neutral), low angle shots, which make a candidate look bigger and more powerful (positive) and high angle shots that make a candidate look smaller and weaker (negative). They counted “lip flap shots” in which narration goes over the image of a candidate speaking (negative) and “the Goldilocks effect” in which one candidate gets the last say and is better and more favorably seen by viewers.

In every campaign, Republican candidates came out with the most favorable coverage. Some campaigns were striking in the tilt in favor of the GOP.

For example, in 1992, Republicans got the final word in news segments 57.9 percent of the time. In 1996, the Republican candidate, Bob Dole, enjoyed the positive, Goldilocks effect eight times more than the Democrat, Bill Clinton.

As their publisher, the Oxford University Press, puts it: “The book draws from a variety of disciplines, including political science, behavioral biology, cognitive neuroscience and media studies to investigate the visual framing of elections in an incisive, fresh and interdisciplinary fashion.”

“The brain is very much wired to have an automatic response to images, especially when they’re colorful,” Grabe said. “The way the brain is wired, if you trust the cognitive scientists who do brain scans, is that the brain is not very specialized for the written or oral processing of words, but it’s supremely wired for image processing, and that’s why images are so powerful.”

It goes far beyond just camera angles and who got the last word, however. Grabe said Republicans have been superb in portraying candidates such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush as populists, while the Democrats have been miserable at it.

“Look at 2000 and 2004,” Grabe said. “Karl Rove was very good at putting Bush in the position of being the regular guy of the regular people — a guy you’d be comfortable having a beer with, a guy comfortable clearing brush and using a chainsaw.

“On the Democratic side you had Gore and Kerry, two blue-blooded, brainy, nerdy guys who were utterly uncomfortable in the populist mode, doing things like wearing jeans and catching footballs on the airport tarmac,” she went on. “That was not their strong suit; they were uncomfortable, and it showed.”

...The researchers don’t give their peers in either print or broadcast news a pass for allowing themselves to be manipulated by Republican strategists. “We’re not saying that producers of broadcasts news are necessarily biased,” said Bucy. “But it’s been a time-honored tactic to continually complain about liberal bias. At some point, people get so tired of the criticism that they overcompensate.”

Grabe said former Republican National Chairman, Rich Bond, once used a sports analogy to explain the technique. “He said if you look at any good sports coaches, you will see that they constantly beat up on the refs, knowing that sooner or later, the refs will cut you some slack. That’s been the admitted strategy for some time, and it works.”

...“People tend to overestimate how much people rely on cable news stations,” Grabe said. “Their audience, all stations combined, is smaller, or close to equal to one major network.”
She went on to point out that a recent Pew study found that 68 percent of Americans rely on television for their political news.

“A lot of people want to downgrade television news and often completely exclude television as an information source,” Grabe said. “Well, 23 percent of Americans are functionally illiterate. Give them an Advil pill bottle, and they can’t read the instructions. So it becomes a bit of an elitist position, and, perhaps, an inaccurate analysis, to ignore the power of network news.”

Manipulating Media And Health Care Reform

TW: These clips are a twofer for me. One they demonstrate something which continues to fascinate me- how media distorts information, not because they are necessarily politically biased but frequently due merely to ignorance and bias toward "showing both sides". Two because it shows how unbelievably difficult it will be to reform health care in this country, something that must happen else we sink into a morass of inequity and misallocated resources. The Olbermann clip dissects how a politically biased "expert" insinuates herself into a debate facilitated by the politically biased media (Drudge, Fox and Limbaugh) but also the merely lazy (CNN and Bloomberg).

The 2nd clip to me is almost more frustrating, the CNN anchor is blindly pushing "showing both sides" without any apparent knowledge or the topic or for that matter without paying any attention to her own reporter who is basically calling the premise of the "expert" false.

The Media Is Biased...In Search Of Conflict

TW: Folks, usually on the right, get uptight about media bias. I have said this before and will repeat, the media is highly biased but not for one party or the other, merely for conflict. Conflict is loud, emotional and made for TV. The Republicans are clearly enjoying their "opposition" role but so did the Democrats for the past eight years. It is amusing to see the channel with the most Republicans being the NBC channels, the alleged left-wingers. CNBC has never been in the least left, I can gag watching their continuous odes to business (and of course Larry "Goldilocks" Kudlow has a show there).

So the Dems just need to get used to the above and govern through it.

Pathetic Know Nothingness In Action

TW: The know-nothings and ignorance is bliss crowd on the right-wing gets their wish, Joe Wurzelbacher as war reporter. Sad really.

From Economist:
"RIGHT-leaning blog-and-video site PajamasMedia decided that it would be a boost to its journalism—or its ads revenue, perhaps—to hire Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher as a correspondent in Israel. Mr Wurzelbacher filed his first dispatch to a bevy of TV reporters who hadn't seen a good trainwreck in months.

I'll be honest with you. I don't think journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what's happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I-I think it's asinine... I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you're gonna sit there and say, 'Well look at this atrocity,' well you don't know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.

We'd hope to never have to comment on Mr Wurzelbacher again. We assumed that, as an Average Joe who simply wanted to own his own plumbing company, he would return to his Ohio home and start working hard again. But it seems he's figured out what Paris Hilton and Johnny Knoxville took years to discover: being a nitwit in public is much easier than working."

From conservative blogger Confablulum:

"But any Pajamas Media figure who revels in Joe’s new assignment ought to lose whatever credibility they’ve built up as a serious news organization, or an enterprise seriously invested in improving upon the mainstream media’s flaws...he’s cheerleading exactly the kind of thing he’d criticize were the mainstream media to do it. Coocooning, I think he calls it. But has The New York Times, to cite one frequent Instapundit target, ever so cynically pandered to its audience by hiring a reporter so little qualified? Has it ever so blatantly sacrificed the quality of information it provides its readers? Even if the answer is yes — which I don’t think it is — it makes Pajamas Media no better than the very news organizations against which it defines itself as a superior alternative."

http://culture11.com/blogs/theconfabulum/2009/01/09/say-it-aint-so-glenn/

From Andrew Sullivan:

"The conservative blogosphere began as a way to ask more questions, to get more scrutiny out there, to add new perspectives to the cocoon of the MSM, to crack the silly professional smugness that infected many newsrooms. It is ending in the dissemination of propaganda in the defense of war and an attack on journalism itself"

Why Do We Imprison So Many People?

TW: Many conservatives see a chart like above and see progress, I see failure.

From Reason:

"According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report released yesterday, 2.3 million Americans were behind bars in 2007, 1.5 percent more than in 2006 and a new record. The number includes about 780,000 people in local jails, 1.4 million in state prisons, and 200,000 in federal prison. Roughly one in five state prisoners and more than half of federal prisoners were serving time for drug offenses. Assuming the percentage of drug offenders in jails is similar to the percentage in state prisons, the total is more than half a million. "That is ten times the total in 1980," notes the Drug Policy Alliance, "and more than all of western Europe (with a much larger population) incarcerates for all offenses."

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/130543.html