They will never stop talking about it ...

Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, I mean. In this segment from today's Morning Joe, Miki grumps about Bill Clinton in a current interview responding to questions about the Lewinsky affair. This interview doesn't sound to me like he's ducking the issue, he engaged with the questions the reporter, Craig Melvin, was asked. Until it was obvious that that Melvin wasn't going to stop asking about it.

Miki seems to think anything less than permanently banning Bill Clinton from public life is insufficient punishment for him. Melvin seems to be outraged that Clinton didn't make a private apology to Monica. Even though the clip shows him very publicly apologized to her by name. And, of course, if he had spoken to her privately after the scandal, the media would still be drooling over it.

Mika: We've Been Waiting Decades For This Bill Clinton Interview 06/04/2018:

The scandal and Clinton's impeachment were two decades ago. But the national press got such a thrill out of it they keep going back to it at every opportunity.

For a reminder of how thoroughly Bill Clinton was investigated on the Lewinsky affair and other sex and sexual-assault allegations, Joe Conason's A ‘Reckoning’ For Bill Clinton? Don’t Forget Starr’s $70 Million Probe National Memo 11/17/2018.

I know I'm doing my own tiny bit to give extra visibility to these reports. But here is a Velshi & Ruhle clip on the same topic, Steve Kornacki: Bill Clinton’s Script On Lewinsky Hasn’t Changed 06/04/2018:

This, like the Morning Joe clip, is a weird flashback to 1998-2000. And, astonishingly, the reporting is just as bad

Corporate Dems: they just can't help themselves

George Lakoff has spent years advising the Democrats to stop adopting Republican framing of political issues. He talked about it in this interview with Paul Rosenberg, This Is Why Conservatives Win Salon 11/22/2014. He talks there about some of the scientific and philosophical ideas behind his theory.

But what I consider most important in his advice to Democrats is that they need to stop framing issues in Republican terms. Here's how Lakoff puts it in the interview:

The reason for that is that in the brain, there’s a hierarchy of frames, which is there in neural circuitry. When you strengthen something lower in the hierarchy that implies strengthening things up higher in the hierarchy, which is the way that neural system works. So that is why conservatism has come as far as it has in the last 30 years. The conservatives have been using their language, getting it out there on all the issues, and progresses have done the opposite.

The reason for this is really interesting, because progressives think that they have to speak to the other guy in the other guy’s language. You’ve got to speak their language for them to understand it. It’s exactly the wrong way. Because as soon as you use conservative language, it activates conservative frames, which activates the conservative moral system, which strengthens it, and weakens your own. [my emphasis ]

A classic example is the long-time habit of Democrats framing the right to abortion by saying they are personally opposed to it, but what protect women's right to choose. For Hillary Clinton, that meant for years that she said that "abortion should be safe, legal and rare." Those formulations play to the conservative frames, because they are an obvious Mugwump way of saying, "I agree that abortion is wrong but I want people who want to do that wrong thing to have the right to do that."

All the while the conservatives have been arguing that abortion is murder, people who do abortions or have them are "baby-killers," and America since Roe v Wade in 1973 is worse than Hitler Germany and the Holocaust because of all the "unborn babies" that have been aborted since then. This bit from Pat Robertson in 1992 was unfortunately all too typical of what respectably Republican Christian Rightists still say (Robertson Letter Attacks Feminists New York Times 08/25/1992):

A fund-raising letter written by the television evangelist Pat Robertson in opposition to a proposed equal rights amendment to the Iowa Constitution suggests that feminists want women to kill their children and practice witchcraft.

The equal rights amendment, on which Iowans will vote Nov. 3, is a broadly worded measure that would bar sex discrimination.

But Mr. Robertson's letter, distributed late last month to supporters of the evangelical organization Christian Coalition, described the proposal as part of a "feminist agenda" that "is not about equal rights for women." Claims of 'Anti-Family'

Instead, the letter said, "it is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." [my emphasis]

There was definitely a lack of symmetry between the two parties on that issue. Hillary stepped up her game on the abortion issue during the 2016 Presidential campaign, straightforwardly defending the right to abortion.

But the old Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC) with which the Clintons were closely identified was all about framing moderately liberal positions to sound like conservative ones. And Hillary had a bit of a present-day relapse here (Emma Gray, Hillary Clinton: ‘There Is Nothing Elitist About Fighting For Women’s Rights’ Huffpost 05/04/2017):

“For a lot of women, it stung to realize that perhaps our country hadn’t come as far as we hoped; that not only are sexism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia still with us, but they run deep,” Clinton said. “And a lot of troubling ideas have been elevated in the weeks and months that followed, including the ridiculous, insulting notion that we only care about women’s rights in certain parts of our country ― not in what some in the press call ‘real America.’” ...

“Women’s issues aren’t minor issues,” she continued, firmly. “They’re not luxury issues to address after everything else is resolved. They are central to human rights to economies to our national security, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. There is nothing elitist about fighting for women’s rights, equality and opportunity.” [my emphasis]

The first part sounds like the current rhetoric in the ongoing corporate Democrats' attack on Sanders- and Warren-style economic progressives. The accusation that Hillaryites "only care about women’s rights in certain parts of our country ― not in what some in the press call ‘real America’" is one that I literally haven't encountered anywhere.

Her comment, “Women’s issues aren’t minor issues,” is also part of the current corporate Democratic attacks on progressives. But, more than that, it falls into exactly the trap that Lakoff emphasized in the title of one of his books, Don't Think of An Elephant. That's one of his favorite examples, because if you say "don't think of an elephant," it immediately makes the listeners think of an elephant.

So in that formulation just quoted, Hillary could have made the same points by saying things like "women's issues are central concerns for working class and middle class women and men, as well." But instead she invoked unnamed parties who think such issues are "minor" or "elitist." Instead of, for instance, criticizing "the elite" for not paying attention enough to critical women's issues or outright opposing them.

She knows how to do that, because she went on to talk about the health-care debate in a more straightforward mode:

Clinton was particularly critical of the Trump administration’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and roll back funding for women’s health care both domestically and internationally. ... “Over the last 100 days, this Congress and administration have been working really hard to turn back health care ― to turn back health care for 24 million people, but it would affect 180 million people,” she said. “Even today, they’re trying to force through that health care plan.”

Despite their loyalty to corporate elites, the corporate media have never been especially friendly to the Clintons, and their reporting is inaccurate or openly hostile. So we always need to be cautious about jumping to conclusions about reports like this because they may report them in a way that doesn't necessarily convey the actual context and tone of a speech like that. (As of this writing, I haven't located an online transcript or video of the speech.)

But it certainly seems like the establishment Dems are continuing their approach during the primaries in 2016 of trying to paint Democratic progressives as "Bernie Bros" not sufficiently committed to women's issues. Politics is politics.

Bigotry and economic grievances, the unending discussion

Understanding the ideological churn of current politics always overlaps with the ongoing political battles and continuing ideological churn. Not least because the various actors in the process have their own preferences for how they would prefer things to be interpreted in support of their own perspectives. (The present writer does not pretend to be entirely immune from such temptations.)

One thing we've seen is the latest round of the perennial left and left-center hand-wringing and contention over the role of so-called identity politics in comparison to bread-and-butter issues. There are a couple of perspectives that weigh especially heavily on the discussion.

One is the perspective adopted by prominent reporters and pundits in the 1960s in response to the popularity of George Wallace and the populist edge of the Southern Strategy as embodied by Spiro Agnew. Digby Parton did an excellent brief roundup The truth about Donald Trump’s angry white men: Inside the media narrative that the media doesn’t understand Salon 05/28/2016. She quotes quotes star columnist Joseph Kraft in 1968, accommodating himself to the accusations from rightwing politicians like Wallace that the Democrats were arrogant elitists, out of touch with average Americans, i.e., conservative white people, an attitude reflected by the liberal press:

Are we merely neutral observers, seekers after truth in the public interest? Or do we, as the supporters of Mayor Daley and his Chicago police have charged, have a prejudice of our own?

The answer, I think is that Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans–in Middle America. And the results show up not merely in occasional episodes such as the Chicago violence but more importantly in the systematic bias toward young people, minority groups, and the of presidential candidates who appeal to them.

To get a feel of this bias it is first necessary to understand the antagonism that divides the middle class of this country. On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income whites sure of and brimming with ideas for doing things differently. On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovation.

The most important organs of and television [sic in the Salon version] are, beyond much doubt, dominated by the outlook of the upper-income whites.

In these circumstances, it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America. Equally it seems wise to exercise a certain caution, a prudent restraint, in pressing a claim for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at all times the agent of the sovereign public.

This is become a persistent, even chronic, pose taken by our star pundits, who themselves are far more highly compensated in absolute and relative terms than they were in the 1960s. In the well-established posture, pundits earning One-Percenter-level salaries claim to understand and speak for Sarah Palin's Real Americans, who they take to be someone crude on issues of racial equality and women's rights but who have fundamental values and policy preferences that mirror the Republican economic perspective: deregulation, budget balancing, cutting social services including Social Security and Medicare, private schools and private prisons, hostility to civilian government, endless wars, a sturdy and healthy patriotism, even the latter regrettably spills over into xenophobia and bigotry.

Examples of this tendency among our star pundits came be found every Sunday morning on the network political talk shows.

The second perspective is a somewhat lazy left outlook, especially associated at the moment with advocates for third parties, even though those are generally hard to be found. By "lazy" I mean taking a superficial and unreflective position, in this case arguing at a relatively abstract level that economic troubles in general lead to frustration, discontent and alienation that makes someone like Trump attractive just because he's an oppositional figure who can therefore appeal to people who don't share his extreme racial and xenophobic and misogynist views.

Digby describes the evolution of the press perspective of themselves as the true friends of the Real Americans:

This began the decades-long self-flagellation by the media (and the cynical exploitation of it by the Republicans) wherein it was assumed that the most misunderstood and underserved people in the whole country were salt-of-the-earth white folks nobody ever thinks about. Except that it’s anything but the truth. Every single election cycle since 1968 the press has been obsessed with this mythical Real American who is always angry, always frustrated, always railing against the so-called elites because they allegedly only care about the racial minorities or the women or somebody other than them. Then we end up with a mass soul search in which we all come to understand that the key to the election is to address these people’s grievances.

In those early days it was referred to as “The Silent Majority” of Richard Nixon, which Donald Trump has unoriginally revived. Since then, pollsters have come up with slogans to target certain demographics (NASCAR Dads and Waitress Moms are two examples), which the press then uses as symbols of this Real America, representing the breathing heart and soul of the country.

1976 featured media obsessing over the everyman outsider Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian from the South who spoke to Real Americans who just wanted a president who wouldn’t lie to them. It wasn’t long before they discovered that he didn’t really fit the bill. The Real Americans, it turned out, were more conservative than Carter and really wanted the Gipper to Make America Great Again. And thus the most Real Americans in the whole country were discovered: the Reagan Democrat ...

These are people we now refer to as “Republicans” but the myth of these alleged swing voters has persisted even to this day, as reporters commonly wonder if Trump is going to be able to nab those Reagan Democrats, who no longer exist.

What she's doing there is challenging one of the more obvious and consequential features of the dysfunctional nature of our corporate media in its affect on democratic politics in the US.

Both she and Charlie Pierce are writers whose mockery of the notion that hardcore white supremacist or woman-hating voters should be viewed as the simple expression of economic discontent strike me as being directly against both the pretentious Pod Pundit posture and the superficial leftie version. And they are right to do so. Dylan Matthews provides some contemporary examples of this press phenomenon in Taking Trump voters’ concerns seriously means listening to what they’re actually saying Vox 10/15/2016.

And without pretending that this circle can be squared easily, I still insist that we need to be able to walk and talk at the same time on this matter. Joe Stiglitz in Project Syndicate reminds us that economic conditions in the United States really are troubling, and widespread economic distress is very real:

But several underlying factors also appear to have contributed to the closeness of the race. For starters, many Americans are economically worse off than they were a quarter-century ago. The median income of full-time male employees is lower than it was 42 years ago, and it is increasingly difficult for those with limited education to get a full-time job that pays decent wages.

Indeed, real (inflation-adjusted) wages at the bottom of the income distribution are roughly where they were 60 years ago. So it is no surprise that Trump finds a large, receptive audience when he says the state of the economy is rotten. But Trump is wrong both about the diagnosis and the prescription. The US economy as a whole has done well for the last six decades: GDP has increased nearly six-fold. But the fruits of that growth have gone to a relatively few at the top – people like Trump, owing partly to massive tax cuts that he would extend and deepen.

At the same time, reforms that political leaders promised would ensure prosperity for all – such as trade and financial liberalization – have not delivered. Far from it. And those whose standard of living has stagnated or declined have reached a simple conclusion: America’s political leaders either didn’t know what they were talking about or were lying (or both).

And this definitely affects the political climate and people's understandings of how the political system is working.

It's just that the relationship is complicated and interwoven with other factors, including psychological and culture factors, including things as obvious of habitual party loyalty.

It's also critical to recognize that chronically low election turnout means that there is big difference demographically between eligible voters and actual voters. The latter group being considerably whiter and more affluent than the former.

My concern is that this is not an either-or matter of either bigotry or real economic concerns. Both are real. Both matter a lot. And easy simplifications on either can lead political analysts and journalists astray. From whatever part of the political spectrum they may be coming. The Dylan Matthews piece linked above points out some of the relevant complications.

Trump and the Beltway Village press

The economist Brad DeLong used to title a lot of his blog posts with "Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?" Here's another in an endless series of examples that raise that question.

You think Trump's support has something to do with white racism? Xenophobia? Authoritarianism? Media elder statesman Tom Brokaw was on Meet the Press today to set you Mean Libruls with your Political Correctness straight (Meet the Press Transcript - September 6, 2015):

And that's the constituency of Donald Trump right now. There are a lot of people out there who just say, "Look, I don't want to deal with conventional politicians. This guy is saying all those things." But at some point, he's got to tell us if he's going to take down ObamaCare and replace it with something that's a lot cheaper, a lot more effective. Come on, give me the details on that.

If you're going to move 11 million migrants back to their home country, how much is that going to cost? And the point of that is, that if someone came to him with a real estate deal that was only about this is what I can do, and no numbers attached to it, he'd throw them out of the office. And at some point, both the press and I think voters, have to say, "Show me the money."

Yes, you silly hippies, Trump's fans like him because he's, uh, unconventional. And the problem with a massive nationwide police sweep to relocate 11 million or so undocumented workers out of the country, including American citizens by birth? Well, The Donald just hasn't told us how much it will cost yet.! Hey, nobody important wants to hear a bunch of whining about racism and brutality and violations of Constitutional rights and all your other useless librul obsessions.

Michael Tomasky takes on the Trump story in the New York Review of Books 09/24/2015; accessed 09/06/2015. He has a more realistic assessment with this:

Is Trump not the logical culmination of where Republican politics have been headed for many years now, going back to the Clinton and Bush presidencies, but especially during the tenure of Barack Obama? Two qualities more than any others have driven conservatism in our time. The first is cultural and racial resentment, felt by the mostly older and very white population the GOP increasingly represents—resentment against a fast-changing, more openly sexual America, as well as against dark-skinned immigrants, and White House occupants, and gay people and political correctness and the “moocher class” and all the rest. The second is what we might call spectacle—the unrelenting push toward a rhetorical style ever more gladiatorial and ever more outraged (and outrageous), driven initially by talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and now reproduced on websites, podcasts, and Twitter feeds too numerous to mention. There is a strong tendency, perfected over the years by Fox News, to cover and discuss domestic politics as a combination of war, sport, and entertainment all at once.

There's one of those "Is Trump not ...?" constructions that annoy me because it's a way of taking a position without committing to it.

And this is also an important observation about how even though Trump takes:

... a few heterodox and even surprisingly progressive positions, it was resentment—specifically, his remarks about Mexico “sending” us rapists and criminals, back in June — that vaulted him to the top of polls. Trump has continued to stake out far-right positions on immigration, calling for the deportation of around 11 million undocumented people and an end to birthright citizenship, which has been guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment since 1868.

The seemingly left-leaning positions Trump is taking is a typical part of what Public Eye called "sucker punch" populism, which could also be thought of as "sucker populism." The seemingly progressive parts of his campaign talk are not likely to be priorities for him as President. And they don't seem to be a major part of Trump's emotional appeal to so many Republicans.

Celebrity dinners for politicians and media stars, and the sad state of Bob Woodward

I'm to the point that I just don't like to see the President appearing at celebrity press events where stars of the allegedly serious news media do high-level celebrity networking and listen to Presidents and aspiring Presidents do a comedy act. These events promote the notion that politics is mainly a variation of show business and deepen the already shamelessly deferential attitude that the national press shows toward politicians in good standing with the business Establishment.

This weekend, it was Gridiron Club Dinner 2013: Obama Pokes Fun At Self, Reporters (Reuters/Huffington Post) 03/09/2013.

Attending the Gridiron Club dinner, Obama made light of a recent back and forth between his administration and Woodward, the veteran Washington Post journalist whose reporting on the Watergate scandal helped bring down Richard Nixon's presidency.

"Can anybody tell me when an administration has ever regretted picking a fight with Bob Woodward?" Obama joked. "What's the worst that could happen?"

Woodward and White House economic adviser Gene Sperling had a public tussle that played itself out in a leaked email, in which Sperling told the veteran journalist he would regret taking a position on one of Obama's policies. Woodward suggested the move was an example of White House intimidation.

"Who knew Gene could be so intimidating," Obama joked about Sperling. "Or let me phrase it differently: who knew anybody named Gene could be so intimidating?"

Woodward received some well-deserved criticism and ridicule for being such a whiner and a schmuck around that incident.

But Woodward's claim was ridiculed not only because it was silly whining. It also reflected Woodward's go-with-the-flow brand of journalism, in which he tailors not only his analytic spin but his reporting according to changing Beltway Village fashion. Gene Lyons called out an important point in the Woodward flap in Ignoring The Sequester's Inconvenient Truths National Memo 03/06/3013, which is that Sperling was trying to correct Woodward from making a Republican-friendly claim that was not only factually wrong but embarrassingly obviously so:

Bob Woodward, the Washington Post editor ... spent much of last week on national TV demonstrating that he can’t distinguish a warning from an apology.

"You do not ever have to apologize to me," Woodward had responded to an allegedly intimidating email from longtime White House source, Gene Sperling. "I also welcome your personal advice. I am listening."

Wow, that must have been scary! Faced with incredulity after the inoffensive email became public, Woodward alibied that he'd never exactly called it threatening.

Which begs the question of why he was talking about it on TV. Look, people frequently wander into newspaper offices describing government plots against them — often spelled out in all caps, with lots of red-ink underlining and rows of exclamation points. Most often they’re gently shown the door.

But I digress. Sperling's point was that Woodward was completely off base in saying President Obama had "moved the goalposts" by seeking to close tax loopholes enabling guys like Mitt Romney to pay lower income tax rates than his wife's horse trainers.

Could there be anybody in America who didn't know that?

Obama's not-especially-funny joke, at which no doubt the crowd laughed politely - shoot, this crowd may have thought it was hilarious! - actually flattered Woodward by suggesting that he was still some kind of go-getter investigative reporter. In fact, he is mainly known now for his hagiographic sketches of the powerful. Though in his various account of George W. Bush's Presidency, he eventually shifted from hagiography to safe criticism. Rick Perlstein sketches out the evolution of Bod Woodward's George W. Bush in Reading Bob Woodward The Nation 03/06/2013. He also summarizes how the Bob Woodward of the Watergate story is a very different figure that the Woodward of polite Presidential jokes:

All credit to David Folkenflik of NPR for having the presence of mind to invite us to turn to page 105 of All the President's Men to remind Woodward what a real White House threat sounds like: John Mitchell in September 1972 telling his partner Carl Bernstein that if The Washington Post published what it knew about Mitchell personally approving the payment of political spies, Post publisher Katherine Graham was "gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer."

They ran it anyway, of course. They ran it even though Richard Nixon’s re-election juggernaut was proving impermeable to Woodward and Bernstein’s ongoing Watergate full-court press, and many among Georgetown’s cocktail set had begun to consider the Post's ongoing indulgence of the story a bit of an embarrassing obsession, kind of the way a blogger like Glenn Greenwald is looked upon now. Because back then, Woodward had guts. He’s something different now: a barometer of Washington conventional wisdom, who more appears to say what he chooses to say based upon his continually evolving sense of who is up and who is down among precisely that same Georgetown cocktail set. ...

Continue reading Bob Woodward. But not the prose. You won't learn much from that. Read the man instead. That way you’ll learn what the people in power think about what you’re supposed to think.

But even though Woodward wasn't threatened, the Obama Administration has pursued the most drastic approach to Executive secrecy and prosecution of leakers of any Administration ever. Bradley Manning's treatment in military confinement, for which the officials responsible for it should be prosecuted as torture perpetrators, is facing decades of prison time under the prosecution the Obama Administration is bringing against him.

But the major media types who show up to chuckle at the President's bad jokes aren't boycotting the event because of Obama's treatment of Manning. And certainly not because of his push to shut down Wikileaks and arrest Julian Assange.

The Obama Administration has been making some real and substantial threats to the kind of investigative reporting that originally made Bob Woodward famous. (Though Gene Sperling's now-famous e-mail to Woodward was not one of them.) And this Gridiron Club Dinner gives them both Obama and the media bigwigs to pretend that it's all a big joke.

One more grim irony in this is that both the Bush and Obama Administrations gave Woodward extensive access to classified documents to write about the Obama White House when it benefited their PR spin. Yet neither the leakers nor Woodward himself are being subjected to the kind of treatment that Bradley Manning or Julian Assange are facing.

It may show that my sense of humor is declining. But the White House text of Obama's speech I find down right disturbing (Remarks by the President at the Gridiron Dinner 03/09/2013):

Before I begin, I know some of you have noticed that I'm dressed a little differently from the other gentlemen. Because of sequester, they cut my tails. (Laughter.) My joke writers have been placed on furlough. (Laughter.) I know a lot of you reported that no one will feel any immediate impact because of the sequester. Well, you're about to find out how wrong you are. (Laughter.)

Of course, there's one thing in Washington that didn't get cut -- the length of this dinner. (Laughter.) Yet more proof that the sequester makes no sense. (Laughter.) ...

But don't worry. We're all friends again in the spirit of that wonderful song. As you may have heard, Bob invited Gene over to his place. And Bob says he actually thinks that I should make it too. And I might take him up on the offer. I mean, nothing says "not a threat" like showing up at somebody's house with guys with machine guns. (Laughter.)

Yesterday, the same day he was joking with his pals in the press about how important people like themselves weren't affected by the sequester he and the Republicans agreed on back in 2011, he was giving his regular weekly address about how important it is to come up with a deal to pass the sequester. The White House titles the Saturday message End the Sequester to Keep Growing the Economy 03/09/2013 (transcript here):

I would say he's delivering very mixed messages.

But maybe I'm being too hard on him. He said in his supposedly serious message:

As Democrats and Republicans, we may disagree on the best way to achieve our goals, but I'm confident we can agree on what those goals should be. A strong and vibrant middle class. An economy that allows businesses to grow and thrive. An education system that gives more Americans the skills they need to compete for the jobs of the future. An immigration system that actually works for families and businesses. Stronger communities and safer streets for our children.

He should have used that for his comedy routine in the evening. That might have gotten some genuine laughs. He could have thrown in that the Republicans also agrees that rain falls from the sky and that we can see stars at night.

There are other such events, the most egregious being the Nerd Prom, aka, the White House Correspondents Dinner coming up on April 27, sponsored by the White House Correspondents' Association. Comic Conan O'Brien will be the Master of Ceremonies. Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian are expected to be among the guests. (Josh Grossberg, Conan O'Brien to host White House Correspondents Dinner E! Online/NBC Entertainment 02/20/2013) Here is an undated press release at the website, "2013 WHCA℠ Dinner News":

Team Coco is coming back to Washington.

Conan O'Brien, the Emmy award-winning comedian and late night talk show host, will headline the annual White House Correspondents' Association’s annual dinner on April 27, 2013, it was revealed Wednesday by association president Ed Henry.

"Conan is one of television's most innovative and influential talents and I am absolutely thrilled that he has agreed to be this year's featured act," said Henry. ...

The President traditionally delivers his own set of jokes, poking fun at himself as well as his political opponents, before the comedian gets the podium. It's all in good fun and for a good cause.

The dinner is affectionately known as the "nerd prom" because it is a hit on C-SPAN. It draws a wide cross section of movers and shakers from the worlds of journalism, politics, as well as Hollywood all coming together for one night to help shine the spotlight on the next generation of journalists.

The event is also known for featuring some of the hottest names in comedy over the years, including when a boyish, 32-year-old O'Brien turned in a brilliant performance at the 1995 dinner. That was when O'Brien was starting his 16 year run as the host of "Late Night with Conan O’Brien" on NBC.

And this jolly event that bring "Team Coco" back to Washington is sponsored by the Very Serious People at the White House Correspondents' Association, the cutting edge of Beltway Village journalism that takes its adversarial role as the Fourth Estate of American democracy oh-so-very seriously.

Tags: establishment press, mainstream press, mainstream press, nerd prom, white house correspondents dinner

Golfing while the world burns?

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks was pretty caustic about the mainstream press pearl-clutching over President Obama's golf game with Tiger Woods. Media Obsessed with Obama Golf Game -What About Drones?! 02/20/2013:

But there actually was one of Obama's golf outings that was a more substantive matter for public concern, and should have been for any media that cared about providing news more than entertaining photos of celebrities golfing together. Also from Cenk, Tiger Who? Obama Golfs with Oil CEOs 02/20/2013:

Tags: establishment press, mainstream media, global climate change, mainstream press

Celebrity-izing the press and the politicians they are supposed to perform journalism on

The White House Correspondents' Dinner, aka, the Nerd Prom, is both a symbol of the shallowness and corruption of our national press and an institution that significantly promotes that shallowness and corruption.

The Huffington Post reports in WHCD 2012: People-TIME, THR, New Yorker Parties Draw Media, Celebrity Pregamers 04/28/2012:

The 2012 White House Correspondents' Dinner is upon us, which means media figures, celebrities, politicos and more are party-hopping all over the nation's capital.

Media figures kicked off the weekend by attending the People - TIME party at the St. Regis hotel in Washington D.C. Cable news broadcasters including Chris Matthews, Norah O'Donnell, Andrea Mitchell, Greta Van Susteren, Wolf Blitzer and Willie Geist got down with fellow journalists and celebrities. Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Sam Feist and Rashida Jones were in attendance, as were "CBS This Morning" hosts Gayle King and Erica Hill. CBS Chief Leslie Moonves attended with his wife and "The Talk" host, Julie Chen.

The official dinner is on Saturday, but various sponsors do Friday night social events as a warm-up. Even Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks appears in the accompanying slide show, "at a red carpet event hosted by Google and the Hollywood Reporter" on Friday.

This is not to say every person who attends the White House Correspondents' Dinner or its related events will trim their reporting with getting an invitation to next year's version and/or its related events. But the Dinner has become an elite institution of sorts. Charlie Pierce links to another related slide-show which he thinks offers Several Dozen Signs of the Apocalypse Esquire Politics Blog 04/27/2012:

I present to you, in one single slideshow, many of the reasons why we are so very screwed in this country. I even like a lot of these people but, by god, if you were going to put together a diorama of a courtier press corps, you simply couldn't do better than this. A red carpet? A red fking carpet? For pundits? I mean, I like Ed Schultz. Truly, I do. The big mook's heart is in the right place, which is a fishing hole in South Dakota, dammit, not on a red fking carpet like he and his wife are the Newman and Woodward of the fly-tackle store. This photo with [CNN star] Wolf [Blitzer] looking as though [actress] Mila [Kunis] is telepathically fondling him under the table belongs in every journalism textbook in every university in America as an example of what a complete loss of your professional soul looks like. These people have lost forever any right to complain about bloggers's referring to them as The Villagers. Res ipse, motherfkers.

The New York Daily News provides their own slide-show of the White House Correspondents' Dinner's celebrity guest list 04/26/2012. Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan are two of the biggest names this year. Pierce Broznan, Elizabeth Banks of Hunger Games, George Clooney, Dakota Fanning, Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer of True Blood, Charlize Theron, Sofia Vergara, and Reese Witherspoon are among the invitees. And also Uggie the dog from The Artist. (Seriously!)

As a tool of governance, it makes sense for the White House to host such an event. It creates and reinforces social ties among the elite of the Beltway Village. And it makes media outlets and individual "reporters" less inclined to report stories that might displease the White House or embarrass other members of the celebrity media. So, if you take a leak of highly classified information from an Administration official and use it to write some glowing story about the Administration's performance on, say, Bin Laden's death, your chances of getting an invitation to the next year's Nerd Prom will improve. On the other hand, if you accept leaks of a low-level classified document from a Bradley Manning and use it to write a story that embarrasses the Administration, you may find yourself prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

Sadly, for many of our star "reporters" and pundits, the threat of not being invited to socialize with Uggie the Dog is probably more than enough incentive for them to tow the Village line.

Tags: establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, white house correspondents dinner

Bachmann and the press: when will the standard script emerge?

Glenn Greenwald provides us a timely caution about getting caught up in the Presidential campaign spectacle that our collapsed media culture treats as "reality-TV" entertainment to the exclusion of substantive reporting: The misery of the protracted presidential campaign season 08/16/2011.

The article also contains some fairly non-critical praise of Old Right isolationist Ron "Papa Doc" Paul, good friend of the Patriot Militia movement. Ron Paul is against crony capitalism? Please. Papa Doc wants to do away with pretty much all government regulations on business. It would be more accurate to call him an advocate for unimpeded crony capitalism. And, in his fondness for the idea of third party candidacies, Greenwald manages to engage in some superficial "both sides do it" griping about Democrats and Republicans.

This clip from CNN reporter Don Lemon also got me thinking about how our broken media cover Presidential candidates: Don Lemon Calls Out Michele Bachmann, Thanks Sarah Palin. Lemon has apparently made it a regular schtick of his to show politicians repeating the same talking points over and over. In this case Michelle Bachmann. The clip shows her repeating the same phrases on various Sunday morning talks shows. And it winds up praising non-candidate Sarah Palin who wasn't on all the Sunday morning shows for being oh-so-much more responsive than Bachmann. (?!?)

Not having seen any of the original segments, I can't say whether Lemon is taking a cheap shot or not here. But it reminds me of the way pool reporters on the Presidential campaign trail have acted in the past. As Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby documented repeatedly in the days before he fell in love with the Tea Party and decided that liberal bloggers were the bane of the media universe, the pool reporters behave a lot like a group of fraternity and sorority party animals on a trip to see an out-of-state football game. They fell in love with the great Maverick McCain and his honor and moderation after spending time on his press bus in 2000 drinking with him and listening to his stories about war and sex. It's not an environment conducive to critical thinking and careful reflection.This is one important source of the groupthink campaign reporters use to develop their handy and often indelible scripts about the candidates.

And part of what following a candidate on the campaign trail means is that they hear the candidate speak over and over, week after week, often several times a day. And candidates tend to say a lot of the same things and work from a basic stump speech, to the point that the reporters along for the ride get to the point they can recite their own version of it. So what sounds mindlessly repetitive to one of the pool reporters may be fresh and original to large parts of the candidates' audiences.

Don't get me wrong. I certainly done mind the press highlighting Bachmann's s glazed-eyed zombie habits. Jesus' General describes that Charles Manson stare of hers as "the "Eyes of the Anointed," the eyes God employs to mark His chosen." (It's a satire site, people!) "They are the eyes Mrs Bachmann uses when she rebukes sorcerers, witches, and teachers." Joan Walsh uses a phrase from a geezer rock song to describe that look, writing that Rick Perry went "to Iowa to save the GOP from the little Christian lady with the faraway eyes."

Laura Clawson at Daily Kos sees a standard script for Bachmann congealing already: Emerging media narrative: Bachmann is running a 'celebrity' campaign 08/15/2011.

Will any of those scripts come to include serious questions about her Christian Right theocratic ideas and allegiances? Don't bet on it.

Tags: establishment press, glenn greenwald, mainstream media, mainstream press, michelle bachmann

Imagining Obama's proposals to Social Security and Medicare as a victory for the Democrats

The Obama Administration has been looking for a way to claim victory in the horrible mess of the debt-ceiling negotiations. Jim Tankersley of The National Journal (Politics of Austerity Look Better Than the Economics 07/12/2011) gives a Beltway Village view of the political wonderfulness of establishing himself as a centrist - by proposing cuts in Social Security and Medicare, among other things:

As political moves go, Obama's looks pretty deft. He has his response: "I tried. Your team said 'No.' "

"He's won the race to the reasonable middle," said Ryan McConaghy, who directs the economic program at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.

In the Village, cutting the highly popular and successful Social Security and Medicare programs is virtuous in itself. And since our star pundits pride themselves of having the fingers on the pulse of what Real Americans are thinking, they assume it must be good politics, too.

Tankersley does depart from the Village script in this way, though:

Economically, though, it's a questionable embrace. The most compelling evidence that deficits and uncertainty are holding back the recovery is anecdotal. For example, on Monday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released results of an online poll of business owners, more than half of whom cited "economic uncertainty" (broadly) as a top obstacle to hiring. Four in five respondents said the federal deficit posed a risk to the economy — but only one in five called it an "immediate threat."

Empirically, there’s very little evidence of government deficits “crowding out” private borrowing by pushing up interest rates, as many supporters of expansionary austerity claim; on the contrary, borrowing rates remain near historic lows.

I know I've been quoting Krugman a lot lately. But here I go again, as they say. He notes in Psychodrama Queens 07/12/2011 that the Administration itself is happy about an article by Gerald Seib pushing a similar Village psioition that centrism is always good. Even though cutting Social Security and Medicare had been anything but "centrists" until the Democratic President let it be publicly known last Wednesday that he embraced the idea.

But these political calculations with which our Pod Pundits entertain each other usually make bad political analysis. Which Krugman explains in the case of this latest triumph of centralism-that-was-rightwing-Republicanism-a-week-ago:

What I learn from political scientists is that this is all fantasy — albeit a kind of fantasy beloved of political pundits, who love to imagine that complicated psychodramas are playing out in the minds of voters. Well, here's a little secret: most voters don't sit around reading Clive Crook columns or debating the Bowles-Simpson plan. They have a gut sense — things are getting better or they're getting worse — and mainly vote on that basis. They're not paying attention at all to this stuff.

More concretely, there is little evidence for the neat balancing act that our punditocracy loves to imagine is playing out of some neat ideological sliding scale.

While we're on the deficiencies of our punditocracy, check out this piece by Paul Waldman, Chattering Crass The American Prospect Online 07/05/2011, about Mark Halperin.

Tags: establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, medicare, paul krugman, social security

US media and politics today - a concise image

This screenshot is from Yahoo! News ENTERTAINMENT. It says a lot about both our political and media culture in the US right now.



Yahoo! News ENTERTAINMENT section 06-14-2011

When the story about the Republican candidates' debate was the feature, it made the point even more dramatically. I didn't get a screenshot of that. And Democrats can't help but indulge a tiny bit of schadenfreude that "freak show" appears prominently next to the story about the debate.
But still, it's very much of an illustration of how little distinction between "news" and "entertainment" our national media make these days. And this is online news, not "legacy media."

To quote once again from Gov. Jerry Brown's inaugural address this year: "Without the trust of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle; and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void."

That's the dilemma we're up against, in California and the country.

Tags: establishment press, jerry brown, mainstream media, mainstream press

Republican 2012 Presidential campaign takes shape, national press corps continues to deteriorate

The political pundits are happy now that the 2012 Presidential race in recognizably underway. Now they can start obsessing constantly over every real and imagined verbal slip and speculating over every pointless poll on the race. Sex stories and horse-race speculation on political campaigns is what our Pod Pundits live for. And, if they had to choose, they would give up the horserace stories and just stay with sex stories new and old.

Monday night, Republican Presidential candidates Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, and Rick "don't look at my dog that way" Santorum debated in New Hampsire, competing with each other to be the best advocate for austerity economics (for most people), huge tax cuts for the wealthy, and opponents of access to health insurance for the non-wealthy. Beth Reinhard gives a good Beltway Village standard horserace summary in the lede to her story, Romney and Bachmann Lap the Field National Journal 06/14/2011:

Mitt Romney easily survived his first debate of the 2012 primary with barely a nick to his early front-runner status.

Tarred as a flip-flopping phony during his 2008 White House bid, Romney looked at ease during the two-hour live forum, and none of his lesser-known rivals made him squirm. Eager to make pleasing first impressions on a national audience, they all passed when handed opportunities to attack Romney.

She continues, "reporting" that Romney posted a picture on Twitter just before the debate in which he appeared "in an open-collared shirt and tie" and that the image "rang true." True to what, one can only guess, since in her third paragraph she has yet to mention a policy issue the seven candidates may have discussed. During the debate, "Romney came off as relaxed and self-assured." Lovely. We don't yet know in her piece if the relaxation and self-assurance was exercised in the advocacy of legalized goat sacrifices or whatever. But his Twitter image "rang true"!

No, democracy can't survive with a press corps this dysfunctional. The National Journal is considered an important Washington insider sort of publication.

Finally, in paragraph four, we hear vaguely about some issues that were somehow discussed:

Romney was pointed in his criticism of President Obama and gracious to his rivals, saying any of them would make a better chief executive than the current occupant of the White House. He stood by his withering criticism of the federal bailout of the Michigan-based auto industry in the state where he was born and where his father was governor. He easily found opportunities to talk about his experience in the private sector and to lash out at the GOP’s favorite whipping post, the federal deficit.

Despite her dubious status among the savants of the Village, Bachmann was judged to have come in second in last night's horse-race. Reinhard reports Bachmann's contribution this way:

Neither should Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman whose bid faces deep skepticism from the political establishment.

What the only woman on stage lacked in height she made up for with enthusiasm, declaring in front of her rivals that she had filed the official paperwork as a presidential candidate on Monday. She seized openings and one-upped her more slow-footed and less self-assured rivals. While they all want to repeal Obama's health care plan, Bachmann declared, "I will not rest until I repeal 'Obamacare.' "

Also, Bachmann performance was "sparkly."

Reinhard's reporting is unremarkable except as an example of Village laziness and superficiality. An issue is mentioned here and there among the horse-race reporting and theater criticism. But the closest thing to anything specific on what they are saying they would do as President, the closest she comes is saying they would all repeal "Obamacare," a term she doesn't explain further.

Cain showed his "oratorical skills"; Santorum "decided to toot his own horn rather than rail against Romney’s inconsistencies"; Gingrich " undermined his own effort to come across as a fresh candidate brimming with new ideas" - because he referred to having been active during the Reagan Administration, which by some arcane Village logic means he can't be "fresh" and "brimming with new ideas"; Pawlenty "has grown more confident" but is "still honing his debate chops," which presumably means oratorical talent and not karate chops aimed at his rivals. And, in Village reporting at its finest most typical:

Perhaps his best line of the night was one he's used frequently before in candidate forums. Asked about the "separation of church and state," he said the U.S. Constitution was "designed to protect people of faith from government, not government from people of faith."

Because, in the Village imagination, the Real Americans don't understand any of that church-and-state stuff the boring lawyers talk about.

The best moment for Cain, the only candidate who has never served in public office, was when he gleefully proclaimed at the start of the debate, "I am not a politician."

Because, gosh, that's an original line. (NOT)

As I've written here repeatedly, including just yesterday, I don't have much use for a hardline rightwinger like Ron "Papa Doc" Paul, even if he manages to get out a sentence now and then that sounds sensibly critical of our current wars. But don't expect the Villagers to notice that he's a hardline rightwinger. No, to them he's odd because he's not a serious horse-race contender and because he uses strange and funny words like "monetary policy." Seriously. Reinhard seems to think that's about like some obscure technical term from organic chemistry or something:

Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who has run for president before, did little to shake his image as a fringe candidate by talking too fast and dropping obscure subjects like "Keynesian bubble" and "monetary policy" into the conversation.

It's a sad reflection of how badly broken both our political culture and our "quality" national press is, that discussion of "Keynesian" actions and "monetary policy" four years into the most serious prolonged economic slump since the great depression are considered "obscure subjects."

Tags: 2012 election, beth reinhard, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press

Politics as celebrity star fest

"Without the trust of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle; and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void." - Gov. Jerry Brown 01/03/2011

Politics as spectacle is deadly to democracy. And one of the most blatant example of politics as spectacle, of celebrating politics as spectacle, is the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, aka, the Nerd Prom. The President gets to play comedian and treat the issues of the day with all the seriousness of a Saturday Live Skit. Here is Obama at this year's love-feast for politics as spectacle and celebrity:



It has also become a celebration for one of the more concrete manifestations of the decay of American democracy, the near-erasure of even the pretence of an adversary relationship between the White House and the grandees of the Establishment press.

Stephen Colbert actually showed the Dinner up for what it is in his presentation at the 2006 version of the event.



The audience, including President Bush, was not terribly amused. Both the President and the correspondents who are supposed to be covering his Administration as professional journalists are there to celebrate each other and the press' cozy relationship to power. The cozy relationship that gave us the Iraq War.

Bush did his own comedy routine at the 2004 dinner, a video in which he searched the White House for Iraq's missing "weapons of mass destruction." The audience seemed to enjoy that joke about the lies that were used to justify an unnecessary and illegal war much more than they did Colbert's routine a few years later. This version doesn't have the best video, but its grim mockery dramatizes what was so obviously wrong with Bush's worse-than tasteless joke:



Atossa Araxia Abrahamian has it right in The White House correspondents' dinner: an unseemly schmoozefest Guardian 05/03/2011:

The celebrities sitting at almost every table of the Washington Hilton gave the distinct impression that both journalism and politics are now wholly beholden to the whims of the entertainment-industrial complex. That the entire evening's discourse revolved around Donald Trump's birther-babble only confirmed this.

It has always been common for nightclubs to pay bright young things for making appearances. Today, newspapers and magazines pick up the tab, flaunting glamorous contributors – Tina Fey, Bono, James Franco
– while downsizing their newsrooms.

Seeing Rahm Emmanuel rub shoulders with writers, producers and editors would suggest to any reasonable viewer that the press and this particularly photogenic administration enjoy a relationship that is cozier than it is critical. The hoards of people outside the after-parties hosted by DC's rich and powerful are proof that afflicting the comfortable has become much less cool than having drinks with them. Last spring, writer Michael Hastings responded to criticisms of his Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal by saying many other journalists resort to writing "puff pieces" in order to gain crucial access to key government officials. This dinner, with its assortment of eye candy and Kit-Kat pyramids, is the ultimate puff piece.

In fact, this Administration has shown great enthusiasm for secrecy, making claims for Executive secrecy authority that go beyond any ever claimed before, including by the Cheney-Bush Administration. Just this year, there was a scandal over the Pentagon's torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning, who was accused but not convicted of leaking classified materials to Wikileaks. Maybe there's no connection between the press' general defense of the US government's claims against Wikileaks and the fact that senior media figures expect to be part of a celebrity elite that, among other things, parties at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner.

But as Abrahamian observes:

Fewer and fewer Americans trust the press; the polarisation of news coverage is a testament to how ill-at-ease people feel about the information they're being sold. To send the message via C-span that the Capitol, the Fourth Estate and Hollywood are all in it together, if only for one night, hardly helps accusations of elitism.

Tags: establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press

A new conventional-wisdom meme on Obama

The new conventional wisdom take on President Obama can up during the weekly Political Wrap with Sleepy Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks on the PBS Newshour 05/06/2011 at about 2:10 with a question from moderator Jim Lehrer:



From the transcript:

JIM LEHRER: All right, to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

David, do you agree with the conventional wisdom that that forever has changed -- not forever, but has changed the way Americans view President Obama?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. No, I really don't think so. I think he will -- his reputation is certainly enhanced. He made a brave decision. He stood by it. And I think the reputation of -- America feels better because it has been a long time since we have had something function really well.

JIM LEHRER: Because of guys like this [the SEALs who conducted the raid on Bin Laden's compound].

DAVID BROOKS: Guys like that.

JIM LEHRER: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: So -- and even for President Obama, it has been a long time since he has done something popular. Whether you agree or not with stimulus or health care or GM, they were not popular.

And now he's done something really popular. And he did a difficult thing and enhanced his authority. But will it transform his view? I'm doubtful, because this is not central to his presidency. The economy and other things are central to his presidency. And when you look at his standing, it's gone up significantly in the last week, and it's gone up in his handling of terror.

But overall views about the economy, despite these numbers, have not gone up. And his handling of the economy in some polls was flat, and, in some polls, it went down a little. And I think the economy will still be the central way he will be judged.

JIM LEHRER: Do how do you feel, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: I think it has changed. And I think it's changed -- there was a growing narrative, Jim, that was getting traction that the president was the professor in chief, that he was too nuanced, that he was leading from the rear, that -- perhaps too cerebral, and a question of maybe not ready to pull the trigger, to make the bold statement.This was a -- this was decisive. It was cool. It was bold. And I agree, I mean, that it was a success. And we have been yearning for success. We have been dying for success. But I also think it's important -- if one thinks just historically, since World War II, with the possible exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there has not been an unambiguous military intelligence success under a Democratic administration in that long time.

I mean, you have had Vietnam. You had Korea. You had Mogadishu. You had the Iranian hostages. I mean, there really hasn't. And this was. And...

JIM LEHRER: Just in pure political...

MARK SHIELDS: In pure political -- but, you know, in an act of -- a decisive act.

And there's a recognition in the political world that the president really did roll the dice. I mean, this was a high-risk -- high-reward, but very high-risk, not only to the brave men involved, but to his own political future. [my emphasis]

Jim Lobe in Bin Laden Coup Could Mark New Beginning for Obama Inter Press Service 05/06/2011 pointed out a change in the punditocracy's narrative about President Obama:

The well-respected Gallup organisation, which Thursday released a three-day-tracking poll, found a six-percent increase in the president's public-approval rating during the three days after the raid in what it called Obama's first "rally event" – a positive reaction to a major international or domestic crisis.

While that was extremely modest compared to the all-time record 35- percent increase George W. Bush received in his ratings after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the consensus among even right-wing commentators is that Obama has emerged as a more-formidable political force primarily because he has demolished, at one blow, the increasingly widely accepted notion that he is a cautious, even timid, politician who instinctively favours the safest political option and who sees his foreign-policy role as managing the inevitable decline of U.S. power in the world.

"It is this last claim that took such a profound blow when Obama approved the operation against bin Laden and chose the riskiest option involving a face-to-face confrontation with American commandos – on the orders of the president of the United States," wrote E.J. Dionne, Jr., a political columnist at the Washington Post, this week. [my emphasis]

This provides a measure of how lazy our Pod Pundits are with their political analysis. Obama promised during his 2008 campaign to escalate the war in Afghanistan. That was a risk, both militarily and politically, and a bad one. But he took it. He made a bad decision in following through on that misguided promise. But there's no way I would characterize that as showing him to be a "cautious, even timid, politician who instinctively favours the safest political option." I'm not arguing with Lobe's characterization of the conventional wisdom, but rather with the CW involved.

Tags: barack obama, establishment press, iraq war, mainstream media

I think there could be a problem with this arrangement...

Glenn Greenwald:

NBC News and MSNBC were long owned by GE, and now by Comcast, both of which desperately need good relations with government officials for their profits. The same is true of CBS (owned by Viacom), ABC (owned by Disney), and CNN (owned by TimeWarner). For each of these large corporations, alienating federal government officials is about the worst possible move it could make -- something of which all of its employees, including its media division employees, are well aware.

Tags: establishment press, glenn greenwald, mainstream media, mainstream press

Patriotic self-censorship by journalists (or celebrity reporters) and historians

An article that more than balances Gabriel's Ladeen's shut-up-and-cheer-for-the-wars-I-support piece is Stephen Walt's Reporters, scholars, and patriots Foreign Policy 03/02/2011. He's discussing the admission by some reporters that they self-censor their national security reporting out of patriotism or even jingoism.

Acknowledging the classical case of a need for the press to maintain secrecy in the case of reporting troop movement in a war zone, Walt explains why such patriotic self-censorship is problematic for reporters and scholars as well:

First, it is a common error to equate "patriotism" or "love of country" with deference to or support for the policies of the government. In fact, the main justification for a free press in a democracy rests on the assumption that it will take a skeptical, even adversarial, attitude towards the government and its policies. ...

The second problem with the idea that journalists should let their "patriotism" guide their coverage is that it assumes reporters know ex ante what is really "good for the country." I suspect Judith Miller and the other journalists who parroted the Bush administration's bogus case for war with Iraq thought they were serving the national interest by doing so. In reality, however, they were helping pave the road to a national disaster. When reporters allow a misguided sense of patriotism to interfere with their critical judgments, in short, it is more likely that the "national interest" will be subverted rather than served.

And he makes a similar point about the risk of blowback from foreign policy and how citizens actually need to know about operations that can produce such negative consequences:

Finally, when journalists indulge in "patriotic self-censorship," they by definition end up deceiving their fellow citizens in ways that can be deeply if unintentionally harmful. If Americans are not fully informed about what their government is doing (i.e., because clandestine activities are concealed by the government or by sympathetic journalists), then citizens have no way of knowing how much a military campaign or other foreign policy initiative is really costing us. If we don't know how much the country is doing, we have no way to gauge whether the results are consonant with the level of effort. Equally important, when we don't know what our government is up to, we have no way of knowing why other societies are reacting as they are and we become more vulnerable to "blowback" (i.e., hostile backlashes whose true origins have been concealed). [my emphasis]

The jingo argument that Gabriel Ledeen makes effectively dismisses the idea that citizens should be passing judgment on anything our glorious generals may be doing in the name of "war."

He also makes an important point about patriotic distortion in professional history-writing:

This same principle applies to other purveyors of knowledge -- including scholars -- and sometimes with tragic results. In a classic International Security article ("Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self-Censorship in Germany after the Great War"), historian Holger Herwig showed how government officials and historians in the Weimar Republic actively colluded to whitewash Germany's role in causing World War I. Their goal was to absolve Germany of blame for the war and thus to undermine the Versailles Treaty, and no doubt these Germans believed they were doing their patriotic duty. Alas, their efforts unwittingly reinforced Germany's unwarranted sense of victimization, smoothed Adolf Hitler's path to power, and undermined Western resolve in the face of Nazi revisionism. What they thought was an act of patriotism was actually helping plunge their country--and the rest of Europe--into another terrible war.

Tags: establishment press, stephen walt

Mean Maverick McCain is a conservative! This is news?!?

Apparently in the Beltway Village, it is: Reid Wilson, McCain's Shift Makes Him Senate's Most Conservative National Journal Hotline On-Call 02/24/2011.

But our Pod Pundits will still find a way to call him a straight-talkin' Maverick, I'm sure!

To give you an idea of how the political spectrum looks through Village eyes, Wilson writes of Barack Obama circa 2006, "Then-Sen. Barack Obama, meanwhile, began his campaign at the far left end of the political spectrum."

From 2008, the bold Maverick McCain and his best bud of those days:



Tags: establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, mccain

Jerry Brown and (our sad version of) the press corps

David Siders posted this news item at Sacbee Capitol Alert, Jerry Bown boards alone, turns heads on Southwest 02/10/2011:

In his first public appearance outside Sacramento since taking office, Gov. Jerry Brown this morning boarded a Southwest Airlines flight for Burbank, then spent the hour in flight talking about prisons with a corrections employee who happened to sit beside him.

"Are you the governor?" she said when she sat down.

Brown opened his reading material, "Parole Review Briefing Binder," on the tray between them and pointed to it while they talked. The woman, Tianne Rios, asked for an autograph when the plane landed, and Brown obliged.

The governor boarded with the public at Sacramento International Airport, holding ticket No. A16 and sitting in an aisle seat in the third row. He was seemingly unaccompanied by security and said he was traveling alone. He ordered coffee, black.

His presence on the plane turned heads.

Mark Pinkus, a Rhino Records executive who sat two rows behind Brown, complimented his use of a discount airline. But he said, "I would have thought he would have more security, a handler?"

Some passersby shook Brown's hand while boarding. One man said, "Good luck at the chamber today." Brown is speaking tonight at a dinner hosted by the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

Across from Brown in the airplane sat Dimitri Ignatieff, who was heading to Los Angeles for a hearing on the impact of Brown's proposed budget cuts on public safety. Ignatieff, a program analyst for drug court programs, said he "kind of did a double take" when Brown boarded.

"He's got his work cut out for him," he said. "That's for certain."

This article is interesting, though not for its content as such; it's pure celebrity reporting. But it's a good example of how Jerry can get a message to the public despite the dysfunction of the press.

I don't know if anyone from his office specifically pointed out to the press how he was flying to Sacramento to Los Angeles, i.e., with a regular ticket on Southwest, which doesn't have a first class section or even reserved seats. That's the kind of symbolic gesture that resonates with most voters, similar to his well-publicized drive to cut the number of state-payed mobile phones in half and his mandated reduction of the state vehicle fleet.

I don't know David Siders. But we've seen signs already that the state press is irritated that Jerry doesn't pander and preen for them like his predecessor did. It's easy to imagine that reporters are jealous that just regular people on the plane got to speak to Brown instead of them being invited along on the trip for exclusive "access".

On a 2/11 appearance on a local mroning TV program, Good Day LA, FOX affiliate interviewers asked him about his flight without an "entourage". (The video isn't up at the website as of this writing.) He said, "I kind of consider the people my entourage." And he pointed out something that normally does not occur to star journalists and those who aspire to be such, which is that there are elaborate security measures in place at airports that provide an "entourage" for everybody on the flights. He went on to point out that entourages for government officials are not only for security, but also to project power: "something of an illusion" which he observed is "sometimes important".

Jerry isn't mystified by the trappings of power, his or that of others. And that doesn't compute at all with a lot of reporters.

Tags: california politics, establishment press, jerry brown, mainstream media, mainstream press

Obama, the Radical Republicans and the new investigation era of pseudo-scandals

Robert Perry has a good opening look at the Republicans' new round of Congressional investigation sleaze-slinging in Republicans Aim Info-War at Obama Consortium News 01/04/2011:

Finally, Congress appears ready to hold some high-profile hearings – except they won’t be about the most important scandals of the past decade, like how the United States was misled into the Iraq invasion, how the Afghan War was bungled, how torture became a U.S. practice, or how bank deregulation and Wall Street greed nearly destroyed the economy. ...

If the experience of the Clinton years continues to be predictive, the mainstream news media will eagerly clamber onto the right-wing bandwagon in pursuit of scandal stories.

This latest turn of the page on the GOP’s old get-Clinton playbook was, of course, not unexpected. What remains extraordinary is how clueless the Democrats continue to be about the importance of official investigations in educating – or mis-educating – the American people. [my emphasis]

One correction I would make to Perry's article. It's true that in the early 1990s, "The growing right-wing news media began hammering away at Bill and Hillary Clinton’s personal finances, as well as their troubled marriage." And the Whitewater scandal originated with a handful of hardcore sleazebag segregationists in Arkansas.

But it wasn't the rightwing media that made them scandals. It was the New York Times and the Washington Post and other mainstream press outlets. That's a critically important turning-point in the history of the American press. And we shouldn't let them off the hook by pretending it was only the "right-wing new media".

The very astute press critic Jay Rosen wrote in From Judith Miller to Julian Assange Press Think 12/09/2010, "To understand Julian Assange and the weird reactions to him in the American press we need to tell a story that starts with Judy Miller [and her phony WMD stories in the New York Times in 2002] and ends with Wikileaks."

He's referring more specifically to the attitude of the press on national security. And there is a case to be made that the disgraceful Judith Miller/Michael Gordon stories on WMDs in Iraq represented a qualitatively new stage of decay for the American press.

But I don't think it's more decisive than the leap off the cliff that occurred when the New York Times ran their first Whitewater story. As I wrote here several years ago, "In the history of the disaster we know as the Iraq War, the date March 8, 1992, deserve a special place. That was the date Jeff Gerth's first story on "Whitewater" appeared on the front page of the New York Times."

Tags: democratic party, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, republican party, whitewater

Bipartisanship, Shields and Brooks version: Let Grandma eat catfood!

Ah, the beauty of bipartisan consensus. Here is the Friday Political Wrap 11/19/2010 segment from the PBS Newshour, featuring "liberal" star pundit Sleepy Mark Shields and conservative columnist/philosopher David "Bobo" Brooks, agreeing that most old people should be poor:



Obviously, all Serious People agree that Social Security should be slashed, even though it's actual problems are minor and easily fixed without cutting benefits or raising the retirement age and even though cutting Social Security would not reduce the federal deficit. From the PBS transcript:

JUDY WOODRUFF: And speaking of all this, Mark, there was a poll that came out, I guess an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, that showed, for all the public message and these midterm elections that they want government spending to be cut, when you raise, specifically, Medicare, Social Security and doing something with taxes, they say, no, no, we don't like that.

MARK SHIELDS: It's the old line about everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

I mean, that's what -- everyone is for general economizing, Judy, but for specific expenditures. And that's why I don't -- I think David's reporting is quite accurate on the subject, but it's going to require a president taking this and making it the central issue of his administration, whether it is this president, the next president, because it -- that is the only way, you make it visible, that all -- everybody is in.

Everybody is in for a nickel and for a dollar, and it's going to cost you and it's going to cost us, but it is going to be better for everybody else. And I think the argument I would make if I were urging Barack Obama to take up this cause is, look, Social Security and Medicare are going to be cut. Who do you want making those cuts?

Do you want Republicans, who have consistently opposed these programs, or do you want somebody and an administration that believes in them and that believes that the people and Social Security and Medicare have to be protected?

And I think that's the case for Democrats. [my emphasis]

I think I hear the sound of Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt clawing their way out of their graves. This is the "liberal" position?!? That Democrats should cut Social Security in order to save it from the Republicans? Does PBS feed these guys Valium before they go on camera?

The Catfood Commission proposals to slash Social Security is a Social Security Phaseout proposal. The Democrats blocked Bush's 2005 Social Security Phaseout scheme to turn the program into a Wall Street slush fund by flat-out opposing it. Defending Social Security against the Republicans was a significant issue in the Democratic wins of 206 and 2008. And while Blue Dog Democrats got pounded in 2010, the ones who made defending Social Security a key issue did better than the let-Grandma-eat-catfood types.

But if a Democratic President successfully pushes through a completely unnecessary cut to Social Security, the political firewall that has always protected Social Security will be gone. It will no longer be the "third rail of American politics", as Sleepy Mark has so often called it. It will be a severe blow to the American social system and to the economy, though even Phaseout advocates like the Catfood Commission currently talk in terms of a delayed implementation of the Social Security Phaseout. Which once again points out the complete uselessness of Social Security Phaseout in boosting the current economy.

Bobo the conservative chimed in to agree in bipartisan fashion with the liberal Sleepy Mark that the only Serious Possibility is for the Democratic Party to adopt the same position on Social Security that was enshrined in the 1936 Republican Platform. But don't think there are no differences between Serious Liberals and Serious Conservatives. Sleepy Mark wants to adopt Social Security Phaseout sorrowfully. Bobo thinks Social Security is like a diseased wisdom tooth:

DAVID BROOKS: I think that's the way to read the polls. And the polls are against what you said, but that doesn't mean people aren't open to reason.

And I had a wisdom tooth taken out today. And you had asked me, do I support or oppose getting a wisdom tooth taken out?

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I oppose it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Philosophically.

DAVID BROOKS: Philosophically.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: But I did it, because I had to do it.

And so you could say, do you support Social Security being -- retirement raised? No, I oppose it. But, if you explain to people -- and people basically understand this -- we have got to do it, that doesn't mean they won't do what they oppose, but it does take this kind of leadership.

And it also takes, not only the president. It takes business. It takes people in society supporting that. And so far, that business support from business leaders, civic leaders, it isn't there. And the president can't leap out without those people.

We live in a very strange moment. The major powers in the G-20 have decided that Herbert Hoover had the right idea for the early years of a depression: slash government spending and let the economy crash. (See Paul Krugman, New York Times 11/18/2010.) People like Sleepy Mark who go on TV and pretend to be pro-labor liberals advocate Alf Landon's position on Social Security.

Bobo gives his particular specialty as a TV commentator a real workout on this episode: to defend Radical Republican positions - Let Grandma eat catfood! Jesus loves nuclear proliferation! - in a creepily calm and reassuring tone. Here's Bobo saying what that thar noocleur treaty don't amount to diddly:

MARK SHIELDS: ... It has -- quite frankly, it passed the committee 14-4. You know, it is in the interests of the United States. And they are just -- I can only conclude this is about embarrassing the president. I really can.

DAVID BROOKS: I sort of agree with that. I don't see the big deal. I don't see the big deal about the treaty.

If you look at the reduction in warheads, it is a drop from like 1,750 to 1,550. It is not a huge thing. The substance of it is not huge. But the atmospherics around us help us deal with Russia. It helps us deal with our allies. So, it is not that important a thing.

Why make a big opposition to a thing that, frankly, isn't that important, unless are you motivated in part by some sort of Cold War memories, or you just want to oppose the president? So, I think it's unfortunate.

Our pundit corps at its finest.

Tags: establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press,social security

Gene Lyons on the continuing decay of American journalism

I quote Gene Lyons all the time because he understands the major dysfunction of our national media so well:

With precious few exceptions, big-time journalism has literally become a subdivision of the entertainment industry. Cable TV networks in particular treat national politics as an ongoing melodrama whose protagonists -- Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin -- are basically celebrities, symbolic figures to be loved or hated by millions according to how they are caricatured. Reality retreats as fantasy advances.

Conservatives lead the way. It's no small development that several presidential candidates -- Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, etc. -- are now employed by Fox News. Nor that Palin's getting paid a million bucks an episode by TLC for what amount to half-hour campaign commercials. It's a fundamental change in the relationship between journalism and power. [my emphasis]

These sorts of changes don't happen from one day to the next. They accumulate over time. The philosopher Hegel called that process the transformation of quantity into quality. Which may sound exotic, but it isn't really. One person getting sick is an illness; many people getting sick with the same disease at the same time is an epidemic.

That quote is from Who will smack down all the lies? Salon 11/17/2010. Gene Lyons himself realized earlier than anyone else I know of who went to print in a national publication just what a disastrous turn the national media had taken in 1992 with the New York Times' flogging of the Whitewater pseudoscandal. Things have continued to deteriorate since then.

One of the most professionally decadent practices of present-day US journalism is the Goldilocks Syndrome. Gene gives an example of it in Ted Koppel's recent and much-noted lament about the rise of partisan journalism:

One can definitely take issue with the false equivalence Koppel draws between Olbermann and Fox luminaries. Compared to the conservative network's overt political activism, Olbermann's contributions to Democratic candidates, while improper, don't amount to much. Also, for all his grandiosity, MSNBC's resident blowhard doesn't actually make things up -- the most fundamental distinction in journalism.

A realist, Koppel is surely correct to say there's "not much of a chance that 21st-century journalism will be adapted to conform with the old rules." However, with all due respect -- and a viewer [an English-only one anyway!] seeking international news apart from natural disasters and terror strikes is pretty much limited to BBC World News America, where Koppel's a contributing analyst -- his seemingly reflexive need to position himself as the mean between two extremes demonstrates precisely how "mainstream" thinking fails.

Sometimes, see, Goldilocks can't find the porridge that's just right. Sometimes, when two sources tell very different stories, the truth doesn't lie somewhere between them. Often, somebody's lying. Over the past couple of decades, moreover, America's vaunted mainstream media has found itself hornswoggled by one big falsehood after another. [my emphasis]

Tags: establishment press, gene lyons, mainstream media, mainstream press