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

Bernie and the Beltway press

Some of the press treatment of the primaries is ideological. But I think a lot of it is also industry-specific groupthink, in which the Beltway press settle on a script and stick to it even long after reality beats them up side the head.

On Saturday evening, after Tailgunner Ted Cruz won two of three states on the Republican side and Bernie two on the Democratic side, the Washington Post ran this headline online:

In 2008, the dominant script was that the interesting and eloquent Obama would beat dull Hillary in the primaries and Clinton should just drop out sooner than later. But the honorable honest Bold Maverick McCain was the logical choice because of his mavericky maverickness.

The script this year circa December was Hillary was the obvious inevitable choice and the Democratic side and either Jeb! BUSH or Young Marco would easily be the Republcian nominee. Now they are freaking over Trump because he gives a desublimated version of what the Very Serious Republicans' position has been for, well, decades. And Bernie is obviously irrelevant because, well, that's what everybody in the Beltway says.

Chuck Todd did a teaser on Meet the Press Sunday saying that after the break, he was going to explain how Bernie one two of three on Saturday but that meant he was in worse shaped than before. But Nancy Reagan obituaries preempted Chuck's no doubt marvelous explanation.

Sunday he won in Maine, so I guess we should expect headlines like, "Sanders wins three of four states on weekend: How much longer before he drops out?"

The Young Turks have been harping on the media's Bernie script. SUPER Biased Super Saturday Headlines From Mainstream Media 03/05/2016:

Media Desperately Downplays Bernie Sanders Surge 03/06/2016:

Media Ignores Bernie Sanders Maine Blowout 03/06/2016:

Snowden, Democrats and the corporate press

"[Edward] Snowden's whistleblowing has led to many extraordinary revelations. None is more significant or more revealing than what it highlighted about the function many American journalists actually perform, and how far away that is – universes away – from the way they market their function." - Glenn Greenwald, Media Lessons From Snowden Reporting: LA Times Editors Advocate Prosecution of Sources The Intercept 06/07/2015

One of the particular features of the wave of protest and reform movements that we still remember as The Sixties is that in some ways, the corporate media were not primary targets of the protests.

Generalizations are tricky because they're, well, generalizations.

The "alternative" or "underground" press was a feature of the US in the 1960s. Radical America, Ramparts, Socialist Revolution (later renamed Socialist Review) and The Great Speckled Bird were some of the better known and more influential samples of that phenomenon in the United States. And various political groups like the Black Panthers had their own papers and magazines. (Radical America's first issues billed themselves as a journal of the Students for a Democratic Society.)

And the left/populist/socialist press since the 19th century has made criticisms of the established press. So such criticism from the left is scarcely unknown in the pre-blogosphere days in the US.

But the big protests of the 1960s were directed against the corporate press in the way that, for example, the conservative Springer press (Bild, Die Welt) was a target of militant left protests in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Latin American popular movements like Peronism in Argentina have targeted the misconduct of the oligarchic press for a long time.

In mainstream politics in the US, it's the Republican Party that has made "the liberal press" a major target of criticism for decades now. The current form of such criticism owes much to Southern segregationist attacks on the "Northern" and "liberal" press during the fight in the 1950s and 1960s to preserve the Segregation 1.0 system. The Nixon Administration, especially Vice President Spiro Agnew before he resigned in disgrace, railed against the Liberal Press - largely a fantasy image even then - and its criticism of Nixon's Vietnam War policies.

The civil rights movement certainly had occasion to challenge the role of the press. Any decent history of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, for instance, would have occasion to mention the role of "the Hederman press." (See: Kathy Lally, A journey from racism to reason Newspaper: The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., was once the most racist paper in the United States, until an offspring of the publishing family decided to make the paper -- and his family name -- respectable. Baltimore Sun 01/05/1999.)

Dennis Mitchell in A New History of Mississippi (2014) writes about the press in Mississippi during the 1950s and 1960s:

Deprived of leadership from the state's spiritual leaders and intellectuals, Mississippians looked to newspapers and television for their news and ideas. Unfortunately, as a whole, Mississippi's newspapers proved to be the weakest in the nation in their coverage of the civil rights movement, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. The arch segregationist Hederman family owned the papers with the highest circulation in Jackson and Hattiesburg. Their headlines and locally written news stories dehumanized the "mixers;' as they called integrationists, referring to them as human freaks and abnormal mammals. Readers who got past the headlines into the text of wire service reports got more balanced information because the editors did not rewrite wire reports. [my emphasis in bold] (p. 422)

The major media in the US did play a significant role in challenging the official narrative of the Vietnam War. Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers which were printed by various major papers starting with the New York Times was a prime example of this. And with Nixon and Agnew trying to browbeat the press into conformity on Vietnam, liberals and Democrats were understandably inclined to defend the press in that situation.

And the major role papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times played in exposed the Watergate scandals which led to Nixon's resignation further reinforced the image for liberals of the major media as effectively playing the role of an independent Fifth Estate.

Glenn Greenwald quotes an op-ed by Daniel Ellsberg (NSA leaker Snowden made the right call Washington Post 07/07/2013) in which Ellsberg defends Edward Snowden's decision to leave the US to avoid prosecution over his leaks: "Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree. The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago."

And a large part of that difference is a drastic shift toward conformity and lack of critical reporting on the part of major media.

Democrats and progressives have been forced - at a speed that seems all too painfully slow - to recognize the ways in which the national press as a larger institutions and so many of the individual institutions that make it up are often much more of a barrier to progress than a facilitator. The Clinton pseudoscandals were a big factor, the stolen election of 2000 another, and the Iraq War even more so. At least now there is a strong progressive narrative associated with the netroots and the Democratic base that views the national media with a strongly critical eye. The Young Turks online network of sites and online programs is a notable positive element in that regard.

Digby Parton is oe of the most perceptive observers of this issue. As she point out in Hillary Clinton’s toughest adversary: The world-historic narcissism of the political press Salon 06/02/2015, Democratic politicians are much behind the Democratic base on this.

James Vega in Democrats: the mainstream media gang is whining with operatic self-pity ... Democratic Strategist 05/27/2015 points to the reality that, particularly with Hillary Clinton as the leading Presidential candidate, the pro-Republican bias of the "mainstream" media is more pronounced than ever. And he warns that Democrats need to be fully cognizant of that situation:

In the first place, it means that Hillary is entirely right in refusing to play by the traditional rules. The mainstream political press has itself rendered these rules obsolete by failing to report on the most important political story of recent years - the extremist conquest of the GOP. Reporters and commentators who refuse to report this reality as an objective fact about modern American politics cannot possibly also play the role of impartial arbitrators or objective journalists when covering a Democratic political candidate.

Second, Hillary's decision to act in accordance with this insight presents a profound challenge and threat to the GOP crypto-partisans among the press corps, one which will inevitably engender a deep and profound hostility and desire to cut her down to size. ...

As a result, Democrats should prepare themselves for the uncomfortable fact that in the coming months the mainstream press will become increasingly and stridently anti-Clinton. So long as she does not play by their rules they will describe her as "remote," "fake," "robotic", "inauthentic" "scripted", "cynical" "manipulative", "dishonest" and "insincere". Her Republican opponent, whether it is Bush, Walker, Rubio, or any of the other contenders will then be described in contrast as much more "real" "down to earth" "authentic" "open" "honest" and "sincere." Fueled by their wounded vanity and the very real threat to their influence, the mainstream commentators will create a narrative that continually frames the 2016 election in precisely this way.

Democrats must be prepared to fight back. The necessary rebuttal must be to insist that - although the press may genuinely be in denial about their own motives - their failure to tell the truth about GOP extremism makes it impossible for honest Americans to treat them as objective or honest. The Democratic response must be the following:

Until you are willing to tell your readers the truth about GOP extremism, for all practical purposes you are promoting an ideologically partisan, pro-Republican point of view. As a result you cannot simultaneously claim to also be neutral or objective or that you are acting as the unbiased representatives of the public or as guardians of American democracy. Either tell your readers the truth about GOP extremism or accept the fact that honest Americans have the right to view you as partisan advocates for the GOP.

This is important because the Washington press has always been entirely untroubled by criticisms that they are sensationalistic, superficial or cynical. Part of their vanity, in fact, is based on their self-image as the grizzled veterans who have "seen it all." What does get under their skin, on the other hand, is the accusation that behind their protestations of independence they are basically carrying water for the GOP. It gets under their skin because, deep down, they know that it's true. [my emphasis in bold]

"Beltway" denial

Elizabeth Drew has done a whole essay to deny there's any validity to the notion of "the Beltway" as a conventional-wisdom consensus among politicians and Washington reporters, The Beltway Myth NYR Blog 06/24/2014.

She doesn't mention the concept so many DFH bloggers use, the "Beltway Village" or "the Village" for short, much less give Digby credit for coming up with it.

She doesn't cite the Ur-text for the concept, Sally Quinn's infamous column about what tacky outsiders Bill and Hillary Clinton were in Washington, In Washington, That Letdown Feeling Washington Post 11/02/1998. That column featured the classic quote from the man who gave his name to a closely related concept, High Broderism:

"He [Bill Clinton] came in here and he trashed the place," says Washington Post columnist David Broder, "and it's not his place."

Here's how Quinn herself described the gathering she's describing there:

When Establishment Washingtonians of all persuasions gather to support their own, they are not unlike any other small community in the country.

On this evening, the roster included Cabinet members Madeleine Albright and Donna Shalala, Republicans Sen. John McCain and Rep. Bob Livingston, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, PBS's Jim Lehrer and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, all behaving like the pals that they are. On display was a side of Washington that most people in this country never see. For all their apparent public differences, the people in the room that night were coming together with genuine affection and emotion to support their friends -- the Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt and his wife, CNN's Judy Woodruff, whose son Jeffrey has spina bifida.

But this particular community happens to be in the nation's capital. And the people in it are the so-called Beltway Insiders -- the high-level members of Congress, policymakers, lawyers, military brass, diplomats and journalists who have a proprietary interest in Washington and identify with it.

They call the capital city their "town."

Drew's piece does not include the following words and phrases: Whitewater, Iraq War, WMDs, Maverick McCain, Al Gore, Simpson, Bowles, the Grand Bargain, or "entitlements," all famous Village obsessions on which their general consensus was somewhere between badly wrong and nuts.

She doesn't reflect on how it came to be that Maureen Dowd, David "Bobo" Brooks and Little Tommy Friedman are considered Thought Leaders and Very Serious People.

She never refers to Gene Lyons or his book Fools for Scandal, or the one he co-authored with Joe Conason, The Hunting of the President, both of which tell the story of how the Quality Press followed a little band of sleazy Arkansas segregationists off the cliff known as Whitewater.

But she does tell us there are teachers and people who repair shoes in Washington. So "the Beltway" is a nonsense concept. Or something.

Tags: mainstream media, mainstream press

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

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

Thinking in stereotypes: John Boehner, hero of democracy, vs., uh, Snooki?

Nicole Polizzi, aka, "Snooki"

David Rothkopf provides us a good example of declaring conventional wisdom in a superficially informed way without actually troubling the reader (or, presumably, the writer) with the pain of much actual thought. In When ignorance becomes a movement: The rise of Snookiism Foreign Policy 11/17/2010, he serves up the Pod Pundit script of unruly extremists being wisely restrained by sober statesmen. More on what he means by "Snookiism" belove.

The bottom line on Rothkopf pleasing comfortable little tale is that sensible moderates like soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner can be relied upon to protect the Republic from reckless know-nothings:

Some Republicans take comfort in the fact that the Tea Party isn't really a party and had no real hierarchic organization or unified platform in the last election. They see it more as an emotional spasm, the Perot Party Version 2010, and that it will pass. But the 110 newly elected representatives on Capitol Hill who were elected with some Tea Party affiliation are now starting to coalesce into a driving force. If they can effectively form and maintain the discipline of a caucus then they have a chance at further institutionalizing and preserving their movement.

In some respects this might be seen as democracy at work. The problem is we are taking an affliction of democracy -- ignorance -- and turning it into a political movement. This may be disturbing to all those who have a passing interest in the facts, but it creates a special burden for those who must oppose the movement, because those on the other side are actually immune to rational argument, by definition allergic to it.

It now falls to the mainstream Republican leadership, especially to presumptive Speaker John Boehner, to control this group and limit its worst traits. And all spirited Americans who can read and write ought to be pulling for him. Because if he fails, America will face the threat of the spread of a strain of reckless demagoguery unprecedented in our history, a Snookidemic that threatens to effectively lobotomize the body politic.

Once again, the bottom line on this blog post that purports to be a warning against militant ignorance that could "lobotomize the body politic" is that all literate Americans should be pulling for Republican leader John Boehner.

Rothkopf also buys into the favorite press corps assumption that foaming-at-the-mouth Tea Partiers are the Real Americans just like Sarah Palin says they are: "The problem is we are taking an affliction of democracy -- ignorance -- and turning it into a political movement." Rothkopf may want to read up on a long-ago event now known as the First World War to see what depths of knowledge, mature judgment and savvy statecraft were practiced by distinctly non-democratic regimes like the Habsburg and Hohenzollern Emperors, the Russian Czar and the Ottoman Sultan - alll of whom managed to lose their entire empires in that glorious conflict. (The Czar managed to lose his life, as well.)

It's worth noting that Rothkopf's chosen Savior of the Republic, John Boehner, is not quoted in his article actually saying anything along the lines of Rothkopf's script. He was too busy campaigning for Tea Partiers to do so, I suppose. Rothkopf does give us one example of a present-day moderate Republican willing to be quoted on the record criticizing the Tea Partiers, Congressman Bob Inglis of South Carolina - in an interview where he was (mildly) criticizing Republican leaders like Boehner for their embrace of the Tea Partiers!

Another bold Republican moderate boldly and moderately gave Rothkopf an anonymous quote on the Tea Partiers, "We've never seen anything like them. The Gingrich 'Contract with America' revolution was mild by comparison." That was good enough for Rothkopf, though that quote doesn't exactly criticize the Tea Party crowd for being more out-there than Newt Gingrich circa 1994. Whatever. Just cheer for that moderate statesman John Boehner.

This is an entertaining game for pundits. But how serious is it? Did I mention that he sees John Boehner as the Savior of the Republic? Also, about "Snokiism": he links to a You Tube video of Jersey Shore star Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi. I'm guessing his point was that she sounds like an airhead. But since he was specifically using her video as an example of the Tea Party as the political manifestation of "a dumbed-down zeitgeist", you have to wonder whether he actually listened to the video where she says she loves President Obama.

But in the "dumbed-down zeitgeist" which Rothkopf identifies with the Tea Party movement, facts and consistency are like, sooooo 1970s. Snooki says she loves Obama, so that makes her a perfect representative of Obama-hating, science-hating Tea Party blowhards. Or something.

The well-funded sponsorship of Tea Party events and causes by FOX News and assorted rightwing billionaires and corporations kissing up to John Boehner's Republican Party doesn't come in for mention in Rothkopf's jeremiad against "Snookiism".

Best of all, rightwingers can use Rothkopf's column about how John Boehner is our last hope for democracy and civilization as an example of "liberal elitism". So everybody's happy all around! Except maybe for Snooki.

Tags: establishment press, tea party, mainstream media, mainstream press, radical right