Category Archives: News Media

How the Liberal Media Behaves With Abject Obsequiousness to Barack Obama

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By James Fallows, who lived and worked in China and Japan for many years: “Barack Obama’s recent swing through Asia was a relative success, and certainly nothing like the disaster that most U.S. coverage implied.” And in a more recent post, Fallows says the press corps is guilty of distorting reality by “compressing every complex issue into the narrative of the DC-based ‘horse race.'”

Fallows quoted Alexandra Fenwick in the Columbia Journalism Review:

In almost every analysis of the trip, Chinese officials were portrayed as optimistic and newly emboldened to stand up to American interests and Obama was cast in the role of the meek debtor, standing with hat in hand. The line is that little was achieved and Obama was stifled, literally by state television and figuratively by the Chinese upper hand in the power dynamic.

… that negative narrative failed to take several things into account: the strict Chinese image control that doesn’t allow the sort of media celebrity that Obama enjoys elsewhere in the world; progress made in backroom diplomatic discussions; Obama’s stated objectives; and his quiet diplomatic style that doesn’t produce the kind of sound bytes that a scorekeeping-focused press Washington press corps feeds on.

Fenwick interviewed former New York Times Shanghai bureau chief Howard French, who basically said the reporting on the Asian trip sucked out loud. “Everything is shot through this prism of short-term political calculation as opposed to thinking seriously about stuff,” he said.

See also Trish Durkin at The Week. In brief, she says the idea that Obama somehow failed to obtain anything was based on the erroneous idea that there was anything that could have been obtained on one trip.

Last but not least, there is the bupkuss factor: the consenus that Obama, poor jerk, has come away with nothing. No breakthroughs. No deals. Not even an Oprah “a-ha” moment. It’s as if everybody thinks that some concrete public concession on at least one of the biggies — carbon emissions or political reform or North Korea — is something a U.S. president just can’t leave China without, like a silk robe or a ceramic tea set.

But in reality, it’s not like that. Every key element of the Sino-American relationship is too big and too convoluted for the thumbs-up/thumbs-down approach to apply.

So, relax, everybody. Obama came, he charmed, he left. And for now, that’s perfectly fine.

Geniuses

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Paul Krugman: “Art Laffer (why is he, of all people, on my TV?) asks what it will be like when the government runs Medicare and Medicaid.”

Really, he said that. Here’s the video.

And the dippy CNN moderator let it slide. Another genius.

In WaPo, John Bolton published a op ed titled “Clinton’s Unwise Trip to North Korea.”

Shortly after, we learned that Big Bill obtained the release of the two American journalists held by North Korea.

Step Right Up

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Somewhere, I suspect, there’s a summer intern who can kiss off ever getting a job with the Washington Post. Mike Allen writes,

Washington Post Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth said today she was cancelling plans for an exclusive “salon” at her home where, for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few”: Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

Weymouth is saying the fliers weren’t vetted before being released and that they misrepresented what she had intended. Everyone is appalled that WaPo tried to sell “access.” Chris Good at The Atlantic explains how it’s normally done:

The business of media-organized conferences, roundtables, seminars, and presentations works, in most cases, similarly to the everyday sale of newspapers and magazines. The editorial staff has something to offer in the way of content–information, expertise, relationships with prominent sources who will talk about health care in front of an audience (booking power), good questions for the experts and an ability to moderate the discussion–and the business side sells that content to advertisers or attendees.

Still too cozy if you ask me.

More Manufactured Outrage

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I don’t know what’s more amazing: that the powers that be on the Right would even think up a stunt like this, or that so many righties are such sheep — nasty blood-sucking sheep, but sheep nonetheless — that they unthinkingly go along with it.

Here’s the basic story — Wednesday next week ABC News will devote much of its program to the Obama Administration’s proposed health care policy. On that day, “Good Morning America” will originate from the South Lawn of the White House and will include an interview by Diane Sawyer with President Obama. That evening, President Obama will take part in a moderated discussion in front of a live audience on ABC. The moderators will be Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer, and questions will come from the audience, according to ABC News.

One might say, Good for ABC! Unless, of course, you are a Republican.

The GOP officially complained that “opposing voices” will be left out, namely that they won’t be able to plant one of its usual trained goons next to the President to interrupt incessantly with absurd talking points so that no one can have a sensible discussion. ABC promises that people with diverse opinions will ask questions from the audience. One also hopes that Sawyer and Gibson will ask substantive and challenging questions.

Righties are screaming about an “ethical firestorm” because news will be “anchored” from inside the White House. A sampler of reactions:

This is the stuff of apparatchiks and Politburos, not a healthy, ethical free press. ABC will become the Obama network to sell his health care plan for an entire day. … [link]

Dr. Goebbels would be so proud… [link]

As far as I am aware this has never happened before in any administration – Democrat or Republican.

A free and independent press is one of the legs on which all representative governments rest. If we have lost it, The American Experiment’s remaining time is short indeed. [link]

One must ask, in what universe would news reporting from inside the White House, or a President taking questions from a live audience whose members he did not personally choose, be considered subversive of democracy? Beside Bizarro World, of course?

And the answer is, a world of people who think of the place from within the White House as enemy territory that must not be allowed legitimacy.

Update: See Bob Cesca at Crooks and Liars.

Devolved

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If you want to know how the American Right came to its current pitiful state, consider: Bill Kristol will be awarded a $250,000 Bradley Prize from the the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

Yeah, that Bill Kristol.

Eric Alterman and Joan Walsh are both appropriately snarky. They both compile sampler lists of the many times Kristol has been wrong. And not just wrong; stupefyingly, jaw-droppingly, what planet does this guy live on? wrong. I don’t need to repeat all that here. Let’s just say that if stupid were an art form, Kristol would be the Mona Lisa.

In any other context but the American Right, Kristol would be buried in obscurity. Since he’s a white man with a college education one assumes he would rise to a middle management position somewhere, in spite of his obvious handicaps. However, in a true meritocracy he’d be put to work doing something that involved simple, repetitive motions but no sharp objects.

Yes, Kristol graduated Harvard magna cum laude in three years and has a Ph.D., his biography says. But, folks, stupid is as stupid thinks. Either Kristol was dropped on his head post-Ph.D. or Kristol’s professors were paid off. There are no other explanations.

But then there’s Jonah Goldberg, both badly educated and intellectually incoherent. His silly cognitive misfirings are published in the Los Angeles Times and by Doubleday. And if Michele Bachmann belonged to any other party but the GOP, party leaders would keep her locked in the attic and out of public view. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the drift.

I want to call your attention to a section of Thomas Franks’s book The Wrecking Crew published in the August 2008 Harper’s.

For some in winger Washington this is an idealistic business, but what gives it power and longevity is that it is a profitable business. I mean this not as polemic but as a statement of fact. Washington swarms with conservative ideologues not because conservatives particularly like the place but because there is an entire industry here that supports these people—an industry subsidized by the nation’s largest corporations and its richest families, and the government too. We are all familiar with the flagship organizations—Cato, Heritage, AEI—but the industry extends far beyond these, encompassing numerous magazines and literally hundreds of lobbying firms. There is even a daily newspaper—the Washington Times—published strictly for the movement’s benefit, a propaganda sheet whose distortions are so obvious and so alien that it puts one in mind of those official party organs one encounters when traveling in authoritarian countries.

There are political strategists, pollsters, campaign managers, trainers of youth, image consultants, makers of TV commercials, revolutionaries-for-hire, and, of course, direct-mail specialists who still launch their million-letter raids on the mailboxes of the heartland. Remember the guy who wrote all those sputtering diatribes for your college newspaper? Chances are he’s in D.C. now, thinking big thoughts from an endowed chair, or churning out more of the brilliant usual for one of the movement’s many blogs. The campus wingnut whose fulminations on the Red Menace so amused my friends and me at the University of Virginia, for example, resurfaced here as a columnist for the Washington Times before transitioning inevitably into consultancy. A friend of mine who went to Georgetown recently recalled for me the capers of his campus wingnut, whom he had completely forgotten until the guy made headlines as the lead culprit in a minor 2004 scandal called “Memogate.” Later he worked for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, teaching democratic civics to Iraqi politicians.

There is so much money in conservatism these days that Karl Rove rightly boasts, “We can now go to students at Harvard and say, ‘There is now a secure retirement plan for Republican operatives.’”

Consider the conservative movement since the early 1950s — Russell Kirk to William F. Buckley to Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to Newt Gringrich/Grover Norquist to William Kristol/Jonah Goldberg. Whether you agreed with them or not, Kirk and Buckley at least fit the definition of intellectual. Since the 1950s, however, there has been a steady regression of cognitive ability on the Right; a march from reason. And now the entire conservative movement is collapsing into a puddle of utter imbecility.

I am no social darwinist, but I can’t help but think that one of the reasons for this biological devolution is that the money supporting the Right has buffered its specimens from the “survival of the fittest” rule. A “movement conservative” has no need for intelligence or accomplishment, only connections.

We come to it at last: George W. Bush. Removed from his cocoon of privilege he might have clawed his way up to an assistant mangership at the Crawford Wal-Mart, but only because of his ability to bully the employees. He not only never performed the job of President of the United States; I remain unconvinced he understood what his job was. Like Kristol and Goldberg, we’d have never heard of him but for his pedigree.

Of course, not everyone in conservatism was given a hand up by mommy or daddy. Rep. Bachmann appears to have had humble roots, as did Sarah Palin and many others. For that matter, let’s think about Tom DeLay, John Boehner, and that entire generation of Republican politicians. These examples show us that to be successful in the GOP these days requires stubborn ignorance combined with unscrupulous ruthlessness.

In other words, you’ve got to be dumb enough (or, at least, intellectually lazy enough) to mix with the “legacy” conservatives (or want to, for that matter). But it also helps to have the kind of feral hunger for success that aristocrats rarely muster.

In the case of conservative “journalists,” it strikes me that the older generation — e.g., Bob Novak, Pat Buchanan — had enough brains to be genuinely shrewd. They could be infuriatingly disingenuous most of the time, but when these two were in their prime you knew they knew exactly what they were doing. Current right-wing media stars like Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck are, alas, merely pathological.

Writing about Kristol and the state of journalism, Joan Walsh points out that when Kristol’s Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation award was announced, “a Pulitzer Prize-winner in Mesa, Ariz., had already been laid off from his job,” and “a newspaper journalist who was recently shot in the line of duty lost his job a few days ago as well.” Yet Kristol bombs spectacularly at the New York Times and gets a $250,000 award.

One suspects the next generation of movement conservatives will find it challenging to eat with a fork.