Category Archives: News Media

On Request

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Patterico wants all bloggers to embed this video. So I watched it, and said yeah, sure.

You’ll recognize reporter Susan Roesgen of CNN from an earlier post. Roesgen’s work as shown on the earlier video was clumsy. She was over her head, I think, and obviously got rattled. I felt a lot more sympathy for her in the video above.

The thing is, righties are linking to this video as if it vindicates them somehow. I think it makes them look worse. Don’t stop the vid until you see the guy delivering the speech about how Hitler was a socialist. Classic.

Roesgen is getting the Dan Rather treatment now, btw. The righties are digging for everything they can find on her so they can smear her.

Update: Glenn Reynolds is bragging about how genteel, polite, and multi-racial the “tea parties” were. Yes, and I’m Prince Charles.

Update: See also No More Mr. Nice Blog.

Red Alerts

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Yesterday I described the partisans of the Right as being in a big potato sack race, hopping to crazyland. Well, this guy got there. He’s making a Big Bleeping Conspiracy Deal out of the fact that newspapers use press releases. I’m sure the same newspapers who are “complicit” in pushing the “radical” agenda of Families USA have also in the past published stories based on press releases from the “totally off the sanity charts” Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.

(Do these people live in caves? They’re so … innocent of how the world actually works, one wonders.)

Another news story that’s got rightie panties in a twist is from Rasmussen: “Just 53% Say Capitalism Better Than Socialism.” Younger people actually are evenly divided on the capitalism v. socialism question. The older the demographic, the higher the approval of capitalism over socialism. No big surprise.

I have words of comfort for those predicting the End of America — I doubt that most of the respondents know what “socialism” is any more than you do. I suspect only a very small portion of the respondents would say yes to the end of private ownership of property, for example.

But since the meatheads on the Right keep erroneously defining President Obama’s policy proposals as “socialism,” I can see how “socialism” might look good to a lot of people right now. It’s just that “socialism” isn’t really socialism. This country is no more going to embrace real, undiluted socialism than it’s going to fold itself up and fly to Jupiter. So chill.

Update: See also Chris Good and Melissa McEwan.

Hopping to Crazyland

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Call it Clash of the Titan Wingnuts. Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugged is accusing Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs of being an infiltrator, a neo-nazi, a fellow traveler of jihadists. Macranger calls CJ a “closet liberal” (ouch!).

Johnson actually said something sensible, which of course is beyond the pale for a wingnut. Commenting on a Politico piece called “Extremist rhetoric won’t rebuild GOP,” Johnson said,

This turn toward the extreme right on the part of Fox News is troubling, and will achieve nothing in the long run except further marginalization of the GOP—unless people start behaving like adults instead of angry kids throwing tantrums and ranting about conspiracies and revolution.

Based on blog reaction to Johnson, we needn’t be concerned that the Right will take Johnson’s advice.

I want to shift gears for a moment and look at some numbers — Nate Silver shows us that the GOP has lost considerable popularity in recent years. “[T]hose persons who continue to identify as Republicans are a hardened — and very conservative — lot. Just 24 percent of voters identified as Republican when Pew conducted this survey in March, which is roughly as low as that total has ever gotten,” says Nate.

If you go to Pollingreport.com you can find a page with “Dem versus GOP” approval ratings going back several years. There have been more Dems than Republicans all along, but since the 1970s the Dems took a big dive in party dominance. However, in very recent years they’ve been coming back.

A question asked sporadically by the ABC News/Washington Post poll, “Overall, which party — the Democrats or the Republicans — do you trust to do a better job in coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years?” shows the Dems consistently ahead going back to 1992, except for the years 2002 and 2003, when the GOP came way out on top. But by 2004 the Dems had the advantage again.

A Gallup question, “Looking ahead for the next few years, which political party do you think will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous: the Republican Party or the Democratic Party?” had the two parties evenly split, 42 to 42 percent, in 2002. But in 2007 the Dems were up, 54 to 34 percent.

So this movement in public opinion away from the GOP and toward the Dems isn’t something that just started this year. It appears it started in 2004. It just took awhile to become obvious even in mass news media.

At The New Republic, Chris Orr has an intriguing analysis of what’s happening on the Right. Essentially, the Right is already so marginalized its members have nothing else to do but compete with each other for position within the movement. And to do that they’re all trying to out-flank each other on the Right. So conservative politicians and media personalities are in a big potato sack race, hopping to Crazyland.

See also No More Mister Nice Blog.

Happy Happiness in Happyland

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One of the more surreal parts of working on the Buddhism site is cruising around looking for Buddhist news. Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency, is always a great source for stories about the wonderful things the government of China is doing for various Buddhist temples and monasteries.

Today I ran into a happy story about repair and restoration work planned for Labrang Monastery, an important monastery in Gansu Province. On the other blog I wrote a roundup of news stories about Labrang Monastery over the past year. Highlights: Arrests, beatings, torture, strip searches, “disappeared” monks.

Somehow, Xinhua left those details out of its happy story. However, Xinhua did link to a charming photo gallery showing happy Tibetans enjoying peace, prosperity and democratic reform under Chinese rule.

The “happy” stories must mostly be for Chinese, who want to believe them. I understand China does a remarkable job of preventing non-Chinese news sources from penetrating the Great Firewall of China. But I find a remarkable number of westerners who believe them also.

The stories of happy happiness remind me of the stories the Right always wanted to come out of Iraq. The Bush Administration should have hired Xinhua to manage Iraq news for them.

Editorial Pencil Alert

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Before it scrolls into oblivion, be sure to read Fareed Zakaria’s latest column at Newsweek. Then notice the slight editorial change made in the same column at the Washington Post.

Newsweek version (emphasis added):

Two weeks into Obama’s term, Charles Krauthammer lumped together a bunch of Russian declarations and actions—many of them long in the making—and decided that they were all “brazen provocations” that Obama had failed to counter. Obama’s “supine diplomacy,” Krauthammer thundered, was setting off a chain of catastrophes across the globe. The Pakistani government, for example, had obviously sensed weakness in Washington and “capitulated to the Taliban” in the Swat Valley. Somehow Krauthammer missed the many deals that Pakistan struck over the last three years—during Bush’s reign—with the Taliban, deals that were more hastily put together, on worse terms, with poorer results.

Many normally intelligent commentators have joined in the worrying.

WaPo version:

Two weeks into Obama’s term, Charles Krauthammer lumped together a bunch of Russian declarations and actions — many of them long in the making — and decided that they were all “brazen … provocations” that Obama had failed to counter. Obama’s “supine” diplomacy, Krauthammer thundered, was setting off a chain of catastrophes across the globe. The Pakistani government, for example, had obviously sensed weakness in Washington and “capitulated to the Taliban” in the Swat Valley. Somehow Krauthammer missed the many deals that Pakistan struck with the Taliban over the past three years — during Bush’s reign — deals that were more hastily put together, on worse terms, with poorer results.

Even liberal and centrist commentators have joined in the worrying.

I guess at WaPo one is not permitted to imply that Krauthammer is an idiot.

How to Be an Expert

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Yesterday the blogosphere was buzzing about the Jon Stewart-Jim Cramer smackdown (if you missed it, see James Fallows). Via Memeorandum I found this article called “How much money would taking Jim Cramer’s advice have cost you?” The title pretty much tells the story.

Even when times were good CNBC and other “money” channels depressed me, so I’m far from a regular viewer, and I’ve seen only occasional blips of Cramer. But yesterday I wondered, “where does this guy come from?” I checked out his bio, and he did in fact make a lot of money as a hedge fund manager. He also has some background as a reporter. But his hedge fund success, I noticed, came during the late 1990s. You didn’t have to be a genius to make money in the late 1990s.

I put Cramer in the category of “unexpert expert.” These are people who somehow gained reputations in something and are considered experts, but if you check out their backgrounds, and what “wisdom” they actually offer, there’s nothing there. Most political “pundits” are unexpert experts, of course.

The prototype of the unexpert expert is William Bennett, who is considered an “expert” on morality in spite of his gambling addiction and the fact that his ideas about morality never advanced beyond Sister Gertrude’s third grade class at Our Lady of Perpetual Chagrin. All you need to be an expert is (1) your own certitude that you are one; and (2) an ability to project an aura of knowing what you are talking about (see Dick the Dick Cheney). Actual expertise is, of course, not necessary.

Health Care Scare

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Ezra Klein talks about “zombie lies that will not die.” He links to a ridiculous Bloomberg article by Amity Shlaes, who raises the dreadful specter of “government-run health care,” which I assume is a system in which heartless government bureaucrats decide what medical treatments you will receive. This would be a huge departure from our current system, in which heartless insurance company employees decide what medical treatments you will receive.

Shlaes writes,

The administration seems almost to relish the sinister aspect of government-run health care. Otherwise it wouldn’t have created a position called “National Coordinator of Health Information Technology.” That’s a title worthy of Rhineheart, Neo’s boss, who tells him, “This company is one of the top software companies in the world because every single employee understands that they are part of a whole.”

Ezra writes,

This idea that the stimulus bill “created a position” called “National Coordinator of Health Information Technology” got its start in another Bloomberg column written by Betsy McCaughey. She called the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology a “new bureaucracy.”

But this just isn’t true. It’s not sort of true or arguably true or caught in arguments about the nature of truth. George W. Bush created the position of National Coordinator of Health Information Technology in 2004. Five years ago. The current director of the office is a Bush appointee by the name of Robert Kolodner. He has served there since 2006. He exists. If you prick him, he will bleed. If you touch him, he will recoil, because he is subject to our laws of space and time and as such was not somehow created by President Obama back when George W. Bush occupied the Oval Office.

What passes for “opinion” in wingnut world comes from the Pan’s Labyrinth dreamworld they live in. Don’t even try to make sense of it.

Elsewhere in Bloomberg News, John F. Wasik writes a nice piece about single-payer.

In a “Medicare-for-all” program, care would be publicly financed and privately delivered. You would keep your own health- care providers and hospital. The government wouldn’t dictate who your doctor is or choose your hospital. It would be acting more like a huge purchaser bargaining for the best treatment and drugs at the lowest price. …

…There would be a national market and regulation for health policies and no one could be denied affordable coverage. No more “cherry-picking” of only the healthiest people and rejection of the sickest or those with chronic conditions.

Wow, think of that.

Of course, even if their ideas are absurd, the fact that the Right is proposing changes means that we’ve progressed from the position they held as recently as the 1990s, and probably into the 2000s, which was that the health care system we have is just fine the way it is, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I believe George H.W. Bush used those very words in his re-election campaign against Bill Clinton.

With wingnuts, things have to get this bad before they acknowledge there’s a problem. On the other hand, they are grand at making up phantom problems (e.g., Saddam Hussein is going to nuke us) and flogging them ceaselessly. But real problems are uninteresting to them.

In other words, they get worked up over imaginary monsters under the bed and don’t notice the roof is coming off the house.

That’s why Tom Friedman shouldn’t be surprised. He writes today about the financial crisis:

Friends, this is not a test. Economically, this is the big one. This is August 1914. This is the morning after Pearl Harbor. This is 9/12. …

… Yet I read that we’re actually holding up dozens of key appointments at the Treasury Department because we are worried whether someone paid Social Security taxes on a nanny hired 20 years ago at $5 an hour. That’s insane. It’s as if our financial house is burning down but we won’t let the Fire Department open the hydrant until it assures us that there isn’t too much chlorine in the water. Hello?

See also Paul Krugman, “Can America Be Saved?”

Whose Denial?

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In his column today, Frank Rich correctly points out that America suffers from chronic denial.

One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly “changed everything,” slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable. Obama’s toughest political problem may not be coping with the increasingly marginalized G.O.P. but with an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door.

Bad news after bad news — the mortgage meltdown, the financial crisis, steroid use in professional baseball, that we went to war in Iraq over imaginary WMDs — are disasters some saw way in advance, Rich writes, yet most Americans were late to notice them and were caught completely off guard. Yes, but …

I’ll put aside the question of how much Frank Rich knew and when he knew it. I propose that Frank Rich and others who spend their lives in national news media leave their newsrooms and spend some time purely as news consumers. Pick some nice “heartland” community at random — maybe Cedar Falls, Iowa, or Talking Rock, Georgia — and live there for a year. Then they should cut off ties to buddies still working in the news biz and get all of their information from the same sources their neighbors use. That, probably, will be mostly radio and television.

I think then they might get a clue why Americans don’t know what’s going on. Mass media truly is a vast wasteland in which one might occasionally stumble upon factual information about substantive issues, but I wouldn’t count on it.

For example: I don’t often watch daytime television, but from what little I have seen it appears daytime cable news currently is obsessed with some child battering or homicide cases, and the few public details of these tragic stories are repeated incessantly. One might occasionally see a headline crawl like “Expert says millions of Americans will lose their homes.” But for the most part, viewers are shown the same little bits of video of the suspects, over and over again, and invited to speculate whether the girlfriend done it.

Remember “bread and circuses”? Well, bread is getting pricey, but we’ve got plenty of circuses.

Nighttime cable has its little windows of sanity (e.g., Rachel Maddow), but for the most part the producers still lack the imagination not to interview Ann Coulter whenever she publishes more of her pathological projections about liberals. And, of course, we still have wingnut talk radio and Faux Nooz, where right-wing shills like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity sit in front of cameras and make shit up.

Most people, busy with the details of their own lives, don’t have the time or resources to separate wheat from chaff. Especially when there’s so little wheat and so much chaff.

Michelle Malkin Is Stupid, Hateful and Knows Nothing About Progressives.

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But you knew that.

Update: Steve Benen —

What a strange conversation. Fitzgerald had Blagojevich arrested on Tuesday morning, and I haven’t heard any prominent Democrats or progressive voices accuse Fitzgerald of anything. How can the left “turn around and say he has an agenda”? That might make sense, if someone on the left turned around said he has an agenda, or even criticized him in any way at all. But since reality shows otherwise, Kilmeade’s and Malkin’s comments are even more absurd than usual.

Indeed, Kilmeade and Malkin have it backwards. First, Democrats continue to find Fitzgerald so credible, the party immediately turned on Blagojevich, and called for the governor’s ouster.

Second, there are some people who’ve “turned on a dime” to go after Fitzgerald, but they’re all prominent conservatives, not liberals.

Indeed, Ali Frick noted a wide variety of conservative activists, pundits, and officials, all of whom went from supporting Fitzgerald to attacking him, the moment he indicted Scooter Libby.

The irony is rich.