You get what you pay for

Really, Michael Kinsley writes for the NY Post now?

"Trading on the name of the Washington Post"

Greg Sargent is a little pissed at his fellow employees, and rightly so.

Liberal outrage

It's funny how arguments for opposing senseless wars, or useless torture sessions, or demonizing lawyers for defending the accused aren't allowed to be made in the pages of our leading daily newspaper unless those arguments are made by Republicans.

Not "ha ha" funny.

Can't unplug the Wurlitzer

Really, the front page of the New York Times?

It is a source of debate whether “Cheney” is an asset or a liability for this 43-year-old lawyer and former State Department official who keeps turning up on TV, at lecterns and in discussions about future Republican candidates. There is also the question of whether the “Cheney message” on national security — which essentially translates to an aggressive and interventionist approach — is something the Republican Party should be trumpeting, or burying.

I think the fact that this did appear on the front page of our most pre-eminent newspaper is surely proof that "Cheney" is an asset for this otherwise unremarkable human being. But I guess this is all part of the new "sensitivity" to right wing talking points, as recommended by the "Public Editor."

Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief, said, “We did not ignore the Acorn story, so I don’t think it’s fair for people to say we blew it off.” The paper’s follow-up coverage has included a profile of O’Keefe, a report on a House vote to deny funds to Acorn, and an article on the Internal Revenue Service’s decision to drop Acorn from its volunteer tax assistance program. Baquet said people need to keep Acorn in perspective with other Washington stories: health care, two wars and the deep recession.

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

For once, the Times did cover this story appropriately -- looking at the politics behind the Acorn obsession. But having their hand slapped by...their own Public Editor...should lead to greater attention to Drudge. Whoopee!

Must see TV

Steve Benen brings us an important programming note.

A ROUNDTABLE YOU'LL WANT TO MISS.... ABC News' George Stephanopoulos posted an item yesterday, letting viewers know what to expect on Sunday's episode of "This Week." In addition to an exclusive interview with Vice President Biden in Iraq....

We've also got a terrific Roundtable.

George Will is back. He'll be joined by Liz Cheney, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Cynthia Tucker and former Bush-Cheney strategist and ABC News contributor Matthew Dowd to talk about comedian turned Senator Al Franken and what his addition to the senate means for the Democrats and the latest on Governor Mark Sanford's future in South Carolina.

You don't want to miss this show.

Or, maybe you do.

It's the kind of ideological balance we've come to expect on the Sunday morning shows. Consider the breakdown of the four roundtable guests: one conservative pundit (Will), one liberal pundit (Tucker), and two former employees of the Bush/Cheney team, including yet another appearance for the former vice president's daughter.

And, just to add, who the fuck cares what Liz Cheney has to say about anything, least of all the election of Al Franken?

Speaking of Franken...

Working themselves over

I have heard of working the refs. In this case it seems it's the refs working the refs.

Hopefully Bob Somerby will stop obsessing about how we liberals failed to strike back in support of Al Gore eight years ago and focus on this. Because if guys like Tapper and Helperin are leading the way, you can bet the press will try to "atone" for the "sins" they committed during this election.

To hear Halperin tell it, you'd think they tried to cut down the tire swing, not ride it.

The media's war on workers

Seeing the Big Three CEOs fly into Washington on separate private planes gets my dander up, too. But the media is still trying to paint union wages as the real villain here and it's not only wrong, it's wildly inaccurate. It's also a great example of why our policies are often so fucked up -- they're often the result of journalism that's too lazy to get past the ongoing mythology.

A bracelet for feigned outrage

Why, oh why, can't we get a better press corps?

September 29, 2008, 1:41 pm

Bracelet Flap Lingers Post Debate

By Julie Bosman

The Obama campaign continues having to address questions about Senator Barack Obama’s allusion during Friday’s debate to the bracelet he wears of a solider who was killed in Iraq.

This time, it was on “Fox and Friends,” where, Robert Gibbs, a spokesman for Mr. Obama, got into a heated exchange with the hosts over whether he made reference to the bracelet against the wishes of the family of Ryan Jopek, the fallen soldier. While Mr. Gibbs ackowledged the family did not want the death “politicized,” he accused the Fox hosts of “making stuff up.”

Meanwhile, Jopek’s mother, Tracey, has tried to set the record straight, telling The Associated Press on Sunday that she was “ecstatic” when Mr. Obama mentioned her son’s name during the debate, and said she was upset by reports and commentary over the weekend that suggested otherwise.

“I don’t understand how people can take that and turn it into some garbage on the Internet,” she said.

In February, Ms. Jopek, of Merrill, Wis., gave Mr. Obama the bracelet with Ryan’s name on it. Since then, Mr. Obama has worn the bracelet on the campaign trail, frequently mentioning Mr. Jopek while addressing crowds.

Ms. Jopek told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last spring that she was honored by Mr. Obama mentioning her son on the campaign trail.

“I couldn’t believe it. It was such an honor, such an honor,” she said. “To know that he does know his name. It means a lot.”

In Friday’s debate, Mr. Obama brought up the bracelet in responding to Senator John McCain pointing out a bracelet of his own.

“I’ve got a bracelet, too,” Mr. Obama said. “From the mother of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek, given to me in Green Bay, and she asked me, ‘Can you please make sure another mother doesn’t go through what I am going through?’”

Mr. Obama was subsequently criticized by bloggers and conservative commentators, who pointed to a quote from Ms. Jopek’s former husband, Brian Jopek, who said in March that Ms. Jopek had later asked Mr. Obama not to wear the bracelet at public appearances.

On Sunday, the Republican National Committee e-mailed articles about the issue to reporters, one with the headline “Bracelet Wars.”

In her interview with The Associated Press, Ms. Jopek, sounding equally weary, said that she hopes the issue would go away.

Emphasis mine.

Um, if the young man's mother says she's honored Obama wears the bracelet and mentioned her son's name, then isn't the headline of this story disingenuous? The "flap" only "lingers" because RNC and its megaphone, Fox News, is lingering it.

Un-balanced

I second this, but would go further: Not only does it ultimately undermine the profession of journalism, but this "pox on both their houses" fundamentally undermines the average citizen's respect for politics and politicians that is at the heart of the civic collapse in this country, a collapse that''s been going on since the glory days of Spiro and Milhouse. Unfortunately, both phenomenons -- "balance" without proportion, and a fundamental distrust of anyone running for public office -- are accelerating.

Next up: Caligula's horse for Consul. I mean, why the hell not?

L-Y-I-N-G

The Times' reporters seem to have written this entire story with benefit of an "L" on their keyboards.

Harsh advertisements and negative attacks are a staple of presidential campaigns, but Senator John McCain has drawn an avalanche of criticism this week from Democrats, independent groups and even some Republicans for regularly stretching the truth in attacking Senator Barack Obama’s record and positions.

Mr. Obama has also been accused of distortions, but this week Mr. McCain has found himself under particularly heavy fire for a pair of headline-grabbing attacks. First the McCain campaign twisted Mr. Obama’s words to suggest that he had compared Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, to a pig after Mr. Obama said, in questioning Mr. McCain’s claim to be the change agent in the race, “You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.” (Mr. McCain once used the same expression to describe Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health plan.)

Then he falsely claimed that Mr. Obama supported “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners (he supported teaching them to be alert for inappropriate advances from adults).

Those attacks followed weeks in which Mr. McCain repeatedly, and incorrectly, asserted that Mr. Obama would raise taxes on the middle class, even though analysts say he would cut taxes on the middle class more than Mr. McCain would, and misrepresented Mr. Obama’s positions on energy and health care.

In an interview Friday on the NY1 cable news channel, a McCain supporter, Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, called “ridiculous” the implication that Mr. Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” comment was a reference to Ms. Palin, whom he also defended as coming under unfair attack.

“The last month, for sure,” said Don Sipple, a Republican advertising strategist, “I think the predominance of liberty taken with truth and the facts has been more McCain than Obama.”

Indeed, in recent days, Mr. McCain has been increasingly called out by news organizations, editorial boards and independent analysts like FactCheck.org. The group, which does not judge whether one candidate is more misleading than another, has cried foul on Mr. McCain more than twice as often since the start of the political conventions as it has on Mr. Obama.

It goes on...

But, sheesh, John. When you're called on it by Joy Behar, that's really sad.

Sorry, Sarah

A member of the elite media apologizes.

When shit tastes like butter

Did the same Peter Baker write this...

...friends say that Bush, who just turned 62, has been looser lately, more relaxed, more willing to joke around and even do a little dance for the cameras from time to time....

Whatever the president’s virtues, they remain unappreciated in his own time....

If anything, it may be that the low numbers have become almost a badge of honor for Bush....

Donald Ensenat, a friend of Bush’s for more than 40 years who worked as his chief of protocol before stepping down last year, said that the president’s view, as he paraphrased it, has come down to this: “I’ve already taken my last licks for being unpopular, so these last two years I do what’s right — that’s my job, not with my finger in the air.”...

Stoicism has been a hallmark of his second term....

and this?

The selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska proved quintessentially McCain — daring, hazardous and defiantly off-message.

If so, he had quite a weekend, and I must really rethink my subscription to The New York [End] Times.

Sure enough.

Sports talk TV

Funny 'cause it's true.

To strain this metaphor even further (and apologies to all non-sports fans), say the Green Bay Packers were playing the Chicago Bears and scored the first two touchdowns. If our political reporters were sportscasters, David Broder would insist that the Packers should let the Bears score, Sean Hannity would loudly proclaim that the Bears did score, and Cokie Roberts would misreport the score and then proceed to ignore the game.

Maybe that's why so many sports guys are getting into political coverage these days and proving much better at it.

Wonders never cease

Every day, the McCain campaign comes out with a new "ad" that is in fact just a video they created to go with a press release to TV news departments. The press release says that they'll be appearing in "battleground states." But the only airing these videos get is on the TV news.

Steven Benen wonders why TV stations keep taking the bait.

But why would major news outlets repeatedly fall for the same trick, even when they realize the ads are created for the sole purpose of free media attention? There are competing explanations, but my hunch is a lot of outlets are just lazy, and video press releases make their jobs easier.

Um, yeah. It's no different then what corporations (and the White House) do in releasing video press releases. TV news stations are supposed to say where the videos come from, but seldom do, preferring to fill out their 30 minutes with moving pictures instead of just a reporter's face.

Sigh.

Why, oh why, can't we get a better press corps, for the millionth time

Michael Kinsley thinks the GOP is just better at winning presidential elections. Somerby begs to differ.

PART 2—PUNDIT’S LAMENT: Michael Kinsley penned a familiar old saw: Republicans play the game better. (For Kinsley’s column, click here.) These tired old tales pretty much type themselves. But here’s the way Kinsley put it:

KINSLEY (8/23/08): With so much going their way in this election, the biggest challenge the Democrats face is simple: The Republicans just play the game of presidential politics so much better. They play it with genius, courage, creativity and utter ruthlessness.

Kinsley forgot to include an obvious fact: It’s remarkably easy to “play the game well” when the press corps is willing to play on your team—for example, when major pundits like Jonathan Alter were willing to type “invented the Internet” and act like such “genius” claims made sense (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/25/08). Today, Alter tells us that Gore never said it. But uh-oh! Back when it actually mattered, he said something quite different.

It’s amazingly easy to play the game well—when mainstream journalists help you that way. Kinsley, in his upper-class aerie, is of course unaware of this part of the game. Although, in fact, he does blame the press. Or at least, he pretends to do so.

D'ya think?

The Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy held a talk, moderated by Judy Woodruff, between the Sunday show honchos-- Brokaw, Bob Schieffer, and George Stephanopoulos. Discussing McCain's success in the Republican primaries, Brokaw attributed it to the candidate's "indomitable will," and opined that McCain won by simply being "the most authentic...he wasn't trying to reinvent himself."

This is not only wrong, but diametrically, screamingly wrong. It's not a difficult point--McCain won the primaries specifically by reversing himself on taxes, immigration, the religious right, and virtually every other issue important to the hard right. These policies were not only blazingly visible--Mitt Romney and others called him on it loudly during the Republican debates--but obviously destructive, as the last eight years have proven.

And yet, here is Brokaw saying of the candidate who by far has done the most to change his positions that McCain was "the most authentic...he wasn't trying to reinvent himself." Remember, this isn't old, retired, mildly irrelevant Tom Brokaw. This is the new (for now) host of Meet the Press, and certainly someone who will be a prominent figure in the coverage of the allegedly most-liberal cable network during the elections.

Yes, I'm impugning his character

John McCain is a liar. He lies repeatedly, unashamedly, even when he's called out on it. It's time for someone to say that.

And the Times reports the GOP is "worried" McCain is going negative so early. Bullshit. The GOP has never had any qualms about going negative. Early. And often.

Never mind, though, Obama is presumptuous.

UPDATE: Well, what do you know?

The essence of McCain's allegation is that Obama planned to take a media entourage, including television cameras, to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany during his week-long foreign trip, and that he canceled the visit when he learned he could not do so. "I know that, according to reports, that he wanted to bring media people and cameras and his campaign staffers," McCain said Monday night on CNN's "Larry King Live."

The Obama campaign has denied that was the reason he called off the visit. In fact, there is no evidence that he planned to take anyone to the American hospital other than a military adviser, whose status as a campaign staff member sparked last-minute concern among Pentagon officials that the visit would be an improper political event.

[...]

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said again yesterday that the Republican's version of events is correct, and that Obama canceled the visit because he was not allowed to take reporters and cameras into the hospital.

"It is safe to say that, according to press reports, Barack Obama avoided, skipped, canceled the visit because of those reasons," he said. "We're not making a leap here."

Asked repeatedly for the "reports," Bounds provided three examples, none of which alleged that Obama had wanted to take members of the media to the hospital.

The McCain campaign has produced a television commercial that says that while in Germany, Obama "made time to go to the gym but canceled a visit with wounded troops. Seems the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras." The commercial shows Obama shooting a basketball -- an event that happened earlier in the trip on a stopover in Kuwait, where the Democrat spoke to troops in a gym before grabbing a ball and taking a single shot. The military released the video footage.

A three-pointer. Nothing but net.

But I digress. Back to the Post.

A reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding Obama's decision not to visit Landstuhl, based on firsthand reporting from the trip, shows that his campaign never contemplated taking the media with him.

[...]

Gibbs was asked yesterday about the continuing allegations from McCain that the real reason was a desire to bring a media entourage to the hospital.

"That's completely untrue, and I think, honestly, they know it's untrue," Gibbs said.

John Cole explains this man bites dog story.

The McCain campaign forgot one basic thing on this attempted smear- the ego of the reporters and the mainstream media. These folks are fine with printing any lie you can come up with, as long as they have plausible deniability. You can feed them all sorts of shit about someone possessing WMD, or about Obama being Muslim, etc., so long as you cite unnamed sources or undisclosed sources in the government or anonymous experts, and you leave the blame somewhere else. They will print any old rumor if you do that.

But when you try to make them part of the lie, you just can’t get away with it. They were there on the trip- and the McCain idiots tried to make them part of the lie. And they might have gotten away with it had the Obama camp not fought back and had Andrea Mitchell not started the groundswell of media pushback. Now, when the McCain team tries to spread this lie, the egos in the media see it as an attack on their integrity, because they are named accomplices if they do not push back. Again, the ego of the media is the most important thing, and the McCain geniuses forgot it.

But as John also notes, these are reporters, not Fred Hiatt or David Broder or Richard Cohen, all of whom will replay Landstuhl-gate for all it's worth from now through October.

Editing McCain

Watching George W. Bush speak, particularly on the campaign trail in 2000 or in his rare news conferences since, followed by reading reports of his remarks the next day in the newspapers was always a frustrating exercise. The accounts I'd read in the newspaper would have no relationship at all to the fumbling, confused, petulant responses I'd actually heard on the teevee.

Well, seems like CBS News has taken this kind of sanitizing to a whole 'nother level. If 2000 is a guide, the results should prove disastrous.

Whiner nation

Look no further than the McCain campaign to see Phil Gramm's recent comments borne out.

The extraordinary coverage planned for Mr. Obama’s trip, though in part solicited by aides, reflects how the candidate remains an object of fascination in the news media, a built-in feature of being the first black presidential nominee for a major political party and a relative newcomer to the national stage.

But the coverage also feeds into concerns in Mr. McCain’s campaign, and among Republicans in general, that the news media are imbalanced in their coverage of the candidates, just as aides to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton felt during the primary season.

“In every campaign, time is a finite resource, so it is unproductive to spend it worrying about the way Obama is covered,” said Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain. “That being said, it certainly hasn’t escaped us that the three network newscasts will originate from stops on Obama’s trip.”

Could that be because the Obama campaign is intrinsically more interesting than the bumbling McCain campaign? Could it be because McCain has repeatedly chided Obama for not visiting Iraq? Could it be that more viewers will tune in to see how Obama acts and what he says when he visits Iraq than they would if McCain takes another "stroll" there? Could it be that the networks are driven by something called "viewership" and "ratings?" Inquiring minds want to know.

Meanwhile, Obama raised $52 million in June, for an average of $68 per donor, according to the campaign. People get ready.

Pickler!

Our libural media:

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama says John McCain's plan to balance the budget doesn't add up. Easy for him to say: It's not a goal he's even trying to reach.

Ooh, snark! I loves me some snarky news "analysis." Later, though, there's this:

Obama's criticism of McCain's pledge as "overly ambitious" is backed up by fiscal experts.

But let's not let some "fiscal experts" get in the way of a good, snarky lede.

EDITOR'S NOTE — Nedra Pickler has covered presidential politics for The Associated Press since 2002.

And democracy is the better for it, I feel sure.

Whither NPR?

Dean Baker is righteously offended that NPR allowed two authors to get away with hyping "a crisis" in Social Security that isn't.

This is the one area -- yes, way more so than his health care proposal -- where Obama has not been as strong as I'd like. Gotta make sure we push back on this notion of SS as an "entitlement" that is about to run dry loud and clear. That's why I applaud his appointment of Jason Furman.

The other day, interviewing Obama, Michelle or Melissa, or whomever, channeled GOP talking points and asked him

Are tax and spend policies really bad for America, and is that what you're intending to do?

We're really changing the tone, aren't we?