As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Selling The Drama
The media likes to create great stories, with twists and turns, ups and downs, major characters and minor villains. I don't know if they are secretly gleeful to see Barack Obama's health care plan fail, but they certainly don't mind seeing it in trouble. It creates a story that they can expound upon, connect to the history of health care efforts in the past, and they can chronicle every public comment (as opposed to any detail in the bill) to fill hours of cable news. This narrative doesn't have to be perfectly true - it just has to feel like it. Chuck Todd is skeptical about all of it:
TODD: Look, I absolutely believe that, I sometimes think we're getting played here a little bit. You know, we've created this drama that he's struggling to get this done. And there's no doubt, this is a tough road ahead for members of Congress. And they're struggling, and they don't want to vote for this thing, and they're nervous about it. They don't know what it's going to look like a year from now, and they're worried about explaining how, "Hey guess what, that health care reform bill we passed, well you're not going to feel it for three or four years." So they're nervous about this whole thing. But Chris, 15 years ago, we had industry spending millions. There was more money on TV being spent to kill health care than to pass it. We have the exact opposite now... more money has been spent advocating the President's health care proposal than defeating it. That environment makes it like, look they're going to get something. They're not going to do nothing. They're going to get something. Now what it looks like in the end, that's a whole other story.
I think that's right, but "what will health care reform look like" isn't an exciting enough story for the media, or at least not as exciting as pass/fail. So they try to set up a left-right continuum, although the two sides aren't on the same level, and Republicans need Democratic help to scuttle any bill. But they give substantially more weight to a Newt Gingrich and a Michael Steele, and on the other side, a Mike Ross, a conservative Democrats who refuses to listen to his own constituents back home. This part of the story rarely gets heard in Washington:
Rep. Mike Ross, who grew up in this tiny town of 3,600, represents residents like 62-year-old Sandy Barham, a restaurant owner with a heart ailment who can’t afford health insurance for herself or her employees.
"I can’t tell you the stress of living on the edge, just wondering, ‘Am I going to get sick?'" she said in an interview at the Broadway Railroad Café, where fried catfish with hush puppies is a popular feature. "I feel embarrassed, almost, when I go to the doctors and tell them I don’t have insurance."
Many people in and around this economically depressed town can’t afford insurance, even as the battered economy has made it harder for employers to provide coverage for workers. They're looking to Washington for help, and Ross, a conservative Democrat with a strong voice in the debate over health care legislation, says he’s on their side.
Yet Ross stands ready to try to block passage of a House bill that, its supporters say, would provide exactly what Arkansas needs: guaranteed insurance and a wider choice of coverage at competitive prices.
We only hear from people like Ross about the cost of health care, not the fact that they want to raise reimbursement rates for rural hospitals, which would INCREASE that cost.
If only we heard a little from Mike Ross' constituents instead of just Mike Ross.
Earlier this week, Chuck Todd made a tiresome argument about how investigations into lawbreaking in the Bush Administration would be politicized and therefore shouldn't be done because it would distract the nation from the important business of whittling health care down to nothing. Todd decided to respond to Glenn Greenwald's criticism of his opinions on this matter, and the result was a fairly remarkable conversation that offers a window into the mind of the typical Villager, unable to divorce anything from political day-to-day combat, unable to view anything through something other than a partisan lens, unable to determine right from wrong. The one question that Todd fails to answer throughout the interview is why believers in the rule of law are supposed to care about how investigations and/or prosecutions of members of the Bush Administration make certain people inside the Beltway feel. Here's just a sample, but the whole thing goes like this, so give it a read:
GG: Let me ask you this question: The United States is a party to a treaty - I don't know if you ever read it or not, it's called the Convention Against Torture - and one of the things it does is it obligates all signatories to the treaty to prosecute any acts of torture. And it was signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988, and when he transmitted that treaty to the Senate, explaining what that treaty does, he wrote, quote, "Each state party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory, or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution."
Do you think the U.S. should be bound, is bound by that treaty? And, I want to ask you: with regard to the question of whether or not we follow that treaty, why do you describe that as nothing more than, quote "cable catnip".
CT: Alright. The "cable catnip" comment was this. This issue, whenever you see the words Cheney and intelligence pop up, and when I use the phrase 'cable catnip', it is when something becomes, whether the two polarized parts of our political society, are very entrenched in their views on this, and believe the other side is completely irrational on it. And so, that's, whenever you have an issue like that, that's what I describe as 'cable catnip'. Because it becomes something that is easy to put on television, because you can find a left versus right, which is something that cable embraces to a fault, and I'm in this business but I'm, I work my butt off trying to stay out of the left versus right fights and try to stay analytical and stay on the reporting end of things.
And so, that's when I describe an issue as cable catnip. I am not sitting here and saying - and I respect the passion on this, and I don't want to somehow sit here saying that on the right I've been accused of somehow just assuming that our national security is nothing more than cable catnip, or that torture of detainees is somehow relegated to cable catnip. That is not what I'm describing when I say cable catnip, but I want to put that aside.
To go back to your question, of course, any treaty we sign, the United States government is obligated to stand by it. Now, the controversy has been, and what we're trying to figure out - and what I think where the Justice Department is trying to figure out, and where this whole debate has been about - is whether they found a legal way to somehow abide by this treaty or not.
GG: And isn't that--
CT: ...abiding by the treaty--
GG: And isn't the best thing to do to immunize that question from political considerations is to say to a prosecutor, the way that we do with every other accusation of crime: take a look at the pure legal issues here, ask: "were crimes committed; is this the kind of case that indictments are appropriate for, where people should be put on trial," and then just have this be treated like every other accusation of crime, which is the prosecutor taking a look?
CT: I agree, in a perfect world - Glenn, in a perfect world, yes. And if you could also guarantee me, that this wouldn't become a show trial, and wouldn't be put, and created so that we had nightly debates about it, that is the ideal way to handle this.
GG: Why not? What's wrong with nightly debate about whether our government committed crimes?
CT: Because then it becomes, then you do politicize the issue, to the point of where you won't - the fact is, public opinion was on the opposite side of the argument as you. That doesn't mean public opinion should...
Mr. Todd "respects the passion" but cannot divorce the plain fact of law, in the Convention Against Torture, from the media back and forth. Then there's the idea that the Bush Administration "found a legal way" to somehow abide by the treaty. In other words, as long as they find a functionary - every Administration has their own John Yoo - to bless their actions, they can break the law in virtually any way they want. A permission slip from the Office of Legal Counsel, no matter how flawed the reasoning, can enable violations of the spirit, color and the plain fact of the law.
Todd talks about a perfect world as if those who demand accountability and justice are just wild-eyed idealists who don't understand the hard-bitten truth of how the world works. On the contrary, we know how it works, and we find it to be a problem. We understand that the Administration would be reluctant to wade into the actions of their predecessor. We get that the media will try to block holding top officials accountable by bemoaning the partisanship that they put on display every night. We get that the right would have a screaming hissy fit against whoever dared to investigate or prosecute one of their own. We understand that the entire dynamic in Washington is wired to prevent holding any member of any Administration to the same standard as someone in Poughkeepsie who committed a crime.
We just have a problem with it.
If Todd has his way, we will hear more stories - like the tale of a CIA Supervisor bragging about using fire ants on a detainee - of perfidy, that scar us around the world, and we will just move along.
If he were still at the Hotline this would be more specific, but unlike so many of the California punditocracy, he knows what a wave election means.
California: As unpopular as Bush supposedly has been in California, he only lost the state by 11 points in both 2000 and 2004. So what happens with McCain in '08? I think Obama's margin in this state will tell us a lot about Democratic enthusiasm among the base. Anything above 15 points for Obama probably means he will have some coattails down the ballot. And frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if some two to four GOP incumbents go down, shocking folks in Washington (Reps. Mary Bono-Mack? David Dreier?) No one is safe in this Blue state.
As we know, the latest Field Poll had Obama up by 22. And that big a spread is going to cause some disruption.
I hear that Dana Rohrabacher dropped a last-minute mailer to Republicans, imploring them to turn out. The latest registration numbers show that Dan Lungren is in serious, serious trouble. This is not going to be a normal election year in California. And it's going to put the lie to the primary rationale for redistricting that Arnold Schwarzenegger is peddling to reporters.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the Kremlin in Russia sees more turnover than the statehouse in Sacramento, as he made the case for Proposition 11 Thursday in a conference call.
"We have to make our politicians responsive to the people, not to the party," Schwarzenegger said, joined by state AARP president Jeannine English and national AARP CEO Bill Novelli.
Well, the Kremlin is going to see some shakeups this year. I don't know if people are going to make the connection between all that turnover and the inherent fallacy that re-gerrymandering would allow for more competition, but maybe some of that late money flowing to No on Prop. 11 can make that case. Because the facts are that the Yacht Party is on the verge of being wiped out, at the state and federal level. And no redistricting had anything to do with it.
(I knew the Ron Paul factor - he's on the Presidential ballot here - would be huge, as big as Perot's presence in Montana in 1992. Perot got something close to 20% of the vote there, and Clinton ended up winning. This is a replay.)
If A Nose Grows In A Forest, And No One Is There To Hear It...
Last night, John McCain, he of the Pinocchioproblem, retold the story for the Saddleback Church congregants about his time in the Hanoi Hilton (John McCain is very reluctant to talk about his POW experience), when a guard loosened his ropes and, later, on Christmas, drew a cross in the sand, in solidarity with McCain the prisoner, a simple expression of faith. The crowd loved it.
McCain has been telling this story since at least 1999, in his book "Faith of Our Fathers." In 2000 he told the story and it involved the guard drawing the cross with a sandal. I guess the stick was better for the visual of the ad that ran this year:
Now there's the revelation that the story of the cross is remarkably similar to a possibly apocryphal story attributed to the late Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. There are a number of Christian books that tell a similar tale about Solzhenitsyn's redemptive moment with a drawn cross. Here's one from 1997:
Along with other prisoners, he worked in the fields day after day, in rain and sun, during summer and winter. His life appeared to be nothing more than backbreaking labor and slow starvation. The intense suffering reduced him to a state of despair.
On one particular day, the hopelessness of his situation became too much for him. He saw no reason to continue his struggle, no reason to keep on living. His life made no difference in the world. So he gave up.
Leaving his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to other prisoners.
As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.
As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.
Solzhenitsyn slowly rose to his feet, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Outwardly, nothing had changed. Inside, he had received hope.
[From Luke Veronis, "The Sign of the Cross"; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.]
Here's the same story in a 2002 book. And here's another from a book in 1994, which could be the original source. It seems to have spread like an email forward, and most authors source it to Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago, though it's unclear whether the story actually appears there. But it was mentioned a number of times following Solzhenitsyn's death this month. I can't find McCain referring to this story before 1999's Faith of Our Fathers, not even in this incredibly detailed account of his POW experience for US News and World Report published in May 1973.
It's entirely possible that this type of scene happened at a prison camp more than once, and there are differences between the two stories (in McCain's telling, the drawing is performed by a guard; in Solzhenitsyn's, it's a fellow prisoner). The similarities could be entirely coincidental. This is not something you can prove or disprove.
That didn't matter in 2000. Al Gore said he invented the Internet and that he found Love Canal and that he and Tipper were the inspiration for Love Story. That's what happened and there was no shaking anyone in the media off of that, and they were going to use those and other nuggets to build a story about Gore's serial exaggerations, and make that character issue far more important than any policy or point of difference between him and George W. Bush.
Here's my point. I don't actually care about stuff like this. I find it much more relevant and vital that McCain was quicker to begin the invasion of Iraq after 9-11 than even Bush and Cheney, or that he believes in his personal grandiosity so much that he imagines skirmishes on the Russo-Georgian border to be world-historical events that demand action, or that his health care plan would literally cover about 5% of those currently uninsured, or that he wants to continue Bush's policies of inequality by cutting taxes massively for the rich, or that he thinks anyone who makes less than $5 million a year isn't rich, and on and on. Stories about politicians embellishing parts of their personal biography for dramatic effect are fairly routine and show little more than that they're... ambitious politicians, looking to connect emotionally with voters to gain an advantage. Remember how Ronald Reagan convinced himself that he served in World War II? Hillary Clinton's "sniper fire" in Tuzla? Barack Obama's book actually admits that characters are invented and time compressed. So this is nothing new. And I wish ALL of it were ignored, because the thin strand connecting these gaffes and exaggerations to the actual character of the nominee is tenuous at best.
But the media goes ga-ga for this kind of stuff and offers little else, for the most part. I'm pleased that CBS is going to do 35 long segments on every aspect of the candidates' policies this fall, but let's face it, that isn't going to drive the debate of the chattering class. They are uniformly uninterested in the issues, and they would much rather obsess over minutiae and speculate about character, whether the candidates "look Presidential" or "have what it takes" to win. In the LA Times today, there are two articles that speak to this. One is a critical review of broadcast news by media critic Mary McNamara:
SO MUCH has been said about the media's handling of this campaign that it's almost embarrassing to address the topic. But after watching hours, days, weeks of it on television, the cry of anguish cannot be suppressed: For the love of all that is holy, how did one of the most important presidential races in history, between two men who embody such disparate political possibilities, wind up looking like a montage sequence in a Will Ferrell movie?
"Bias" has been the watchword, but watching the nightly news loops, it seems less like bias than just plain old fear. Fear of missing the moment, of boring the viewers, of relying on the old-model thinking -- who, what, when, why, where -- while everyone yawns and returns their collective attention to their new iPhones.
"No, no, wait," news outlets seem to shout like desperate screenwriters in a rapidly deteriorating pitch meeting. Nevermind those boring old proposed policies or the contradictory voting records or any of that stuff, look at this, you're going to love it, it's The Big Reveal.
Indeed, this is a major component of how the news media covers modern campaigns. The other way is through horse-race discussion, taking those gaffes and nuggets and bits of character effluvia and judging how they will "play" with core constituencies. The latest practitioner is Chuck Todd, and he comes out and admits that he's a sportscaster:
Less than an hour later, Todd sat in a third-floor studio for his only practice run anchoring on MSNBC before the conventions. It was his first time behind the desk, and he anxiously checked with the floor director throughout the hour to make sure he was getting his cues right. "This is big-boy TV now," he said.
The Miami native wasn't looking for a television career when he first arrived in this city as a student at George Washington University, already fascinated with politics. "I thought I wanted to manage a presidential campaign," he said. But after working on a few races, including Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin's 1992 presidential bid, he decided "it was more interesting to do it as a sport than trying to be a hired gun."
Here's the thing, though - in the case of the Village, it's more like a home-team sportscaster. The guy who is paid the Raiders to cover the game, and he hates every other team and has no problem shaping the story to benefit his guys. The refs are always against his team and the other guys are always cheating. Their draft pick is forever the savior of the franchise and the free agent they let go was a bum anyway. They give you the "inside story" without ever being critical of the guys who write the paychecks.
If there was an even spread from the media of damaging stories or unfavorable narratives on both sides of the political divide that'd be one thing. But the idea of John McCain as a serial exaggerator in the way that they painted Al Gore would be unthinkable, despite the fact that the evidence is the same, and actually even more so in the case of McCain. So we get media types arguing that infidelity like that of John Edwards disqualifies someone for higher political office without applying that to McCain or indeed several of the GOP field this year. We get them defending Republican military veterans from attacks they deem scurrilous and baseless yet not Democrats of the same rank. We get the same paint-by-numbers narratives of Democrats as weak and feminine and Republicans as strong and patriarchal year after year no matter who the candidate, no matter what the policy, no matter what.
I'm focusing on this gross double-standard in the comparison between Gore and McCain because I think it's the most salient example and it shows to what extent their thumbs are on the scale. The influence is deeply felt by those who watch politics, especially those who see it more occasionally. And when there was a perception on the other side of the aisle that the media was too liberal, they mounted an effort to relentlessly criticize them to make sure their perspective was represented. I don't necessarily want a perspective represented; I'd like to see campaigns covered with a reliance on facts and not fiction, substance and not style. But if continuous, vigilant criticism is what's warranted, well... have laptop, will travel.
(incidentally, this is the third instance that I can remember of McCain possibly fudging his POW record, which he of course is extremely reluctant to talk about. The more extreme Rovian in me wonders whether or not McCain's handlers are just trolling for a response from the opposition, so they can freak out about people denigrating his military service. Hmm...)
Geist: It might be fair, it might be effective, I just opposed dangling babies.
Todd: I think it was a borderline shameless ad, using a baby like that. It just seemed like a sledge hammer on the message…
What's shameless, actually, is using a baby as cannon fodder because his commander in chief doesn't want to admit a mistake. What's shameless is using a baby as infantry because you never met a problem that didn't have a military solution.
Chuck Todd is a squishy Village protégé who has nothing to add to the larger debate but numbers-crunching. He's sadly probably the best we'll get out of these clowns. The bloggers who hailed Todd in the past because he hewed to the numbers that promoted an Obama candidacy are seeing it from the other side now. It was totally obvious that they would try to set the boundaries of debate as they always have.
War costs lives. We don't want to talk about it because it makes us feel all icky, but those statistics that flash across the TV screens represent somebody's kid. It's immoral to discuss invasions and military actions WITHOUT thinking of those babies who will grow up and perhaps become another statistic in a catastrophic mistake. And if the kid is lucky enough to survive his tour of duty, he'll come back home and have suicide drugs tested on him.
We know that both the current President and his would-be Republican successor want to stay in Iraq for a long, long time. There are soldiers fighting there right now who were 12 or 13 when war was declared. Under the McCain-Bush plan babies will be fighting there, and to set that outside the lines of the political debate is unacceptable.
But it's very acceptable to the Village, who wants to wash the blood from this debacle off their hands and never let their beautiful minds wander to thinking about someone's son or daughter giving up his life for nothing. They're culpable and that's why they want this off limits.
Todd, who's a fine numbers-cruncher, would be a good choice if (a) he ever interviewed any political figure ever, and (b) he had any inkling of an interest beyond horse-race politics. On that he's quite good, but Meet The Press is not solely a horse-race poltics show, or at least it's not supposed to be. It airs all year round, even in non-election years, and sometimes it actually devotes itself to covering an issue or two. And there's no indication that Chuck Todd would be able to ask any kind of non horse-race related question.
We need LESS pundits concerned only with the horse race, not more.
I approve of Kevin Drum's suggestion of returning to its roots, with a panel of experts asking the questions instead of one moderator with idiosyncratic beliefs. That's actually how Russert got the gig, by performing well on the panel in the Garrick Utley days. At the very least, it would signal an end of the interminable "bunch of journalists talking to themselves" shows.
So I'm watching Countdown, and Olbermann brings up the delegate math in the wake of Barack Obama's victory in Mississippi. He teases a discussion with Chuck Todd about "changes in the delegates in Texas, one week after the voting, and changes in the delegates in California, one MONTH later!"
So I think to myself, "Self, are you about to be mentioned on Countdown?" Because, as has been well-documented, it was changes originated on this website that led to the national media meekly changing their delegate totals to reflect reality.
So Chuck Todd comes on the show, and Olbermann asks him about California, and Todd hems and haws about there being "a lot of absentee and provisional ballots counted late" in the state, which is true, and about how some 3-1 delegate splits in various districts changed to 2-2, which is also true. Then he said, "and so when all the votes came in, it turns out Obama netted four delegates out of these districts in the last week." (rough transcript)
Yeah, that's actually kind of a lie. There has been no movement in the delegate count since CA-53 flipped to Obama on February 15. Most of the delegate changes happened very early. MSNBC just turned away from the counting, neglected to pay attention, and now makes the demonstrably false statement that Obama netted delegates "in the last week."
What actually happened was that my post about the real delegate counts got picked up by the Wall Street Journal and shamed the entire national media into getting it right. But I guess that wouldn't sound too good on Countdown.
I am a film and video editor, stand-up comedian, and blogger. My editor resume is here. A sample of my stand-up is here. The blog is what you're reading right now. Wasn't that easy?
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