As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."
Friday, October 02, 2009
How Alan Grayson Changed The Debate On Health Care
Many of us already knew that Alan Grayson was a fearless champion against the rich and powerful. His notoriety this week for comments about the Republican plan for health care therefore did not come as a shock. His floor speech and his unwillingness to back down afterward have set a new standard for how Democrats deal with Republican hissy fits, where they get all offended by some comment or another and demand an apology and ritual humiliation. Their goal is to control the narrative and put any Democratic use of moral language out of the bounds of acceptable political debate, a standard that doesn't apply to them.
Grayson DEMOLISHED this tactic. And he did so by continuing to tell the truth and never backing down. And by the end of the week, many were joining him. Yes, they said: why does the GOP have no plan for health care? Why have they allowed thousands to die for a lack of coverage for years without articulating any strategy to deal with the crisis? Why would Republicans try to make an example of Grayson when their members have been using vile language for months, slandering the health care legislation with lies about "death panels" and rationing and people "being put to death by their government," in the words of Virginia Foxx? How could Republicans think there is no crisis in health care when so many are dying?
In a second, this has become the narrative of the week on health care. And Alan Grayson led the way. He just might lead the Congress to a better bill.
Brave New Films celebrates Alan Grayson's contribution to the debate with this video.
Let Rep. Grayson know you have his back. And join the I heart Grayson Facebook group. He really deserves the attention he's getting.
Mike Lux extends the argument that E.J. Dionne made in the Washington Post about the alternate reality the media covered in August, and the actual reality on the ground. It's an important piece, give it a read.
We still have a media wired for conservatism and based on the celebrity model of building up heroes only to knock them down. This is troubling for the progressive movement. We still don't have a big enough megaphone to influence this outcome, and indeed our progressive validators in the media get major ratings out of mocking the insanity instead of offering the real stories, for example, of why we need health care reform.
I didn't address the New York Times' Sotomayor temperament story yesterday. I think you could probably talk your way into believing that this was a perfectly legitimate area of concern, as Adam Liptak did. And I generally like Liptak as a reporter. But I also sympathize with Christy Hardin Smith's take.
You want to know why those opposing Sotomayor keep raising this issue of "she's a bitch on the bench?" (And how often have you seen this tack with a man. Honestly.)
It's because they know that a Heathers campaign is media catnip.
The titillating nature of junior high anonymous gossip mongering is so much more amusing and more easily understood by political reporters who don't bother trying to comprehend legal intricacies.
I think Liptak can get away with saying that Sotomayor's demeanor and style of questioning might be of legitimate interest if he didn't allow a bunch of anonymous sources to characterize it as "difficult" and "nasty" off the top. He did give voice to perhaps the best rebuttal of this line of argument, however:
Judge Guido Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School who taught Ms. Sotomayor there and now sits with her on the Second Circuit, said complaints that she had been unduly caustic had no basis. For a time, Judge Calabresi said, he kept track of the questions posed by Judge Sotomayor and other members of the 12-member court. “Her behavior was identical,” he said.
“Some lawyers just don’t like to be questioned by a woman,” Judge Calabresi added. “It was sexist, plain and simple.”
He said Judge Sotomayor’s forceful and lucid arguments had persuaded him to reconsider his position in a number of instances. “And I’m a tough act,” he said.
Actually, I think Sharon Theimer's AP article, accusing Sotomayor of hypocrisy because she grew up in poverty but now accepts her salary as a federal judge instead of living in a Bronx tenement, would warrant much more criticism.
There's no doubt that the media is treating this pick differently because Sotomayor is a woman, so driven are they by conservative frames and narratives.
I watched Obama's speech on the economy this morning, and I thought he laid out the scope of the problem and the consequences of inaction pretty well. He also cited the source of the crisis - "profound irresponsibility" and the final judgment on failed laissez-faire policies. And he's signaled that he's perfectly willing to let the package's total grow as it makes its way through Congress. You can read the whole speech here.
Republicans obviously have their own thoughts on this, and they'll try their best to derail the bill and increase the tax cuts relative to the fiscal spending. Whatever - they know nothing but obstruction. What's got me concerned is the gasbag reaction immediately following Obama's speech. On MSNBC, the first talking head pronounced that this was "the University of Chicago lawyer" Obama, not the soaring rhetoritician of the campaign. Non-Senator Tweety Matthews agreed that economic talk doesn't look good on TV because it's not "visual" enough. And Richard Wolffe, trying to sound knowledgeable, cited some of the specifics Obama offered as stimulus projects - moving to electronic medical records, weatherizing federal buildings - and intoned "it's not going to cost a trillion dollars to get electronic medical records."
Oh dear. This brings me back to a post that Jamison Foser cited this week by Niko Karvounis of the Century Foundation, about how the media's lack of expertise or even interest in policy matters could easily derail progressive initiatives by failing to offer a counter-balance to right-wing lies. Karvounis focuses on this question with respect to health care.
Right now, health care reform is an abstract goal that everyone wants -- excitement and anticipation are high. But as the substantive process of health care reform gets under way, two things will happen: first, ideas will be crafted into policies -- concrete plans of action and complex administrative measures, and second, politicians will become involved in the reform process. Policy can get pretty complicated; so the public will rely on the media to help it navigate the ins and outs of the issue. Once politics begins to shape policy discussions -- that is, once politicians enter the picture -- it's all the more important to keep the focus on policy, because it's at this point that policies have a real chance of being implemented. Americans should know their options.
Unfortunately, reporters aren't health care policy experts. In fact, they rarely ever talk about the issue. In a December report, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that, out of 3,513 health news stories in newspapers, on TV and radio, and online between January 2007 and June 2008, health care policy made up less than 1 percent of news stories and just 27.4 percent of health-focused stories. Instead of talking about issues like coverage, prescription-drug care, costs or public programs, the media prefer to report on specific diseases and conditions (cancer, diabetes, obesity and heart disease) and potential epidemics (contaminated food and water, vaccines, binge drinking). Together, these two topics made up 72.6 percent of health coverage.
This is less than ideal. When Congress begins to talk about health reform in earnest, the important news that will affect all of us will be about policy and institutional changes. The media need to be good at covering this stuff -- yet as the Kaiser report shows, newscasters, reporters and editors have very little experience (or interest) in discussing such issues. Worse, history shows that when health care reform efforts are actually under way, the media ignore policy in favor of more sensational stories.
During President Bill Clinton's efforts at health care reform in the 1990s, for example, media reports disproportionately focused on politics rather than policy. In their 1998 book Politics, Power, and Policymaking: The Case of Health Care Reform in the 1990s, Missouri State University professors Mark Rushefsky and Kant Patel found that that in 1993 and 1994 -- the height of public debate over Clinton's plan -- the New York Times reported just 257 stories about policy considerations (proposed reforms and solutions, analyses of options) and a whopping 549 on politics (personalities, disagreement, partisanship). When the nation's health care system was at stake, spats received more coverage than substance.
It's very troubling and can be easily extrapolated to this stimulus package. The media will cover it as a wrestling match, with the twists and turns being entirely filtered through the lens of surface politics. The right will send its passel of spinners to talk about "pork-barrel spending" and "unnecessary" art museums and bike paths being built with the taxpayer's money, and the chattering class will glory to their front-row seat at the prizefight. But the truths and the falsehoods never get sorted out. That goes double for health care, where a host of right-wing myths crop up in almost any media report about the issue.
Karvounis is hopeful - more than he should be IMO - that the media can talk intelligently about these issues. I do think that the public has more access to intelligent analysis about the merits of policy, but that's nowhere to be found among mass media. And ultimately, that's still where most people get their news and where most editors and executives take their cues on what to report. This is an extremely important point:
But it's important that the media rise to the occasion. As Rushefsky and Patel put it, "the mass media may not tell us what to think, but they are very successful in telling us what to think about." News helps us figure out what's important and what's at stake. A dearth of good policy stories will mean that the public isn't understanding the challenges, trade-offs, compromises, etc., that really shape health care. The public will misunderstand the terms of the debate as purely a clash of parties and personality -- as a question of whether "ObamaCare" will succeed -- instead of story about structural changes and policy choices that will affect all of us. We shouldn't focus on how much we like or dislike the politicians involved in health care reform; the focus should be on the strengths and weaknesses of their proposals.
Traditional media has very set narratives for how they view policy fights, and they believe the public wants to view those fights along those lines. In the brawl, reality is subsumed in favor of the he-said/she-said approach. It's going to take a supreme communicator to break through that very ingrained structure. But it'll take more than that. The rot in our traditional media is very widespread.
More clips here and here. Wow, McCain can't stand being challenged. Don't these writers know that he deserves the Presidency by fiat?
Meanwhile, Mike Murphy (of all people) gets it right that McCain has no business being in Iowa in the first place. It's a sure loser for McCain and a total waste of resources, and just another opportunity for him to get angry.
Of course, his NPR interview this morning went the same way. The campaign narrative got set when nobody was looking. McCain is running a dishonorable campaign and the Palin pick was a stunt, and everybody knows it. It must be killing him at some level that he's been unmasked. He's now denying his slanders within minutes of saying them. What an empty suit.
Senator Barack Obama and two other prominent Democrats urged federal housing regulators on Tuesday to cut the golden parachutes of the ousted leaders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, another sign that the government bailout of those mortgage giants could reverberate through the presidential campaign.
Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, asked that any “inappropriate windfall payments” to the chief executives and senior managers of those agencies be voided, in a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the new regulator for Fannie and Freddie.
Together, Daniel H. Mudd of Fannie Mae and Richard F. Syron of Freddie Mac are eligible for as much as $24 million in severance, retirement benefits and deferred compensation.
“Under no circumstances should the executives of these institutions earn a windfall at a time when the U.S. Treasury has taken unprecedented steps to rescue these companies with taxpayer resources,” Mr. Obama wrote.
(standing on my table clapping)
You know, this kind of populism could be reported on. It could be acknowledged that Obama opposes taxpayer funds going directly to CEO windfalls while John McCain's own fundraiser is installed as the new head of Fannie Mae. It could be noted that Obama seeks to end the privatization of government resources while McCain has at 20 fundraisers who have lobbied for Fannie and Freddie.
It could be turned into a narrative about which candidate is on your side and which isn't.
It won't be, because there's important "common idiom parsing" to be done.
MATTHEWS: Now, it'll die, as we said, it'll jump the shark. Two days ago, no, we're all talking about -- you're waving the tabloids around, come on. Two days from now -- I want to ask you, what will we talk about two days from now?
SCARBOROUGH: Whatever the McCain campaign wants us to talk about, because the McCain campaign is assertive.
Only the Obama campaign is just as assertive - really, they are. I've seen what they blast-fax every single morning. Only they don't have longstanding ties to these media jokers, so their ability to pull the strings is useless.
I am sorry to agree with Mark Halperin, but this is indeed a low point in the annals of American politics. The faux outrage from the McCain campaign over the common analogy "lipstick on a pig," a line that was the title of McCain aide Torie Clarke's book, was something I expected to be a giant cable news story, but that doesn't make it any less depressing.
It doesn't matter that Mike Huckabee shot it down. It doesn't matter that the "Truth Squad for Palin" conference call yesterday was so ridiculous that former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift actually ended up claiming that Obama shamefully called McCain a fish. It doesn't matter that McCain said the same thing about Hillary Clinton. It doesn't matter that Joe Klein, who has finally cracked the GOP code on this stuff, is sardonic and mocking:
The John McCain campaign is so, so upset that Barack Obama said that McCain's efforts to camouflage his own policies is "like putting lipstick on a pig." I am sure that there is no cynicism involved here. I am certain that Steve Schmidt and his band of merry men--and they are, almost exclusively, men--are deeply offended, in their feminist souls, by what they perceive as a glancing reference to Sarah Palin's lipstick on a pit bull line in her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
What matters is that it's being covered at all. Not just by the Republican house organs of Fox News and the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal but by the so-called "respectable" news organizations. This is the clearest indication that liberals are still swimming up-current against a corporate media that is actively working against them. There is no way in the world that this nonsense should be getting any level of attention. I'm not questioning the size of the attention, I'm questioning the existence of it. But it's cheap and easy to build a flimsy set, play a soundbite from a pool feed, and get two shouters on opposite sides of the political spectrum to argue about it. There's no food or lodging cost to putting a reporter in the field, no cost to rent space around the country or the world for the reporter to file a story, no cost for a cameraman at all, really (most of the remotes where you see talking heads coming from have a ready-made camera setup and a button for the talent to push; it's a one-man operation).
Now, Obama is absolutely right to call the media out for promoting this phony outrage, but I don't know how much good it does:
Calling it "the latest made-up controversy by the John McCain campaign," Obama responded to the Republicans' charge that he was referring to Palin when he used the phrase "lipstick on a pig" at a campaign stop Tuesday.
"I don't care what they say about me. But I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and Swift-boat politics. Enough is enough," he said.
Yeah, they're lying. But if you're explaining, you're losing, as they say in politics. And yet if the Obama campaign "went on the attack" over something - which they do, literally every day - it doesn't get reported. People are acting as if the media is this blank slate where they just absorb whatever message reaches them and they blurt it back out. That's not how it works. There are editors and story producers who manage the content and make decisions on what to cover. And inevitably, they cover the Republican attacks and smears. Not the fellow POW who said that McCain is unfit to lead the country, not the good friends of Sarah Palin who said that she is unacceptable as Vice President, not the unchallenged statement that McCain wanted to abolish the Department of Education. It's "lipstick!" and the like.
Yes, you can't win if you're constantly on defense. You also can't win if your message is stifled and those making the editorial decisions of what to play up and play down consistently fall on the side of your opponent. If there's anything that the Obama campaign needs to do better, it's something that's done out of sight of all of us, and that's haranguing media executives and working the refs. Not that I think it would matter.
...I mean, The Poor Man has this right, but people throw around this word "fight back" an awful lot without defining what it means. One dude shouting with nobody around to hear it isn't going to do much.
Besides, the media is owned by big corporations like GE (NBC), and the GE’s of the world tend to do quite well in Gilded Ages (although personally, that’s shortsighted - depressions are a bitch even for the fat cats). Nevertheless, GE recently intervened to knock Keith Olbermann down a peg because he was getting too loud and too liberal. Glenn Beck is fine though. Joe Scarborough too. Tucker Carlson is edgy! Fox News doesn’t exist.
My friends, expecting the media to live up to even some middling ethical standard is pointless. Don’t complain, fight back. It’s incumbent on everyone from Barack to the guy on the bar stool to swing big, hard and often. Fuck the issues, fuck decency, fuck the facts, fuck civility. That’s a loser’s sport.
What happens when they swing and nobody sees it? Because that happens every day.
We're finally getting around in the larger blogosphere to something I was flogging a few weeks ago - how the media is failing to apply the same standard to John McCain that they did to Al Gore in 2000.
It's completely clear that the McCain campaign is outright lying about Sarah Palin's opposition to the bridge to nowhere. It's almost comical how many news stories have debunked it (here's a pretty thorough list). And the Obama campaign is not being passive about it, either. Not in any way.
On the same day that dozens of news organizations have exposed Governor Palin's phony Bridge to Nowhere claim as a 'naked lie,' she and John McCain continue to repeat the claim in their stump speeches. Maybe tomorrow she'll tell us she sold it on eBay," said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor.
And this is only one of a host of lies that McCain and Palin have uttered on the stump and in interviews. McCain, who has abandoned virtually every "maverick" instinct he's ever had, just yesterday blasted Obama for wanting to cancel a weapons system that he himself opposed just a few years ago. This has happened multiple times and it's not going to stop. In fact, Palin is STILL saying that she opposed the bridge to nowhere on the campaign trail. She's lied about it at least 23 times.
It's not going to stop because the media has not exacted a price for all the lying. They haven't built a "serial liar" narrative around John McCain the way they did around Al Gore, despite there being far more cause for one in this case. This is what Matt Yglesias was getting at yesterday with Marc Ambinder's blithely ignorant post wondering why the electorate doesn't penalize campaigns for lying. Yglesias correctly stated that the media doesn't penalize the campaigns, so why should the electorate, who's getting their cues from that same media? One-off stories debunking the lies are nice, but an overall narrative - which does exist - is the only thing that would do the trick in this case. In response, Ambinder said this:
...it must somehow be the press's fault that John McCain is enjoying a post-convention something-or-other because Americans don't realize that he's a lying liar, or whatever, [...] To move to a Greenwaldian debate about the duties, obligations and frustrations of the press -- well -- read elsewhere if you want to play that game. I'll abstain.
Ambinder is playing the conventional journalist's game of failing to recognize that the media is part of the story of campaigns. It's inescapable that they are the filter through which candidates must get out their message. And the hands-off approach they take, their unwillingness to referee on the side of the truth, hurts America.
If everyone got a newspaper once a day, and there were eight political stories, and all of them were different each day, and one of them had pointed out that Palin actually did support the Bridge to Nowhere, then the press would indeed have done its job. The job was to report the story, and they reported it.
But cable news and blogs and radio sort of changed all that and now there's too much information, and so consumers largely rely on the press to arrange that information into some sort of coherent story that will allow them to understand the election. And the press assumed that role -- they didn't create some new institution, or demand that the cable channels be credentialed differently and understood as "political entertainment."
They fill this new role through the methods storytellers have always used to tell stories: the repetition of certain key themes and characters, which creates continuity between one day's events and the next and helps the audience understand which parts to pay attention to [...] This requires deciding what matters. And on this, people have different opinions. Take the Bridge to Nowhere, which Ambinder mentions in his post. I think it's important that one of the central arguments the McCain campaign is making for Palin is a lie. I think that should be reported a lot, at least as often as the McCain campaign repeats it, and then if the McCain campaign doesn't stop repeating it, their lying should be emphasized a lot, because that's also important. On the level of first order principles, I know the press agrees with me, because they did this with John Kerry. The crucial problem in this discussion comes here: The press isn't allow to admit that they construct these narratives at all, and so can't transparently justify why they choose to use one and not another. Which creates mistrust and anger.
In a similar way, the press can't report that their corporate overseers play a significant role in shaping the news that we see. If you don't believe that, look at the MSNBC situation from yesterday. It's a cable network with a corporate parent that has found a niche generating cable news with a nominally liberal perspective, but it conflicts with the perceived rights and repsonsibilities of the corporate parent, so they must act against their financial interest and squash the nominal liberal perspective.
So they tie their own hands about a fundamental part of the campaign, something that really shapes public opinion on a variety of subjects. It really comes down to whether or not the grand poohbahs of the chattering class like the candidate. Glenn Greenwald weighs in on this.
It isn't particularly surprising that journalists view debates over their "duties and obligations" as sanctimonious, worthless, boring irritants -- a frivolous little "game" that is the last thing they're going to indulge. After all, they have campaign planes to catch, Steve Schmidt gossip to be dished along, petty scoops to uncover, and the daily drama of the election to be dissected. They're not going to be sidetracked from those fun and exciting pursuits by haughty objections from interlopers about the destructive role they're playing in our elections, or by ponderous debates from non-members about their so-called "obligations" to scrutinize candidates' claims and expose the falsehoods of political leaders. Please.
I do think that Democratic operatives embedded in the media, what few there are, have started to catch on to this, and maybe a constant haranguing can bring us to some kind of reckoning. Paul Begala does a good job here.
ROBERTS: That would appear, Paul, to end any argument over whether or not she supported the bridge initially. But why can't Barack Obama make that point stick?
PAUL BEGALA, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Because the press won't do its job, John. I criticized Barack Obama when he hasn't been tough enough. Barack's job is to run against John McCain, right. Don't shoot the monkey when you can shoot for the organ grinder. His job is not to focus on number two but number one. But it is the media's job when a politician flat out lies like she's doing on this bridge to nowhere so call her on it. Or this matter of earmarks where she's attacking Barack Obama for having earmarks, when she was the mayor of little Wasilla, Alaska, 6,000 people, she hired a lobbyist who was connected to Jack Abramoff, who is a criminal and they brought home $27 million in earmarks. She carried so much pork home she got trichinosis. But we in the media are letting her tell lies about her record.
ROBERTS: Hey, OK. We got to let Alex respond to that. Flat out lies, Alex?
ALEX CASTELLANOS, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Let's be a little gentle. Look, every elected official in this country works under the system we have, which is you try to get a little bit of your tax money back. You just don't want to leave it all in Washington. The amazing thing about Sarah Palin is when she became governor she actually stood up and said no. And she made it -
BEGALA: That's not true.
CASTELLANOS: She took a strong stand. That is rare and that never happened.
ROBERTS: All right.
BEGALA: That's just not true. You know, John, the facts matter. There's lots of things that are debatable who is more qualified or less experienced or more this or more passionate, whatever. It is a fact that she campaigned and supported that bridge to nowhere. It is a fact that she hired lobbyists to get earmarks. It is a fact that as governor she lobbies for earmarks. Her state is essentially a welfare state taking money from the federal government.
ROBERTS: We still have 56 days to talk about this back and forth.
BEGALA: This is the problem. We have this false debate when we ought to have at least agreed upon facts.
There is going to be a lot of resistance to this. The Village establishment couldn't dare see themselves as biased arbiters and swayers of public opinion. They're just going to have to be called out. Repeatedly.
I hear a lot of people fretting about the latest USA Today/Gallup, and in particular they're saying that Obama is losing the messaging war and watching the election slip away. I think that Josh Marshall may be right that their messaging appears largely reactive (he's also right that messaging and the air war is far more visible than the ground game, where I think the Obama campaign has a serious advantage). But to the extent that he is right, he must also take into account how that narrative has been set by corporate-owned media.
Indeed Obama has run ads with their core messaging strategy of lashing McCain to Bush. They've released at least a half-dozen of them over the past two weeks. There was certainly an option for responsible media to notice this aggressive advertising strategy. They haven't. Instead, McCain "celebrity" ads and sneering attacks are given the top-line treatment. The Obama campaign ran with the "how many houses does McCain have" gaffe for a few days. They could and should keep doing so, but media allowed it to be overshadowed. In fact, they just banished a nominal liberal away from their political coverage after howls of attacks from Republicans, which still have the desired effect.
MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.
That experiment appears to be over.
After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.
The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.
“The most disappointing shift is to see the partisan attitude move from prime time into what’s supposed to be straight news programming,” said Davidson Goldin, formerly the editorial director of MSNBC and a co-founder of the reputation management firm DolceGoldin.
As Glenn Greenwald notes, giant conglomerates which own major defense contractors are simply never going to be in the business of promoting liberalism. Olbermann is anti-Bush and mildly interested in protecting civil liberties but he's hardly echoing liberal positions on issues. Rachel Maddow's premiere tonight will be very interesting to watch, but that's of course one show.
What comes through here is a need to placate the right. And that absolutely seeps into coverage of the day-to-day of this Presidential campaign. McCain's people have worked the refs and the refs have responded. They conflate documented lies from Republicans with one statement that says McCain voted 95% of the time with Bush (true in 2007, and it was 100% in 2008 so they're being generous) when the lifetime score is 90%. This gives the impression that "everybody fibs" in political campaigns, which allows the GOP to continue lying because they're never called on it.
Back in 2000, the exit polls showed that among the 24 percent of the electorate who said it was very important to them to select an “honest and trustworthy” president, 80 percent voted for George W Bush. This, I assume, had something to do with the fact that the press repeatedly weaved through its coverage of Gore a narrative about Gore’s alleged difficulty telling the truth, even though most of the data points where Gore lied or “exaggerated” were actually made up by the press. McCain, by contrast, has not only been caught in several bald-faced lies, but in a few instances — this business with Palin and the bridge most notably — keeps on doing it in very high-profile contexts even though they’ve gotten called on it repeatedly. So where’s the narrative about how McCain’s key strategy introducing Sarah Palin to the public and turning his campaign around is based on putting lies at the heart of the presentation?
The extent to which Obama's campaign can change the messaging narrative is extremely limited and was always going to be extremely limited. The media is simply locked in to their preconceived notions of how Democrats and Republicans are viewed by them. They are uninterested in policy except where candidates, particularly the Democratic candidate, differ from ideological orthodoxy, but of course they never determine what that orthodoxy is, so all you end up hearing is a Democrat telling America what Republican plans they would adopt. They whine that the policy proposals are not fresh, but they are completely uninterested in hearing about them at all. They poll-watch and judge horse races and look at who's hitting who with what ad and who's fighting. And they already have written those scripts in triplicate.
If anyone has a clue how to beat this back, I'm all ears. I would say that ensuring that online media flourishes is paramount, and hoepfully less people will get their news from these "official" sources in the years to come.
...so HowardKurtz comes out and says that McCain's latest ad, claiming that Sarah Palin stopped the bridge to nowhere, is a lie. OK, but isn't it part of a pattern of lies? This is what the press did to Al Gore in 2000, and it's more warranted here. That would match the Obama campaign's comment:
"Despite being discredited over and over again by numerous news organizations, the McCain campaign continues to repeat the lie that Sarah Palin stopped the Bridge to Nowhere. John McCain has voted with George Bush 90% of the time and he and Sarah Palin will continue Bush's economic policies, his health care policy, his education policy, his energy policy, and his foreign policy. McCain and Palin will say or do anything to make people believe that they will change something besides the person sitting in the Oval Office. That's the kind of politics people are tired of, and it's anything but change."
It's totally absurd that the media critics far and wide have come out of the woodwork to cluck their tongues and shake their heads at MSNBC's decision to give Rachel Maddow a prime-time show, on the ground that it could reflect a dangerousleftward drift (because liberals don't watch news shows). This is the same so-called liberal media that has seen cable shows from Tucker Carlson (conservative), Joe Scarborough (conservative ex-Congressman), Glenn Beck (batshit crazy wingnut), Michael Savage (scumbag wingnut), Alan Keyes (crazy scumbag wingnut conservative), Sean Hannity (see above), Bill O'Reilly (ditto), etc., etc. Now one liberal finally gets a show and this could cause a dangerous imbalance in the force. (I consider Olbermann more of a Bush-hater than an actual liberal). Glenn Greenwald demolishes this argument quickly and quietly.
For years, cable news -- well beyond just Fox -- has been suffuse with the hardest-right ideologues. Virtually every Karl Rove disciple not formally with the McCain campaign is now employed in some capacity in the media. Dan Bartlett just joined CBS News as a "political analyst", and just today, Time announced that it has hired Mike Murphy, GOP strategist and former chief McCain adviser, as a new columnist and new poster at Swampland, and he promptly wrote a column filled with trite Rovian platitudes about how Obama is "irresistible to the wine-and-cheese lovers" but can't connect with the salt-of-the-earth working-class People because Obama "reminds them of the Ivy League whiz kids they've dealt with at work during the latest downsizing." [...]
Maddow is unquestionably one of the smartest and most incisive commentators anywhere on television -- perhaps the smartest. One would think that the presence of smart commentary in the wasteland known as "cable news" would be cause for celebration among those super-Serious intellects at TNR. Zimmerman even brings herself to recognize that Maddow's "no mere histrionic provocateur" and "has proved herself to be a savvy commentator with quick, smart takes on the news of the day." But no matter. She's a liberal -- and, therefore, to the Tucker-Carlson-loving Sacha Zimmermans of the world, her mere presence is likely to infect and degrade our political discourse with shrill, overheated, fringe, sickly partisan rhetoric -- "refusing to acknowledge anything but spite, paranoia, and conspiracy theory when it comes to the other side."
The reaction to Maddow's show highlights just how suffocatingly narrow, and right-wing, the spectrum of mainstream political discourse in America is. Hiring Michael Savage, Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson to host their own shows didn't jeopardize NBC's news brand, just as giving Glenn Beck -- Glenn Beck -- his own show didn't jeopardize CNN's. Most mainstream political and media figures even continue to insist that Fox is a legitimate news organization because Brit Hume confines his overt right-wing talking points to the Sunday show. But the presence of a liberal on MSNBC instantaneously destroys traditional principles of Journalism.
This is going to be appointment television for liberals, and the ratings are almost sure to go up in the time slot. But the fear and loathing over Maddow's ascension has little to do with ratings. It's about genuinely progressive ideas and perspectives "infecting the discourse," as it were. Now, the chattering class does a pretty good job of neatly avoiding whatever Olbermann puts on his show and ensuring none of it shapes the narrative. With Maddow there as well that will get slightly more difficult, but only slightly so. This will be a 2-hour island on a sea of conventional wisdom and rigid narrative.
I will note that the Finemans and Alters of the world who come on with Olbermann do end up reflecting the viewpoint of the host. A lot of them are just eager to please, anyway. So more liberals they might have to curry favor with in order to stay on the air might be a good thing. Whether it gets reflected in the broader narrative, I'm not sure.
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...)
Today there was a headline that John McCain wears $520 Ferragamo loafers. If the liberal blogosphere were set up like the conservative blogosphere, everybody would be frantically posting about it and linking to one another's attempts at humor, making really crude Photoshops with McCain in a full-length gown and shoes made of gold, create horrible YouTubes about "Richie John" or some other kind of nonsense pun, and basically cause such a ruckus that the AP and Washington Post would devote 1,600-word stories to the shoes and where they came from and maybe an interview with the shoe salesman.
But sadly, we're not juvenile delinquents. We didn't see the Edwards haircut as a big deal and we don't see McCain's shoes as a big deal, and the most we can muster is a slightly ironic raise of the eyebrow and saying "If McCain were a Democrat he'd be pummeled for this..." Rich people can wear what they can afford and I don't really have much to say about it. But there is a kind of asymmetrical warfare at work here. The pundit media, the chattering class, has virtually no grasp of policy and exists to be fed the kind of pointless stories like what kind of shoes a candidate wears. Republicans are all too willing to do the feeding; but Democrats pretty much aren't, and that's a character flaw. Or rather, it's not a flaw, but it causes the critique of Democrats as weak and effeminate to go unchallenged, often. Meanwhile Republicans are tough and rugged and they live on ranches (even though McCain's is not a ranch, it's called one).
I don't know what to do about this. I'm not going to pounce on every little cool kid snickering statement to prove that McCain is some dandy or whatever. It's just not worth it. He has no understanding of the economy, no principles that he keeps for more than five minutes, and constructs his foreign policy around more wars and using the military to problem-solve. That's enough for me. But at some level, these bullshit ticky-tack things do have to be combated in the media.
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