Michael Socolow, assistant professor in the department of communication and journalism at the University of Maine, grudgingly acknowledges the importance of Spiro Agnew in firing the first salvo in the American people versus, what was then, still very much a mass media:
The attacks on the media perfectly encapsulate the cynical brilliance of the Nixon administration. Scripted by Pat Buchanan and Bill Safire, and vetted by President Richard Nixon, Agnew’s speeches (there were several) began in Des Moines, Iowa, on Nov. 13, 1969. They proved remarkably successful. Agnew appeared on the cover of Time and Life magazines, special features on his criticism aired on all three national broadcast networks, and invitations to speak to civic and community organizations flooded his office.
The speeches were notable for both their content and style. No successful national politician had so forthrightly attacked The New York Times or CBS News. Stylistically, the speeches were filled with insults (barely) cloaked in peppery, alliterative phrases. But hidden beneath Agnew’s name-calling was a far more serious in-dictment of media consolidation. This part of the speech — now largely forgotten — changed the American media landscape forever.
In the newsrooms and executive offices of American media organizations the attack led to a great deal of internal self-examination. At CBS News, Charles Kuralt already had been assigned (“On the Road”) to report back on rarely reported aspects of America, and shortly after Agnew’s speeches NBC News sent two reporters out to do the same thing. A survey of local television stations revealed that 115 of 123 stations had started “a serious search” for more “good news items” after Agnew’s attack. Local news turned more toward soft news and light features, beginning a move away from critical reporting that has continued to this day.
The New York Times responded by implementing the OpEd page after years of internal debate. John B. Oakes, the editorial page editor of the Times who conceived the idea of the OpEd page (basing it upon a commentary page in the old New York World called the Page Op), had tried to launch the innovation for more than a decade. The publisher agreed only after the White House’s criticism could no longer be ignored. Oakes later described Agnew as typical of the oppositional voices he wanted represented in the Times. The first edition of the OpEd page featured both a critical assessment of Agnew’s speeches and an unflattering caricature of the vice president.
Both Agnew and Oakes professed a belief in the value of a diverse marketplace of ideas, but they held divergent philosophical views on the media’s social role. Oakes believed the media should lead and teach, invigorating the public sphere with fresh perspectives and ideas. For Agnew, the media’s responsibility was to be re-sponsive to the masses. This essential question — whether the news media should lead public opinion or reflect it — remains unresolved four decades later. But with the rise of the blogosphere, Fox News, the decline of journalistic authority and the fragmentation of audiences, Agnew’s vision clearly holds the upper hand.
Were Agnew alive today, he would undoubtedly be pleased by his contribution to the current media environment. Never have the American media been bombarded by such constant criticism — from both the right and the left. The motivations, assumptions and biases of professional journalists are closely and constantly examined, and the authority of their work has correspondingly eroded.
Two observations: first, didn’t Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center say much the same thing a decade ago? And second, a generation whose elites spent the last 40 years alternately shouting “Question Authority”, “Dissent Is Patriotic”, and teaching postmodernism, multiculturalism, and the importance of diversity in all things, shouldn’t be too surprised when the rest of the American people take them up on those ideas and begin to seek out media sources that reflect their own values.
In 2007, Bernadine Dohrn, Obama associate and former member of the Weather Underground terrorist group described living in America as being trapped in “the belly of the beast”:
We who are, as we used to say, in the belly of the beast … It again means not that we are the only purveyor of violence in the world, but that we have an extraordinary, special responsibility, not necessarily the most enviable one, of how to act here, inside the heart of the monster.
Which, while ordinarily disgusting language to describe America, seems oddly appropriate for this Obama-related story:
Despite all the evidence we have published that exposes ACORN as both corrupt and criminal, no other mainstream media organization has shown any signs of investigating ACORN despite countless angles and document trails. So I knew I had to go down to the protest on Bundy Drive to ask ACORN protesters a few questions.
With very little time I got in the car with Big Government Associate Editor Alex Marlow to meet Gary H. down at the protest. When we arrived, the protesters were fifty or so strong, monitored by a few police units standing to the side. Given that the police made me feel safe, I walked straight toward the chanting protesters while accepting an ACORN full-color single page handout entitled, “ACORN MEMBERS — MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THEIR COMMUNITIES,” which sung the praises of the organization.
As I walked toward the group I noticed a news camera was filming them, so I stood next to the camera, not only to memorialize what I was saying, but also as a further attempt to grant myself security, given that I was greatly outnumbered.
I told the group that my website, BigGovernment.com, was the website that had launched the ACORN story and that I was here to answer any questions they had about our investigation. Instead of engaging me, they backed away, pointed at their ACORN buttons, screamed and chanted. One ACORN leader, a towering African American gentleman, told the group: “‘We don’t want to hear what he has to say.” And began leading them in a group chant:
“Everywhere we go, people want to know, who we are, so we tell them: We are ACORN, mighty, might ACORN!
They also chanted, multiple times, words from the old Unidad Popular Marxist song that accompanied Salvador Allende’s successful 1970 presidential campaign in Chile: “The people united, will never be defeated” – a rallying cry for radical leftists all over the world.
I tried to draw their attention and talk as loud as I could, and asked a series of questions, “What do you think about Dale Rathke embezzling millions from your organization?” “How much are you getting paid?” “Are you aware that ACORN has been caught paying less than the minimum wage for protesters fighting for a minimum wage increase?”
And I also told them many times, “You are being used.”
As Andrew writes, “One thing was certain from this confrontation. They were not prepared for it.”
Huh. There seems to be a lot of that going on amongst the left this year. Or as Sue Esty, the assistant director of American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees Maryland was quoted as saying in September, in reference to the right having learned Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals playbook, “It’s kind of scary! They have learned all of the tricks.”
Update: Earlier today we linked to Moe Lane’s post about Missouri’s Democrat Secretary of State Robin Carnahan and her incredible ability to say absolutely nothing about her desire for PelosiCare in a three minute soundbite. Found via Glenn Reynolds, Dana Loesch notes what else she isn’t saying much about: “More on Carnahans’ Ties to ACORN”, adding, “This also makes sense as to why so many ACORN workers were present at Russ Carnahan’s summer rally for fauxcare.”
At the moment I will not address the merits of the criticisms, but focus instead on the interesting diffusion process that followed from the initial criticism from Coburn. Each day it was picked up by another few blogs. A quote from John Stossel provides a sense of the tone of the postings: “This summer’s town hall meetings made many congressmen and senators uncomfortable. No worries. The sycophants they fund have used your tax money to fund a study that advises politicians how they can avoid seeing you altogether.” Initially, I would infer, the first few blogs must have been on some distribution list from Coburn’s office (i.e., they weren’t just watching his website) because there were quotations from materials from Coburn that were not on his website. Thereafter you could see how different blogs picked up on the story, typically quoting or copying from another blog. So what one sees is a signal propagation process through the blogs. And as the signal propagates it evolves. Thus, for example, Stossel quotes from the Heritage blog, but then adds his distinct emphasis. The link and copying structure reflects the attention each blogger is paying to other blogs, however one would guess that each blog has a different but overlapping audience.
So the lesson here is that bloggers communicate with other people, including fellow bloggers.
Actually, it is quite flattering. I just love how a blogger in Poca, West Virginia, with a few thousand hits a day is placed on par with Sean Hannity, who reaches 10 million listeners. There is something very American — and very strange — about that.
Don adds, “Heaven help us if Harvard ever discovers Twitter.”
Veteran blogger and former Vodkapundit partner-in-Stoli Will Collier writes:
Pulp Engine is a brand-new site (is it a blog? I’m not sure) that some writer friends and I have been working on for a while now. It’s an online fiction magazine devoted to new stories written in the “pulp” tradition: horror, science fiction, and detective stories are in this issue, with more lined up for the future. We plan to release new “issues” bi-monthly, assuming real life allows.
We decided to build Pulp Engine because we were heartily sick of plotless “literary” fiction, and decided to go write what we’ve been wanting to read: good stories that are actual *stories,* not just the diminuendos of personal revelation that clog writing seminars. We’ve had a blast putting it together, and I think you’ll get a kick out of the results. I have a story of my own up in the first release, the first piece of fiction I’ve actually finished since college (and it was FUN to write).
James Brown’s famous refrain will have to be put on hiatus for an extended period in San Fransisco, CNN notes:
San Francisco’s Bay Bridge was shut down Tuesday and was expected to stay closed indefinitely after a piece of the bridge fell onto the roadway, the California Highway Patrol said.
The piece of steel and cable that fell from overhead initially caused a minor car accident, which backed up traffic for miles, said CHP Officer Peter Van Eckhardt. No one was injured in the accident.
That section of the bridge, which had recently been repaired, will be reinspected before the span reopens, officials said.
All eastbound and westbound lanes were shut down at 8 p.m. PT Tuesday, Van Eckhardt said.
Public transit agencies throughout the Bay Area were told to brace for an expected increase in ridership Wednesday, the officer added.
About 280,000 vehicles cross the Bay Bridge every day, according to the California Department of Transportation.
A 50-foot section of the bridge collapsed in 1989 during the Loma Prieta earthquake, killing one person, prompting efforts to make it quake-tolerant.
There’s a fascinating new media twist to the story though: Jennifer Van Grove of Mashable.com notes that the first photo of the bridge cable hitting the deck was Tweeted by a commuter shortly (very shortly) after the incident occurred:
While this is certainly not the first time that a Twitter user tweeted breaking news before mainstream media outlets — there’s plenty of incidents like the Jakarta bombings and Hudson plane crash to reference — it certainly serves as another telling example of the power of Twitter as a communication platform.
As old media continues its death spiral while concurrently iPhones, Blackberries and pocket-sized HD cameras continue to proliferate, expect more and more stories to be broken first via citizen journalists, rather than the more grizzled “pros.”
Host Stephen Green interviews Eric Olsen, the founder of Blogcritics.org, on how new FTC regulations will impact bloggers. Recorded at the annual Blog World Expo convention this past weekend in Las Vegas. (Watch for video on Monday at PJTV!)
Most of you are now up to speed on all the nonsense at what could have been a focused effort to promote conservative activism at Western CPAC. If you aren’t, I would encourage everyone to take a trip through the posts written by the people who helped make the weekend worthwhile for me. Ed Morrissey, Melissa Clouthier, Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit), Ed Driscoll, John Schulenberg (Infidels Are Cool), as well as John Sexton and Morgen Richmond (Verum Serum) have excellent wrap-ups of the various outbursts of dementia and other highlights. Caleb Heimlich, Elizabeth Crum, Jon Fleischman and Rachel Alexander rounded out the under 90 crowd that spent most of the weekend dodging the expanding prostates that tend to dominate old-school conservative gatherings.
It is this group of people and others like them who make me stick around and fight the fight. Honestly, if I thought that conservatism had to remain in the hands of the guy I wrote about earlier and/or some of the zombie extras from an old George Romero movie I saw wandering around WCPAC, I’d have moved to Costa Rica this afternoon.
The single most energizing thing about the election of Barack Obama is that it’s made online conservative activists redouble our efforts to find new ways to get the job done. Blogging stalwarts have kept the pressure on while people like me have gone nuts on Twitter and Facebook. I won’t for a moment pretend that I did any of this by design, it’s all been a happy accident on my part but the gift horse’s mouth is wide open and I ain’t taking a peek.
The confusion on the right stems from the fact that conservative principles are enduring. This leads to a misbegotten belief among some that everything else about conservatism is supposed remain unchanging. In fact, everything but the principles should be in flux, especially in the modern political era.
So we now have friction between the “Well, we’ve always done it this way!” crowd and those of us who moved into the 21st Century as soon as it was available for occupancy. It would be nice to have everyone come along for the ride but some people just can’t seem to leave 1984.
As I said yesterday: fine, we don’t need them.
The exchange of information and ideas between the new media people this past weekend was invigorating and inspiring. We talked about local politics, national politics, entertainment (Andrew Breitbart had a great line about conservatives ponying up the money to make movies they like rather than whining all the time) and a variety of other subjects. We were always in a good mood, hopeful and solutions-oriented. That’s why we get so irritated with the birther/impeachment crowd that some would have everyone believe constitutes a significant part of the base.
Here’s the reality kids: the base is traditionally the part of a political movement that mobilizes and gives it the extra juice it needs to get through close elections with some success. The drooling checkbook hordes who keep hoping for some kind of magic birth certificate fairy to show up in lieu of cultivating articulate candidates who can speak about real conservative issues are stinking up the place and they need to go.
We are the Base. Resistance is futile.
Be sure to follow the links in the above passage for much more on the conference.
On the New Media panel we shared with the people Steven mentioned above (and the now infamous Captain Blastfax), Kruiser summed up Twitter in a single, perfect, sentence:
“It’s typing, people, OK?”
Hopefully the audience who attended that panel will leave Western CPAC with an understanding of how easy it is to get started with citizen journalism on some form, whether it’s blogging of Tweeting, and if they stick with it and get their chops together, where it can take them. It’s a far cry from as recently as 1996, as this passage from David Gelernter that I read during my appearance on the new media panel on Saturday highlights:
Today’s elite loathes the public. Nothing personal, just a fundamental difference in world view, but the hatred is unmistakable. Occasionally it escapes in scorching geysers. Michael Lewis reports in the New Republic on the ‘96 Dole presidential campaign: ‘The crowd flips the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say ‘yeah, i’m the Media. Screw You.’ The crowd hates the reporters, the reporters hate the crowd– an even matchup, except that the reporters wield power and the crowed (in effect) wields none.
Within a couple of years of that event, the Drudge Report would launch, followed by the Blogosphere, Twitter, YouTube, and the like. Old media still hates the general public, but for very different reasons than the decades in which they took them for granted.
As far as some of the zanier stuff that went on at Western CPAC, I’m of two minds. As someone who identifies as fitting in somewhere on the center-righthand side of the aisle, it’s frustrating to observe. As a journalist/blogger/new media guy looking for stories, it’s wonderful to observe:
And it also serves a purpose, as well. In 2007, Jeff Jacoby explored “The Fights on the Right” in the Boston Globe:
On one important issue after another, the right churns with serious disputes over policy and principle, while the left marches mostly in lockstep. Liberals sometimes disagree over tactics and details, but anyone taking a heterodox position on a major issue can find himself out in the cold. Just ask Senator Joseph Lieberman.
In the liberal imagination, conservatives are blind dogmatists, spouters of a party line fed to them by (take your pick) big business, their church, or President Bush. Yet almost anywhere you look on the right these days, what stands out is the lack of ideological conformity.
In numerous articles and posts at National Review, Jonah Goldberg has stressed the importance of fighting out ideas on the right — and in that regard, the folks who attended Western CPAC may have gotten more than they bargained for.
It may have been messy — at times even a little ugly — but it was rarely boring. Nobody faxed it in this past weekend.
Update: John Fleischman, who chaired our New Media panel, has a lengthy “Review of the Event”, rounding up a variety of posts on Western CPAC, along with photos, at his Flash Report Website.
Yesterday, tea partiers gathered in Troy, Michigan. (If any state needs a bit of the lower-taxes and less government spending old-time-religion…it is Michigan.) This time, their protest was focused on the Big Media itself, specifically the local NBC headquarters. Anyway, a camerawoman from Big Media NBC didn’t seem to appreciate that just about anyone can now chronicle events with video.
Incidentally, as James Lileks once wrote, “Here’s a pivotal moment in American culture: the moment Sonny Crockett no longer smoked Luckies.” That was almost 25 years ago; didn’t this fellow NBC employee get the memo?
“When I saw these videos [by O’Keefe and Giles], I couldn’t help thinking, this is the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society,” said Breitbart, who put the videos on BigGovernment.com. “Everybody that is a conservative news junkie thinks that ACORN is the most important institution for us to uncover to the American public.”
And speaking of the Post, as Dave Weigel wrote last month in a competing DC newspaper, the Washington Independent:
When one report from The Washington Post called him for a story about O’Keefe and Giles, Breitbart compared their tape to the photos of Abu Ghraib prison released in April 2004.
“She goes, ‘Wait a second! I worked on the Abu Ghraib stories,’” said Breitbart. “I go, ‘Yeah, that was one aberrant National Guard unit. And now I have five ACORN places that are all complicit in the exact same thing. And there are more!’” (The reporter, Carol Leonning told TWI that the conversation did not go this way, but that she enjoyed getting Breitbart’s take “very much.”)
Breitbart, angered by the Post’s eventual story–it seemed to intimate that O’Keefe and Giles had been motivated by ACORN’s registration of non-white voters, in a line that was corrected days later–moved right on. BigGovernment had claimed a victory that conservative journalists and activists had been seeking for years, occasionally embarrassing ACORN with a state lawsuit, but drawing no blood. It was a natural next step for Breitbart. Until a few years ago he was known mostly as the man behind the curtain of The Drudge Report and a ringleader for Hollywood’s quiet community of political conservatives. (Breitbart lives in Los Angeles and runs his web operations from an office in his basement.) With the launch of BigGovernment, he is gaining new recognition as the conservative movement’s most successful — in terms of damaging liberals — new media pioneer.
“I get accused of breaking some journalism school rules,” said Breitbart. “Well, why don’t we have the Howard Kurtz conversation on a low-rated CNN show after this? Or at a J-school of your choice? I’m willing to be accused of being a monster.”
Actually, in the interview with Western CPAC, Breitbart describes himself as a latter-day “merry prankster”, happily attempting to make the media play by their own self-professed rules; or as an earlier generation’s chief prankster once wrote:
Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
Of course, these days, the legacy media are very much their own religion; not for nothing did Hugh Hewitt once dub Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism “the highest temple of a religion in decline.”
Click below to watch, or visit my YouTube page to watch the interview in a variety of other formats. The group interview with Andrew was somewhat hastily announced, which is why I used the cigarette pack-sized Sony Webbie HD I happened to have on me to record it; be on the lookout for more from the event, albeit hopefully in a slightly smoother form, and recorded on more sophisticated gear. But I think Andrew’s remarks compensate for the handheld videography:
Breitbart’s appearance at CPAC, and his speech after this interview to the assembled masses on new media, was one of the high points of Western CPAC. At Hot Air, fellow Western CPAC attendee Ed Morrissey has been doing an excellent job documenting some of the less-than-stellar moments there, including the gentleman on our new media panel who espoused the virtues of a truly bleeding edge social media technology — the fax machine(!) — and another nontraditional journalist’s attempt at a kamikaze interview with the one of the conference’s chief organizers.
(Click here to watch my earlier interview with Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV for their take on Internet video versus another territory of the ancien media regime — television.)
Update: The above clip was the conclusion of Breitbart’s chat with the bloggers at Western CPAC. The fellas at Verum Serum have video of the first few minutes his conversation.
NFL Commish Roger Goodell said that Rush Limbaugh and his “divisive comments” have no place in the NFL.
What does have a place in the NFL? Here’s a short list of players who were active after being convicted of felonies — I added Michael Vick to a list I found here:
Michael Vick: felony dogfighting charges
Leonard Little: vehicular manslaughter/DUI
Michael Irvin: felony drug possession
Ray Lewis: obstruction of justice in a murder
Plaxico Burress: felony weapon possession (in jail but not yet banned for life from the NFL)
Pacman Jones: technically a felon since he pled guilty to obstruction of an officer case in GA
And what has Limbaugh done? Said some words that some people disagree with — and in some cases he hasn’t said them at all because the quotes have been made up.
As for owners, former wide receiver Tim Brown once accused Al Davis, the owner of the Oakland Raiders, of being a racist. What’s Al still doing in the NFL, Rog? Isn’t the mere accusation enough? It’s certainly enough to exclude Limbaugh from your little club.
Rush himself explores the character issues of those who derailed his efforts at stimulating the St. Louis economy — complete, as he notes, with sources.
Meanwhile, in a press release from the National Center for Public Policy Research, “Jackson & Sharpton Effort Against Rush Limbaugh is an Effort to ‘Get Whitie’ and a ‘Racist Act,’ Says Leading Black Conservative.” And at American Thinker, prominent black conservative Lloyd Marcus asks, “If Rush Limbaugh is a Racist, Are His 20 Million Listeners Also?”
Related: “Welcome to America circa 2009, where loyalty to the ruling class determines private ownership of assets. Sound more than a bit like Chavez’s Venezuela?”
In her Examiner.com column, Kathy Shaidle writes, “The ‘Tea Party’ is just beginning”:
Many “tea partiers” and 9-12 protesters were angered by the way the mainstream media misreported their big protest In Washington, DC held on September 12.
In response to this and other examples of liberal media bias, Operation: Can You Hear Us Now? was born.
This coming October 17, activists will be rallying outside their local elite newspaper and tv news outlets to protest media bias against conservative ideas.
Step 1: Contact all your freedom-loving, American-loving, free-speech loving friends and get together to plan. Draw from your local Tea Party group or 9/12 group or other friends. Protest all things you did in D.C. – plus the complicit media!
Step 2: Identify local left-wing media outlets (most likely TV, since no one reads newspapers anymore).
Step 3: Plan a rally for October 17th, 2009. If you have enough folks, visit multiple sites concurrently, otherwise pick your least favorite, liberally biased outlet as ground zero. Time it for max participation for the working (i.e. tax-paying) class. Before the AM news or at the evening 6 o’clock hour might be good (local time).
Step 4: Use your 1st Amendment Right to Free Speech right outside their offices or broadcast locations.
By the fall of 1972, then-President Nixon had famously circled the wagons as the Watergate scandal was breaking. With plenty of flop-sweat on his brow, Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, was quoted in All The President’s Men (and later in the Redford/Hoffman movie version) as saying at a press conference:
I personally feel that this is shabby journalism by the Washington Post…I think this effort on the part of the post is getting to the point, really, of absurdity…
I don’t know what their motivation is. I have personal observations about what their motivation may be. You have a man who is the editor over at the Washington Post by the name of Ben Bradlee. I think anyone who would honestly want to assess what his political persuasions are would come quickly to the conclusion that he is not a supporter of Richard Nixon.
I read the other day where Mr. Bradlee was giving a speech and he said the Nixon administration is committed to our destruction — referring to the press — that this administration is committed to the destruction of the free press.
There has been nothing as long as I have been press secretary where we have ever involved ourselves in a program of the destruction of the free press. We respect the free press. I respect the free press. I don’t respect the type of shabby journalism that is being practiced by the Washington Post, and I have stated that view to you.
Flash-forward nearly 40 years. President Obama’s White House Communications Director Anita Dunn appears to be doing her best to channel the spirit of the late Nixon aide regarding the one network on American TV that isn’t totally in the tank for the administration:
The White House is stepping up its attacks against the Fox News Channel, labeling it a bastion of stilted and opinionated journalism. A top administration communications official has called the Fox “opinion journalism masquerading as news,” and vowed to wage a war of ideas against the network.
Speaking with Time Magazine, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said that the administration intends to be “more aggressive rather than just sit back and defend ourselves, because they will say anything. They will take any small thing and distort it.”
The White House blog has begun singling out and taking on the cable news network. Recent blog posts carry pejorative headlines such as “Fox Lies,” and “even more Fox lies.” Time calls Dunn the “general” of this anti-Fox campaign.
White House bloggers have focused the most attention on Fox prime time host Glenn Beck. They have derided his “disregard for the facts” and his “attempt to smear” the administration for, among other things, lobbying the Olympic Committee for the 2016 games.
Surely every president has to endure his share of intense criticism from those in the media establishment that disagree with him or his policies. So scathing critiques of the office are nothing new.
Dunn, Gibbs, and the left’s anti-Fox crusaders would have Americans believe that the sort of ‘opinion journalism’ they are combating is somehow confined to the right; that conservatives, unlike liberals, will “take any small thing and distort it.” But the left certainly has its share of network television shills.
Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, David Shuster, and Chris Matthews, among others, have all partaken in too many instances of journalistic malfeasance and pro-Obama pontificating to list here. My esteemed colleagues here at NewsBusters have documented scores of such instances.
So criticism of the president is nothing new, and it is non-partisan (that is, both sides engage in it). So why the sudden interest in countering messages from the right that can damage Obama or throw him off message?
It is apparent that the White House feels there is some new necessity in firing a shot across the bow of potential critics. The nature of Obama’s agenda cannot alone account for this necessity. Though Obama’s legislative proposals are certainly vast in scope and scale, every president attempts to enact changes that inevitably spur intense opposition.
It is not the novel nature of the Obama administration that is forcing the White House to ramp up its message machine. Rather, it is the size and force of the opposition that requires Obama’s team to root out and attempt to discredit all potentially damaging messages from the media.
Criticism of Democratic officials is nothing new for Fox News. But Fox is giving its liberal media competition a run for its money like never before. It is absolutely destroying CNN and MSNBC in the prime time ratings.
For instance, during Monday prime time, Fox News had almost four times as many viewers than CNN, and three times as many as MSNBC. During the 5 PM slot, Glenn Beck had roughly four times as many viewers as Wolf Blitzer, and almost five times as many as Chris Matthews. At 8 PM, Bill O’Reilly had more than five times as many viewers as CNN’s Campbell brown, and more than three times as many as MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.
The administration tried over the summer to doctor town hall meetings with plants in the audience and pre-screened questions. Helen Thomas, not exactly an outspoken conservative, likened this media manipulation to the Nixon administration’s attempts to control the press.
Where would she get that idea?
Update: In the comments below, “Letalis Maximus, Esq.” channels Patton, or at least George C. Scott’s portrayal thereof:
“Alinsky, you magnificent bastard, I read your BOOK!”
As you well know, I was the person who came up with the idea behind the Huffington Post, and even helped Arianna and Ken Lerer launch the sucker. At the time I did not abdicate my point of view as a right leaning voice. I stated what I believe today: Let’s put it all out there, and may the best ideas win.
Is it insignificant that I was behind the left’s most prominent blog/media site?
Is it insignificant that I have written for the liberal-leaning Daily Beast which carried Conor Friedersdorf’s criticism of me?
I believe that you and Conor would like to paint me into a corner, the one you are currently trying to paint Glenn Beck into. You are trying to marginalize me because of the net effect, pun intended, of the White House/NEA “propaganda” series on Big Hollywood, and the explosive ACORN expose´ on Big Government. Protecting President Obama and the left at all costs is your prerogative.
But anyone who knows me, has conversed with me, understood my complexities and paradoxes, does not comprehend the “obvious point” that Conor is trying to make, and you are attempting to affirm.
The New York Times is a daily read. It always has been. I loved its recent profile of my college pal, hotelier Jeff Klein.
No daily publication can capture the essence of the cultural elite — good, bad and ugly — like the New York Times. The paper has its merits, no doubt. But when it comes to the political scene, its ascent into monolithic partisan hackery in its news pages — never mind the op-ed experience — is worthy of exploration granted its self-identified motto “all the news that’s fit to print” is disproved day after day when the news that hurts the political left is either ignored or distorted to sate its diminishing readership’s need for political conformity.
At no point have I attempted to hide my political leanings as I have endeavored to create Big Hollywood and Big Government. There is a need for a checks and balance against the New York Times and the rest of the supposedly neutral traditional press. Just as there was a need in 2005 for Arianna to put her platinum Rolodex online so that the world could see how the power brokers, power agents and power left felt on matters that face us all. Information is gold.
I don’t resent criticism. I embrace it. But I do resent self-superior journalists attempting to malign me and my vision without coming to me to get my thoughts. I’m glib and quotable and even prone to slip up. Try me!
At The Next Right, Patrick Ruffini sees a “Rising Rightroots and Declining Netroots Now at Parity (or Better)”:
Lost in the hubbub about the tea parties, the health care town hall protests, Joe Wilson, and the ACORN sting is the outcome of a long-simmering meta debate about the vibrancy of the grassroots right and its capacity to organize online. Along with a slew of other bad political indicators, the perception that the GOP might be stuck in a permanent Luddite rut reached its peak with the election of Obama and the role the Internet played in his victory.
Nearly a year later, not only have things turned around, but they’ve done so faster than anyone could have dreamed or imagined in those post-election doldrums.
First, hundreds of thousands of people showed up, flash mob-like, at Tea Parties not even three months after Obama Nation reached its apogee with the inauguration. The left was caught flat-footed and stammered that it must have been the creation of Fox News, although Fox News existed in the latter Bush years and during the McCain interlude and was unable to conjure up a similar display of enthusiasm in that period.
In August, the rightroots gained further velocity with the health care protests. This was significant in that it was the first head to head match with OFA and the unions, and it was no contest.
The third key moment came when Joe Wilson was able to raise as much (if not more) money than his Democratic opponent after the “You lie!” outburst. The left’s immediate rallying around Rob Miller was a textbook netroots play, aided by ready-made infrastructure (an ActBlue page ready to accept contributions without crashing and display real-time feedback). For a Republican — especially one deemed to be on the “wrong” side of a PR war — to have been competitive in money raised with a netroots Democrat is something that simply would not have happened in the Bush years. This is especially striking given that Markos, Stoller, Bowers et al. made money raised for candidates the sine qua non of the netroots, an outgrowth of the left’s 1970s era obsession with countering “big money” in politics.
Finally, the O’Keefe/Giles video bust of ACORN — the right’s biggest media coup since Rathergate — showed the right to be getting its sea legs in investigative journalism, a space virtually patented by the left in recent years.
What we seem to be witnessing is the Feiler Faster Thesis in action, with a robust grassroots opposition to Obama, aided by the Internet, taking shape far more quickly than anyone could have predicted, and comparatively speaking, in a far more timely fashion than it took the left to gets its act together against Bush.
I’ve been a big fan of Jack Shafer’s media columns at Slate, but the title of this piece, “Two Cheers for Andrew Breitbart — Sometimes it takes an outsider to show the press corps the way” is curious.
So what makes Breitbart an “outsider”? This is the media where former New York Times editor Howell Raines famously said, that his paper’s diversity efforts “have made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.” Are journalism’s politics that monolithic that any apostasy means you’ve “blacklisted yourself?”
That’s Roger L. Simon’s phrase for how Hollywood works, but thanks to the Internet, journalism is now much more decentralized a product. And in no small part, thanks to Breitbart.
In other words, journalism is something you do — it’s not a title given to you by a guild. Since the mid-to-late-1990s Breibart:
Worked behind the scenes at the Drudge Report since its early days.
Co-authored Hollywood Interrupted.
Helped launch the Huffington Post.
Distributes online news feeds of all the main wire services.
In contrast, during that same period, much of traditional journalism went backwards. They attacked newcomers such as Drudge and the Blogosphere. They used forged documents to attempt to bring down one president and were so badly in the tank for one candidate in 2008 that 90 percent of the public can see it.
I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a manner that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it’s because we don’t understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide – especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50:50.
Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes . . .and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain’s. That’s what reporters do, I was proud to have been one, and I’m still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.
So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?
The editors. The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay-out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.
Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power . . . only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a pension.
In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway – all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.
And then the opportunity presents itself: an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career. With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.
And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country . . .
In contrast, Breitbart and his affiliates have exposed corruption in ACORN and the National Endowment for the Arts — and that was just in the past two weeks.
The labeling debate is pointless. It was ideologically driven reporting. [As opposed to the Post's coverage of the 2006 and 2008 elections? -- Ed] It was two activists using deception to try to make an organization look bad — all the more reason for skepticism.
But the pair hit paydirt. The ACORNers’ behavior was nutty. Who offers advice about pimping out 13-year-old girls? What planet were these people living on?
Did O’Keefe and Giles produce a fair and balanced story that included how many ACORN offices rejected their scheme? No. They released the worst stuff. But they’ve never hidden their motivation. Nor has their ally and Web guru, Andrew Breitbart, whose company was also named in the ACORN suit.
I don’t put much stock in the argument that mainstream journalists should have done something like this. People may think we’re whores, but we don’t look good in the getup. Plus, lying is a firing offense at many news organizations.
Huh. And yet Diane Sawyer still has a job at ABC, after bluffing her way into the rubble of the World Trade Center with a hidden camera on the evening of September 11th, 2001. 60 Minutes has been on the air for over forty years doing one hidden camera sting after another. And five years before he was fired from CBS, Dan Rather told Bill O’Reilly — with a remarkably straight face –”I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things”:
O’REILLY: I want to ask you flat out. Do you think President Clinton’s an honest man?
RATHER: Yes, I think he’s an honest man.
O’REILLY: Do you? Really?
RATHER: I do, I do.
O’REILLY: Even though he lied to Jim Lehrer’s face about the Lewinsky….
RATHER: Who among us has not lied about something?
O’REILLY: Well, I didn’t lie to anybody’s face on national television. I don’t think you have.
RATHER: I don’t think I ever have. At least I hope I never have.
O’REILLY: No. How can you say he’s an honest guy then?
RATHER: Well, cause I think he is. I think at core he’s an honest person. I know that you have a different view. I know that you consider it sort of astonishing that anybody would say so. But I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.
Your mileage will vary, but for my money the most entertaining part of the ACORN undercover video sting–which, dollar for dollar, has been the most impactful piece of journalism this year (that I’m aware of anyway)–is watching Respectable News Outlets approach the controversy with radiation-resistant tongs.
After numerous quotes from MSM gatekeepers as they remove the ACORNs from their fundaments, Welch adds:
These gatekeepery examples of pretzel logic are by no means monolithic–see Jon Stewart, or Ken Silverstein at Harpers, for example. But they illustrate a tendency that’s been mostly dominant since long before Matt Drudge published information about Monica Lewinsky’s dress: Newspapers, especially those with national aspirations, still lack the ability to process or even talk about news that emanates from frowned-upon pockets in the great media ecosystem. And in hiding behind the shield of News Judgment, they all too frequently advertise the fact that theirs is being proven inadequate.
On the other hand, Kurtz and Shafer are models of Lou Grant-era old-school journalism compared to this wag at the Huffington Post and his not-so-tacit Godwin’s Law violation: “First They Came For ACORN…”
Update:Star Trek had its “Emergency Manual Monitor” set, located above atop the Enterprise’s engine room. To scan the Blogosphere, Michelle Malkin writes that the New York Times has launched its “Opinion Media Monitor” — also known as He Who Must Not Be Named:
So, get this: The Times has now assigned an anonymous editor to “monitor opinion media” so the effete journalists don’t get caught flat-footed again. But they won’t identify the editor because they don’t him or her getting e-mails from the public (heaven forfend) and they don’t want him or her getting feedback, criticism, or tips from the blogosphere (the MSM must be shielded from the angry mob). Snort:
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.”
Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.
“Not liberal bias,” eh? Then how to explain the institutional refusal of the Times — Hoyt included — to address directly and openly the paper’s own complicity in covering up the ACORN story before Election Day?
For the benefit of the Times’ anonymous Opinion Media Monitor, whoever you are, here is what your paper’s belated coverage of ACORN is still missing — reprinted from my Sept. 16 blog post, “What’s missing from the New York Times coverage of ACORN.” I’m going to make your job easier by reprinting the entire post so you don’t have to spend any precious energy clicking on the link:
