News Corp’s decision to walk away from Newsday is an unexpected twist in the three-way bidding war for the paper. Murdoch and Tribune Co Chief Executive Sam Zell had an agreement in principle to sell the paper to News Corp, with Tribune retaining a small stake to create a way to defer large capital gains taxes that a total sale would incur.
As recently as three days ago, Murdoch said on a conference call with investors to discuss News Corp’s quarterly financial results that the deal with Zell was nearly done.
“I don’t think Cablevision will prevail,” Murdoch said, responding to a question about why he has not raised his bid, which he characterized as “competitively priced.”
I find newspapers interesting; Rupert Murdoch, very interesting:
Murdoch is not prone to the whining and woe-is-meism that so many other newspapermen practice. He’s willing to invest in his properties. He’s willing to lose money. For a 77-year-old man, it’s almost as if he has begun the first year of a 20-year plan to modernize his media portfolio, so he’s a real optimist.
Remember when he started the Fox Television Network? Everybody in the country said, oh, there are room for three conventional networks. And when he started Fox News Channel, people said, oh, there’s really only room for CNN. There can’t possibly be room for another.
And time and again, he goes in and he defies the so-called experts because he’s a force of creative destruction.
He will go in and he will steal anybody’s bacon. And he generally steals it honestly by competing, and for that you really have to admire him.
That’s Slate’s Jack Shafer talking. Here he speaks to Murdoch’s conservative reputation:
I think you’re making a mistake when you call Rupert Murdoch a conservative. He is a political opportunist. If you take a look and see who he supported in the most recent Australian election, it was not the conservative. It was the liberal.
Likewise, in the United Kingdom, Murdoch eventually put all the support of his daily newspapers there behind Tony Blair. […]
He likes to back a winner. He likes to have access. He threw a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s reelection bid for the Senate in 2006. This is a mistake people make all the time about Rupert Murdoch, the idea that he is some sort of conservative ideologue who has come to the United States to, I don’t know, guarantee the Reagan restoration, when all he really is, is a political pragmatist.
In his book, Schecter makes the case for why, although he supported McCain in his run in 2000, McCain no longer deserves support and in fact, his candidacy should be fought actively, without hesitation and on all fronts. Schecter outlines his reasons for these sentiments and fills in those reasons with more details than you may be able to absorb. Schecter draws a portrait of both McCain’s political trajectory and the parallel trajectory of how his political choices since 2001 are a thumbing of his nose at the very people who got him to the presidential precipice in the first place.
A couple of disclosures before I offer you my phone interview with Cliff: I’ve never been a McCain supporter. And I haven’t known of Schecter that long either - here’s the first post I ever wrote about Schecter. However, it was fascinating talking to someone with a seemingly vast knowledge base about someone whom I’ve never really studied.
JMZ: You argue on behalf of former McCain supporters who should be able to realize that McCain isn’t what he once was. Who, then, is the alternative and why?
CS: Well. There’s always, “What we have versus what we’d like to have.” I’m an Obama supporter and he has a lot of appeal to Independents. But he hasn’t done it the way McCain did it – by attacking his own party in big speeches. Obama has done it by standing up, not by splitting. Obama talks about rising above partisanship and reaching out to all people on all sides and getting past the muck where politics has gotten so nasty. Obama says, I’m going to talk to you like an adult. And that’s what McCain had called “straight talk” – but he hasn’t given us much of that [this election cycle.] Read the rest of this entry »
This Guest Voice post is by journalism professor and author Walter Brasch who is also a syndicated newspaper columnist and radio commentator, and president of the Pennsylvania Press Club. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Moderate Voice or its writers.
People. People Who Don’t Need People
by Walter Brasch
From a pool of about seven billion, those hard-working geniuses at People magazine have managed to find the hundred most beautiful people in the whole wide world. And—get ready for the surprise—almost every one of those beautiful people are rich American celebrities.
For almost two decades, People’s editors believe they have been given the divine right to anoint who they believe to be the most beautiful people on the planet. The ethnocentric celebrity-fawning People editors are so secure in their self-imposed knowledge that they don’t even tell us what criteria they used to make their determinations. Not even an “editor’s note,” common in most magazines.
For the first few years, People etched their version of reality into our minds by attaching cutesy capsulated biographies to full page color pictures of the most beautiful. This year, the writing is minimal, the design is almost to the level that a good college journalism or graphics arts student could create and, except for a few full page and two-page spreads, most pictures are no bigger than thumbnail size.
Leading off the 69-page special section is actress Kate Hudson. Advance stories about her selection appeared in just about every American newspaper and major website, all of which think stories about celebrities are more important than stories about the recession. Also on the list are Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Ashton Kutcher, and Norah Jones. The seven member cast of TV’s “Gossip Girl” made the list. “Onscreen,” People told us, “they are gorgeous, scheming, backstabbing high schoolers.” Just what America needs. More future business executives and politicians.
The first few years, when the magazine editors could find only 50 beautiful people, there was a fairly even split between men and women. This year, about 90 percent are women. Except for six athletes (three men and three women), the rest are actors, singers, dancers, and models.
Three years after the first list came out, People recognized the elderly. Of course, the elderly were Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, and Barbara Babcock. This year, there’s a special two-page spread–it barely got into the magazine, look for it on pages 174-187–for 40 celebrities, 10 in each of the categories of 20s, 30s, 40, and 50s.
People once selected size 5-foot-11 size14 model Emme as a beautiful person. It championed her as representative of the “burgeoning large-size modeling industry.” Of course, these vacuous editors have no idea that a size 14 isn’t large—it is the average size of American women. This year, the only large size models are in full page ads for Jenny Craig diets and Curvation underwear, which declared, “Style starts with the Side Shaper Underwire bra and shaping panty.”
Teachers, social workers, and medical researchers, no matter how beautiful, didn’t make this year’s cut. But, they shouldn’t worry about it. Neither did Miss America, Miss USA, Miss World, Mr. Universe, or, for that matter, Miss Crustacean, Ocean City, New Jersey’s, salty tribute to hermit crabs, and a spoof of the beauty contest that once inhabited next-door Atlantic City.
People magazine may need people to justify its $254,000 full page advertising rate. But, people, even with insatiable curiosity about celebrities, really don’t need People.
James Woodard spent 27 years in prison for a crime that he did not commit. He was released last week as a result of DNA evidence gathered through an unprecedented cooperative effort between Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, a Democrat and the first black DA in the history of Texas, and the Texas Innocence Project.
Together they re-examined hundreds of cases and have freed 17 Texas inmates so far — their effort still has 250 more cases to review. Last year NPR’s Morning Edition profiled DA Watkins. Last night 60 Minutes did a segment on the DA and the Innocence Project that featured the story of James Woodard. Convicted in the 1981 murder of his girlfriend, Woodard served 27 years and four months, the longest of any inmate in the nation to be cleared with the help of DNA.
Woodard had always maintained his innocence, he says, including every one of the 12 times he came up for parole:
“They always told me, as long as you deny your guilt its saying something about you, you know you are not willing to own up to your deed. And we gonna deny you,” Woodard says.
But Woodard refused to admit guilt. “I wasn’t guilty,” he says.
“You chose truth over freedom,” Pelley remarks.
“I mean, a man has to stand for something,” Woodard says.
Jeralyn at Talk Left called it “one of the most moving segments ‘60 Minutes’ has ever done” and points to a summit on the wrongfully convicted in the Texas Senate on May 8.
A Georgia resident, I am reminded of the case of convicted “cop killer” Troy Anthony Davis who sits on death row here despite the recantations of seven witnesses who testified against him, despite the fact that no murder weapon was ever found and no physical evidence linked him to the crime, and despite the fact that he has maintained his innocence throughout.
RELATED: 60 Minutes was at the top of its game last night. Crooks & Liars and Think Progress both applaud the What Really Happened to Pat Tillman? segment. Said Pat’s mother Mary Tillman, “this isn’t about us. It’s about what they’ve done to the public. This was a public deception.”
After six years at Guantanamo Bay prison, the only journalist yet to be incarcerated there, Sami Al-Hadj, was released last week. The case of Mr. Al-Hadj, who was a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, has sparked renewed outrage around the world.
It’s not easy reading for an American, but a good sampling of the emotion in the Arab world over the case can be found in this article from Algeria’s French-language Le Quotidien d’Oran.
“The United States is indeed a democracy: Within its own borders, the rule of law is enshrined. But beyond its walls, only the law of the jungle prevails. Read the rest of this entry »
Respondents to my “Macrame Journalism” post make some engaging points, while other points need clarification.
The post was not a defense of journalism (I’ll get into that another time), but a definition of it. Readers are correct to say that journalism today suffers from self-inflicted damage. But what divides journalists from macramé journalists is education and training. The traditional journalism industry, both on and offline, would not hire applicants who could not show a baccalaureate level of journalism education. A macramé journalist, meanwhile, can join the field with an ISP connection and a blog account. Much of their work is very good, but at its best, it is commentary, not journalism. At its worst, it is the same as an avalanche of unsigned letters to the editor. Assigning such blather the stature of “citizen journalism” is inappropriate and dangerous.
he word “abridge” in the First Amendment makes clear that the authors understood that the power of the press predated the Constitution. The origins of such a press were with the Zenger decision in 1734 that established truth as justification to publish. The weight was on “truth.” It was not enough for Peter Zenger and his attorney, Andrew Hamilton, simply to say his newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, had printed the truth about government officials. Truth required documentation and verification. For almost 300 years, that documentation and verification has been the cornerstone of America’s press. Investigative reporters won’t publish information without triple verification, and then only after a phone call offering the opportunity to verify or deny to the story’s subject.
Enforcing the First Amendment has required the enforcing of such standards, both in freedom of the press and in freedom of speech. The press was granted such power that in the courts a body of law was created and started to grow, protecting citizens from press abuses of its power. The standard of truth is the first burden placed on the press by that law. Free speech is held to a similar standard, which has also shown up in courts since 1789. Classic example: Is an individual who yells “Fire!” in a crowded theater, when there is no fire, protected from prosecution by the First Amendment? Not many Americans have turned their backs on the standards of free press and speech. When they do, thank God, it makes news.
Any out-of-work reporter (plenty of those around) could operate independently online, not writing commentaries like this one, but doing real journalism. As I pointed out in the last post, such work would be instantly recognizable as journalism, just as macramé journalism is instantly recognizable.
I won’t tell my 100 college journalism students what one respondent said about “kids these days and their blogs and rock ‘n roll music and long hair.” They will be the online reporters and editors of tomorrow. Traditional journalism, in converged (print and broadcast) form is moving steadily toward the Internet, where doing business is infinitely cheaper than the traditional broadcast model that has been in place for the last 500 years. I call the new model “incast.” No longer will news organizations (and other media) spend millions sending information out to the audience at large. Online, all that content is just files in a computer, accessible at any time to consumers coming in, a ridiculously cheap and efficient (one-to-one marketing!) model.
What are the news organizations going to do with all that money they save? They won’t have to repeat cycles anymore like CNN, as one respondent pointed out. And they will have millions to hire journalists to fill a practically infinite news hole. That’s where my little longhairs come in.
And now it moves to media center stage: the trend of Republicans crossing over to vote in Democratic primaries. But the New York Times reports that many GOPers aren’t doing this because they’re “dittoheads” obeying the wishes of mega-partisan talk show host Rush Limbaugh, but disgruntled Republicans who feel their party has left — or is leaving — them:
INDIANAPOLIS - Until now, Shirley Morgan had always been the kind of voter the Republican Party thought it could count on. She comes from a family of staunch Republicans, has a son in the military and has supported Republican presidential candidates ever since she cast her first ballot, for Richard M. Nixon in 1972.
But this year Mrs. Morgan exemplifies a different breed: the Republican crossing over to vote in the Democratic primary. Not only will she mark her ballot for Senator Barack Obama in the May 6 primary here, but she has also been canvassing for him in the heavily Republican suburbs of Hamilton County, just north of Indianapolis — the first time she has ever actively campaigned for a candidate.
“I used to like John McCain, but he’s aligning himself too closely with what Bush did, and that’s just not what I want for this country,” Mrs. Morgan, who is 56, said when asked to explain her rejection of the presumptive Republican nominee.
This should be a warning flag to John McCain. As I’ve predicted many times on this site, there is a large segment of voters that aren’t going to look at political party at all this year — but want to take a big broom and sweep away the people who are in charge who have brought the United States a war seemingly without end (even if X voter originally supported the war), a decimated economy, a sagging dollar, an epidemic of home foreclosures and plummeting local property values, and an economy peppered by massive corporate cutbacks or failures and employment ills.
Seen from this perspective, the decisions of Democratic rivals Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to ignore Democratic progressives’ demand to boycott Fox News, makes political sense: Republican voters are in play in these primaries and they all can’t be dismissed as participating in Limbaugh’s call to basically sabotage the Democratic primaries.
This suggests that indicates that the potency of the Democratic party’s most progressive wing, is now being offset in some primaries by more conservative and centrist voters who are cross-over Republicans who feel their party has failed them. And they’re shopping around.
The Times confirms this:
Since the start of the primary and caucus season in January, Republican voters have been crossing over in increasing numbers to vote in Democratic contests — supplying up to 10 percent of the vote in states that allow such crossover voting — and they are expected to play a pivotal role in the fiercely contested primary here. What is less clear, however, is the motivation for their behavior: are they genuinely attracted by the two Democratic candidates? Or are they mischief-making spoilers, looking to prolong a divisive Democratic fight or support a candidate Mr. McCain can beat in November?
Local Republican Party leaders in Indiana concede the attraction of the Democratic candidates to some of their party members. And interviews with roughly a dozen Republican voters in central Indiana suggest that they are driven mainly by concerns about the economy, with discontent over Bush administration policies driving their involvement in the Democratic race.
What’s now happening between Obama and Clinton is competition for some of these Republicans — Republicans probably dismissed as “well-they-must-be-Rinos” by lockstep Republican partisans who will adjust their positions or jettison previous principles according to the latest pronouncements from the White House or EIB Radio Network. The Times again: Read the rest of this entry »
I was born in 1943, just in time to enjoy town squares, in the small rural towns. By the 1950s, and the arrival of better highways and more comfortable cars, residents of those towns had started to drive to larger regional cities to shop, eat, and see a movie. Around the town square, businesses closed, leaving darkened brick shells through which dry goods, sundries, hardware, groceries, movie stars and fountain Cokes had flowed.
In these empty storefront windows in the 1970s started to appear signs of business activity unrelated to the prosperity of the town. The most telling of these signs was this one: “Macrame.” It proclaimed, loudest of all, that the square, once the center of commercial and civic activity for a proud people, was dead, and the old, sad, deserted buildings were now hosting splinter arts and crafts groups learning to knot yarn in a certain way.
Journalism is on that same path today. Since the Zenger decision in 1734 established its purpose and power in America, journalism has served a proud people continuously for almost 300 years. Now it is being gutted, its professionals bought out or laid off, its buildings closing, its customers and its business fleeing on a new superspeed highway to a new region that no one yet understands.
Where journalism was, in the pre-Internet world, Americans now find macramé journalism, a hobby practiced by a huge number of Americans on the Internet and in the blogosphere. This new, fun way of knotting information has done what the founding Americans hoped could never be done. Macrame journalism has a loop around the feet of the First Amendment, which is struggling, as calves do against the ropes, but will soon go over on its side.
Journalism is not Cowboys and Indians in the back yard. The term “citizen journalist” is an oxymoron. Many citizens now publishing on the Internet write very well, and argue convincingly, but without working knowledge of journalism definitions, values, and principles, and commitment to those principles, they are not journalists. Do you realize that the rate of media illiteracy in America is 90 percent? Not their fault; all media, including journalism, is based on a set of definitions and values that are not taught to American schoolchildren. They should be, just like algebra, but they are not.
The First Amendment, as it applies to journalism: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.” Do you realize what an amazing statement that is? It tells us that the framers of the Constitution in 1787 knew that freedom of the press already existed, like one of the self-evident truths, or an unalienable right. That kind of power, practically absolute, created by the recognition of truth as a right to publish, deserved great respect in its handling. It is scary now, witnessing hordes of amateurs calling themselves citizen journalists, and taking their work seriously, and even scarier that traditional publishers go along with it. Scary not because of an abuse of press power, that the First Amendment has managed to protect for more than 200 years, but of a draining of it. Without that power, democracy starts to die, too.
This is not a defense of journalism; it is a definition of it. Journalism still exists, on and offline, and it is as instantly recognizable as macrame journalism. You macramé journalists, go ahead and keep writing. It is your First Amendment guarantee of free speech, and some of the commentary is very good. But to a journalist today, cruising the town square of journalism, it looks dead, and feels sad. It feels like the First Amendment is being looted.
Howard Dean was on The Daily Show last night. The interview was all smiles and laughs but chock-a-block full of important and substantive information. It went on for an unusually long 9 minutes and ran right up into the commercial break.
Stewart commented on Jeremiah Wright on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday’s shows and — in contrast to every other cable news show — his clear and conclusive emphasis was on how miffed with the media he was because “this issue which should have only had enough fuel to last one news cycle has somehow lasted eight news cycles.”
Now Stewart’s is not a news show. It doesn’t have to obey the “News” rules, so it is not able to speak with that “News” authority. No, Stewart’s is a comedy show.
Any comic fool can rush in, where the angels of journalists and historians fear to tread. And as we know if we’ve ever watched any Shakespearian tragedy, fools can often be the wisest people on the stage.
Bob reminds us that comedy does not have to deal with the inconvenience of checking facts, getting multiple sources, or trying to get it right. Comedy gets to make stuff up! But it’s also able to intellectually explore lots of the stuff that neither journalism nor history can because they’re both so bound by facts.
That comic freedom has obvious attractions to intellectually active and politically engaged young minds. So I’m thinking that Stewart and his spin-off Stephen Colbert are out there dog-whistling to the youth-vote. And I’m wondering how accurate we’ve got that measured. Aren’t they — with their cell phones and non-traditional media habits — a demographic we’ve traditionally had trouble tracking anyway?
Maybe the Colbert bump holds a clue. It was in the news a while back as a legit phenom for Dems (Republicans need not apply). Thompson gives it the benefit of the doubt:
You know, some people might say, well how can this be? I think the burden of proof is on proving that there is no such thing as the Colbert bump. I think the common sense assumption would be that, yeah, there probably is. Until proven otherwise, that seems to be the commonsense thing that one would have.
For months it has been a “given” that Senator Barack Obama was way ahead in North Carolina — in some cases by double-digits in the polls — and that rival Senator Hillary Clinton didn’t have much of a chance to win the state’s Democratic Presidential primary, and create eleventh hour “Big Mo” in their battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. New polls suggest it may now be time to retire that “given.”
What’s going on among the Democrats now clearly is on two levels: the votes and the primaries on one level and the appeal to decision-solidifying Superdelegates on another. The political context is changing rapidly for Obama and not to his advantage.
Obama has a big problem: the latest Rasmussen Poll gives Clinton a two point lead — but indicates a TEN POINT DROP in Obama’s polling since Obama’s former Pastor, Jeremiah Wright’s press conference.
In the race for the Democratic Presidential Nomination, the Wright impact is especially evident. Clinton now has a statistically insignificant two-point edge over Obama, 46% to 44%. However, that represents a ten-point swing since Wright’s press conference. Before Pastor Wright appeared at the National Press Club, Obama led Clinton by eight points.
In Indiana, Clinton leads Obama by five points. In North Carolina Obama leads. Rasmussen Markets data shows Obama continues to be the favorite for the Democratic nomination, but expectations have slipped significantly in recent days. Currently, the frontrunner is given a 74.4% chance of winning.
A bevy of new national polls, plus surveys in Indiana and North Carolina — which hold key primaries on Tuesday — suggest that Hillary Clinton is closing the gap since her campaign-saving victory in Pennsylvania last week, and that the controversies dogging Barack Obama are having an impact.
In a national Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll, Clinton leads Obama 44 percent to 41 percent. The Illinois senator is viewed unfavorably by 42 percent of all voters, up 9 percentage points since February. Clinton’s unfavorable rating is still slightly higher than Obama’s, but it has dropped slightly. And by 10 percentage points, Democrats now view Clinton as likelier than Obama to beat presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. Democrats gave Obama a 4-point edge last month.
The Clinton campaign’s strategy to raise doubts about Obama’s electability is clearly succeeding, but not only due to the two Clintons’ at-times-Rovian-style negative campaigning. Three other contributing factors are Obama’s political bungles, his former Pastor’s insistence on a controversial high profile that sucks the air out of Obama’s daily media coverage, and Clinton’s increasing enthusiasm as a campaigner (which many analysts are noting). The Globe continues:
In a national NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, Obama’s lead has narrowed to 46 percent to 43 percent, and his unfavorable ratings have also risen. In March, 51 percent of voters viewed him positively and 28 percent saw him negatively, but in the new poll 46 percent view him favorably, but 37 percent negatively.
In a national New York Times/CBS poll, Obama leads 46 percent to 38 percent among Democrats, but 51 percent say they believe he will be the eventual nominee, down from 69 percent a month ago. And 48 percent of Democratic primary voters said they believe he would be the strongest candidate against McCain, down from 56 percent a month ago.
And in a Quinnipiac University poll, Clinton runs stronger than Obama in match-ups against McCain in the general election swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. Clinton would get 49 percent to McCain’s 41 percent in Florida, leads 48 percent to 38 percent in Ohio, and 51 percent to 37 percent in Pennsylvania.
It’s clear that Obama knows he has a problem.
This morning he went on the Today Show (VIDEO HERE) with his wife Michelle — a husband-wife damage control appearance that was reminiscent of when then-Governor Bill Clinton went on 60 Minutes with Hillary Clinton in 1992 to be grilled by Steve Kroft amid allegations of (pre-Oval office) infidelity.
Last night Michelle Obama went on CNN. And on Sunday Obama will enter the Lion’s Den and be on “Meet The Press” with gotcha! journalist Tim Russert.
But Obama’s immediate concern is likely North Carolina. The vibes coming from polls aren’t good ones. And, if he loses there, the ugly and divisive Democratic party race will likely get uglier and more divisive as Clinton moves in for the political kill and Obama pulls out all stops to stabilize his campaign.
A survey of 571 registered likely voters in North Carolina’s May 6 Democratic primary shows Sen. Hillary Clinton having moved from a double digit deficit in an InsiderAdvantage poll taken in mid-April to a two point lead over Sen. Barack Obama in this telephone survey, conducted April 29. The survey was weighted for age, race, gender, and political affiliation. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8%
Prior to his appearance on Fox News Network’s “Hannity & Colmes,” on which the poll was released, InsiderAdvantage’s Matt Towery noted: “The shift has come almost entirely from white voters age 45 and over. There was a small drift of African-Americans back towards Clinton, but not so significant as to establish any trend.
“I believe when all is said and done, Obama will likely carry North Carolina; or if he loses the race, it will be by just a few points.
“Our polling generally does not indicate the eventual compression of black voters that Obama usually enjoys just before Election Day. If that happens, my guess is that he will pull this out. However, this poll is clearly an indication of reaction to the latest statements by his former pastor; and it forces Sen. Obama to split resources between Indiana and North Carolina.”
Even with the pollster’s hedge, the bottom line is that this is awful news for the Obama campaign. Narrowing polls are one thing in NC; Clinton pulling ahead is another. Perception helps sculpt reality. And news stories down the line show an Obama campaign that is on the defensive and a Clinton campaign that is taking advantage of it…and the polls show some results. A WRAL news poll doesn’t show Clinton ahead — but, once again, the TRENDING in the polls is clear:
A WRAL news poll released Wednesday shows Barack Obama’s double-digit lead over Hillary Clinton among Tar heel Democrats is eroding.
Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. surveyed 400 likely Democratic voters Monday and Tuesday. The results show Obama with a 7 point lead over Clinton, with 9 percent undecided. The poll has a margin of error of 5 percentage points.
“Right or wrong, it’s the Wright phenomenon for Obama,” said David McLennan, a political science professor at Peace College.
McLennan said Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is dragging down the Illinois senator. Wright has made comments such as suggesting that the AIDS virus was invented by the government to destroy “people of color.”
“It is a media-driven story. Wright is very controversial. He makes controversial statements. He gets people fired up, but it’s not one of the top issues in the polls,” McLennan said.
Note again that polls are all over the place — and for confirmation of this, GO HERE to Pollster.com and see the graph of various polls. Obama partisans will say “Well, those polls are flawed because others show him well ahead!” Clinton partisans will pooh-pooh polls showing Obama in the lead, say they don’t count and point to the one showing Clinton ahead. But it is the trending of recent polls that needs to be watched — even though the graph that charts various polls shows Obama ahead.
THE BOTTOM LINE FACT: Both campaigns will have to pull-out-all-stops for the political ground war. An Obama win in NC would give him a cushion against his broken momentum and Clinton’s likely win in Indiana. A Clinton win in North Carolina would be considered an upset and ensure a tooth-and-nail battle right up to the convention and bolster Clinton’s argument that Obama has some electability problems, even though she has some of her own.
In reality, both Democratic candidates increasingly seem to be damaged political goods, but McCain is burdened with his anchor-like tie to President George W. Bush — a tie that could become increasingly toxic once the Democrats stop politically disemboweling each other and turn their focus instead on the Republican candidate. McCain’s Bush ties are a bigger sticking point with voters than Obama’s relationship with his pastor.
HERE’S A CROSS SECTION OF WEBLOG OPINION ON THE POLLS:
April 30th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
This looks like quintessential — and usually quite effective — damage control: politically sagging Democratic Presidential nomination contender Barack Obama is planning a major mutual T.V. appearance with his wife Michelle, the Los Angeles Times reports:
Now that Barack Obama has distanced himself publicly, if painfully, from the pastor who married him and his wife and baptized their children, he is getting close to the wife in a national television appearance.
NBC’s Meredith Vieira will sit down with Barack and Michelle Obama today in Indianapolis for an interview that will air on the “Today” show Thursday. A segment of the talk will air on NBC’s “Nightly News” and on MSNBC this evening.
Michelle Obama has been a tireless campaigner for her husband on the road. And now, as the Democratic candidate for president attempts to put the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in the campaign’s rear view mirror, he is presenting a new image for public consumption: A professional and happily married couple willing to face a rough political time together.
This kind of appearance by beset candidates can indeed work since it provides lucrative sound bites that are played over and over and helps offset some other negative news that has come out of news cycles.
The most prominent example of an appearance of this kind that was successful is from 1992 when then-Governor Bill Clinton went on 60 Minutes to be grilled by Steve Kroft amid allegations of (pre-Oval Office) infidelity. His wife Hillary Clinton was by his side. DETAILS HERE.
One must hand it to the Beijing authorities. It takes tremendous gall for a regime that outlaws press freedom or open criticism of any kind, to liken the failure of Western reporters to parrot the Communist Party line to a lapse of journalistic ethics.
April 29th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Past political campaigns have had their share of people associated with candidates who are placed on the defensive — but seldom has one in any year had one as proactively insistent on keeping himself alive and injected into an excruciatingly close race as the political albatross now dangling around Democratic Senator Barack Obama named Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Aside from the eager nodding of heads and the unspoken “Keep it up!” you can almost feel coming from the campaign of rival Democratic Presidential wannabe Senator Hillary Clinton, conservative Republicans are ecstatic. Jonah Goldberg, writing in The Los Angeles Times:
God bless the Rev. Jeremiah Wright!
After Barack Obama gave his big race speech in mid-March, many critics noted that the Illinois senator had thrown his own grandmother under the bus to defend his controversial pastor. Well, Wright proved over the last few days that he would not be outdone. He not only threw Obama under the bus, he chucked much of the liberal and mainstream media under there with him. If this keeps up, to paraphrase Roy Scheider in “Jaws,” he’s gonna need a bigger bus.
For six weeks, Obama’s biggest supporters have diligently argued that to so much as mention Wright is in effect racist. When Hillary Rodham Clinton said that Wright wouldn’t have been her pastor, Andrew Sullivan gasped on his Atlantic blog that this was “a new low” in the election. When Lanny J. Davis, Clinton’s consummate spinner, defended her on CNN by describing what Wright actually said, CNN’s Anderson Cooper lambasted Davis for daring to even repeat Wright’s comments. Newsweek’s Joe Klein chimed in, “You’re spreading the poison right now.”
What Wright has done the past few days by (over)exposure is to leave himself in the eyes of many indefensible in terms of the center — and converted himself into an unrelenting albatross also chained to a 1,000 lb. anchor dangling around Obama’s neck:
Obama and his defenders have repeatedly insisted that the bits from Wright’s sermons that got wide circulation last month had been taken “out of context.” His infamous sound bites were grounded in concrete theological or factual foundations, they claim. He was quoting other people. He’s done good things. Nothing to see here, folks.
And so God bless Wright because he’s left all of these folks holding a giant, steaming bag of … well, let’s just call it a bag of “context.”
His positions and the context of his remarks, some could argue, are still explainable, but the problem is that those making that argument right now veer into a nuanced area of nuance — the kind of argument that usually does not work in elections where candidates oversimplify, generalize and try to link up their opponents with broad-brush imagery of stances, events or individuals that will be seen unfavorably by key chunks of an attention-span-challenged electorate.
All this comes at a time when Obama’s campaign is reportedly battening down the hatches for what is expected to be a brutal campaign lasting well into the summer, the New York Times reports:
Mr. Obama’s aides said that they remained confident he would win the nomination. “We feel very good about the position that we are in,” said David Axelrod, his chief strategist. “But we have gotten to the position we are in by taking every week and every contest seriously.”
Still, they said they were no longer as hopeful as they once were that the contest could be resolved before June 3, the day of the last primaries. As a result, they were girding for six weeks of attacks by Mrs. Clinton and potential election defeats that could raise further questions among superdelegates — the elected Democrats and party leaders who will ultimately determine the nominee — about Mr. Obama’s strength as a general election candidate.
And Wright’s double-whammy of appearances came at a time of introspection and private disappointment:
In discussions with donors and supporters last week, Mr. Obama’s advisers played down the loss in Pennsylvania, noting that both sides had expected Mrs. Clinton to win there.
Still, the message belied private frustration and disappointment that Mr. Obama shared with a few associates and advisers, particularly over the hardening narrative that he could not appeal to working-class voters, and a personal frustration for comments he made about some small-town voters being “bitter” at their economic conditions. (Mrs. Clinton seized on those remarks, which have shadowed his campaign.)
“Everyone’s got a real calmness about where we are,” said David Plouffe, who is Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, “but a real sense of urgency that we have eight contests coming up in pretty rapid succession.”
But now it’s clear from the amount of space Wright has gotten on blogs, on serious cable talk shows, on screaming head cable and radio talk shows and in the opinion columns:
Wright is proactively making it tough for Obama to right his campaign.
Will he have to make a statement to distance himself even more from him? And what if Wright’s love affair with national media coverage continues? In essence, Wright himself has been putting the muscle, meat and flesh on the skeletal stereotypical imagery critics have tried to sculpt about Obama. And he won’t stay out of the spotlight to let the issue defuse itself.
Candidates’ associates have seldom totally sank a national political campaign.
But perhaps we are about to see an example of what happens when an association does.
Yet another study finds Democrats and Republicans going to our separate media corners. This one from University of Georgia associate professor of journalism Barry Hollander as reported by the AJC’s Political Insider:
What he documented was a quiet stampede.
In 1998, 27 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of Democrats tuned in regularly to Atlanta-based CNN. Eight years later, the number of Democrats had risen to 29 percent.
But the number of Republicans who tuned in to CNN had shrunk to 19 percent. Gosh, where do you think they went?
Over the same period, Fox News’ share of Republican viewers jumped from 14 to 36 percent.
Hollander documented a media shift among Democrats to friendly sources, too, but the most dramatic change has occurred among Republicans. And, possibly, among more casual consumers of news.
“Republicans have dramatically dropped news sources that they perceive as being biased against their position. They’ve completely fled into Fox and have left CNN, broadcast news and all the others,” Hollander said.
Outrage over alleged liberalism could explain this, except for one inconvenient fact. Republicans, Hollander said, have even dropped C-SPAN, which — because of its verbatim approach — is widely considered neutral in content.
Something larger is happening, the University of Georgia professor asserts. “People have always hung out with people like themselves,” Hollander said. The water-cooler world that most people live in is a huge echo chamber of attitudes and ideas.
“It was always thought that the media was the savior in this,” Hollander said.
Of course, “always” is a relative term. And some of us don’t want or need a big media “savior.”
Hollander comes from a very particular media biastradition. His concerns are clear and sincere, this from the university press release for the study:
Television news audiences are divided along party lines like never before, according to a new University of Georgia study that warns the trend may have damaging consequences for political discourse and democracy in America.
“Ideology and partisanship used to be completely unrelated to the television news people consumed,” said study author Barry Hollander, associate professor of journalism in the UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. “But they’ve become significant factors in the last five years.”
Hollander sounds certain that ideology and partisanship are bad and that certainty is the received wisdom of the day. But if we go back in history, say, to a time before journalism schools… Read the rest of this entry »
April 26th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
There are signs of what could be a shift in the news media conventional wisdom: for the first time in months, some key pundits are hinting and even saying that Senator Barack Obama could lose the Democratic nomination to what has long been described as a seemingly-impossibly behind Senator Hillary Clinton.
These kinds of cracks in the conventional wisdom often signal the beginning of a major shift, totally negating what earlier conventional wisdom steadfastly suggested “had” to be true.
The catalyst: Clinton’s win over Obama in Pennsylvania. Even though it was expected, the recent bad publicity surrounding Obama on several fronts, his campaign being on the defensive, the unrelenting push by Clinton on several fronts, and the realities of how American politics works in the 21st century have started to change some media thinking.
I’m beginning to think Hillary Clinton might pull this off and wrestle the nomination away from Barack Obama. If she does, a lot of folks—including a huge chunk of the media—will join Bill Richardson (a.k.a. Judas) in the Deep Freeze. If the Clintons get back into the White House, it will be retribution time, like the Corleone family consolidating power in “The Godfather,” where the watchword is, “It’s business, not personal.”
Not that anyone will be sleeping with the fishes with Hillary in the White House, but with the Clintons it’s business and it’s personal. Just think of all the scores to settle, the grievances to indulge.
Clift details how the Clintons were often at odds with Washington officialdom, which never liked them anyway. She notes how now some conservatives are cheering for her…and not only because they think they can defeat her. She is winning some fans due to her all-encompassing push to win no matter what. She writes:
Now the burden is on Obama to win the next round of primaries on May 6. He has said publicly that Indiana could be the tiebreaker, a prediction he could come to regret. If Clinton can win Indiana, hold Obama to single digits in North Carolina, and then run up a big margin in Kentucky on May 20, where she’s leading in the polls, she could overtake Obama in the popular vote. “We have to win big and lose small,” says an aide. Obama may yet discover his inner Rocky and recast himself now that the media is turning on him. It’s hard to be the next new thing for 15 months, which is how long he’s been running. And it’s time enough for Hillary to win ugly, if that’s what winning takes.
Barack Obama is winning, so why does it look like Hillary Clinton is having all the fun?
Senator Obama has been thrown completely off his game by a combination of political attacks (some fair, some foul), a toxic eruption (the volcanic Jeremiah Wright was a gift from the gods to the Clintons and the G.O.P.), and some pretty serious self-inflicted wounds.
You can almost feel the air seeping out of the Obama phenomenon. The candidate and his aides are brainstorming ways to counter the Clinton death-ray machine and regain the momentum. They need to generate some new excitement and enthusiasm, and they need to do it soon.
Despite all the new voters who have been brought into the process, Democrats are filled with anxiety about their prospects in November. A nervous operative told me on Friday: “If we lose this election, it would be like Johnson losing to Goldwater.”
Herbert notes that part of what’s going on is the polarizing nature of the campaign, anger among Democrats but there is a constant:
Their message varies, depending on whether it’s in public or behind the scenes. But the mantra is roughly as follows: Obama won’t win! He can’t win whites. Jeremiah Wright! He can’t win women. He can’t win Hispanics. He’ll lose Jewish voters. Farrakhan! We’ll nuke Iran.
The share of Clinton voters who have been telling exit pollsters that they will not vote for Senator Obama if he wins the nomination is inching toward the red zone. At the same time, there is growing resentment of the Clintons’ tactics among Obama partisans, especially the young and African-Americans.
While he doesn’t say Clinton could well win, the hint is there:
Hillary Clinton may be behind, and she may lose. But she is now widely seen as the tougher of the two candidates, the one who is more resolute, who will fight harder and longer (and, yes, more unscrupulously) to achieve her desired ends.
An edge in toughness is hardly a good quality to cede to your opponent.
….Some Democratic officials who were worried about having Senator Clinton at the top of the ticket in November are now expressing concern about Mr. Obama. Mrs. Clinton’s bar-brawl tactics have raised her negatives sharply, but they’ve also raised doubts about Mr. Obama. Is he a fighter? Is he tough enough to take on the G.O.P.?
One of Senator Obama’s favorite phrases is “the fierce urgency of now.” There is nothing more fiercely urgent for him right now than to reassure voters and superdelegates that an Obama candidacy will not lead to a Democratic debacle in November.
Some Democrats and Obama supporters in general are likely to dismiss Clift’s and Herbert’s columns as them taking the Clinton and/or Republican themes hook, line and sinker. That’s the modus operandi for partisans on both sides: question the motives of those who dare criticize your candidate.
But that’s clearly NOT what is happening here.
What’s happening is that Obama has long said he wants to change the political culture, a goal that many independent voters as well as many Democrats and Republicans would find highly laudable. But you can’t hope to change the political culture unless you’re in a position to change the political culture.
It’s sort of a Catch 22. Obama is going to have to show — and show soon — that his campaign in ideas, tactics, and energy can function in America’s polity — the polity as is. Not the polity as he and others might wish it to be. That means being more nimble, making the case for his candidacy, countering any Clinton charges, effectively answering lingering reservations that constituencies he is having problems with may have about him.
The bottom line reality that he’s facing is that just as Hillary Clinton is not entitled to the Presidency because she’s a Senator and a former first lady, Obama is not entitled to the nomination because his message is hope and change. Even when you do an job interview you have to aggressively overcome lingering objections.
Obama has to do that — and quickly. Because these two writers are now writing sentiment that is lingering “out there” and may increasingly be out there. If it goes “out there” enough so Superdelegates are concerned at a time when Obama doesn’t perform as well as he hopes in upcoming primaries we’ll see what we have seen so much when Campaign 2008 began last year:
The conventional wisdom will be revealed to be not so much conventional wisdom as to have been flavor of the day wisdom — a flavor that could change totally a day later.
April 25th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman went to Brown University to give a speech on Earth Day and he was greeted by a big student crowd — and pies in his face thrown by environmental activists.
Note when you watch the video how this form of pie-in-the-face is not funny at all but is done in a way so that it resembles an assault. And it is dealt with (correctly) that way by the legal system:
The legalities and proprieties of pie-throwing aside, what’s notable in the video above is that these students were the gang that couldn’t throw pies straight.
“The old adage that “the first casualty of war is truth” is one to which the Pentagon has stuck to with unheard of will, strength, and consistency. Thanks to the Benedictine work a journalist from The New York Times - and there is no better word to describe it- we now know that the U.S. executive has applied itself to building a propaganda machine so powerful, that it highlights the disdain that Bush and company feed on with respect Read the rest of this entry »
![[Het Parool, The Netherlands]](http://www.parool.nl/columnisten/joep_bertrams/beeld/041608-doodstraf.jpg)
of pie throwing: