The blog Hypnosis Control has this You Tube goodie that purports to show subliminal advertising for presumptive GOP nominee John McCain on a Fox News broadcast.
Is it real? Imagined? Intentional sublimal? Unintentional picture placement? A doctored video put on You Tube? Who knows (and if Fox denied it some people would say don’t believe them anyway). We embed, you decide…
FOOTNOTE: I could never understand all the fuss about subliminal advertising, despite the research. If subliminal advertising (intentional or otherwise) truly worked, we’d have heard a lot of it by now and banned or otherwise the government (any government) would use it to influence and manipulate the population.
It’s like expecting that people who listen to Rush Limbaugh would ever follow Rush if he suggested, for example, that voters should vote in Democratic primaries or change their party registrations to vote in and sandbag the primaries. It’s as SILLY an idea as that! (Never mind…)
The Fox Movie Channel showed “Gentleman’s Agreement” last night, a preachy drama about anti-Semitism that won the Academy Award 60 years ago, and it brought into focus the realization that I may live to see a black man inaugurated as President of the United States.
What Barack Obama faces from now until November would be unimaginable to the people who made and saw that movie then, including a 23-year-old just back from World War II who had little audacity and even less hope of living in the rich, glossy world it portrayed.
Gregory Peck played a magazine writer who pretends to be Jewish. A decade later, I was an editor on one of those magazines, unknowingly hired by George W. Bush’s grandfather as the first Jew among thousands of employees, working with Laura Z. Hobson, who wrote the novel on which the picture was based.
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.
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 »
When I came into the newspaper business in 1967 at the tender age of 20, most reporters and editors drank like fish and smoked like chimneys (on the job), lived and died for the news scoop, type was set on massive linotype machines using molten lead, and when the presses of morning and evening newspapers rolled it was like printing money.
Today newsrooms are like vegetarian cafeterias, the scoop is most often the purview of cable news channels, or Internet sites, the entire typesetting and printing process is electronic, and when the presses roll for the remaining morning papers (there are no evening papers as such anymore), one can only wonder how many years it will be before they are silenced.
The reasons for the long downward spiral of the industry are complex and multi-layered, but basically boil down to something that I was saying well before I wrote my last story and quit a few weeks before the 9/11 attacks:
Newspapers will not survive if they don’t change and change damned quickly by embracing the Internet and hugging it to their collective bosom.
I take no satisfaction in being right. (And yes, it was weird to feel like a fireman without a ladder when the first aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center on that beautiful September morning.)
The only good thing to be said about Faux . . . er, Fox News is that their ratings ain’t lookin’ so hot these days.
Neither are the ratings for other cable news channels, but at least you wouldn’t expect them to make a whopper of a mistake in promoting a Clinton-Obama debate based on the legendary Douglas-Lincoln debates and being so impaired as to believe that the Douglas was abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass.
“Legally, for a political party to run Frederick Douglass for federal office would have been on a par, not with running a citizen of another country, but with running a shovel or a cow: a piece of property whose nature precluded its being a citizen, let alone a Senator. The most Douglass might have aspired to, in 1858, was to be granted such rights in something like the way Caligula made his horse a Consul.”
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
Add to the increasingly long list of bad news for Senator Barack Obama in his battle for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination the latest Newsweek poll which shows him losing ground shockingly fast to Senator Hillary Clinton:
After an important primary win in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton has reduced Democratic rival Barack Obama’s double-digit lead among registered Democrats and voters leaning Democratic by more than half, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll. Plagued by controversies over Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s comments and the candidate’s own “bitter” remarks, Obama has seen his favorability rating slip significantly in the last week, the poll found.
The survey found that Clinton now trails Obama by seven points, down from 19 just one week ago. The previous NEWSWEEK poll, conducted on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, found that more than half (55 percent) of registered voters believed Obama was more electable, while 33 percent gave the edge to Clinton. The current poll finds Obama leading 46 percent to 38 percent.
The question becomes whether Clinton now has “Big Mo” or whether it’s a matter of Obama quickly losing it. But the Obama camp has received some bad news recently. Two key tidbits: his shrinking lead in the Gallup Daily tracking poll, coupled with signs that the news media narrative is now changing from “Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a chance” to “Hillary Clinton might actually be able to be nominated.”
Once again, polls fluctuate and trending is what matters…but the trending for Obama hasn’t been good this week and this poll contains little good news for his campaign:
One of the more problematic results for Obama was that four in 10 of registered voters (including Republicans and independents) now have an unfavorable opinion of him–and the same number said there is “no chance” they will vote for Obama if he becomes the nominee. Four in 10 registered voters (41 percent) say they have a less favorable opinion of Obama based on his association with his former pastor, Rev. Wright, whose racially and politically inflammatory sermons have been circulated on the Internet and covered in the media. A similar number (42 percent) say they will not vote for Obama because of comments he made about “bitter” small-town residents clinging to guns and religion.
There is, however, one ray of sunshine for the Illinois Senator:
Even so, the NEWSWEEK poll indicates that despite the political damage inflicted over recent weeks, Obama still edges out McCain in a trial head-to-head heat for the White House, 47 to 44 percent. That margin was only one point wider a week ago. Clinton—whose own favorability rating has not improved even as Obama’s has slipped—also holds a three point lead with 48 percent of the vote to the Arizona senator’s 45. Among all registered voters, more than half (53 percent) still hold a favorable opinion of Obama, compared to the 47 percent who view Clinton favorably and 51 percent who have favorable views of McCain.
But it’s clear the Obama camp is, at the last, on the defensive right now and, at the most, in a holding pattern. Note these developments:
1. Hillary Clinton is trying to press Obama to a Lincoln-Douglas style debate with no moderators. Since Obama has seldom gained from debates, it’s hard to imagine him agreeing no matter how much she tries to pressure him. And he is refusing. When candidates try to make another candidate not debating the issue, it usually fizzles unless the other candidate feels there is something to be genuinely gained. Her husband Bill Clinton is also demanding Obama debate.
2. Bill Clinton is now unleashed.The Clinton campaign feels he’s a plus. And BC has been pressing for the campaign to go more negative and faster.
3. Obama has agreed to go on Fox News – a sign that he is pulling out all stops now to steady his campaign. The question: if he thought the ABC News moderators were tough on him, is he fully prepared for what will face him on Fox News? The upside for Obama: he handles himself well and gets some headlines — and produces some good sound bites — it’ll get lots of air time and communicate that his campaign is not just on the defensive.
Polls should continue to fluctuate, but right now Obama has hit a rocky patch. What to watch for this week: can he stabilize his tumble or reverse it?
“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 »
Sometimes marriages are made in heaven. And then there are the political marriages that are seemingly made further south, in hotter climes. Now there’s a report that the honeymoon may be over between Democratic Presidential nomination aspirant Senator Hillary Clinton and conservative mega-media-giant News Corp maven Rupert Murdoch.
For political and media junkies, its timing could not be more fascinating.
So perhaps it’s exchanging one Democratic party nemesis for another — after all Clinton already WON the New York primary — but the New York Times notes that breaking up is hard to do:
A popular parlor game in political circles in recent years has been dissecting the shifting relationship between Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media mogul, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
Two years ago, there were signs of a thaw, with Mr. Murdoch, who owns The New York Post, not only endorsing Mrs. Clinton’s bid for a second Senate term in his paper, but also organizing a fund-raiser for her.
Recently, though, the relationship appears to have taken a turn for the worse. Mrs. Clinton has been skewered in The Post throughout her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, and recently taken to task over her claim that she had encountered sniper fire in a visit to Bosnia as first lady (though she later said she had “misspoken”). The newspaper even ran an article, datelined Sarajevo, to debunk what one of its headlines labeled a “ ‘low blow’ lie.”
Now another sign has emerged offering possible clues to Mrs. Clinton’s Murdoch status: Mr. Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth is holding a fund-raiser at her London home this month for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.
On the other hand, there are enough variables to suggest that this may be more of an inching away from a closer relationship than any kind of a divorce. For one thing, for several years the apparent Clinton-Murdoch alliance benefited both sides.
For another, the new NY Times article notes that:
…analysis of campaign contributions from employees of the News Corporation and its affiliates, including 20th Century Fox, Fox Sports and the like, reveals they skew heavily Democratic and toward Mrs. Clinton, who collected more than $100,000 in donations compared with about $80,000 for Mr. Obama.
The records show that the employees gave less than $20,000 to Republicans seeking their party’s presidential nomination.
Last year, even Mr. Murdoch contributed $2,300 to Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. His son James contributed $3,450 to Mrs. Clinton. This followed The Post’s endorsement of her re-election in 2006, as well as Mr. Murdoch’s highly publicized fund-raiser for her.
So Murdoch’s employees are more prone towards Hillaryland versus Obamaland or even McCainland.
In reality, wooing the people who control the press is not new in American politics. What is new and surprising to some is Clinton’s desire (for those who considered her a polarizer) and ability (she wins them over) to in-effect court rich publishers who have demonized her and her husband and even in one case suggested they were involved with murder.
Yes, politics does make strange bedfellows. And Mrs. Clinton is hoping that 8 months from now the elections will give birth to a new title before her name (President-elect Hillary Clinton).
But is all of this this negative? Not necessarily.
To many Democrats, it’s jaw-dropping. But it shows that Clinton (a) can win over her most bitter foes, and, (b) is willing to take a deep breath and make peace with those who were out for her husband’s and her political scalps…if the peace treaty can advance the Clintons’ main goal.
It does raise a question: what next, a meeting and endorsement from Rush Limbaugh?
April 1st, 2008 by MICHAEL STICKINGS, Assistant Editor
Here’s the latest Clintonian trend: suck up to the right-wing media. As if it wasn’t enough that Hillary herself cozied up to Dick Scaife (and was cozied back), top Clinton surrogate Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania — he who thinks whites may not be ready for a black president — thinks the world of Fox News, claiming it is truly the fairest and most balanced of them all:
I think during this entire primary coverage, starting in Iowa and up to the present — FOX has done the fairest job, and remained the most objective of all the cable networks. You hate both of our candidates. No, I’m only kidding. But you actually have done a very balanced job of reporting the news, and some of the other stations are just caught up with Senator Obama, who is a great guy, but Senator Obama can do no wrong, and Senator Clinton can do no right.
So he said yesterday on Fox & Friends (via The Politico).
I’ll let Steve Benen translate: “Rendell’s argument seemed to be that Fox News is more negative towards Obama than the credible cable news networks, which therefore makes Fox News ‘fair,’ ‘objective,’ and ‘balanced.’”
Now, Hillary herself may not believe this — Steve thinks not, and he’s probably right. But the fact is, one of her key surrogates — an all-important Pennsylvania surrogate with national standing, a party celebrity — said it (and may think it, who knows?). And, of course, what he said was both biased and stupid. Biased because he equates objectivity with attacking Obama and stupid because everyone knows Fox News isn’t at all fair or balanced. Read the rest of this entry »
March 25th, 2008 by MICHAEL STICKINGS, Assistant Editor
On Fox News Sunday the other day — C&L has the video and part of the transcript — host Brit Hume referred to McCain’s recent Iran/al Qaeda gaffe as “a senior moment”:
I think it’s probably just a blip, but it was a bigger blip than he wanted or needed at the time. I think the overall impression of the trip was this is a man welcomed by, knowledgeable of and comfortable with foreign leaders across a big part of the globe. But the mistake, nonetheless, raises questions not about his knowledgability — we all kinda believe he has that — the question, perhaps, about his age, which is an issue. You know, the feeling was not that he’s a dope, didn’t know his way around, that he might have had a senior moment there, and I think that’s unfortunate for him. But I think probably the trip was a net plus.
It was a fairly serious (and revealing gaffe), and not an isolated one. And it may not be so much a matter of knowledge — he is a smart man who knows a great deal about the world — as it is of competence.
What is interesting, though, is how the gaffe has been received, and how future gaffes will be received. McCain continues to get a free pass from the major media in terms of experience, knowledge, and general competence, and even in terms of judgment and his positions on the issues, especially on foreign policy, international relations, and military matters. Simply put, the media like him and don’t ask the tough questions. This gaffe seems to have punctured the bubble around him, though, and, for once, the media are taking a more critical view of their darling. At the very least, the gaffe got some coverage, and he looked bad. Perhaps it was a turning point.
Or perhaps not. The spotlight isn’t on him the way it’s on Obama and Clinton, and the media have yet to show that they intend to treat McCain like they will undoubtedly treat either Obama or Clinton as the Democratic nominee. He is still the avuncular, straight-talking wise man. While partisans like Hume will excuse his gaffes as reflections of old age, downplaying them into meaninglessness, it will be up to the non-partisan (or less explicitly partisan) in the media to do their jobs and act like professionals. It’s time to take McCain seriously — he is the Republican nominee, after all — and to revoke his free pass. Read the rest of this entry »
Howell Raines, who was executive editor of The New York Times from 2001-2003, is credited with bringing a healthy dose of advocacy journalism to the Gray Lady but was brought down by the Jason Blair scandal. He warns in his new column in Condé Nast’s Portfolio.com that there is no greater threat to American journalism than the possibility that media mogul Rupert Murdoch or some other unwelcome suitor would force its sale.
Money quote:
“He will spend whatever it takes to undermine the Times‘ standing as America’s leading general-interest newspaper. But my real fear is that Murdoch or some other unsuitable purchaser will then buy the Times through a combination of financial and psychological pressures on the strong, but hardly ironclad, Sulzberger family trust that controls the vast majority of the company’s voting stock. There is no more important question in American journalism than the future of the Times, and I don’t think the newspaper or the journalistic profession is taking Murdoch in particular or the takeover issue in general seriously enough.”
It is hard to argue with Raines about the threat, but it is no one’s fault but its own that The Times is not the newspaper that it once was — much improved in some respects but so troubled in many others — and it should be no more immune to the ongoing shakeout in the newspaper biz than any other publication.
Have Democrats - and Europeans - become too comfortable with the inevitability of a Democratic President in 2008? Financial Times Deutschland columnist Thomas Klau writes in part, ‘The dramatic struggle between two exceptional Democratic politicians has drawn attention away from the fact that McCain’s candidacy is also a turning point - a break in the position of Republicans which, as far as party politics is concerned, could mean a historically and culturally deeper break than the Democratic Party’s nomination duel. … The reproach so often repeated by Obama - that McCain offers only a sequel of the failed politics of George W. Bush - misses the point: McCain has contradicted Bush’s policies so often, that no one can embody calls for change the way he does.’
By Thomas Klau
Translated by Julian Jacob
March 6, 2008
Germany - Financial Times Deutschland - Original Article (German)
The saga goes on - the epochal battle for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Once again, the voters have resisted the pressure of the media, which was so quick to choose a favorite candidate.
In the U.S., people love quick results and clear statistics and a fast declaration of winners and losers. But Americans also appreciate the courage of those who don’t give up. Hillary Clinton has fought on after being written off and has gone on the attack when many were urging her to clear the field for Barack Obama. On Tuesday [Mar. 4] , the voters didn’t abandon her.
The senator’s tenacity and her steadfastness in times of great stress could be her best argument, if in Denver in July it comes down to drawing party delegates to her side. Clinton will need arguments because despite her victory yesterday, the numbers continue to speak against her. In terms of the number of delegates, Obama is out in front and will be almost impossible to catch - the arithmetic and dynamics of the approaching primary dates work in his advantage.
Now the battle for the Democratic nomination will become harder and perhaps dirtier. Clinton’s revitalized election team will make every effort to keep the Illinois senator on the defensive. Obama’s squeaky-clean image will suffer if for the first time, the press keeps its klieg lights on the senator’s more problematic contacts. It is here that he is vulnerable to attack. He’s member of a Black church congregation in Chicago, the leader of which has maintained contacts with Black racists. And the corruption trial against a former Obama supporter, building contractor Tony Rezko, is imminent.
DEEP-SEATED PARTY CRISES
With the withdrawal of Mike Huckabee, the Republican primary battle has ended with the formal selection of John McCain. The dramatic struggle between two exceptional Democratic politicians has drawn attention away from the fact that McCain’s candidacy is also a turning point - a break in the position of Republicans which, as far as party politics is concerned, could mean a historically and culturally deeper break than the Democratic Party’s nomination duel.
Politically, Clinton and Obama are conventional Democrats, located in the middle-left of their own party. But McCain is the first Republican presidential candidate in many years who has ascended in spite of the resistance of the culture warriors - that aggressive nationalistic wing of the Party. Unlike the leading figures of the present U.S. government, his TV is not tuned to Fox News - the propaganda channel of the right - but MSNBC - and anyone who knows the United States understand how much that says.
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated foreign press coverage of the U.S. elections
And no one is even trying anymore to show them the boundaries. It all ends up being about who is more objectively offensive and who should apologize to whom. When the issue is: they’re all wrong in their fast and loose use of language. Absolutely wrong. These folks are supposed to be our best journalists who get these hours to themselves because of their skill and ability. Instead, they get out there and work to get attention, pure and simple. Sometimes they have to say they are sorry, sometimes they don’t. But what are we really showing everyone about who we are, by what we like and tolerate?
Feh.
For background, Media Matters is a good place to start for the latest kerfuffle. For the record, of course Bill O’Reilly should not be talking about holding off on lynching parties for Michelle Obama. What a completely ridiculous choice of words. There must be 1000 other words, at a minimum, that he could have used to make the same statement.
Last week’s Chelsea Clinton furor marks a low point in cable network competition for eyeballs and ears during the 24/7 news cycle and raises broader questions about their prime-time “journalism,” which has degenerated into a babble of idiot ids vying for attention.
David Shuster’s “pimped out” remark exemplifies a trend reported almost a year ago by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, that “cable news channels…are moving more toward personalities, often opinionated ones, to win audiences.
“The most strident voices, such as Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck, are among the biggest successes in winning viewers, as is CNN’s new crusader, Lou Dobbs. How much those individual shows affect a channel’s overall audience is harder to gauge. Their growth in 2006 was substantial, particularly among 25-to-54-year-olds, but those gains were not enough to stanch the overall declines.
“The shifts toward even edgier opinion are also probably a response to another change. Cable is beginning to lose its claim as the primary destination for what was once its main appeal: news on demand. That is something the Internet can now provide more efficiently.”
First we got Coulter promising with a straight face to campaign for Hillary if McCain wins. Now Rush Limbaugh is saying that he’d rather see Clinton or Obama win the presidency than John McCain, despite Bob Dole’s plea for sanity on the party’s far right. Too bad, Bob Dole. That ship sailed a long time ago.
When it comes to the McCain mutiny, Limbaugh has plenty of company on the right side of the dial. Laura Ingraham endorsed Mitt Romney last week, saying, "There is no way in hell I could pull the lever for John McCain." Sean Hannity, who also endorsed the former Massachusetts governor, regularly rips McCain. Hugh Hewitt is urging the audience for his syndicated radio show to fight for Romney against what he calls a media-generated "McCain resurrection." But with a program heard on 600 stations, including Washington’s WMAL, Limbaugh is the loudest and brashest voice inveighing against the man he derides as "Saint John of Arizona." (New York Times)
Could it be that even some of the dittoheads have noticed that the far right has turned out to be wrong about every single thing it’s said every single time? Doubtful. Clearly, though, a certain number of sane Republicans have noticed.
by Damozel |Hurray! Ann Coulter has semi-endorsed Hillary, sort of! Ed Morissey asks "Has Ann Coulter jumped the shark?"He wonders if this will finish her off with anyone who still takes her seriously, assuming anyone still does. Jill Miller Zimon has the video right here. Is this the greatest campaign season ever, or what? It’s not exactly fair on Hillary, but I can’t help chortling madly as I watch it again and again and again.
So. Ann too is well and truly infected, as the Captain puts it, with “McCain Derangement Syndrome.” You might be surprised by her extreme solution to it, but I’m not. True, from Duncan Hunter to Hillary might strike some as something of a leap, but McCain has the power to drive neocons right over the jagged edge, bless him. This campaign season, liberal is the new conservative!
A year ago today, back when a surge was something that you didn’t want to fry your computer, extraordinary rendition was a stirring playing of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, people thought FISA was the federal agency that protected their bank deposits and a Huckabee was a . . . something or other, I posed a couple of questions:
Can we survive two more years of a Bush presidency?
Have we become a nation of sheep?
Looking back over the previous 12 months and ahead to a watershed 2008 election, the answer to both questions is an equivocal “yes.”
The ability of the most amoral presidency since forever to shock but not surprise ripened like cow pie in a pasture on a hot summer day during 2007:
* George Bush’s Forever War morphed into a business deal that merely forestalls the eventual collapse of Iraq: Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki gets coup insurance in the form of a long-term U.S. troop presence and the U.S. gets first dibs at Iraq’s vast untapped oil riches.
* In a fairy tale ending, the president commuted the prison sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby, of course, had been thrown overboard by his bosses as they lost control of the Wilson-Plame affair, which grew out of one of the administration’s bigger whoppers justifying the war.
* U.S. attorneys were sacked because they resisted becoming handmaidens for a Justice Department that had become a branch of the Republican Party with subpoena power.
* The shroud of secrecy was torn off the administration’s enthusiastic embrace of Nazi-like torture techniques, which so troubled the head of the CIA’s clandestine service — although not for the right reasons — that he ordered the destruction of terrorist interrogation videotapes despite being explicitly told not to do so.
* The administration’s bellicose Iran policy crashed upon the shoals of a report by the nation’s spymasters that Tehran apparently had shuttered its nuclear weapons program four years earlier, an inconvenient disclosure that did not dissuade the president and vice president from continuing to rattle their sabers.
* Two key administration players – presidential mentor Karl Rove and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – resigned after working tirelessly to suborn the rule of law while stonewalling a feckless Democratic congressional majority in its feeble attempts to call them out. Both men, and most especially Gonzales, face a perilous New Year because of their probable criminal culpability.
* Meanwhile, the U.S. economy increasingly looked like a house of cards as the gap between Wall Street and Main Street grew, the war became a half-trillion dollar albatross and the dollar tanked against major foreign currencies. A home mortgage meltdown long in the making was exacerbated by an administration that shamelessly continued to reward the rich and give the finger to a middle class in crisis through, among other acts, vetoing an expansion of the life-saving S-CHIP program.
Can we expect more of the same in 2008? Absolutely. But that does not diminish the importance of digging deeper into the rotten core of the Bush presidency.
This means bringing Gonzales and other perps to justice, demanding increased transparency in what the administration and Congress does, working to restore civil liberties lost in the unprecedented Bush-Cheney power grab, and insisting that the Republican presidential field either climb out of Bush’s bed or explain why voters can expect more of the same any of them become president.
Will the republic survive another year? Yes, just as the hundreds of terrorism suspects have survived another year without due process in Guantánamo Bay and other way stations in the Rumsfeld Gulag, but there remains the specter of a citizenry even more disenchanted with its president and other so-called leaders and the institutions they profess to represent then at the end of the Clinton presidency.
