RJ Matson, Roll Call

This Guest Voice post is by Walter Brasch, professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University and president of the Pennsylvania Press Club. He often writes on the blog The Democratic Daily.

Coming to a Town—but only until Tuesday—a Clinton

by Walter Brasch

The Clintons are patrolling Pennsylvania as if they’re border collies herding all the stray sheep into the flock.

The same day that Hillary Clinton was campaigning door to door in Scranton, Bill Clinton was in Lewisburg, Bloomsburg, and Jim Thorpe, three small rural Pennsylvania communities in three different rural northeastern counties. The day before, Chelsea Clinton was in Oregon; the day after, she was at colleges in western Pennsylvania.

Sen. Clinton once dominated the race for the presidential nomination. After her win in New Hampshire, her strategists convinced her to concentrate on the “big vote” states, essentially ceding several of the Super Tuesday states to Sen. Barack Obama, who had emerged as her primary rival. In that Feb. 5 election, Obama edged Clinton in delegate votes, 847–834; more important, he took 14 states to Clinton’s eight.

The perception was that Clinton and her campaign not only were struggling but no longer had a chance to win the nomination. Although Clinton later won Texas and Ohio, two states she needed, she trails Obama in total delegate votes, 1,641–1,504, according to the Associated Press, with eight million voters and 158 delegate votes at stake in Pennsylvania. (Pennsylvania also has an additional 29 super delegates, officially known as “unpledged delegates.”)

Less than two months after Super Tuesday, Obama has significantly narrowed the wide gap in voter perceptions that once gave Clinton significant advantage over the first-term Illinois senator in experience, health care, the economy, and the handling of the war in Iraq.
Read the rest of this entry »

Oops! It happened again – Chelsea Clinton was asked about the Monica Lewsinky scandal while stumping for her mother.

There is some unanimity among mainstream media pundits and bloggers, including some who have been otherwise critical of Hillary and Bill Clinton, that such questions should be off limits. Their reasoning, such as it is, is that Chelsea was a teenager at the time, she surely has attained some sense of closure by now, and the whole subject is . . . well, yucky.

I beg to differ – up to a point.

The children of presidents should not be blamed for their fathers’ failures, or for that matter praised for their achievements. But if they choose to become players in campaigns or otherwise promote themselves they become fair game for reasonable questions from the news media.

Hillary and Bill Clinton did an admirable job of shielding Chelsea from the press when she was First Daughter and the press largely acquiesced. But she has chosen to become an active participant in the 2008 presidential campaign and should not be given a free pass.

Laura and George Bush are doing an admirable job of shielding daughters Barbara and Jenna from the press and beyond some self-inflicted bad publicity, the press largely acquiesced.

Neither has been active participants in their father’s administration, but should that have changed when Jenna went out on tour last year to promote Ana’s Story: A Journal of Hope, a young adult’s book that she co-authored?

Yes, as I argued here, because the book was being promoted as the work of the president’s daughter and the likelihood that it would have been published in the first place if she was just another elementary school teacher is not great.

Ana’s Story is a true account of the struggles and triumphs of a Latin American teenager born HIV-positive, not a true account of being in the White House on 9/11 or flying over New Orleans with her father after Hurricane Katrina. But that did not mean that Jenna was not fair game for questions about her father.

As it was, interviewers did ask Jenna what she thought about the Iraq war, among other topics. She could have brushed the questions aside, but answered with circumspection that nobody wants war, her father included.

The Iraq war is pretty yucky, too, but it was an appropriate topic for a question as was Jenna’s answer.

There is an unfortunate confluence of circumstances in the case of Chelsea and Monica.

Hillary Clinton has pretty much gotten a free ride concerning the Lewinsky scandal, which was one of the defining event of the Clinton co-presidency and American political history. The yuck factor notwithstanding, she needs to address that event, most notably how she apparently was able to forgive her husband and be a key player in his defense when he was impeached.

Hillary Clinton is more than fair game as a self described hands-on First Lady. Chelsea Clinton also is fair game, but only within the context that Jenna Bush was fair game. She can choose to brush aside questions about the Lewinsky scandal, as she has been doing, but that does not mean that the questions should not be asked.

On the heels of his Wisconsin primary victory, Senator Barack Obama won Hawaii’s 2008 Democratic Presidential caucuses in a landslide:

Sen. Barack Obama, who was born and raised in Hawai’i, won the state’s Democratic Presidential caucus in a landslide Tuesday. Obama had 20,974 votes, or 76 percent, to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s 6,529 votes, or 24 percent, with 68 percent of the precincts reporting.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.”

Something even more basic is involved as well…

Read the rest of this entry.

MSNBC correspondent David Shuster’s use of the phrase “pimped out” in referring to former first daughter Chelsea Clinton’s modest political activism has led to his apologizing, his suspension by the network, a major blog and commentator furor — but it also reflects a shoot-at-the-lip cable broadcast news and talk show culture that characterizes the increasingly-popular cable channels.

And howls of outrage from the Clinton campaign, coupled with suggestions that Hillary Clinton would never debate on MSNBC again, show how cable news talk can go over the line and itself become a political issue — an issue that can perhaps impact public perceptions of a candidate and of the news media itself.

First, in case you were on Venus and missed it, this You Tube shows you Shuster’s apology/non-apology (it’s phrased in a way so that it was not enough to get him out of hot water) and gives you a good chunk of the offending broadcast so you can view it in context:

Some thoughts:

(1) Shuster’s raising the issue was itself silly. Family members of candidates have been out on the hustings and working for family members for generations and/or running on their family connections. A few examples: the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Clintons, the Gores, the Kerry family… Moreover, Chelsea Clinton just a month ago came under fire in the media for not saying anything at campaign rallies. There is not the slightest thing unseemly about her working for her Mom — particularly since she is a young woman now and not a pre-teen or teen. BOGUS ISSUE to start with.

(2) His use of the phrase was dumb because, unless he needs to get wax cleaned out of his ears, there have been enough instances now of people using flippant language and getting themselves into career hot water. Some instances have been over racial language. Using sexual language linked to prostitution when describing a candidate’s daughter is giving your critics a gun to shoot you with.

(3) His comment about Huckabee won’t convince some Hillary supporters that it was a compliment. Watch it again and it can be argued that there was a touch of sarcasm in the way he said it. Additionally, in the segment he says basically that she doesn’t have a right to work for her mom until she sits down and talks to a reporter in an interview. When did THAT REQUIREMENT come about? That’s the first we’ve ever heard of it.

(4) He’s the latest instance of a media type who has gotten a big break to host a show and took it and ran with it — and slipped into a more casual, opinionated style that he could never use if he was still reporting straights news. It’s all part of our early 21st century BROADCAST MEDIA CULTURE.

Just as weblogs have now evolved largely into extended op-ed pages, so has much of television cable news evolved into talk radio transplanted into a broadcast news setting. It stems back to the creation and success of Fox News, which grafted radio talk onto the newcast model. MSNBC has been struggling for years, but it recently began making some modest gains in its programs as in many ways the anti-Fox. It’s edgy, but often a bit more to the center or the outright left. Shuster was subbing on Tucker Carlson’s show, which is a conservative news talk show.

There are several media types who joined cable talk and adapted their once-more-staid styles to the flippant, edgy style of cable talk — which is derived from talk radio which created the media role model now known as Fox. MSNBC has slowly built a lively team of talkers who often had more sedate careers in their earlier incarnations.

Chris Matthews was a superb print columnist who found his often controversial broadcast talk voice. Keith Olbermann was a topnotch sometimes controversial sportscaster who took a while to find his present HIGHLY outspoken and controversial voice at MSNBC where he has become the prime nemesis of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

The excellent reporter and go-getter Dan Abrams was General Manager at MSNBC for a while before returning to his own show — and he started doing menial jobs with NBC Sports,then working his way into sports reporting, NBC News and then Court TV. He now hosts his own show and his present style is lively and blunt cable news talk style.

All of them became “edgier,” “livelier,” and used (even if unconsciously in some cases) a media model with its roots in talk radio and cable talk pioneer Fox. It puts a premium on lively talk, talking — often shouting — heads, controversy and pushing the envelope on discussion.

You can almost sit in your living room and personally watch cable talk show hosts’ evolution as they first come on the air and gradually find their (flippant) voices as they adjust to the tone and tenor of cable talk — which ain’t any relationship of how things are discussed in the real world of news coverage.

In the talk radio world, those of us in San Diego have watched the evolution of our former Mayor Roger Hedgecock from mayor, to an early stumbling and often ineffectual talk show host to someone who is now as slick and professional in terms of being a first-class broadcaster as Rush Limbaugh or Ed Schultz.

So in effect, this could have been Shuster’s “big break” to his next career move — perhaps getting his own show on MSNBC eventually…which won’t happen now.

(5) The outrage from the Clinton camp is real. The Clintons have always tried to protect Chelsea and as she dips her toe into the waters of real world political campaigning, they probably went ballistic to hear someone use a word associated with prostitution to describe what is CERTAINLY her GENUINE and HEART-FELT desire to help her mother win.

(6) The controversy won’t hurt Hillary Clinton. MSNBC will bend over backwards and do somersaults now to show that it doesn’t hate Hillary, Hillary Clinton’s as a caring mother will be enhanced, and the Clinton family will (rightfully) appear as victim in this news story.

The bottom line: Shuster is suspended, when he comes back he won’t be on the fast track to his own show (at least not on MSNBC) and he never would have used those words on a report he was doing for NBC Nightly News or MSNBC.

He had fallen into, got sucked into, and was consumed by the cable TV talk radio culture which increasingly resembles the no-holds-barred world of stream-of-consciousness weblogs.

Except most of us who do weblogs would not be so dumb as to use the phrase Shuster did and virtually invite denunciations — particularly when the “issue” raised was a silly non-issue that should not have been raised in the first place.

But, then, we don’t get big salaries from networks.

P.S. There’s one silver lining in this controversy for MSNBC: It shows that at least one person is watching Tucker Carlson’s show.

ALSO READ THESE MEDIA REPORTS:

Read the rest of this entry »