No More Farce!

Jiro · 10-11-2009, 04:51 AM

Calling 'Em Out: The White House Takes on the Press

Quote:

There was never a single moment when White House staff decided the major media outlets were falling down on the job. There were instead several such moments.

For press secretary Robert Gibbs, the realization came in early September, when the New York Times ran a front-page story about the bubbling parental outrage over President Obama's plan to address schoolchildren — even though the benign contents of the speech were not yet public. "You had to be like, 'Wait a minute,'" says Gibbs. "This thing has become a three-ring circus." (See who's who in Barack Obama's White House.)

For deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer, the more hyperbolic attacks on health-care reform this summer, which were often covered as a "controversy," flipped an internal switch. "When you are having a debate about whether or not you want to kill people's grandmother," he explains, "the normal rules of engagement don't apply."

And for his boss, Anita Dunn, the aha moment came when the Washington Post ran a second op-ed from a Republican politician decrying the "32" alleged czars appointed by the Obama Administration. Nine of those so-called czars, it turned out, were subject to Senate confirmation, making them decidedly unlike the Russian monarchs. "The idea — that the Washington Post didn't even question it," Dunn says, still marveling at the decision. (Read Mark Halperin's grades for the Obama Administration.)

All the criticism, both fair and misleading, took a toll, regularly knocking the White House off message. So a new White House strategy has emerged: rather than just giving reporters ammunition to "fact-check" Obama's many critics, the White House decided it would become a player, issuing biting attacks on those pundits, politicians and outlets that make what the White House believes to be misleading or simply false claims, like the assertion that health-care reform would establish new "sex clinics" in schools. Obama, fresh from his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, cheered on the effort, telling his aides he wanted to "call 'em out."

The take-no-prisoners turn has come as a surprise to some in the press, considering the largely favorable coverage that candidate Obama received last fall and given the President's vows to lower the rhetorical temperature in Washington and not pay attention to cable hyperbole. Instead, the White House blog now issues regular denunciations of the Administration's critics, including a recent post that announced "Fox lies" and suggested that the cable network was unpatriotic for criticizing Obama's 2016 Olympics effort. (See pictures of Barack Obama's nation of hope.)

White House officials offer no apologies. "The best analogy is probably baseball," says Gibbs. "The only way to get somebody to stop crowding the plate is to throw a fastball at them. They move."

The general in this war is Dunn, 51, a veteran campaign strategist who arrived at the White House in May. She has been a force in Democratic campaigns since the late 1980s and helmed Obama's rapid-response operation during his run. At the White House, she has become a devoted consumer of conservative-media reports and a fierce critic of Fox News, leading the Administration's effort to block officials, including Obama, from appearing on the network. "It's opinion journalism masquerading as news," Dunn says. "They are boosting their audience. But that doesn't mean we are going to sit back." Fox News's head of news, Michael Clemente, counters that the White House criticism unfairly conflates the network's reporters and its pundits, like Glenn Beck, whom he likens to "the op-ed page of a newspaper." (See pictures of Barack Obama behind the scenes on Inauguration Day.)

As a mother — who plans to transition to a new job later this year in order to spend more time with her 13-year-old son — Dunn is a rarity in the almost all-boys club that is Obama's inner circle. But her impact on the White House has been unmistakable. Since her arrival, the communications operation has been tightly refocused, with greater emphasis on planning ahead to shape the news cycle and controlling staff contacts with the press. In daily internal meetings, she points out where to strike back or admit error.

It is not hard to awaken her fiercer instincts. "Here in the White House, you are reluctant to feel like you have to go to that place," she says. "But we have to be more aggressive rather than just sit back and defend ourselves, because they will say anything. They will take any small thing and distort it." In other words, after eight months at the White House, the days of nonpartisan harmony are long gone — it's Us against Them. And the Obama Administration is playing to win.

it's about time that media gets some spanking for idiocracy'ing far too long and too much.

jillio · 10-11-2009, 02:56 PM

Agreed. The media has provided a platform for the lunatic fringe. They are best ignored.

LDNanna · 10-12-2009, 01:09 AM

Yup.

Jiro · 10-29-2009, 08:52 PM

Shep Smith Apologizes For "Lack Of Balance" In Fox News Report

Quote:

Shepard Smith apologized for a "lack of balance" on a story aired during his Fox News show today. Reporter Shannon Bream was covering the campaign for governor in New Jersey when she snagged an interview with the Republican candidate Chris Christie, but when Smith asked her when she would interview the the Democratic candidate, and current Governor, Jon Corzine, Bream replied, "We have in multiple requests, and when it comes in, we'll let you know."

Smith was not happy to hear that: "Wow. I didn't know that was about to happen. My apologies for the lack of balance there. If I'd had control it wouldn't have happened."

why am I not surprised?

Jiro · 10-29-2009, 08:54 PM

The lucrative business of Obama-bashing

Quote:

Four days before Barack Obama was sworn into office, a prominent radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, told his conservative listeners that a major American publication had asked him to write 400 words on his hopes for the Obama presidency.

“I…don’t need 400 words,” he said, “I need four: I hope he fails.”

The remark set the tone for a steady stream of unbridled and often bizarre criticism from Limbaugh and like-minded radio and TV commentators, several of them working for Fox News, the network owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Obama responded four days after his inauguration, telling a group of Republican congressmen they needed to break away from a mindset of confrontation.

“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”

What followed should have helped the new administration to reflect on the wisdom of singling out a media critic. But it didn’t. Limbaugh promptly portrayed himself as a man of such pivotal importance that the president of the world’s only superpower needed to pay personal attention to his tartly-worded opinion.

The controversy over his ill wishes for the president caused, as he put, his ratings to go “through the roof,” a reassuring development for a man who makes $38 million a year under an eight-year contract that runs through 2016. The score of that early skirmish: Limbaugh 1, Obama 0.

The White House is now engaged (as in war, not diplomacy) with an even bigger target, Fox News, to the evident delight of Murdoch. “There were some strong remarks coming out of the White House about one or two of the commentators on Fox News,” he told the annual shareholders’ meeting of News Corp, the media conglomerate that includes Fox. “And all I can tell you is that it has tremendously increased their ratings.”

His cheerful observation came a few days after the administration switched from occasional counter-attacks to full-scale offensive. Anita Dunn, the White House Communications director, fired the first rocket in mid-October by saying Fox News was not a legitimate news organisation but operated as a research and communications arm of the Republican Party.

The president himself stayed out of the fray this time but two of his closest aides, Senior Advisor David Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel followed up with similar comments on television news shows. Axelrod went as far as to urge other news organisations not to treat Fox News as a legitimate news outfit. Fox denies its news coverage is slanted and says critics fail to understand the difference between reporters and commentators.

SHOCK VALUE AND SHOW BUSINESS
Past performance is no guarantee of future results but it is probably a safe bet that the controversy will be good for the Fox bottom line - and that the commentators with the most provocative attacks on Obama will benefit most, a pattern reflected by the network’s third quarter results.

They showed Fox News as the dominant cable news organisation. It drew an average 2.25 million prime time viewers (a 2 percent increase over the previous year) - more than twice the combined number of its nearest competitors, CNN and MSNBC, both of which suffered considerable audience declines.

The shows by Fox’s top conservative commentators all showed steep increases, but none more than Glenn Beck (up almost 90 percent), who said of Obama on a Fox show in July: “This president has exposed himself as a guy, over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture.”

Commentators aiming for shock value are not in the business of context, such as pointing out, for example, that Obama’s mother was white and that he had close and cordial relations with his white grandparents. Obama was visibly shaken when his white grandmother, Madelyn Dunham died, a day before he was elected president.

Beck’s “hatred for white people” remark prompted several advertisers to abandon his show but that didn’t hurt the bottom line. A Fox spokeswoman said at the time that offended advertisers had shifted to other Fox programmes so there was no revenue lost.

Which raises the question why Fox News, which effectively functions as the voice of the opposition, has been more of a commercial success than its competitors which feature liberal, pro-Obama commentators and give a platform to people who want the president to succeed?

After all, he won the elections with the votes of Americans who bought into his reform agenda. And according to a Washington Post/ABC poll to mark his ninth month into the presidency, his job approval rating stands at 57 percent and only 20 percent of the country now consider themselves Republican, the lowest percentage in 26 years.

Even on the most hotly disputed aspect of Obama’s health care plan, the public option seen as socialism by conservative commentators, a majority of Americans are coming out in support of the president, according to that poll.

So why is the White House acting as if right-wing critics pose a mortal danger? Thin-skinned sensitivity to criticism? John Batchelor, a conservative radio show host, has a different suggestion: ignorance.

“The White House war on Fox,” he wrote on the website The Daily Beast, “shows its ignorance of the network’s true purpose: show business. And Team Obama is giving Murdoch just what he wants.”

ah.... of course!!

jillio · 10-29-2009, 09:01 PM

And to think there are those few disturbed people who actually give credibility to Faux News and Limbaugh.

Jiro · 10-29-2009, 09:09 PM

The O’Garbage Factor
Fox News isn't just bad. It's un-American.

Quote:

Last week, when White House Communications Director Anita Dunn charged the Fox News Channel with right-wing bias, Fox responded the way it always does. It denied the accusation with a straight face while proceeding to confirm it with its coverage.

Consider Fox's Web story on the episode. It quotes five people. Two of them work for Fox. All of them assert that administration officials are either wrong in substance or politically foolish to criticize the network. No one is cited supporting Dunn's criticisms or saying that it could make sense for Obama to challenge the network's power. It's a textbook example of a biased journalism. (Click here to follow Jacob Weisberg.)

If you were watching Fox News Channel, you saw the familiar roster of platinum pundettes and anchor androids reciting the same soundbites: this was Obama's version of Nixon's enemies list, the rest of the news media is in Obama's corner, Obama should get back to governing, and so on. On The O'Reilly Factor, Alan Colmes, the network's weak, battered house liberal, mumbled semi-agreement while "Doctor" Monica Crowley and Bill O'Reilly lit up the scoreboard with these talking points.

Any news organization that took its responsibilities seriously would take pains to cover presidential criticism fairly. It would regard doing so as itself a test of integrity. At Fox, by contrast, complaints of unfairness prompt only hoots of derision and demands for "evidence" that, when presented, is brushed off and ignored.

There is no need to get bogged down in this phony debate, which itself constitutes an abuse of the fair-mindedness of the rest of the media. One glance at Fox's Web site or five minutes' random viewing of the channel at any hour of the day demonstrates its all-pervasive slant. The lefty documentary Outfoxed spent a lot of time mustering evidence that Fox managers order reporters to take the Republican side. But after 13 years under Roger Ailes, Fox employees skew news right as instinctively as fish swim.

Rather than in any way maturing, Fox has in recent months become more boisterous and demagogic. Fox sponsored as much as it covered the anti-Obama "tea parties" this summer. Its "fact checking" about the president's health-care proposal is provided by Karl Rove. And weepy Glenn Beck has begun to exhibit a Strangelovean concern about government invading our bloodstream by vaccinating people for swine flu. With this misinformation campaign, Fox stands to become the first network to actively try to kill its viewers.

That Rupert Murdoch may tilt the news rightward more for commercial than ideological reasons is beside the point. What matters is the way that Fox's model has invaded the bloodstream of the American media. By showing that ideologically distorted news can drive ratings, Ailes has provoked his rivals at CNN and MSNBC to develop a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news. In this way, Fox hasn't just corrupted its own coverage. Its example has made all of cable news unpleasant and unreliable.

What's most distinctive about the American press is not its freedom but its century-old tradition of independence—that it serves the public interest rather than those of parties, persuasions, or pressure groups. Media independence is a 20th-century innovation that has never fully taken root in many other countries that do have a free press. The Australian-British-continental model of politicized media that Murdoch has applied at Fox is un-American, so much so that he has little choice but go on denying what he's doing as he does it. For Murdoch, Ailes, and company, "fair and balanced" is a necessary lie. To admit that their coverage is slanted by design would violate the American understanding of the media's role in democracy and our idea of what constitutes fair play. But it's a demonstrable deceit that no longer deserves equal time.

Whether the White House engages with Fox is a tactical political question. Whether we journalists continue to do so is an ethical one. By appearing on Fox, reporters validate its propaganda values and help to undermine the role of legitimate news organizations. Respectable journalists—I'm talking to you, Mara Liasson—should stop appearing on its programs. A boycott would make Ailes too happy, so let's try just ignoring Fox, shall we? And no, I don't want to come on The O'Reilly Factor to discuss it.

sad.... sad..... sad......

Jiro · 10-29-2009, 09:11 PM

Racist Email Doc Resurfaces as Expert on Glenn Beck

Quote:

Back in July we brought you the story of Dr. David McKalip, the Tea Party movement anti-anti-reform activist who was caught circulating a racist email with a photo of loincloth wearing President Obama in the guise of a witch-doctor.

After we publicized the email, McKalip apologized, later said he was withdrawing from the public debate over health care and felt compelled to resign as the head of the local medical association.

So we were surprised when TPM Reader JG let us know that last night McKalip resurfaced as an expert on health care reform for none other than Glenn Beck at Beck's town hall style meeting to discuss the horrors of reform.

If you don't remember, here's the photo McKalip sent around ...

how much more farce can they keep this up?

saywhatkid · 10-31-2009, 02:26 AM

That's a mighty long loincloth he is wearing....

rockin'robin · 10-31-2009, 10:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by saywhatkid

That's a mighty long loincloth he is wearing....

10-31-2009, 02:26 AM	#9 (permalink)
saywhatkid Thinking outside the box Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Trapped in a box Posts: 1,916	That's a mighty long loincloth he is wearing.... __________________ "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." — Jimi Hendrix

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10-11-2009, 02:56 PM	#2 (permalink)
jillio Registered User Join Date: Jun 2006 Posts: 32,396	Agreed. The media has provided a platform for the lunatic fringe. They are best ignored.

10-12-2009, 01:09 AM	#3 (permalink)
LDNanna Everything purple is mine Join Date: Feb 2009 Posts: 887	Yup.

10-29-2009, 09:01 PM	#6 (permalink)
jillio Registered User Join Date: Jun 2006 Posts: 32,396	And to think there are those few disturbed people who actually give credibility to Faux News and Limbaugh.