Posts Tagged “media”
If anyone wonders how (A) a nation can move step-by-step down the path toward fascism, or (B) why the mainstream press in this country is held in such increasingly dismal regard, this week’s cover story in Newsweek provides a searing case study.
Co-authors Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas—both award-winning, Ivy League-educated journalists who move in the highest circles of academia, media, and politics; IOW, the very definition of establishment credibility—have decided that one of the key issues facing the incoming Obama administration, when confronting the boundaries of presidential power, is (as the cover blurb puts it), “What Would Dick [Cheney] Do?”
And Editor-in-Chief Jon Meacham—he who recently resuscitated the meme that “America is a center-right country”—heartily endorses this angle, writing inside the magazine that the cover feature addresses how “the urgent question now is whether President Obama will hew to [the anti-Cheney] dogma or whether, confronted with the realities of office, he will begin to see virtue in the antiterror apparatus Cheney helped Bush create.”
This, in the aftermath of an election that decisively and unequivocally repudiated the disastrous policies of Bush and Cheney—even Bush himself used the word “repudiated” in his semi-self-aware press conference today!—is what our establishment media wants us thinking about.
Where does one begin?
Well, with getting one’s gorge to subside. But after that…
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Tags: Constitution, Dick Cheney, fascism, FISA, George W. Bush, journalism, media, Obama, Rachel Maddow
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The question of who will fill Obama’s Senate seat has gotten the lion’s share of media coverage, but meanwhile things are heating up around another question, the one of who will replace Obama’s Chief of Staff—Rahm Emanuel—in the seat from Illinois’ fifth Congressional district, here in Chicago.
I went to a meeting tonight of the local chapter of Democracy For America (the organization that springboarded out of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential run), for a presentation and discussion of what’s happening in the 5th district. The room was packed, standing room only—I’d estimate at least 80 people there, on a cold wintry weeknight. Locally, at least, this contest is attracting some real attention.
I used to live in the 5th… back in the ’90s when it was represented by Dan Rostenkowski, then (for one term) Republican Michael Flanagan, then Rod Blagojevich… although I’d moved on to a new neighborhood by the time Rahm was elected in 2002. Not exactly a list covered with glory, but still, as those names might suggest (except for Flanagan, the only successful GOP challenger for the seat in 50 years), it’s a district that carries a bit more weight than the average Congressional seat, in terms of influence and career prospects.
And unlike the Senate seat, a vacancy has to be filled by special election. The primary for this one will be held on March 3, only eight weeks away. Chicago being a Democratic city, whoever wins the primary will win the general… and whoever wins the general can quite likely stay in Congress for as long as he pleases after that. And given that genuinely open Congressional seats in Chicago are not exactly everyday occurrences, it’s a free-for-all.
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Tags: Chicago, House of Representatives, Illinois, media, Rahm Emanuel, Tom Geoghegan, voting
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A completely subjective list, of course. But what the hell… aren’t they all?
Going in to 2008, one could hardly open a magazine or flip a channel without hitting a media comparison to 1968. It was 40 years ago (a nice, round number), and it was a paradigm-shifting political year that looked familiar, with an open competition for the presidential nomination in both parties, all while a war was on overseas.
As it turned out, 2008 was a momentous year in its own right, arguably the most significant year in decades, and without question one we will all remember vividly. But it was not assassinations and riots that made its mark in the history books, unlike in 1968; it brought distinctive events all its own.
There’s not really a lot of room for debate over the two most significant news events of the year, and the annual AP survey of news editors corresponds with what almost all of us would surely conclude on our own, a point-counterpoint of encouraging and discouraging developments:
1) The presidential election of Barack Obama
I’ve already written quite a bit about this one, of course… but suffice it to say that it’s historic for the fact that he’ll be the first African-American president; it’s historic for the fact that he won with a (generally) upbeat, honorable, serious campaign; and it’s historic in that it marks a realignment back toward progressive politics after a generation of destructive radical conservatism, and after eight years of arguably the single worst president in American history. How Obama really performs in office of course remains to be seen, but what he’s accomplished so far this year stands on its own.
2) The worst economic meltdown in our lifetimes
Written more than a little about this, too, of course. It seems almost quaint now to recall that when I started this blog, back in mid-September—although we now know that we were already nine months into a recession—it was still possible to ask “how bad is the economy?” and wonder if it would still get worse. Within days, everything started to go to hell in a handbasket… in a way that seems to have created a destructive feedback loop, where every new development just exacerbates what came before. Homes foreclosing, jobs disappearing, businesses (and entire industries) collapsing, credit freezing, investments evaporating… we’ll remember this for a long time, no matter how much we might prefer to forget it.
After that, the choices grow more arguable. My assessment:
Tags: Blagojevich, Chicago, climate, Congress, economy, Election 2008, financial crisis, FISA, history, Illinois, international, iPhone, journalism, Madoff, media, Obama, Top 10 lists
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Collapsing industries are hardly an unusual thing this year. Real estate, banking, airlines, automobiles, music and more are all in dire straits. One of the most consequential ones, however, with ripple effects that will last far beyond the pain of this current economic downturn, is the death spiral of the newspaper business.
For some years now, even when economic times were better,a common question in public discourse was “will print journalism be able to survive the challenge of the internet?” 2008 was the year the answer became a painfully clear “no,” and the question shifted to “how long before print journalism gives up the ghost?” Indeed, one of the biggest news stories of the year was, ironically, the death spiral of the industry responsible for coving big news stories.
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Tags: blogging, economy, Humanities Festival, internet, journalism, media, newspapers
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As the Obama administration and the new Congress set about choosing priorities and strategies for policymaking, an important consideration will be the political attitudes of the electorate. That, however, is often as much a matter of perception as reality.
It therefore comes as no surprise that even before Election Day (and with increased fervency once the results were in), status-quo-oriented opinion makers were spreading the meme that “America is a center-right country”:
Jon Meacham in Newsweek:
“America remains a center-right nation… [Obama] will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal—a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril.”
Joe Scarborough on MSNBC:
“This country is more conservative than it was when we took over in 1994 after two years of calamitous Democratic rule. It is a center-right country.”
Karl Rove in the WSJ:
“It is a tribute to his skills that Mr. Obama, the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, won in a country that remains center-right.”
John Boehner in the WaPo:
“America is still a center-right country. This election was neither a referendum in favor of the left’s approach to key issues nor a mandate for big government. Obama campaigned by masking liberal policies with moderate rhetoric to make his agenda more palatable to voters.”
Rich Lowry at NRO:
Republicans are consoling themselves by telling anyone who will listen that we still live in a ‘center-right country.’ They’re right.”
And there are countless others. As David Sirota has documented, media usage of the term spiked dramatically right after the election, and is still going strong.
The problem here is, it’s just not true.
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Tags: Congress, conservatism, history, media, Obama, Pelosi, polling, Reid, Republicans
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Looking around, Friday was a day of curiously juxtaposed ups and downs, as on the one hand there was the pleasant schadenfreude of seeing the wheels continue to come off not only John McCain’s campaign but those of other desperate Republicans as well, while on the other hand we all mourned the passing of the inimitable Studs Terkel.
But rather than focus on anything too serious, I thought I’d take a short break to look at the less weighty side of political life. On the day that Obama took at least a few hours’ break to take his kids to a Halloween party, I dug up an interview with him from that long-ago time before the conventions, in (of all things) Entertainment Weekly, asking him about his choices in (yep) entertainment.
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Tags: McCain, media, Obama, super-heroes
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It’s been interesting times since Sarah Palin was chosen as John McCain’s running mate two weeks ago—political theater at its highest and lowest. Coming in the wake of the Republican Party’s rebuke of any of McCain’s even remotely moderate policy leanings in its hard-right official platform, it was little surprise that the party also pushed him away from his preferred choices for a running mate, someone like Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge, and forced him to choose the more ideologically doctrinaire Palin in order to shore up the “base” of the GOP, the die-hard 28-percenters who still support Bush.
And it’s no surprise at all that the party has completely ignored McCain’s earlier vows to keep the campaign itself dignified and serious. From the repeated lies about Palin’s record regarding the “Bridge to Nowhere” and other earmarks, to the sleazy attack ad distorting Obama’s record on sex education, to the faux outrage over Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” remark, any pretense of dignity is long gone.
I find it disappointing that the McCain campaign is stooping to such bottom-feeding, Rovian tactics… disappointing, yes, but not at all surprising. He’s not even pretending to take the kind of stands he ran on eight years ago, and anyone who still imagines that he could be any kind of “maverick” in office with the GOP power structure cracking the whip like this just hasn’t been paying attention.
What I find really interesting, though, and indeed genuinely surprising, are two other trends. One, from all appearances the only people (in public or in the larger media) really buying into the sycophancy toward Palin are the hard-right ideologues, the diehard Bush supporters who would never have voted for Obama under any circumstances anyway but now have a fresh face they can support with more enthusiasm than they had for McCain himself. (I think any recent shift in the polls is largely due to Palin bringing a lot of the lunatic fringe off the fence and back into the “likely voter” camp; and even so the recent evidence of a “swing” seems largely due to overcounting Republican voters.)
Two — and this is the reassuring thing, in the wake of much wailing and gnashing of teeth and armchair strategizing from the blgosphere last week provoked by the fear that Palin might be a “game changer” — the media’s not playing along this time. Its enchantment with McCain seems to have worn off since his campaign dragged the media itself into the line of fire, and suddenly everywhere you turn someone’s calling out his misleading, deceptive, diversionary, and generally sleazy tactics for what they are. And it’s not just liberal pundits like Paul Krugman. I mean, when such a died-in-the-wool creature of the Beltway establishment as Time’s Joe Klein starts complaining that you’re taking cheap shots, you know you’ve crossed a line. Or Jim Lehrer calling the campaign “dishonest” and “dishonorable.” Or the Associated Press. The hosts of The View. Even Bill O’Reilly (!). Really, pretty much everyone is talking about about how McCain’s reputation for “straight talk” has derailed.
That’s the narrative that’s emerged in the last few days, and that’s the narrative the rest of the public, aside from the true believers, is going to pick up. Both Obama and McCain promised to run a different, more serious kind of campaign. Only one of them is sticking to it.
Tags: Election 2008, McCain, media, Palin
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