A Maverick He Ain't

One of the myths that John McCain has been able to sell to the public through the mainstream media is the idea that he is some sort of maverick. Like with a lot of myths, however, this one doesn't bear close scrutiny.

Congressional Quarterly did an analysis of John McCain's votes in the Senate going back to the first year of the Bush Presidency. Over the last eight years, McCain has supported Bush 90.625% of the time with his Senate votes. The lowest percentage came in 2005, when he "only" supported Bush 77% of the time. So far in 2008, as of May 15, 2008 he has supported Bush 100% of the time.

So, given the fact that McCain has supported Bush over 90% of the time, why does the media keep referring to him as a "maverick"? Contrary to what liberals may believe, it is not their preference for Republicans. It is because most reporters and political commentators are part of a herd. Very few of them are original thinkers. Most of them just follow the lead of the rest of their group. The fact that they report it that way, however, doesn't make it so.

"Moderate" Republicans & the Corporate Media

Okay, so last week the corporate media was breathlessly reporting about how Senator Arlen Specter was coming down hard on Gonzales and the Bushies over Fredo's possibly perjuring himself before Congress. Well, if you thought Arlen's backbone would once again collapse, you were absolutely right. Yesterday, he told a talking heads show that he wanted to wait until there was a intelligence briefing before deciding whether Gonzo had committed perjury.

This is from an AP story linked to in this entry's title:

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he wanted to wait at least until a briefing Monday by the Bush administration on classified spy programs that could help him decide whether Gonzales lied to Congress.

Once again a so-called GOP "moderate" is backtracking and enabling the Bush Administration to continue pursuing its illegal and reckless policies. What the media tends to overlook is that none of what Bush has done to America and the world could have been done if GOP "moderates" like Specter, Voinovich, Chaffee, Snowe, Collins, McCain, DeWine, and others hadn't supported Bush in the Congress. Bush couldn't have gotten his reckless tax cuts through Congress, couldn't have started the Iraq War, couldn't have appointed ideologues to the United States Supreme Court, and couldn't have ran huge deficits if "moderates" from his own party hadn't supported him.

Now, of course, after enabling all of the above, Republican "moderates" want to back away from the destruction they have caused and be seen as "breaking" with Bush. The sad thing isn't that they think they can get away with it. The sad thing is that the corporate media will let them get away with it.

Media Out to Get Edwards?

There is an article in the Atlantic Online about why Edwards' haircut got a lot of media attention and Mitt Romney spending $300 of his campaign's money at a spa didn't. Here is the bottom line: a lot of reporters just don't like Edwards.

This is a quote from the article: There is a difference in the political reality: fairly or unfairly, a healthy chunk of the national political press corps doesn't like John Edwards. We have seen this before. The national political press corps didn't like Al Gore in 2000 and didn't like John Kerry in 2004. This antipathy was one reason why this country has been afflicted with Bubble-Boy Bush for eight years. A reason, by the way, that the mainstream media won't acknowledge.

The reason why national political reporters can afford to engage in such pettiness is that they don't really need the kind of programs that Democrats like Edwards push. They have good jobs with good health care. Their kids don't have to worry about being educated or about serving in the American military. They make a pretty good living. In short, they belong to the part of America that isn't really affected by the idiocy of this administration.

American democracy will be a lot better off when the national political reporters who live inside the Washington Beltway have a lot less power and influence. Hopefully, that day is not far off.

Why Media Doesn't Like Al Gore or John Edwards

Over at Talking Points Memo, Reed Hundt, who was on the FCC during the Clinton administration, has a post about how Gloria Borger and Gwen Ifill on the PBS show "Washington Week in Review" or whatever it is called now were dissing Al Gore.

Over at Daily Kos this past week, there was a post about how the media is attacking John Edwards for his supposed hypocrisy because he wants to help the poor and lives in a big house. That followed the attacks on him for his haircut and the attacks on him for consulting with a New York hedge fund.

These attacks are happening because Gore and Edwards are attacking the traditional media (Gore) and the way America treats the rich compared to the poor (Edwards). This makes the major corporations which own the media companies very unhappy. This in turn is going to be known to the reporters who work for those media companies, which will lead to negative stories about Edwards and Gore. Such stories will, ironically, prove Gore's point that he made in his book "The Assault on Reason."

The traditional media realizes that it is under attack from the left. Reporters are used to being attacked from the right, but these attacks from the left are really ticking them off. Just look at the reactions of people like David Broder of the Washington Post to bloggers. People like Broder realize that more and more readers are using the Internet for news and leaving traditional media like the Post.

The Post, for example, is suffering a decline in readers even though its only competition in D.C. is the Moonie paper, the Washington Times. Its not that the Times is picking up readers at the Post's expense. More than likely younger people, and Washington is a pretty young city demographically, are using the Internet and not the Post for information.

This lost of readers to the Internet threatens the Post's parent company's bottom line, which impacts Broder's salary. It also threatens the self-image of the Post, which prides itself on being one of the nation's premier papers. The Post's self-image, in turn, is probably important to Broder's self-image. It is hard to maintain that self-image if the Post is losing readers to bloggers.

There will be more such attacks in the future. Any politician, like Gore, who is seen as supporting the use of the Internet in public discourse runs the risk of being the subject of such attacks. Maybe what Democrats should do is create a website where such attacks are listed and any candidate who is not being attacked by the traditional media shouldn't be supported by Democrats.

Media Matters' Jamison Foser Asks: Why Are Only Progressive Politicians Accused of Hypocrisy

In this post by Jamison Foser of Media Matters asks why are only progressive politicians like John Edwards tagged by the media as hypocrites while conservative politicians who advocate for the rich are ignored? MCDAC has also wondered about this and we have come to two conclusions.

One is that it is far easier for the media to cover personal issues such as a politician allegedly being "hypocritical" than to cover policy issues. The media justifies this because they say that revealing a politician's personal character tells us how that person will behave in office.

First of all, that is a debatable premise. Bill Clinton obviously had some issues regarding his marriage, which the media explored ad naseum. Yet, that didn't stop him from advancing programs that were supported by a huge majority of the American public. Did that fact that Clinton was involved with Jennifer Flowers or, for that matter, Monica Lewinsky, tell us anything about the policies he pursued as president?

Second, the American public cares more about substance than personality. There is a lot of increasing dissatisfaction with the media and a lot of it is driven by the content of today's media. This is true of the news media as it is of the entertainment media.

The other reason why the media focuses on the alleged "hypocrisy" of a politician like John Edwards is that a lot of them make a lot of money and don't want to pay more taxes. We are not talking about people who cover your local city hall. We are talking about the blowhards who pontificate on the cable news shows or who have executive positions in news organizations. These people are doing alright financially. People like Edwards will raise their taxes and, in the process, make them feel guilty about not doing enough to help the poor. It is a common human reaction when someone's positions make you feel guilty to try and tear that person down. Attacking the person for hypocrisy is one way to avoid the issue the person is raising.

So, that's our take on why the media treats progressive politicians one way and conservative politicians another way. It is easier and it protects their financial interests.

Irony of the GOP's Position and the Media's Position Iraq War Funding Resolution

James Fallows is an award winning writer for the Atlantic Monthly. He wrote an article about the Iraq War that appeared in the Atlantic and included the following: There is no evidence that the President and those closest to him ever talked systematically about the "opportunity costs" and tradeoffs in their decision to invade Iraq.

No one has pointed to a meeting, a memo, a full set of discussions, about what America would gain and lose. The Administration apparently did not consider questions like "If we pursue the war on terror by invading Iraq, might we incite even more terror in the long run?" and "If we commit so many of our troops this way, what possibilities will we be giving up?"

Bush "did not think of this, intellectually, as a comparative decision," I was told by Senator Bob Graham, of Florida, who voted against the war resolution for fear it would hurt the fight against terrorism. "It was a single decision: he saw Saddam Hussein as an evil person who had to be removed." ... A man who participated in high-level planning for both Afghanistan and Iraq--and who is unnamed here because he still works for the government--told me, "There was absolutely no debate in the normal sense."

Think about what that means: this Administration took this country into a war with a country that had not attacked us, was not implicated in the attacks on 9-11, did not have any weapons of mass destruction, and before they started this war, they didn't bother to present Bubble-Boy with a memo outlining the calculated costs versus the expected benefits. Nor was such an analysis imposed on the Administration by the media. The media never asked Bush whether he had compared the costs to the benefits before starting this war. They never asked the Administration to produce a memo that Bush had been given in which the costs and benefits were set out. Instead they sallowed the Administration's BS hook, line, and sinker.

Now, however, both the GOP and the media want to impose such a debate on Democrats who want us to leave Iraq. Now we are supposed to weigh the costs of our leaving against the costs of our staying. Now that we are stuck in this awful mess, the GOP and the media want to do some cost-benefit analysis. Well, if we didn't have to do it to get into this mess, why do we have to do it to get out of it?

Quotes taken from a Fallows article about George Tenet, which you can read here.

Sojourners Magazine and Sherrod Brown

For those of you who aren't familar with Sojourners, it is a Christian organization founded by Jim Wallis. Wallis is the author of God's Politics: Why the Right is Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. Sojourners is an organization that talks about issues such as free trade, death penalty, and poverty as well as abortion and gay rights. It publishes a magazine. In its magazine this month is an article on free trade that points out how the mainstream media only pushes one side of the free trade debate, and that is the side the favors globalization. In that article is a favorable reference to Ohio's newly elected Senator Sherrod Brown. You can read the article by clicking on the link in this entry's title.

GOP Allegations of Voter "Fraud" are Purpose-Driven BS

The New York Times has an article about how the U.S. Justice Department has been going after so-called "voter fraud" cases across the nation. Not surprisingly, even though under Ashcroft and Gonzales, the Justice Department has been aggressively pursing these cases, very few prosecutions have taken place. No evidence of any conspiracies have been found and most of the cases that have been prosecuted seem to be examples of immigrants and convicted felons not knowing the rules.

The same thing was shown here in Ohio when an organization representing the homeless surveyed the local board of elections to find out how many instances they had of people voting illegally. The number was extremely small. Yet, despite little evidence, the Republican General Assembly passed a restrictive voter identification law that is clearly aimed at poor people, senior citizens, and minorities.

As we have pointed out before, while voters are required to show identification when they vote in person, they are not required to provide copies of such identification when they vote absentee. Why? Because Republicans in the General Assembly figured that their voters would vote a higher percentage of absentee ballots and they didn't want to disenfranchise the "right" kind of voters, only the "wrong" kind, ie, those that vote Democratic.

What the media doesn't get, though, is that Republicans in Washington and Columbus know the truth about their so called "voter fraud" theories. What they are looking for is a way to cloud the issue so that the media won't call them on their bs. If it was up to the mainstream media, they wouldn't, because most of those idiots are willing to parrot the GOP line. Unfortunately for them there is developing across America truly independent media in the form of websites and blogs that they can't control. Because of the pressure from these sites, like www.talkingpointsmemo.com mainstream media companies like the New York Times are beginning to pay attention.

See What the Media is Covering & Why It Matters

The website www.journalism.org is sponsored by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Its website has a lot of interesting information. One of the items on the website is a survey of what stories are appearing in newspapers, television, cable television, and the Internet. You can read the latest survey here. What the latest survey shows is that the 2008 presidential campaign gets more attention from news organizations than Iraq policy. Which, of course, exemplifies the problem with the media in America.

Several years ago a journalism professor named Thomas Patterson wrote a book about the way the media covered the 1992 presidential campaign. One of things he pointed out was that while the public looks at political reporting from a governing schema, the media looks at political reporting from a campaign schema. This is a critical difference. The public wants information on the candidates so that voters can decide who to vote for and what they will do if elected. The media, however, wants to look at political reporting from a campaign schema. Reporters looking at the campaign from such a schema are going to focus on such things as tactics and fundraising but not on the issues or what the candidates will do once elected.

Why this difference? Because in the final analysis it is a lot easier, and probably more fun, to cover the campaign than it is to cover what a candidate actually says about the issues.

The Obama Factor or Why the Media Has Trouble Covering What They Can't See

Readers of this blog will remember that we have previously remarked on how video clips of Barack Obama on You Tube were getting many more views than clips of other candidates. (See this entry: http://mcdac.blogspot.com/2007/03/2008-candidate-views-on-you-tube.html ) Now we see that Obama has raised far more money than anyone expected just a few weeks ago and has raised it from about twice as many people as Hillary Clinton. All of this seems to have surprised the political reporters and commentators. (See this article from the Washington Post, for example.)

The question is why is this catching most reporters by surprise? We think that its because it is happening out of their sight and therefore out of their control. The media is used to top-down organizations. By that we mean that a candidate forms a core group, that group reaches out to more people, and so on, but the campaign is controlled by a relatively small number of people headquartered in one place. Such a group is easy to reach and easier to cover. The media knows where they are and develops contacts within the organization.

Internet driven campaigns, which is what Obama may be conducting, are much more diffuse and much more spread out. Let's say a volunteer tapes Obama giving a speech and puts it up on You Tube which is then seen by a 1000 people. All of that doesn't really catch anyone attention, yet Obama's message has been seen by a 1000 viewers, all of whom had to make a conscious choice to watch that video clip. Some of those viewers may then be motivated to contribute or sign up to work as a campaign volunteer. None of which is necessarily going to be seen by the media covering the campaign, most of which are based in Washington.

Not only is it going to surprise the media, but it makes their job harder and decreases their power. The more that people can access the Internet and obtain information on their own, the less they need political commentators and reporters. The media didn't react well in 2004 when Howard Dean began the heavy use of the Internet in presidential politics. Whether they react well to Obama's use of the Internet will be one of the more interesting stories of the 2008 campaign.

How Media Supervisors Influence What Information You Receive

If you click on this entry's title you can read a blog post by former Washington Times reporter George Archibald. Archibald claims to be the first reporter hired by the Washington Times outside of the original founding group. The Washington Times is a paper owned by the Moonies and is a wingnut media outlet. Now, this former reporter is a true believer, no doubt about it, and the reason why we are recommending his article is not that we agree with him. It is because his article contains fascinating examples of how editors and other media supervisors determine and define what is news.

Often media personnel like to deny how they shape the news by the story lines they chose to present. They act as if news stories just magically appear. Well, that is simply not true. There are literally millions of stories that the media could present, but only a relatively small number get presented. Every story that is presented appears because of the conscious decision of someone to present the story. In corporate media there are a number of such persons. There is the author of the piece, his or her supervisor, that person's supervisor, and depending on the importance of the story, maybe another person, perhaps the publisher, owner, or station manager.

These decisions are why labor issues aren't covered by most major news outlets while we hear about Anna Nicole Smith and her demise ad nauseum. These decisions are why the negative aspects of trade agreements aren't usually presented to the public and why, until recently, Bush was presented as just "a regular guy", even though he was raised, and remains, part of the economic elite of America.

It is also why blogs are much more individualistic in outlook. Usually they are run by one person, or a small group of people, and they have a particular bent or outlook. The writers are not supervised by people who may have a different agenda than the writer of the story. It is also why blogs can, if they chose, get ahead of a story, because the writer doesn't have to work through a bureaucracy, so to speak.

Why Political Journalism Sucks: The Media Focuses on Celebrity

If you click on the link in this entry's title, you will be taken to an interesting article in the online edition of American Prospect magazine. The article raises the question of why Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico isn't getting more coverage. The reason posed by the author is that during the last decade or so political journalists decided that celebrity counted more than political or governing experience. Obama has more celebrity status than Richardson, so does Edwards and Clinton.

It's not just Democratic candidates who are covered more if they are celebrities, it also happens to Republicans. Consider the coverage given to Rudy Guiliani, a former Mayor of New York, the city where most national media companies are headquartered, to that given to Huckabee, the Governor of Arkansas.

It is an interesting theory and a very well written article. Take a minute and check it out.

Hillary Clinton's Use of Webcasts in 08 Campaign

When Hillary Clinton announced, she used a webcast to reach supporters and the general public. She bypassed the traditional first announcement to a rally where supporters are invited along with the media. Now her campaign is using webcasts embedded in email announcements to announce her positions to her supporters. The first one that has been issued deals with Iraq. You can view it by clicking on the link in this entry's title. A viewer can, of course, also view it by going to her presidential campaign website.

This is a very intriguing step and one that many more campaigns will be adopting, if they haven't already. It allows politicians to bypass the media and get their message directly out to their supporters and it is much cheaper than buying commercial time on television.

Tactics like this will, over time, change the relationship between the media and candidates. Right now, candidates need the media and so put up with the a lot of the media's stupidity on issues and campaigns so as not to tick off media representatives. Once they no longer need the media, candidates will become a lot less tolerant of their stupidity, their vapidness, and their biases.

Such tactics could also drastically reduce the cost of campaigns. It costs a lot less to send out email messages than to run 30 second spots on television and you can target them a lot better. This is a campaign tool that bears watching and developing, not just for national campaigns, but for local campaigns as well.

Is the Mainstream Media Helping Bush Start War with Iran?

If you click on this entry's title you will link to a great article in the trade magazine Editor & Publisher which points out how both the Washington Post and the New York Times are aiding the Bush administration in its efforts to start a war with Iran. Once again these two "liberal" media giants are pushing an idea promulgated by the Bush administration without any critical analysis. In 2003 it was the idea that Sadam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. In 2007 it is the idea that Iran is arming the Shia militia in Iraq and that such militia are using these arms to kill American soldiers.

Now, the point of the article isn't whether Iran is or is not arming such groups, it is that the mainstream media seems to have learned nothing from the Iraqi War experience. In the case of the New York Times the author of its article was the co-author with Judith Miller of a series of articles on the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that has been totally discredited. Why in the world would a newspaper that trumpets its "excellence in journalism" assign a reporter to cover this story on Iran whose work on Iraq was so shoddy? Why in the world does the Washington Post allow officials to make claims that the "highest levels" of the Iranian government are involved in giving weapons to Iraqi insurgents without them going on the record?
Are they trying to out-Fox Fox News? Don't we deserve better from our media? If they can't or won't hold critically analyze this administration's claims, then what are they adding to the public debate that we couldn't get from a Bush administration public relations handout?

Obama Takes on the "Mainstream Media"

One of the charges leveled against Obama is that he doesn't have enough experience to be President. His response to that charge is interesting. He points out that the "mainstream media" doesn't cover his policy proposals, but covers burning issues like what sort of swimsuit he wears. According to his aides, he is very much against the kind of celebrity driven news coverage we have seen too much of in America. (You can click on the link in this entry's title to read more.)

There could also be another reason why he is criticizing the media. He has seen the GOP get away with it for years and has watched while it has been able to intimidate reporters with cries of "liberal bias." He has watched what Eric Alterman calls "working the refs". Just like a good coach will work the refs to get calls for his team or against the opposing team, Republicans have been working the refs for a generation or more to get favorable news coverage or critical news coverage for Democrats. They have successfully built a myth that news organizations are biased against them and that therefore people shouldn't believe what they read about Republicans unless it is favorable to them.

The attack that Obama is launching, that the media is too frivolous is actually much better than accusing the media of a "conservative bias." First of all, it is true. Second, the media would use charges of such a bias to tell the public that they are not biased. "See", they will say, "both sides claim we are biased, that is proof that we are not biased." Then, they will, with considerable self-satisfaction, go back to being just the way they have always been.

It is much harder, though, for the media to blow off the charge of being frivolous. In an age of celebrity driven journalism, when networks are cutting their news departments, when newspapers are forsaking investigative journalism of corporations and government to cover the shenanigans of Paris Hilton, it is hard to refute such a charge. Who knows, if all Democrats start doing this, it might just actually lead to better journalism.