I really do not understand this attitude:
It is an odd, and we’d say regrettable, pattern of this White House that it lets itself get dragged down into fights with specific media outlets.
George W. Bush experienced acrimony with the New York Times, but for the most part, other than general frustrations of a conservative administration, complaining about a liberal media, it was no big deal.
But in addition to Fox News, now The White House is going after highly-respected and influential car site Edmunds.com.
They’re actually using The White House blog to dispute the site’s analysis of Cash-For-Clunkers (via Detroit News).
How. Dare. They! They are disputing an analysis! Don’t they know they’re supposed to just sit there and let their critics say whatever they want! The White House is supposed to be “above it all” and is never supposed to correct or address their critics! For shame!
Don’t they know they are supposed to just sit there and let people babble about death panels and how tax cuts make you go to heaven and that the real problem with Wall Street was too much regulation and that cigarettes cure cancer and so forth. How dare the White House have a position on issues?
Carwin
And once death panels and like become the focal point of the debate blame the WH for “not getting out in front of this earlier.”
These people have no shame.
El Cruzado
I do visit the site sometimes to check on car news and stuff, and I have no problem with it, but it does have a strong glibertarian “guvmint is evil” bent that sometimes rears its head. This might be one of those cases.
MattF
Right. Politics is all about ponies and starbursts and Jesus– only hopeless dweebs care about policy.
Foxhunter
Credibility fail.
Please move on to the next topic that will be ‘good for the Republican party’.
MikeJ
I just wish we could get an administration that would actually do to Republicans what they always accuse us of doing to them.
ellaesther
George W. Bush experienced acrimony with the New York Times, but for the most part, other than general frustrations of a conservative administration, complaining about a liberal media, it was no big deal.
Are they fucking kidding me?
I mean, for real, it’s Halloween tomorrow, not April Fools Day.
I would suggest that whoever wrote that probably doesn’t know anyone, or know anyone who knows anyone, who covered the White House, and not for Fox News, during the last Administration.
Indeed, I would submit that a big piece of why so much offense and umbrage are being taken over to the Fox is because they got very comfy being treated as the special kid, and feel it’s their right, their rightful place. And now they’re being treated like the red-headed stepchild. (No offense to red-heads. Or step-children. Much offense to Fox).
jibeaux
In what way are you taking on an entire media outlet by disputing one analysis of a government program they published? Unless you agree with (or at least accede to) every single thing published on a website, you are “going to war” with the website? JC would have been killed by friendly fire a kabillionty times by his own commenters by that standard.
ellaesther
@Foxhunter: Well, great minds, thinking alike, etc!
@MikeJ: From your mouth to God’s/the FMS’s ears/orecchiette.
ellaesther
@ellaesther: Crap! I meant FSM! The FSM’s orecchiette! Crap!
Foxhunter
@ellaesther: I agree. Also.
:)
JM
Whoa! So the WH engages in media pushback and all of a sudden it’s “targeting” and “attacking” and “baseball bats”?
The wussification of America continues.
dmsilev
Wow, talk about lowering the bar. Now, pushback against a single particular article whose conclusions the White House disputes is equivalent to “going to war” with the publication.
By that standard, the Bush administration was the Genghis Khan of media relations.
-dms
flukebucket
Damn. The comments attached to the article are ugly.
sloan
It’s because Republicans have never complained about the LIBERAL MEDIA. Ever.
Obama is the first politician to do this. He is a monster.
sgwhiteinfla
Didja see the Jon Stewart take down of FoxNews last night? Priceless.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-october-29-2009/for-fox-sake-
Comrade Dread
I really didn’t realize that everyone working in the major news organizations were fragile Southern belles in a perpetual fit of the vapours.
No doubt, the reason why newspapers are going out of business is because it is too expensive to pay the people who have to follow their reporters around carrying fainting couches.
asiangrrlMN
@ellaesther: Love it.
I also love watching the comfy, cushy, media hoo-has shiver in their Pradas and clutching their pearls. My what a delicate bunch they are! We must treat them with kids’ gloves.
My guess is they’re running skeered. For years, the deal has been that the Republicans can do what the fuck they want with little push back from the media (indeed, with a lot of aid and abetting from said media), but the Democrats were supposed to STFU and take it. Everyone was supposed to pretend that we have a liberal media who won’t give the conservatives a break, whereas in reality, that is exactly backwards.
Most of the traditional media has been complicit in this farce, so of course, when the White House starts pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, the members of said media are going to push back with all their might. It’s their livelihood at stake, in other words.
Foxhunter
Related to the ‘pushback’, here’s an intersting take in the current New Yorker on the WH/Fox battle royal.
Here are the last couple of lines from the piece:
WTF? Journalists can spew bullshit and ‘opinion’ as news but lean on the 1st for protection against their lies?
What am I missing, besides a Master’s in Jourmalism from my esteemed school at UGA??
asiangrrlMN
@sgwhiteinfla: Link no work. You fix.
Trinity
@dmsilev: This.
Trinity
@sgwhiteinfla: Linky no worky. :(
donovong
Whatever. This guy is about as credible about business as George W. Bush, and apparently about as “successful.”
Walker
@Foxhunter:
Who the hell cares what the New Yorker thinks. That is a magazine for a brand of liberal whose influence is thankfully waning.
jibeaux
Here is my shot across the bow at the Balloon Juice empire: that p-e-n-i-s reduction ad was s-t-u-p-i-d. Ha ha! Wither in the face of my attack and surrender now!
Balconesfault
Yes – the Bush Administration went after the NY Times, and it was no big deal.
That’s because the freaking NY Times didn’t run a lead story on their front page every frigging day calling out Bush.
Because the NY Times, and MSNBC, and other portions of the media slighted by Bush didn’t play the martyr card and whine and bitch and moan and make themselves the story … the Bush Administration was more dignified than the Obama Administration, which must face massive flopping from the right every time they point out some error.
I’d believe our media to be idiots, if I wasn’t aware of how highly they’re being paid for participating in this charade.
Zifnab
In my day, the President just got up on his podium and put his foot down. Because he was the Decider. Now you’ve got all these people running around and disagreeing with this scary negro who can’t even produce his birth certificate.
I don’t even know what to think about that, so I’ll go back and watch some Glenn Beck.
PeakVT
@El Cruzado: Most car sites seem to have a glibertarian-ish bent – probably because if the federal government had sane energy policies they’d all be driving econoboxes. With stock mufflers (gasp).
fouro
I know it’s a business site, but 90% of the commenters seem like their biggest talent is monitoring their stapler. In fact, they remind me of the kind of car salesmen I’ve enjoyed firing when repositioning dealerships.
Senyordave
You want some real wingnuttery, read the comments section. It is first class craziness, with a touch of Michael Savage-style hatred thrown in.
Can we please start the re-education camps soon?
Foobar
Didnt the Shrub admin threaten the NYT such that they sat on multiple stories about law breaking done by said lawbreakers?
And then there’s the NYT reporters being leaked false war propaganda by the admin that the reporters ran with which was then pointed to by the same admin personnel on talking head shows are some kind of proof of their own war propaganda?
Didnt that admin use the wibbul media to out a CIA agent?
Didnt the wibmedia ride shotgun in the tanks during the iraqmire invasion?
Didnt that admin have an army of retired DOD people on the dole to push admin-friendly stories on all the news fronts?
Didnt Jeff Gannon have a hall pass at the Whitehouse?
Didnt the Bush admin create phoney “news” reports and pay TV people to flog their stories?
gnomedad
Actually, you understand it perfectly, but I shouldn’t carp about figures of speech. It is the right that has made pretending not to understand into an art form. In this case, the inability to distinguish criticism and censorship. Not letting your opponents say anything they want unchallenged is a violation of the First Amendment! It’s exactly what Hitler did!
kth
The tone on the White House blog post was a little snarkier than I would have liked. Edmunds.com are industry hoes to be sure, ever arguing for the right to drive as much as we want, as fast as we want. But they aren’t the same as Fox, and the WH blog ought to have been more respectful in its disagreement.
Sentient Puddle
Oh it’s pretty simple. The script is that the media spews some bullshit, the government responds in turn by saying that said media is ideologically biased, media responds in turn with some small potatoes examples about how they’re fair and balanced, and this nonsense debate makes everyone feel better.
But the White House has gone off the script and is now attacking the media on actual substance. So clearly they’re playing unfair because the media doesn’t have a script for this play. Come on, White House! Don’t you know that you’re supposed to play into what they expect their next move to be?
GReynoldsCT00
@sgwhiteinfla:
I did! I did! Loved it…
Steeplejack
@asiangrrlMN:
Heh. Still kills me every time.
slag
@sgwhiteinfla: I’m now completely in love with Jon Stewart. In a purely platonic way, of course.
oklahomo
@Comrade Dread:
Clearly the White House needs to push for a cash for worn out fainting couches program. Instant turnaround for the furniture sector of the economy. And a public option covering broken strands of pearls, what with all the spastic clutching going on.
JenJen
And in other news, Liz Cheney attacks President Obama for his trip to Dover in the wee hours of yesterday morning, saying that President Bush had more class because he didn’t drag cameras along when he did the same thing.
Of course, as TPM points out, she does have a point… it’s true, President Bush never took a pool photographer with him when he never went to Dover AFB.
How does she get away with a fib like this? By just going on Fox News where nobody will ever ask her about it?
asiangrrlMN
@Steeplejack: I thought of you as I posted that. It made me smile.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/
Just let it play. It’s the first video.
The Moar You Know
@Walker: A-fucking-men.
GReynoldsCT00
Of course! See Stewart, Jon….
The Moar You Know
@kth: You’re quite correct; people should always be respectful to those who lie about them.
Right?
J
Strongly agree with jibeaux @7: in what way is this of a piece with what the WH has said about Fox (granting, if only for the sake of argument, that there was something objectionable about that)?
‘George W. Bush experienced acrimony with the New York Times’
This is a remarkably mealy-mouthed way of putting matters. Does it mean that Bush was at the receiving end of acrimony, but not capable of it himself? That relations between Bush and the NYT were acrimonious, i.e., that both parties were responsible for the acrimonious tone? That the acrimony came from Bush (the complaining)? Presumably the point is to seem to have made a judicious comparison while evading the need to say anything clear about what Bush’s–axiomatically superior–actions actually were.
dmsilev
@JenJen: And of course, previous Presidents have *never* memorialized the deaths of soldiers.
Four score and seven years ago…
-dms
Bootlegger
I was at my Toyota dealer getting service for my Corolla this morning and overheard a salesman telling another customer that the dealership had sold all but 2 cars on the lot during the CFK program. Since not every Toyota car qualified for the CFK program its safe to conclude that the program affected car sales across the board. The salesman went on to explain how the factories were working overtime to reinventory the dealerships.
Yep, smells like failure a’ight. Also.
Mike in NC
How long before serious person Richard Cohen weighs in with his personal tsk-tsk?
ellaesther
@asiangrrlMN: I think (and I hate to say it, because I was long in the media and still think of myself as such) that mostly (and as usual) Jon Stewart is right: The media are neither left nor right, they are lazy.
At least as far as TV goes, for the most part, the story that gets covered is the story that everyone is covering, because it’s easy to cover.
The intellectual laziness then gets compounded by a need for easy viewership, a lack of resources, and (under Bush) a lack of access, and voila! We get weeks and weeks on Michael Jackson, and regurgitated talking points, and a failure to look into demonstrably false accusations.
This is far from true for everyone, and I don’t think that the media, as an industry, is necessarily any more given to human foible than any other industry — but neither do either of those caveats mean that it’s not a real problem.
mk3872
Plus … why is every time the WH takes on reports that they feel are false, it is called a “WAR” ??
Why is everything with the U.S. media a WAR ??
They seem more hawkish and war-mongering than Dick Cheney
El Cid
Yeah. It was ‘no big deal’ because you fucking jack-asses watched the Bush Junior / Reagan II regime do WHATEVER THE FUCK IT WANTED and declared it ‘no big deal’.
Worthless assholes. They can’t stand the rightist Establishment not dictating every fucking last thing on the planet.
Morbo
Goodness, you would think that the White House was some sort of political entity or something. As opposed to the Business Insider which of course has no political agenda.
@mk3872: As with almost everything, George Carlin had the answer.
CT
Friend of mine works at a car dealership and they loved Cash for Clunkers. Getting all the paperwork done in time was a pain, but they sold every car that qualified for the program. Prior to that, their lot was a ghost town. The notion that most of the people were going to buy cars anyway is laughable-they sure as heck weren’t showing up to buy any for several months prior to CFC.
Xanthippas
I would say this is tantamount to a little blogger feeling astonishment when his erroneous take-down of a bigger blogger is audaciously addressed and also destroyed by that big blogger on that big blogger’s blog. By which I mean, it would be ridiculous to feel astonished at someone’s audacity in replying to your stupid criticism just because they’re more prominent than you, right? So, why can the White House directly respond to their stupid critics via a blog? But that’s what members of our privileged media believe, apparently.
Bill In OH
@PeakVT: You’ve pretty much nailed it, PeakVT. I finally had to give up my subscription to Car and Driver, otherwise a pretty good mag, because I got so tired of the constant glibertarian “I can buy any fuel-sucking V16 monster I want! It’s my God-given right as an American” rants and the junior-high level global climate change denialism.
I never really thought of Edmunds.com in the same light, but obviously they’re no better.
SFAW
dms @44
Yeah, but the world little noted nor long remembered that whiny photo op by that Republican guy. Who, interestingly, was the LAST Republican to win a war. (No, the Spanish-American “War” doesn’t count, nor does Grenada.) Since that time, the Republics leave it to the Dems to clean things up.
Mnemosyne
In case anyone has never seen them: fainting goats.
licensed to kill time
Here’s an interesting study from the Pew Research Center:
And a breakdown:
I’d like to know what planet those 14% who think Fox News is “mostly liberal” live on.
(apologies if this has already been posted/discussed – it’s so hard to keep up with the BJ’ers! )
Whispers
The Edmunds.com analysis was so much crap. The took the total number of money spent on all cars, and then divided it by their estimate of how many extra cars were sold. And since they estimated that 80% of the cars would have been sold anyway, they concluded that each car in the Cash for Clunkers program cost $24000, instead of $5600.
This isn’t analysis, it’s lying.
Martin
The Edmunds analysis is crap. They say that 80% of the sales would have happened anyway, yet sales went from 9M to 14M to 9M from July-August-September. Yeah, maybe those 5M cars would have been sold eventually, but the point of stimulus is to get them sold *now*.
The analysis on the housing surge was equally shitty.
Jay B.
@Walker:
Oh Christ. The New Yorker? It’s only the best magazine left standing, maybe including Harper’s along with it. Just this week, I read, in addition to Louis Menard’s dumb piece mentioned above, a great article on a North Korean woman who survived the famine and the staggering story about how she did it, an interesting piece on Wes Anderson’s new movie and a great stage review. And I haven’t finished it.
They’ve also done more than just about anyone to properly contextualize the Obama presidency, they did more than anyone but maybe McClatchy to expose the Bush Administration and they are one of the remaining general interest magazines which actually has interesting articles about different things.
Jesus man, don’t sound like another proud anti-intellectual just because you didn’t like one thing out of the magazine.
HRA
@sgwhiteinfla:
Thanks for the link. It was great!
cat48
It is funny how this WH confuses the Wingnuts messaging. One day they are screaming about him being weak. The next day he’s Nixon or Hitler. They barely have time to call him a tax and spend liberal who wants to kill everybody with guvmint-run health care.
Foxhunter
@Jay B.: I’d like to hear Walker explain his reasoning as well. I mean, get on TNR for being the ‘waning influence’, but the New Yorker isn’t *that* bad. Looking at Walker and TMYK’s comments, you would think I referred to the Weekly Standard. Not only that, I never implied anyone ‘cared’ what the New Yorker thinks.
Guess I better go cancel all my subs and get that lifetime deal to ‘The Nation’. Or is that an intellecutally waning rag, too?
reid
@Bill In OH: I also subscribe to C/D. Pat Bedard was the biggest glibertardarian, but at least he’s gone now. Csebe would also occasionally write some annoying things, but I didn’t mind him as much. And he’s gone too. David E. Davis is there now, and he seems like a snobby smarmy character. Eh, I mostly just read the reviews….