John and I were just discussing Chuck Todd’s unbelievably idiotic tweet defending McCain’s latest primary-induced flip-flop. Todd’s an idiot, but not as dumb as Howie Kurtz — was John’s take on it. Mine is that neither Todd nor Kurtz is dumb in the usual sense. To stay in the good graces of elite media is simple — just keep saying everything is good news for conservatives, that we are a center-right nation, that John McCain is a principled maverick and so on. Criticize the Iraq war and you get shit-canned — ask Ashleigh Banfield or Phil Donahue. Any reporter interested in having a cushy, high-paying gig for the rest of his or her life would be foolish not to keep repeating the Village-approved talking points.
It really is that simple.
I realize that, per Forrest Gump, one could argue that stupid is as stupid does. And obviously, saying things that aren’t true, making incorrect predictions, etc. is in some sense stupid. So I see that point.
Here’s how I look at it: once a barnacle finds a good rock to attach itself to, the barnacle eats its brain, because it doesn’t need the brain anymore. The barnacle would be stupid not to eat its own brain. The same applies to Chuck Todd, Ben Smith, Mike Allen, Howie Kurtz, etc.
Christian
What an excellent summary of modern mainstream media culture.
Athenae
They’re not just dumb, they’re lazy. Laziness accounts far more easily than political or even class bias for most of the “stick to the established narrative”-ness in the news. After all, if you have the shortcut already, why bother to learn anything more or explain it to people?
A.
FlipYrWhig
Your theory _really_ explains Mike Barnicle.
bago
Concise.
The Grand Panjandrum
They also get a premium health insurance plan. They’ll need it. Most of them need to have a plexiglass stomach surgically implanted so they can see out every time they get their head up their ass. And from what I read that is a rather common occurence.
It really is a shame about Todd because he is very good at analyzing voting return data. Probably as good at it as anyone I’ve ever watched.
Jill (aka jwh186)
And evangelicals. If the bible dictates what you think and how you live you have no need for reality, facts or critical thinking. It all just gets in the way.
Morbo
Olbermann Olbermann Olbermann, nanner nanner nanner.
/troll
Ugh
So are Olbermann and Maddow just figments of my imagination then?
Ugh
Though I guess maybe they are not in the “good graces of elite media” so they wouldn’t count.
jibeaux
Ugh, you just had to make me think of that Hannibal Lecter / Ralph Fiennes scene, didn’t you, right after lunch.
El Cid
Hey, you forgot to simultaneously insult leftist conspiracy theorists with their boring descriptions of corporate machinations and media cultures favoring the interests of the powerful through the ordinary workings of enculturation, hiring, promotion, and firing. Usually that’s what I see and hear alongside such frustrations. It’s de rigeur, and helps to prove you’re not a moonbat.
Elizabelle
OT. This might make John happy after such a soggy day yesterday.
NYTimes: Ohio Sues Credit Rating Agencies (Reuters report)
Ohio’s attorney general sued Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch Ratings on Friday, asserting that they provided misleading credit ratings that led to hundreds of millions of losses for state funds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/business/21ratings.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1258740011-hbt8UY4FMQ+skDXHq9Q/aQ
kay
OT, but someone has to Tweet John Cole and tell him his long-wished for complaint has finally been filed:
” Ohio’s attorney general sued Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch Ratings on Friday, asserting that they provided misleading credit ratings that led to hundreds of millions of losses for state funds.
The official, Richard Cordray, filed the lawsuit in United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio on behalf of five Ohio funds that assert they lost more than $457 million because of “false and misleading ratings” of mortgage-backed securities by the ratings agencies.”
ThresherK
Without reading carefully I thought that was “Criticize the Iran war and you get shit-canned…”
Or am I reading tomorrow’s truths today?
comrade scott's agenda of rage
No but then, neither is based outta DC. Neither has spent any time there as a reporter/journalist/stenographer. That explains one main difference since as best I can tell, anyone who’s there for any amount of time always turns into what we’re hating right now.
Perhaps not Helen Thomas but I never liked her even when she was cogent since she’s always come across as a reporter who’s extremely taken with herself.
The thing is, we can shriek all we want, it won’t change how the current crop of asshats do bidness. I know from talking to a current member of the WH Press Corpse that while they do *hear* our shrillness, they *always* chalk it up to the “shrill left, therefore, it can be ignored”.
And yet, their editors are scared shitless of the “shrill right” and, according to this reporter, it’s the editors that lean heavily on the reporters in terms of what they report on and how they couch it.
The system is rotten but then we all knew that.
El Cid
Via Wonkette: get ready for Tea Party: the Documentary History of the 2nd American Revolution of 2009.
Well, at least they’re not given to hyperbole. Ever.
Ugh
comrade scott’s agenda of rage – that’s a good point.
Zifnab
If history has proved anything, it has proved that you can maintain stellar ratings by just monotoning the same idiotic gibberish over and over and over again, without making any attempt to distinguish yourself from the large crowd of like-minded bleating sheep.
That’s why FOX News has been hemorrhaging ratings by constantly moving right, MSNBC’s worst rating hours are hosted by left wing Maddow and Olbermann, and CNN is proudly leading the pack with the stellar mindless moderate Wolf Blitzer.
aimai
Woah. Harsh. But so, so true.
aimai
Ash
Barnacles really eat their own brains!? I don’t know why that sort of terrifies me.
Darius
Eh, laziness may explain why the mainstream media prefers “narratives”, but it doesn’t explain why the mainstream media always chooses to run with the right-wing narrative.
I think Doug’s right – they do it to curry favor with their fellow Villagers.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Exactly. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by a desire for a paycheck.
@Athenae: This. Also.
El Cid
@Darius: Thank you. There is no random falling of the incompetent — the incompetent accidentally fall overwhelmingly on the economic rightist / hawk side of the issues.
Joel
I thought this was a reference to Mike Barnicle, and how you can keep your cushy Village position, even when you’re a plaigarist and a douchebag, to boot.
Midnight Marauder
I think you make a fantastic point, DougJ. But nonetheless, Chuck Todd has transformed into an inane ignoramus of the highest degree. And I think you’re barnacle brain eating theory is the best explanation I’ve heard thus far about why Chuckie T. has morphed into such a dolt in his post-election role.
Every tweet he posts is apparently another delicious morsel out of his intellect.
Punchy
DougJ, good analysis, but you’ve left out a HUGE cog in the machinery. My take is that journalistic Darwinism should evolve the species of reporter who speaks the truth, uncovers the lies, and in general, stands out. This would elevate him/her above the others, and as we all know, whether the blog comments are positive or negative, blog comments at all “show” that reporter is someone.
So what’s putting the kibosh on development of such a rogue reporter, like the muckrackers of past? CORPORATE MEDIA ownership. Corps prefer lower taxes (Republican mantra), less regulation (Republican tenet), monopolistic practices for price fixing (Republican…), etc.
So it’s not just an individual’s desire to fit into this nebulous “Village” you describe. It’s that they’re all shackled by their employers to support the R cause to the detriment of the D’s policies.
low-tech cyclist
Here’s how I look at it: once a barnacle finds a good rock to attach itself to, the barnacle eats its brain, because it doesn’t need the brain anymore. The barnacle would be stupid not to eat its own brain. The same applies to Chuck Todd, Ben Smith, Mike Allen, Howie Kurtz, etc.
Best, and funniest, explanation I’ve ever read of why the Village is the way it is.
Thanks for bringing a grin to my Friday, Doug.
Jason B at Work
This is going to sound like a defense of bad journalistic behavior when it is not. But you really can’t overestimate the tendency one has to trust the response one has to one’s own surroundings. It is easy for me to imagine that, given the social circles that these guys frequent, the country would indeed appear to be center-right. Hell, if I was a complete cultural newbie having been randomly dropped into Augusta, GA (my current hometown, for better or worse), I could only assume that the country is hard-right. And I’ll be honest with you: even though I’m not a total cultural idiot and highly value John Cole’s blog and other more left-leaning sites, for the most part it’s not very real to me. Sure, you people all exist, and I’m grateful (sometimes this is all the keeps me from going crazy considering where I live), but the evidence of my eyes proclaims more than anything else that you exist in a vacuum. It’s possibly some counter-intuitive side-effect of evolution, or it’s possibly just me, but sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that the country is anything but center-right given the realities of my daily life.
I’m not defending Howard Kurtz, may he burn in a thousand imaginary hells. I guess what I am saying is that if we want media types to at least seem less skewed, many tough-slog changes are going to have to happen to the culture first. And let’s face it, it’s far, far, far easier to be conservative than it is to be liberal, in the same way that it’s easier to blow up a house than it is to build it…
It occurs to me that this may sound like a pessimistic comment when it really isn’t. I think things have been leaning our way for some time now, even without the disaster of the Bush years, but I do think that these things tend to happen slowly, sometimes so slowly that one would be forgiven for wondering if things will ever change at all.
Violet
So true. And in this economy they’re extra careful. It wouldn’t be easy to find another cushy gig were they to stray leftward.
How did the whole Woodward/Bernstein/Watergate thing happen, though? I mean, they took down Nixon. That wasn’t following the whole center-right playbook. Could something like that happen again?
jenniebee
OK, I completely missed it, what did McPain do exactly to get himself injected into the news cycle? Did he continue to not support the health care bill, continue to not support the stimulus, continue to be in the minority opposition party, continue to have, for all I know, pedicure parties with Joe Lieberman… what? I mean, if what he was doing before was supporting Obama, who needs his support anyway?
Randy P
@Zifnab:
There seems something there at odds with what I’ve been hearing over the last few years.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/02/may-ratings-mayhem-fox-ne_n_210500.html
Here’s the most recent data from a TV ratings web site
For the MSNBC lineup. These are the MSNBC titles pulled from the hour-by-hour listing. The three numbers are overall, 25-54 and 35-64. Rachel and Keith get two listings because they are broadcast twice.
Morning Joe- 324,000 viewers (119,000) (188,000)
Hardball w/ Chris Matthews—502,000 viewers (107,000) (266,000)
Ed Show—495,000 viewers (118,000) (271,000)
Hardball w/ C. Matthews—625,000 viewers (132,000) (295,000)
Countdown w/ K. Olbermann – 1,041,000 viewers (288,000) (488,000)
Rachel Maddow Show —957,000 viewers (273,000) (448,000)
Countdown w/ K. Olbermann – 575,000 viewers (162,000) (286,000)
Rachel Maddow Show —361,000 viewers (129,000) (240,000)
I’m having a hard time trying to figure out how you equate these numbers with the “worst rating hours”. Unless you are comparing the late-night rebroadcast with something primetime or something.
I did find lots of right-wing websites trumpeting how they are ratings losers. But no actual ratings numbers justifying that.
Is this Karl Rove math?
RememberNovember
George Orwell is laughing his ass off right now, whilst having tea with FDR and Che Guevara.
Stooleo
The Wikipedia page on barnacles is fascinating. What was most astounding was this quote.
I hope that this doesn’t apply to the villagers.
MikeJ
@Randy P: It just makes a better story if you can say Rachel Maddow is the same as Rush Limbaugh. No thinking required and everybody’s equally not as cool as me.
ChrisZ
Do barnacles eat their own brain’s too? I thought it was just sea squirt’s that did that. I guess it’s such a successful strategy that multiple creatures employ the tactic.
Zifnab
@Randy P:
Sarcasm, actually. FOX ratings have also been climbing. In fact, the more partisan you get – traditionally – the better your ratings are.
CNN’s milquetoast stenographer garbage and pro-corporate-but-not-really-partisan-one-way-or-another message isn’t winning them much of anything.
El Cid
Che liked tea?
Napoleon
@Stooleo:
Actually many of them are big dicks.
goblue72
@Randy P: Ai yai – I think zinfab was being snarky. (i.e. the left-wing shows on MSNBC and right-wing shows on Fox get the ratings while the more objective, straight news of CNN sits in the ratings toilet – in other words, we get the kind of journalists we want)
Randy P
@Zifnab:
Ah, OK. For some reason it often seems hard on this site to distinguish the trolls from the snarkers. Or maybe it’s just me.
What I said about right-wing sites is true. What you’ll mostly turn up when you search for “Olbermann ratings” or “Maddow ratings” is right-wing sites crowing about how they’re going downhill and on the way to cancellation.
And as usual for your modern neo-con, completely disconnected from the numbers. Hence my comment about Karl Rove and his “we’ve got the math” from Election 2008.
Elizabelle
One of the problems re ratings: It’s not that CNN is “moderate.”
It’s that CNN sucks royally. It was way better several years ago.
Fareed Zakariah’s GPS is one of its few bright spots.
Otherwise: sheer repetition and your brain cells hit the floor.
Constantly Negative News.
Zifnab
@Randy P: CNN’s ratings have been in the tank for years now. I assumed that was common knowledge when I made the Blitzer quip. I think they’re somewhere in the 200k range most of the day, which is pretty abysmal given the market available.
I, personally, don’t get anywhere near cable news – left, right, or center – because all of it is so nauseatingly ego-drenched and generally snark free.
freelancer
OT- I love me some TNC today:
Omnes Ominbus
@El Cid: Che liked chai.
Re: barnacles and brain eating. Insert zombie joke here [ ].
DougJ
This is going to sound like a defense of bad journalistic behavior when it is not. But you really can’t overestimate the tendency one has to trust the response one has to one’s own surroundings.
I agree with you.
sparky
two words: Citizen Kane
Elizabelle
“Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, and one of three members of his party who had expressed reservations about starting debate on the major health care legislation, has issued a statement saying that he will vote to bring the bill to the floor.
… The Senate is expected to vote Saturday evening on whether to take up the legislation. To send the bill forward will require all 60 votes under nominal Democratic control in the Senate — 58 Democrats and 2 independents, and precisely the minimum number needed to overcome Republican blocking tactics. Senator Nelson is one of three Democrats whose vote has been uncertain. The other two are Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas.”
http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/senator-nelson-will-vote-to-start-health-debate
Emma Anne
@Violet: How did the whole Woodward/Bernstein/Watergate thing happen, though? I mean, they took down Nixon. That wasn’t following the whole center-right playbook. Could something like that happen again?
They were police reporters, not political reporters. Sure, the same thing could happen again. But it would be a fluke, just like that was.
There is a reason why Izzy Stone is so celebrated by us lefties. He was extremely unusual. Sui generis, really. And they tried to make his life a living hell because of it.
licensed to kill time
@Stooleo: Wow, huge pen!s to body size ratio, AND it eats its own brain. Sounds like a dream guy. Your own barnacle boy toy.
R-Jud
@sparky: It’s apt and all, but all I could keep thinking while watching that clip was: “This is one take! One take!!”
Jesus, Orson Welles makes me feel so unworthy. To have done that before he was 30! I gotta watch that whole thing again sometime.
Tommy
I don’t want to spoil your analogy, but this is wrong on so many levels …
How would a filter feeding crustacean eat its own brain?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Ugh: I don’t think Olberman and Maddow are trying “[t]o stay in the good graces of elite media” as Doug put it.
L. Ron Obama
“Hung like a barnacle” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Mike G
How did the whole Woodward/Bernstein/Watergate thing happen, though? I mean, they took down Nixon. That wasn’t following the whole center-right playbook.
That was a case of different right wing factions in conflict. Mark Felt (Deep Throat), the second in command at the FBI, was certainly not a liberal crusader for freedom and transparency in government on principle. And Woodward was pretty much a tool of Naval Intelligence. Nixon went down because he pissed off powerful right wingers.
Shawn in ShowMe
Apparently Reid persuaded him by agreeing to exclude a measure to end the anti-trust exemptions for the insurance industry. That’s actually a a decent bit of negotiating. There’s no way that measure would have made it to the final bill anyway. The odds of Pauly Shore making a comeback are better.
Ruckus
@The Grand Panjandrum:
I thought that their heads were so far up their asses that they were back sitting on their shoulders. It’s what they depend on, they look, well, normal but really their heads are firmly up their ass.
oklahomo
@licensed to kill time:
Maybe this explains all the gropings Bobo gets under the table from Senators . . . it wasn’t a hand, Bobo.
Royce
I think it’s soft-pedaling to say our media are lazy or dumb.
The media’s corporate owners wish to have a certain reality portrayed, and the media “stars” comply (I can’t call them journalists). And even if this arrangement has damaged our nation to the point of its being treason … we Americans collectively just sit and take it and tell ourselves gentler stories to explain the situation.
It’s gone on so long that our media is now composed of professional propagandists. However, these are hardworking, intelligent propagandists: the dumb and lazy ones are us, the American people.
And still so many people can’t seem to see what’s going on, which is testimony to the blacker arts of political mass-media rhetoric. The propagandists are very expert at keeping us all “spinning.”
slag
Difficult to determine who is more the optimist in this debate: John Cole or DougJ.
Theoretically, in John Cole’s model, stupid is intrinsic to the individuals, but given that there’s some variability in the system, the completely stupid individuals in it can be replaced with less stupid ones. In DougJ’s model, stupid is intrinsic to the system, and for the less stupid individuals in the system to survive, they must become completely stupid.
Either way, I’m pretty sure stupid wins this one.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
I think the likes of Todd and Kurtz are chosen for their positions precisely because they are purveyors of conventional wisdom. That is to say, you get mostly centrist pablum from the media not because reporters are idiots or are hapless victims of systematic right-wing pressure (though those things play a role) but primarily because the execs choose this sort of journalist in the first place. Just a thought.
sparky
@R-Jud: well, yes, but keep in mind how the rest of his life turned out when you think about the age issue.
Liberty60
@Darius:
My take on this is that most journalists are grad school alums along with the DC policy wonks and polliticos; they eat at the same restaurants, send their kids to the same schools, live next door to each other in Gerogetown.
They aren’t “liberal” in the sense of being leftist, and they aren’t “conservative” in the Palin/ Beck/ Erick Erickson mold;
they are Yuppies who naturally see the world through the filter of upper class priviledge and entitlement.
A tax cut is meaningful to them and their world; a reduction in AFDC is an abstraction they read about in a position paper.
When a common thief is sent to prison for life for stealing a slice of pizza, they understand the need to be tough on crime; when a government official allows a man on the other side of the world to be tortured to death, they understand that we should “keep on walking” that this would be “criminalizing policy differences” and that sort of thing.
mere mortal
Sorry, DougJ, you were not the first to make a connection of this sort:
“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it.
It’s rather like getting tenure.”
– Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991
Howlin Wolfe
@ChrisZ: They eat their own apostrophe””””s
tc
I’ve talked to Howard Kurtz before and I know two people who know him well. By all accounts, he’s dumb as a rock.
DougJ
Sorry, DougJ, you were not the first to make a connection of this sort:
You found it! I wanted to reference this but I only heard it verbally and didn’t know if it was something my friend just said once or if it was a real saying.
Thanks.
Redshirt
Are there any national media outlets that are not corporate owned? NY Times, maybe?
DougJ
Are there any national media outlets that are not corporate owned? NY Times, maybe?
Neither NYT nor WaPo is corporate owned.
Mike G
When a common thief is sent to prison for life for stealing a slice of pizza, they understand the need to be tough on crime
Yet when “one of their own” villagers is convicted for involvement in blowing the cover of a covert CIA agent and destroying a CIA anti-nuclear-proliferation network, they are outraged that any punishment be imposed upon a member of their oh-so-special tribe, and demand a pardon.
Spoiled, self-entitled, solipsistic douchebags.
drillfork
@Athenae:
Laziness is a very underrated fault of the Villagers. These guys have cushy jobs (including those bennies that we simply can’t afford to give the Unwashed Rabble) and lavish lifestyles. Because they can just wallow around in groupthink with other Villagers, they never have to do any actual reporting — i.e., work.
As to why it’s always right-wing nonsense they spew, it’s because they’re almost completely insulated. America may not really be a center-right nation, but the Beltway sure in the fuk is…
drillfork
@Royce:
I hate to NOT be cynical here, but I think most Americans actually have… let’s call them good intentions. But you have a family, a job and you’re trying to scrape by, you just don’t have a lot of time for digest news beyond the boldest headlines. And, as we all know, the boldest headlines are incredibly fucking misleading. Hell, I basically had to drop out of society before I had the time to find out what’s really going on. (And plenty of days, especially after reading Glenzilla, Taibbi, Naomi Klein et al, I wish I didn’t know what I know.)
Yes, Americans are largely ignorant. And of a few of them are proudly and deservedly ignorant. But I believe that the majority of Ignorant Americans are just trying to live, and they just haven’t found the time to know any better.
Warren Zevon on his final album: It’s the home of the brave, and the land of the free, where the less you know, the better off you’ll be…
mere mortal
My pleasure, DougJ.
That quote has been a favorite of mine for a long time, I remember e-mailing it to my then-boss when he earned tenure at a major university over a dozen years ago.
fraught
Would it be elitist to say that someone with a high-school diploma and a couple of years of college might not be the best guy for a network to have as it’s White House correspondent and as the head of it’s political division? It’s taking Chuck longer to get his degree than it took Sarah by about 16 years.
CT is the exemplar of Good Guy Networking, a school of advancement theory invented and practiced by Tim Russert and entails heavy use of football fandom as a career strategy and pretending to use a superficial knowledge of statistical analysis to confound the brains of everyone who hated their statistics courses in school and that means everyone.
BrianG
Cool analogy, but where is the claim that a barnacle eats its own brain coming from? I can’t find any supporting evidence for that…
Pococurante
I can’t either. They maintain an eye over their lifetime so some degree of brain is required.
Another great faith-based analogy brought low by the Scientific Method. ;-)