After Tunch’s Excellent Adventure (aka John Cole’s Very-Bad-No-Good-Terrible-Horrible Evening), possibly I was just primed to pick up this local news story…
Open Thread: Mark <del>of</del> in the BeastPost + Comments (67)
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Open Thread: Mark
The sad heart of Ruth, again
In defending her and Jake Tapper’s freak-out over the Obama administration’s decision to begin describing Fox News accurately, Ruth Marcus lets something very telling slip:
One of my sentences provoked particular derision from the left. “Imagine the outcry if the Bush administration had pulled a similar hissy fit with MSNBC,” I wrote. I confess to having forgotten about the Bush administration’s public tangle last year with MSNBC. White House counselor Ed Gillespie wrote to NBC News president Steve Capus complaining about a “deceptively edited” quote from President Bush, but he used the opportunity to complain about other allegedly slanted coverage and “the increasing blurring of those lines” between the “news” as reported on NBC and the “opinion” as reported on MSNBC.
Hissy fit? Well, Dan Froomkin, then a liberal blogger for The Post, cited “the White House’s unprecedented attack on NBC News,” noting what he termed “the White House’s outsized reaction,” and he hypothesized that an infuriated Bush had ordered the attack: “So is it a stretch to suspect that Bush told his counselor to get a little revenge?”
So let’s get this straight, she asks us to imagine an outcry if the Bush administration had attacked MSNBC. Then she admits that Bush did this but she forgot. It must have been quite an outcry! And then she cannot find a single member of the mainstream media that complained about it. Not one! (I’m not sure Froomkin is really a “liberal blogger” but he’s not really part of the regular media, either.)
It would be hard to make my point better than Marcus already made it.
I’d Also Like to Note
That while half of the beltway media have the vapors over Obama being too mean to Murdoch’s hacks, Chris Matthews is on my television debating with his guests whether or not Obama is “tough enough.”
I think DougJ said it best a while back:
I’m watching Monica Crowley and Pat Buchanan on the McLaughlin group and so help me God, I am praying for a dirty bomb in Georgetown.
These people will destroy us all.
Was it always this bad?
The Neocon Fainting Couch
When we last visited steely-eyed warrior Peter Wehner, he was leading the chairborne rangers in an epic battle against George Will, who Wehner decided had grown weak at heart over Afghanistan. That was but a few weeks ago, but since then our valiant warrior has left the fields of battle and taken to the fainting couch:
The term “sister organizations” is important because it shows solidarity with a news organization under fierce attack by the White House. This is the kind of question one would hope to see when a president and his top aides target a news organization and then, for good measure, try to dictate to other news organizations what they should do, how they should act, and which stories they should follow. But so far, stunningly, the media — including the White House press corps — have mostly been quiescent. One might have expected more in the face of these extraordinary efforts at media intimidation and media control. If the situation were reversed, and a Republican White House were targeting an entire network in a similar fashion, criticisms, condemnations, and thundering editorials would be pouring forth; terms like “abuse of power” and “chilling effect” would be on the lips of virtually every reporter in America.
A few quick things:
1.) Fox is not a news organization. Period.
2.) Fox news helped to organize and promote partisan political rallies, including situations in which their producers were caught rallying the crowds and their rabble was shouting down and ACTUALLY intimidating reporters from other networks.
3.) Fox is not a news organization. Period.
4.) Peter Wehner worked for the Bush administration. The Bush administration, in eight years, conducted more abuses to the field of journalism than anyone I can recall. A partial recollection of the Bush administration’s wrongdoings include:
- -Paying Armstrong Williams, Michael McManus, and Maggie Gallagher and others for favorable opinions about WH policies or to attack opponents of the WH.
-Planting Jeff Gannon to lob softball questions.
-Used reporters to out a CIA agent, then sat by and watched reporters go to jail to protect their sources.
-Fed reporters misinformation about WMD in Iraq, then used those reporters stories as corroborating evidence of the existence of WMD in Iraq.
-treated Helen Thomas like a leper.
-waged a coordinated campaign against NBC.
-kicked all the NY Times reporters off of their planes.
-the Pentagon Pundit program, which sold the war by planting former military officers on networks. Uncovering this story earned a journalist the fucking Pulitzer.
-Staged mock press conferences with FEMA employees pretending to be reporters.
-allowed Ari Fleischer to tell everyone (but directed at journalists) they needed to “watch what they say and what they do.”
And that is simply off the top of my head, and god only knows what lies and abuses Peter Wehner was responsible for while working at the Bush era Office of Strategic Initiatives. By comparison, the Obama White House has merely stated the obvious, which is that the Fox news is not a news organization.
I’m thinking Peter Wehner can just stfu.
Can Anyone Make the Case?
This seems like good news:
The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday approved a bill that would curb the health insurance industry’s limited exemption from federal antitrust laws and would allow Justice Department enforcement in the areas of price-fixing and market allocation.
The approval of the bill by a vote of 20 to 9, with three Republicans joining 17 Democrats in favor of the measure, is the latest sign that Congress is intent on cracking down on perceived abuses by health insurers.
I’ve heard reports that this is “retaliation” for the health insurance companies reneging on their deal, but it just seems to me like something that should be done anyway. Why shouldn’t they be forced to compete? Why should they be allowed to engage in price-fixing?
Who Is the Real Barack Obama?
So far, I can recall Obama being compared to the following figures:
Hitler
Stalin
Pol Pot
Mao
Carter
Bush
Nixon
David Duke
I think now it is time to start the definitive list of people Obama has been compared to, good or bad. Include a link to the comparison.
Nixon mojo
There’s an incorrect premising underlying all the blather about Obama “Nixon-fying” the White House, namely that Nixon somehow failed politically. Yes, Nixon ended up having to resign, yes, the Republicans did badly at the polls in 1974. But it’s worth remembering that when Nixon got into office in 1968, Republicans had held the White House for any only eight of the previous 36 years (and those eight were Eisenhower, who wasn’t much of a Republican). Between 1968 and 2008, they would hold it for 28 out of 40 years. And this isn’t just post Nixon, ergo propter Nixon reasoning: Republican political success rested largely on gains made among white southerners and non-college educated whites, two groups that Nixon explicitly targeted with the Southern strategy and the politics of class resentment (I recommend reading Steve Pearlstein Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” on this topic).
Nixon won, ultimately. And anyone who sees the way the press cowers before Fox News today (and cowered even more cravenly before Dubya until 2005) knows that the press lost.
It’s great that Woodward and Bernstein took Nixon down. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. If the same kind of report came out about a Republican president today, Fox would be calling the report communism and Halperin and Politico would be spinning the whole thing as great news for Republicans.
The media likes the idea that Nixonian politics were proved a failure when Nixon was driven out of office. But it’s simply not true.
None of this is to say that what the Obama administration is doing with Fox is actually Nixonian. The comparison only makes sense if you equate Beck and Hannity with Woodward and Bernstein.
But the idea that you can show something is a bad political strategy by calling it Nixonian is just silly.