More and more, I feel that understanding modern politics without linking to Politico is like understanding the Third Reich without watching Triumph Of the Will. So I’m just going to tell you straight up: if you want to understand the idiocy of our modern press corps, you need to read this:
Ed Chen, a White House correspondent for Bloomberg News who is president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said he asked for the meeting “to clear the air because in my 10-plus years at the White House, rarely have I sensed such a level of anger, which is wide and deep, among members over White House practices and attitude toward the press.”
[……]“We had a very good exchange with Robert,” Chen said. “He stayed overtime, and thus was late for his next meeting.”
[…..]Among the issues discussed:
[….]—More behind-the-scenes access for news photographers….
—CNN’s Ed Henry, who represented the networks at the meeting, pushed for more bill signings and world leader meetings to be opened to cameras.
—Internet access on Air Force One is being explored…..
For the love of FSM, it wasn’t so long ago that Ari Fleischer was openly threatening journalists and Elisabeth Bumiller was admitting she was scared to ask questions.
And now things are worse than they’ve ever been because reporters can’t access porn twitter from Air Force One.
DougJ +4
Yutsano
You were right the first time.
mistermix
More like understanding Jerry Lewis without watching The Nutty Professor.
Cacti
I sense some lingering butt hurt over the POTUS’s refusal to let the Village stalk his daughters.
dmsilev
More bill signings on the air? Am I the only one who finds those incredibly boring? I mean, they’re all the same. President, using roughly 50,000 pens, signs the bill. Surrounding the President are half the members of Congress along with a bunch of regular people who are impacted by the new law. People clap. The end.
dms
slag
Stalkers. All of them.
arguingwithsignposts
Fixed for ya. This has nothing to do with politics, everything to do with media’s expected privilege.
I wonder what Bill Moyers would say about this shite? Somebody (DougJ?) should ask him.
jeffreyw
Not enough open threads! What’s this, a nose to the grindstone day? It’s fuckin Saturday, dammit. There, I feel better already.
bleh
The press have always assumed that they can bully Democratic administrations, and the Dems have acquiesced.
The Republicans — starting with Reagan — decided to behave like prison daddies, and the press rolled over.
Until the Dems realize that they have to do the same, they’ll suffer the consequences of their inaction.
Media whores are media whores. You don’t bitch slap ’em, they walk all over you.
One would expect Rahm to have known this …
arguingwithsignposts
@jeffreyw:
Look back one. Anything with cats and dogs is an open thread, IMHO
Yutsano
@jeffreyw: I promise to get off your lawn now.
Mike Kay
I don’t get. All the “grievances” they list happened when bush was resident. Why weren’t they mad then?
They should be kissing Obama’s feet for not dragging them out to god awful heat of crawford, where there was nothing to do during the off hours.
arguingwithsignposts
And dammit, my idea for a fun Saturday night comment thread gets stepped on by the Politico. So I’m repeating this from the previous thread, when someone suggested Ray Liotta as Tunch in the BJ Movie:
ETA: I’m thinking Jeff Goldblum as Tim F. for some reason.
Mike Kay
You know, on second thought, I know what this is about.
They’re all pissed because the President ditched them and didn’t take them along to watch his daughter’s soccer game last weekend.
calling all toasters
They should take a page from McCain: keep the booze flowing and these assholes will love you. Drunks, all of them.
d.s.
THEY CAME INTO TOWN AND TRASHED THE PLACE
Linkmeister
This song seems appropriate.
Little Children, by Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas (1964)
arguingwithsignposts
@Mike Kay:
Having just watched a 7-year-old girls’ soccer game this weekend (my daughter’s), I can say that I, for one, would be mightily pissed to have the entire WH press corp show up for one of these games. Think about all the other kids, for pete’s sake. Think about the Monday Morning quarterbacking about whether the FDOTUS was playing adequate defense, or whatever. Think about the trauma for the other girls on the team who would show up in front of the world playing little league soccer. Geez.
arguingwithsignposts
@calling all toasters:
Don’t forget the tire swings and bar-b-q.
dmsilev
@Mike Kay: That’s probably what it is. I maintain that the proper way to view the political press corps is as a bunch of status-obsessed junior-high students. Throwing a hissy fit because they didn’t get invited to something fits the profile perfectly.
I’m willing to bet that at least one reporter, probably from Politico, has stormed out of the White House Press Room screaming “I hate you I hate you You never let me do anything” at Robert Gibbs, and then slams a door behind them and starts twittering their discontent.
dms
arguingwithsignposts
@dmsilev:
Leave the WH Press Corps aaalllloooonnnneee!
Yutsano
@arguingwithsignposts:
I refuse to answer for myself, as that would probably reveal too much about me. But Maraget Cho for Asiangrrl29 and Sam Worthington for TattooSydney. They’ll either laugh their tails off at the suggestions or kill me later for it.
arguingwithsignposts
@Yutsano:
Great minds and all that. I thought the same thing. Or Lucy Liu, since she is so deft with the Rusty Farm Implements ™
Max
I really fucking loathe these people.
P.S. – I see Annie Laurie as Susan Sarandon.
gurglebleg
Yeah. But that was the golden years when Bush would sit next to those correspondents he liked and drink an O’Dule’s with ’em. I mean, he was just this guy – you know?
Yutsano
@arguingwithsignposts: Actually that was my safe pick. I know for a fact she loves her some Margaret. It’s the other one I risk my neck over. Though the spat should be very amusing.
arguingwithsignposts
@Max: Oooh, good one. I’m still waiting for someone to get to DougJ and JC. I’d think a younger Walter Matthau for JC, but WM is too old now. What would be a good cantankerous actor for him?
John Cole
@arguingwithsignposts: Walter Matthau has been dead for a decade. Thanks.
jl
This is the best part of the Politico waste of time:
“The immediately precipitating event for the meeting was an April 10 incident in which President Barack Obama left the White House complex to attend one of daughter’s soccer games at 9:20 a.m., without being accompanied by the usual traveling press pool,”
The tale of the horrifying tragedy continues:
“which had been told to show up by 11:30 a.m. About fifteen minutes after his departure, press officials scrambled to assemble a partial pool that departed at 9:43 a.m. But the pool did not catch up, and the president got back to the White House 10 minutes before the reporters.”
What a bunch of big babies.
Make me press secretary.
I would have told them to STFU, and anyone out of line was a traitor to the Unlimited Executive In A Time Of War, and they had better be careful what they say. I would also start bestowing affectionate nicknames like ‘Stupid’ ‘Punk’ ‘Weasel’ and ‘Pukebrain’ and ‘Roadkill’, and ‘Foxhack’ and ‘Lazysh*t’.
It would feel like old times for them and they would start writing hagiographies and blowjobs like they did for Bush. Because that is what they do!
John Cole
When do we get to watch the feats of strength where George Costanza wrestles Ed Chen until he cries.
d.s.
The press views the Democrats as the “fun teacher” in high school and act with rage when they find out that they can’t get a second extension on that essay that was due last week. “I THOUGHT YOU WERE COOL!!1111”
They view Republicans as the strict, partially senile schoolmarm. Just sit at your desk and stay still. No sudden movements. You’ll get a B as long as she can’t remember who you are when she’s writing the grades.
DougJ
John would be Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
I would probably be Michael Rappaport, though I’m holding out for the guy who plays Jim on The Office.
Max
@arguingwithsignposts: When I picture John Cole, he always looks like Jim Gaffigan. Who I think is very funny.
Since that is kind of an obscure pick, in the BJ movie, I see Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Cole, if we have the budget.
ETA – Doug J… Jinx I owe you a coke.
Mark S.
Geez, just put a tire swing on Air Force One.
OT, I was reading Sully and he said, “Over the last decade, it is surely evident that big government has come back with a vengeance.” I was pretty sure this was bullshit and in Googling I found a pretty cool site that lets you throw in all sorts of numbers and spits out spiffy little graphs.
Long story short, federal spending has been around 20% of GDP and total spending (including state and local) has been in the mid 30’s for the last sixty years. What seems to make the most difference is whether the economy is growing or not. So big govt hasn’t come back with a vengeance.
arguingwithsignposts
@John Cole:
haha. I lose track of who’s dead and not – Abe Vigoda is still alive, for instance. :)
Comrade Mary
Hmmph! Lady Smudge’s minion is OTing all over the place tonight, so I’ll just point out — AGAIN — that I suggested PSH for John in the other thread, and The Brain for Tunch.
DougJ? Bill Murray.
arguingwithsignposts
@DougJ: Hey, you can’t pick your own self! PSH is an interesting choice for JC. He has the range to play anyone (HUGE PSH fan).
Nick
@bleh:
Aren’t they doing the same and isn’t that why the media is bitching?
arguingwithsignposts
@Comrade Mary:
An inspired choice. “What are we going to do tonight, Brain?”
Yutsano
@arguingwithsignposts: Abe Vigoda is never going to die. He’s just going to slowly fall apart piece by piece and keep acting until too little of him is left. Then he’ll stay in the Hollywood rest home for retired actors telling kids to get off the lawn. And I say this as someone who loves Abe.
jeffreyw
@Comrade Mary: Bill was killed the other day in Zombieland, sorry.
jl
Sorry, got the threads mixed up. Below is my suggestion for casting Cole and Tunch in the proposed comedy/horror flick
The way things are going in the Tunch household, I think casting Cole would be very easy.
Some extra would play Cole at basic union rate. Not sure what the character would be named. Maybe TunchVictim Number One, or something like that. Alll he has to do is just fall down and lie their until the Tunch CSI team gets there.
Hypothetically, since he is dead, I think Klaus Kinski would make a great Tunch. But he’d need to fatten up a little.
Comrade Mary
@jeffreyw: Note what Yutsano said above your comment. You were taken in by another ace performance by the man who immortalized Fish. That was Vigoda-as-Murray, not Murray himself.
Ooh — wait! Hal Linden as Barney Miller could play John. Running herd on a bunch of crazies? Seems about right.
Gordon, The Big Express Engine
@John Cole: I am picturing you as more of a Jason Segal type guy from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Specifically, I am thinking of the scene where he’s in his “hanging around the house all day” clothes and imitating Gandalf: “You shall not pass!” Tunch as the Balrog of course…
arguingwithsignposts
Damn, I never thought about this, but who will play rahm?
And we need someone to play Michael Gass. Perhaps Vincent D’Onofrio?
John Cole
Surprised no one has suggested Brando for Tunch.
Yutsano
@arguingwithsignposts: What did Vincent ever do to you? No name actor with an expertise in spittle plz.
@John Cole: Or Orson Wells.
John Cole
I actually look like PSH, specifically when he was in the Savages.
arguingwithsignposts
@Yutsano: Well, first off, I have to disclaim that I am a huge D’Onofrio fan – but I was thinking of his turn in “Full Metal Jacket.” The whole faxing credenzas, helicopters … aren’t … joking thing seems up his alley. OTOH, who was the guy who played Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs”?
BTW, I’m assuming an all-star cast along the lines of “The 10 Commandments” here. We can get anyone and everyone we want. Which leads me to … who will direct?
ETA: I’m assuming no dead actors, or would it be more fun with dead actors? The Orson Wells joke just lives for Tunch. ;)
Comrade Mary
@Yutsano: The voice actor for The Brain (Maurice LaMarche) explicitly modelled his character’s voice on Welles.
My suggestions have layers, people. LAYERS.
jl
Welles also good for Tunch. Would be a development from his character in The Third Man, except darker and more implacable.
Cole still not eaten up? Huh… Got the nip dosage right just in time I suppose.
Mike Kay
@John Cole: I did in the last thread.
https://balloon-juice.com/2010/04/17/a-photo-montage/#comment-1699746
Anya
@Mike Kay: What’s so facinating about kids’ soccer game, they should thank him.
arguingwithsignposts
So here’s a question related to our discussion of PSH and the BJ movie: I LOVE “Charlie Wilson’s War.” In that movie, did PSH bring Tom Hanks up to his level, or does Hanks actually have it in him to act that well? Because most of the time it seems like he’s acting like Tom Hanks as … whoever.
Maude
For Tunch, Broderik Crawford or Humphrey Bogart. That makes John Lauren Bacall.
El Cid
Have any of these employees of the billion dollar media ever fucking considered that their fucking job — from us dirty stinking peons’ point of view — is to cover the fucking god-damned substance of what the government is doing?
And I don’t god-damned mean what some noteworthy fucker thinks the government is doing or what some other fucker thinks the perception of what the government is doing.
I mean what god-damned used to fucking be called the news.
arguingwithsignposts
I HAVE IT!
Hugh Laurie is John Cole!
This movie will be made, bitchez!
jeffreyw
You people are casting Tunch and have overlooked the perfect man for the job. I (aka whitehairedoldgrouch) humbly submit myself.
demo woman
This can’t be good. Although Bush had eight years it doesn’t matter to the whachos. Link
jl
@jeffreyw: I clicked on the link in your comment and saw piles of food.
With modern special effects, I guess huge piles of food playing the role of Tunch could work. It is appropriate.
Will it be believable when it obliterates its nemesis, Cole? That is the big problem I see.
maus
“in my 10-plus years at the White House, rarely have I sensed such a level of anger”
uppity uppity uppity uppity
Uloborus
I want to be played by Ben Stein! I can show up, like, once, make a lengthy and rambling speculation, chide you all for misusing Cognitive Dissonance (which you are – you’re mistaking an obscure and unproven theory for the phenomenon) and then wander off mid-thread and never show up again.
jl
@maus: Well, people should have expected this kind of horrible scandal when they made an inadequate black man president.
Never woulda happen under Dub. Class was back in those days.
PS: Lauren Bacall should play Lilly.
jeffreyw
@jl: Click it again, added another pile just now.
gwangung
I would also suggest Tamlyn Tomita. You just don’t expect it from her (and boy, does she ever NOT tolerate foolishness…)
Nick
You think I’m kidding when I say the media is conspiring against this administration.
They will undermine him and his party, they will lie, cheat, and do everything they can to hurt him and Democrats and liberals.
So the next time you’re wondering why the Democrats are losing the message war, go back to this diary.
Uloborus
Nnnnnooooo, Nick, we all basically know the MSM, particularly television, is heavily conservative and falls on the Republican side of everything. I suspect you’ve been in the worst of it and are mistaking your personal experiences for something system-wide, but it hardly matters. Deliberately or by accident, television news is heavily conservative, and major newspapers tend to be, too. It couldn’t be more obvious.
Does anyone have any good figures for how well those two systems are doing these days?
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
@arguingwithsignposts:
Ted Levine, AKA Leland Stottlemeyer in Monk.
Since dead actors are eligible, will Mr. Cole ban me for saying I kind of picture him as a young William Demarest in a Preston Sturges movie?
Nylund
To be fair, the Obama administration has let a lot less male gay porn stars who right for fake publications pretend to be journalists than the last administration.
d.s.
@Nick:
The Dems’ problem is that they needed to start pushing back against the conservative project to declare the mainstream media “liberal” 40 years ago.
At the beginning there was some truth to the conservative criticism, so it resonated with a lot of fair-minded people. The problem is once an idea gets implanted in the public consciousness it’s hard to get rid of it.
The media hasn’t been liberal in the slightest bit for probably 25-30 years. Journalists can read the polls, and once Reagan won 2 consecutive landslides they made a conspicuous effort to trim any obvious liberalism.
Over the last 15 years we’ve seen the largest outlets become openly conservative.
But the media is still overwhelmingly convinced that they are liberal, and therefore if appears that the Republicans are doing something crazy or dangerous, it’s probably just that a New York/DC based journalist can’t understand their Middle American values.
Even though Democrats won the popular vote in 4 of the last 5 presidential elections, it still makes intrinsic sense to them that the public is conservative, and therefore the extremes of Republican wackiness and corruption are just reflections of Heartland Values.
WereBear
@dmsilev: Ah, geeze, now I have The twitter of their discontent running through my head in Laurence Olivier’s voice…
Know what? These folks didn’t tell the whole story about lying us into a friggin’ war, they didn’t give anyone a clue about the coming financial meltdown, and they kissed Bush’s ass for eight years while he was ruining the country.
They can sit on a machete and rotate.
hamletta
@Comrade Mary: And LaMarche dubbed the voice of Orson Welles in Ed Wood. And who played Welles? Vincent D’Onofrio.
Freaky! Wheels within wheels!
kay
@Nick:
It is frustrating, but the truth is I couldn’t do any better.
I’m stumped. I don’t know how to fix it.
I listened and watched last week as Republican after Republican appeared on television, on the radio and in print and flat-out lied about the proposed financial reform bill, and they weren’t challenged on it. Instead, we had a fake debate about whether Democrats were drafting legislation designed to secretly bail out banks.
We never resolved the issue of whether Democrats were drafting health care legislation designed to kill old people.
I don’t know how to fight that.
calling all toasters
Michael Gass *must* be played by Margaret Dumont.
El Cid
Clinton came in and ruined the town for the insiders, and they sure showed him.
Nick
@kay:
Most Democrats and liberals don’t either, and many won’t admit it. What everyone is missing here is what the media has picked up as its successfull plan.
Increase the momentum for Republican and conservatives, piss all over any victory Democrats have, and demoralize Democrats and excite Republicans.
What is demoralizing Democrats? How about the fact that no matter how successful they are, no matter how much they accomplish, they just can’t never win, and they’re going to pay for their successes.
And now the media has done what it’s wanted to do…demoralize permanently an entire new generation of liberals/Democrats. When the GOP is back in charge and Democrats want to win back control, how many former Obama supporters are going to say “Fuck this, everytime we win and try to accomplish something, we just get tossed from power”
If my bosses have their way, that would be everyone.
Chris
Well, as David Broder or Sally Quinn put it (in case there’s a difference), they came in and trashed the place, and it wasn’t their place.
What do you mean, “they/them” were the Clintons and not the Obamas? They’re all the same, damn dirty Democrats.
You have to realize, members of the WHCA, like members of the teabag party, didn’t achieve their position and power in life by being happy with what they’ve achieved (or by taking what they get, even and maybe especially when it’s substantial); no, they’ve always got to ask for more, often indignantly, to make sure that nobody mistakes them for complacent.
Mnemosyne
@Nick:
Actually, I don’t think you’re kidding at all. It’s been obvious since about Nov. 5, 2008.
I still think that you’re vastly overestimating the influence that the MSM has. They’re increasingly talking only to one another, only to be freshly shocked and appalled with the Little People do something unexpected, like electing a blackity blackity black man as POTUS by a huge margin.
(Edited to insert forgotten verb. It may be bedtime for Mnemo.)
Bob K
@Mnemosyne:
“I still think that you’re vastly overestimating the influence that the MSM has.”
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe. – Albert Einstein
The Tea Party Express have their tv’s tuned to Faux Pravda, their radio tuned to Rush or something similar, while too many other people would just rather watch “American Idol” or “Entertainment Tonight.” Watch the news? Read a paper? Too depressing.
kay
@Nick:
It isn’t even that. I could live with that. It’s this insistence that whatever the Senate GOP says about, oh, the proposed financial reform bill is not verifiable.
People joke about “he said-she said” in media but in my work “he said-she said” means no one else was there. There were no witnesses. That’s why we’re relying on two competing stories from two interested parties. Because we don’t have an independent source, or facts pointing in one or another direction. That’s why “he said-she said” is so unreliable, because we have to determine credibility.
That’s not true of media. They don’t have to determine anyone’s credibility. They can go to the text.
That’s not true of legislation. There’s what the Democrats say about it, and then there’s what the Republicans say about it, and then there’s the text.
Media don’t have to rely on “he said-she said”. They can read the goddamn thing. Who in their right mind presents facts like this? As competing opinion presented by interested parties?
kay
@Mnemosyne:
If you want an indication of how successful media can be at one of these campaigns, ask people who have inherited anything ( a 40,000 house, a small sum of money, their grandmother’s kitchen table, payment on a life insurance policy) if they’ve ever paid an estate tax.
You may have to call it a “death tax” because that’s the term by which it’s known, but ask around. Ask them if they paid “the death tax” when they received something tangible on the death of another. See what they say.
That was one successful media campaign, I’ll tell you, the calculated well-funded effort to misrepresent the estate tax. That worked.
Cerberus
@Nick:
You seem to be under some delusions that your super secret “you’re all doomed” media plan is somehow new.
In 1897-1898 a rich media personality decides he wants to invent a war entirely to increase his newspaper revenues and does so causing the Spanish-American War. Up until the 70s, media often presented a “he-said, she-said” sort of deal with the nascent civil rights, women’s rights, etc… movements in order to not turn off Southern viewers and the Moral Majority. The Moral Majority were taken at their word that they were the majority. Similarly, before them, anti-jazz and anti-rock-and-roll types were regularly invited on air to talk about their insane vendettas and were treated as serious people. This is all back in the halcyon days of “the liberal media”.
So no shit it got worse when the media got serious about pimping right-wing insanity.
But the thing is, the media has always managed to “forget to cover” most of the actions by the left-wing and liberals, have always given more weight to what the more privileged people have to say about some inequality or oppression, have always found themselves unwitting dupes for the “official story” of wars, and have otherwise ignored massive stories just because those suffering are too brown or too female or too gay.
Emmitt Till’s mother had to actively bring the story into the light for it to end up hitting home. The media wasn’t exactly on the initiative.
We like to remember the exceptions. Upton Sinclair, Woodward and Bernstein, Edward R Murrow, those who afflicted the comfortable and stood up for humanity. And we still have them in pockets. Colbert and Stewart, Olbermann and Maddow, Rich and Klein and Rall and Taibii.
We also have a weapon they never dreamed of. Upton Sinclair and the muckrakers? Their media was so compromised, they had to release books to get the horrible truth out there. Murrow and Woodward and Bernstein took horrible risks and needed a publisher with balls to get their story rolling.
We?
This generation your feeble bosses hope to demoralize?
We got the internet.
Suddenly in real time, a million suffering people can get out their stories in real time. Suddenly in real time, people can look into and notice the exact ways in which media presentation differs from the facts on the ground. Suddenly in real time, people can look into the raw source for things and find out if the official stories hold true.
Suddenly in real time, the media is finding out that if it fails to live by the standards it has always claimed it followed, by the credibility it has built over those generations of exceptions, then it will cease to exist.
The Obama generation? They’re not going to be turned off politics, anymore than every generation of fighters ends up getting turned off by the slow pace of change. But they are being turned off media.
I don’t think I’m the only one of my generation who barely uses the TV for anything more than video games and who mostly get their news from online. Most of the commentary on the “very serious pundits” from the people is as an intro of the problems with the MSM.
These very serious rich people who are your bosses, Nick, they are damning themselves to irrelevancy. They are trying to game the system, but it’s not really working. All they are doing is losing what is left of their credibility.
I mean, look at the elected Democrats. Here was a party of suckers. People who wholly bought into the idea that the media war was critical to success and that whatever the talking heads said must be true.
Suddenly they found, that wasn’t true. Health care reform support got depressed during the assault and then went back to what it always was at after it was passed.
When you lose even your biggest suckers, Nick?
You’ve lost the game.
But feel free to continue to ride out the season and collect your paycheck, because your bosses are fucking you out of a job. For nothing.
SRW1
What? Obama is still refusing free manicures for the press corps on Air Force One? How can reporters do their job then?
kay
Senator Warner, in attempting to explain financial reform to Candy Crowley (and failing) just said “we’ve created a death panel for financial firms”. He smiled when he said it.
The Republicans and the media are literally speaking a made-up language. Warner has to translate.
At the end of his elaborate explanation, this was her question:
“Aren’t there politics being played on both sides?”.
She has NO EARTHLY IDEA what’s in the bill. None. It’s unknowable. That proposal will remain a mystery.