Two quick pieces. The first:
Sarah Palin. Mike Huckabee. Newt Gingrich.
Today, that is a list of paid Fox News political analysts. Two years from now, it could be a list of Republican presidential candidates.
A former Fox analyst, Angela McGlowan, entered a House race in Mississippi last week. Over at MSNBC, Harold E. Ford Jr. was on the payroll until a few weeks ago, when he told his boss that he was seriously contemplating a run for the Senate from New York. TV names are also constantly being run through the candidate rumor mill. There is a “Draft Larry Kudlow” movement. There is also talk of a political bid by Lou Dobbs, who left CNN last fall.
“It does seem amazing how many are being either discussed as candidates, rumored as candidates, or are actually doing it,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC.
Television and politics have always been intertwined, but never to this degree, TV executives and journalism professionals say. It would seem that the so-called revolving door for political operatives has been extended to the politicians themselves, at a time when cable news is more politically charged than ever.
The second piece (via the indispensable Jay Rosen):
At The A.P., a cooperative owned by its member newspapers, in-house lawyers say they are becoming more aggressive on a number of fronts. In 2009, the agency was party to 40 lawsuits, moderately up from four years ago, when the number of lawsuits was in the low 30s, according to Dave Tomlin, associate general counsel for The A.P.
But The A.P. has been vastly more assertive in appealing denied Freedom of Information Act, or F.O.I.A., requests from the federal government under the Obama administration, which came to power promising to operate a more open government and alter what some media lawyers complained was a trend toward more government secrecy in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“After 9/11, I sensed there was an element of defeatism around government secrecy,” said Mr. Tomlin, adding that news organizations were often not forceful in filing appeals of denied information requests.
It is precisely when the government is trending towards secrecy that you are supposed to become MORE vigilanyt, not less vigilant, you clowns. I guess Ron Fournier was too busy writing mash notes to Karl Rove to notice.
The weirdest thing about my shift to the left is that as aright-winger, I never felt there was anything to the charges of media bias. I thought the media was relatively fair, and if anything, lazy and insulated. Nowadays, my viewpoint has changed completely. I consistently see one side of the debate shut out and overwhelmed, by both systemic and intentional bias. Progressive and liberal viewpoints simply are not given the time of day.
Napoleon
Ron Fournier is a political actor masquerading as a journalist.
John Quixote
.
I did not realize that skeksis were allowed to run for office.
c u n d gulag
Dear AP,
I hope that my journalism teacher in college from ’77 to ’78 is still alive.
But if she reads this, it might kill her.
ASSHOLES!!!
El Cid
@John Cole:
It’s not just you or blog commenters. There are entire fields of academic scholarship devoted to thematic and content analysis going back decades or even centuries to look at ideological trends in the big business-owned press.
Wander into the archives from a few decades ago and read about foreign policy in a Time magazine or various newspaper coverage, to distance yourself from being caught up in the moment.
ADM
“The weirdest thing about my shift to the left is that as aright-winger, I never felt there was anything to the charges of media bias.”
That seems really unlikely.
MattF
I recall, many years ago, when you would occasionally see an actual-real-live-no-kidding, left-winger on TeeVee. But that was then.
Napoleon
@El Cid:
Back in the early 80’s I did a paper for one of my college history classes (history was my major) and I read a lot of articles from Time, Newsweek and US News (plus major newspapers, WaPo and NYTimes), regarding certain events in the Vietnam War and it was overwhelmingly obvious US News was basically an arm of the US military PR office, Time was not far behind and Newsweek was the only one that used a healthy degree of skepticism and balance. It really took me by surprise how obvious it was looking back.
flounder
They missed little Ricky Santorum, who is also a paid Fox shill/presidential candidate.
John Quixote
@MattF:
I saw one of those on MTP yesterday. She made the guy Megan McCain is crushing on look like a fool.
djork
Holy crap. I did pretty much the same thing in the 1990s for a History of the Vietnam War class. Was the assignment to analyze the articles for bias?
El Cid
@Napoleon: Yet the odd thing is that there is this odd mix of realizing that overall the degree of professionalism was higher, in adherence to a lot of formal journalistic principles, while being so obviously different from peoples’ common view that the age before TV dominated coverage was some sort of golden age.
But, no problem — the right wing screams enough that the media lost Vietnam for America, that they were always against it, and empirical reality just vanishes, and their imagined reality replaces the measurable one. The decade of pro-intervention cheerleading and embedded reporting vanishes in favor of a notion that U.S. reporters were mainly smoking dope on Viet Cong tanks with Jane Fonda and spitting on veterans when they got back to the U.S. And, by golly, by the time Gulf War 1 rolled around, our journalists sure weren’t going to repeat that set of imagined mistakes! And, hell, when it came time for Gulf War II, they’d show those Golden Age super-hero comics a thing or two about jingoist patriotism and pro-war PR!
rob!
The “liberal media bias” lie is probably the most useful, effective one of all the bullshit Conservatives have been able to sell to the general populace.
“All Poor People are Lazy and Shiftless and Just Don’t Want to Work” is a close second. My sister-in-law used that one just the other day.
Napoleon
@djork:
No my best recollection is it was about the Rolling Thunder operation, which took place over a fairly long time period so I ended up reading quite a bit, including quite a bit that was not directly related to that operation. A by product was that even though my paper wasn’t about bias it was almost impossible not to notice it and come to some of my own conclusions which I doubt made it into the paper because that was not what it was about.
rob!
No sooner did I hit the Submit button then I heard Chuck Todd on MSNBC say that after the break, they’re going to a segment on taxes, and they’ll have special guest GROVER NORQUIST on to talk about it!
GROVER NORQUIST!! Was Satan already booked?!?
rootless_e
Gotta read the Powell memo
http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.html
Brian J
Perhaps they are appealing more denials because they expect to actually get somewhere. It’s not as if the Bush administration was a model concerning suggestions from the outside, after all.
As far as the lack of distinction between pundits and politicians, I don’t really care. Harold Ford won’t be going anywhere. People like Kudlow and Dobbs are always thrown around, but it never amounts to anything because when there’s an actual chance to win the race, some person who has spent their lives in politics wants it and has the right connections. It wouldn’t surprise me, then, to see Kudlow run in either New York or Connecticut, because Schumer and Blumenthal are going to win.* What about Palin and Gingrich? They were politicians before they were pundits, so they are different. And if those two idiots ever get anywhere near the presidency, we are so screwed that it doesn’t matter, so I can’t bring myself to care.
*Wait, wouldn’t the fact that he is supposed to run in either state mean he’s more in it for himself? Yes, that’s probably true.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
This:
is a design feature, not a bug. The rich and powerful got tired of being made fools of in (and by) the media, so they bought it. Now it does what they want, thus we get buried by the inaccurate, incomplete and misleading bullshit that they try to pass off as “news”. The only people who believe that shit are idiots who would enjoy drinking Brawndo and they eat that shit up like ice cream. The rich and powerful own the news and if politicians want on the gravy train, rather than getting run over by it, they better sing the tune that the Masters of the Universe want to hear. Or else.
Now the newsrooms are becoming starting points for political careers? Color me not surprised one bit. The Masters of the Universe has a powerful army of imbeciles who are ready and willing to do their bidding. Voting against their best interests is one thing they have been trained to do. I have to admit that they do it very well, they really don’t give a shit about putting out the effort to find out what reality is. They just want it spoon fed to them, preferably spiced up with their favorite hates and prejudices.
They don’t think for themselves any more, they are programmed and then unleashed. How you beat something like this is beyond me, it’s literally like trying to fight zombies.
JenJen
It’s amazing to me how Cheney seems to pop out like a cuckoo in a clock every time the President seems to be getting a leg up on wingnut memes (approval rating steady since August; pwning the House GOP summit, etc). The former Veep is nothing if not reliable, and the media just gleefully repeats his talking points and instead of solving problems and digging our country out from the 8-year hole Cheney/Bush buried us in, we’re back to “Vice vs. Vice” and “Cheney Smackdown!” and other such ludicrous, embarrassing bullshit and media “themes.”
I successfully avoided all politics this weekend past and happily watched the world come together at the Olympics. A delightful tonic to being nauseated daily. I highly recommend it, and it’s a shame it only lasts two weeks.
mr. whipple
@JenJen: “I successfully avoided all politics this weekend past and happily watched the world come together at the Olympics.”
It has been a lot of fun, hasn’t it?
Brian J
@JenJen:
If Ann Coulter can call Biden a drunken Irishman on television, why can’t we call Cheney a sad turd of a human being who has no credibility and even less intelligence, or something actually offensive? Perhaps the White House thinks it’s not worth it to get into a fight with Cheney because his effect is actually minimal, but I am not sure.
Don
In fairness on the FOIA issue, FOIA has never materialized as the media resource that people thought it would. Or as people think it is used. My recollection from my journalism law class is that a tiny percentage of FOIA requests are media or organization based.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Improved. Slightly.
JGabriel
JenJen:
And in other news from Mixed Metaphors Of The Animal Kingdom …
.
Brian J
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
I would have gone with “and lucky his fat ass isn’t sitting in a prison cell,” but I’m not sure of how that would fly, legally speaking.
joes527
I don’t care who is president. More FOIA appeals is an objectively good thing.
The problem is that the press slept through the Bush years, not that they are waking up now.
Dan Robinson
The old saying is “Virtue is it’s own reward.” This doesn’t convey the true meaning of the concept. “Virtue is it’s only reward.” One must be willing to be virtuous not because of some unspecified reward, but because the only payback will in having done the virtuous thing.
Yeah, the media is fucked up, and pursuing progressive goals in an tilted media environment is unfair, but doing the right thing is the only reason for doing the right thing.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Brian J:
I thought I would go easy on him. I don’t like saying this but our planet will be a better place when he departs it, I view the man as pure evil.
This was the guy who ran our country, at least for the first five years. The last three was W on autopilot because he was pissed off at Cheney.
Scooter found that out the hard way.
Laertes
I get you. I’ve got conservative friends and they, too, are convinced that the media shut out conservative views and promote liberalism.
It’s hard to believe that people have such irrational views, but when one gets out a little bit, one learns that people believe all kinds of crazy shit. It all comes down to your trust heuristic. We’ve got this badass catch-22 hard-wired into our brains. One part is that we uncritically accept statements from sources we trust and hyper-critically examine or ignore those from sources that we don’t. The other part is that we’re inclined to trust sources that reliably provide statements that comport with our existing views.
Unwelcome information is an irritant, and sometimes you can literally feel it itching inside your brain. This is where the awesome power of an ideologically friendly news source comes into play. Suppose that you learn something that’s both true and doesn’t fit well with your preconceptions. Say, for example, you learn that some public figure that you admire has committed some criminal fraud. You’ve got a problem: This information is irritating. In your world-view, people who share your ideology are generally virtuous, and the sort of behavior you’ve just learned about is, in your mind, characteristic of the other side but rare among your own lot, largely because people inclined to such behavior are more naturally drawn to the other side’s shameful ideology.
Since you’ve learned the information, your first line of defense, your view filter, has already failed. Either you drifted outside of ideologically sanitized sources or the story was so big that you weren’t able to miss it. Your second line of defense is what psychologists call the Half-Assed Debunking.
This doesn’t have to be a substantial defense. All that’s required is that a trusted source attempts a debunking, and carries it off with enough confidence that the reader is left with the impression that what he just read probably made sense. If someone trusts you, they’ll accept your conclusion and just breeze over the bits where you show your work, assuming that you’ve done it properly.
So it is that a person can come to believe absolutely anything, so long as they have some desire to believe it, and some partner who’s willing to help them believe it.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” – Voltaire
bemused
Yesterday, Fareed Zakaria commented on Paulsen’s & Greenspan’s answers to David Gregory’s question to them on the deficit & the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy expiring. Paulsen said anything that is going to be a tax increase has got to be questioned & Greenspan agreed. Zakaria said the Bush tax cuts are a huge part of the federal deficit & if they are continued, there would have to be huge cuts to middle class & domestic programs which would not pass in Congress. Zakaria said shame on Paulsen & Greenspan for not acknowledging that.
Pretty rare to hear that from anyone in msm.
demkat620
And as I type this, Grover Norquist is on MSNBC with a caption that informs me that the US Deficit is the main concern of voters.
I really think sometimes if we just gave the GOP power back and sat quietly, the press could go back to their happy lovefest with the strong daddy figures.
And all will be right again with the world. At least I think that is what the media things.
aimai
Conservatives think that “the press” is liberal and shuts out conservative viewpoints because non conservatives (women, non whites, liberals) *exist at all* in American society and appear to have to be addressed, occasionally. What they want is a TV and media world entirely composed of soft focus pictures of white women with lots of health, middle class, children and the 700 club. The very fact that you have to have a “meet the press” that ever includes any reference to non republicans, non conservative issues, or a world which isn’t entirely governed by right wing propaganda is an affront.
I really mean that. Its the same effect you get when a college classroom goes from being 100 percent white to 51 percent white–suddenly black people are everywhere! Ditto for women. If your imaginary world is all white, or all male, or all organized according to conservative principles the mere existence of a counter weight, however small, is an insult.
aimai
Brian J
Ever read Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media?, Mr. Cole?
There’s a part in the very beginning where he talks about how Pat Buchanan, James Baker, and Irving Kristol, among others–not exactly Marxist revolutionaries, to say the least–all claimed there was little to the notion that the media was biased in favor of liberals.
Annie
Now news is all about money and celebrity status. Journalists see the Becks and Rushs and O’Reilly’s, and they want to make that kind of money and have their size of audiences, no matter the ethics of the whole thing. They also want to have celebrity status — writing books, signing autographs, doing book tours, etc. No longer is news about the news, or about getting any facts, or investigating real corruption and real issues. It is a hugh business, with hugh corporate interests.
Funny, no one talks about the Saudi’s being shareholders in the Fox news parent company. If this was MSNBC, or any other supposed “liberal” MSM, Fox and the right would be all over it, everyday, all day, and Beck would have his trusty blackboard out.
bemused
When I hear people snort & say the media is liberal (except for fair & balanced of course, I like to ask them to explain why I & all the liberals I know think our news is pathetic. I ask them why the so-called liberal commentators I see on tv news are either people I’ve never heard of before or are people no Dem would ever call liberal, anything but.
They never have an answer.
Kryptik
@demkat620:
Because we currently don’t have a sad amount of unemployment and plenty of broken social systems that need reform, rather than cuts.
But no, because a Dem is in the White House, obviously the most pressing issue is paying back the debt Republicans skyrocketed when they were in charge. Goddamn fuckers don’t even try to make sense, do they?
ChrisB
The reason you don’t see many progressives is that reality has a well known liberal bias. All you had to do was see Rachel Maddow on Meet the Press yesterday armed with facts which put the lie to everything that Republican congressman had to say. It just squelched the conversation. Left the conservative portion of the TV audience unfulfilled. Bad for ratings.
By contrast, Harold Ford had no problem agreeing with his friends from across the aisle. He, like them, was mostly unencumbered facts but had conventional wisdom on his side.
Oh yeah, and you can add Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz to the list of commentators mentioned for Senate bids.
Cerberus
@aimai:
This.
You can hear it when they talk about anything to do with minorities. They want them gone and find any mention or acknowledgment of a world or a viewpoint not their own to be offensive.
It’s basically really tied to privilege and a common known phenomenon whereby if you take a dominant “default” group like men or whites or heterosexuals and force them to spend the exact same time speaking or say the same things or be in the same proportion in an event, both sides will perceive it as being “dominated” by the minority group (this is where the myth that women talk too much comes from).
In a more extreme version of that, for those who were raised very insular in carefully designed suburbs to eliminate contact or knowledge about as many minorities as possible, especially on a personal level, it can feel foreign to hear about them and inclusion at all can seem like the “real” world reporting about the people who matter and who actually exist is being “taken over” by this strange inclusion of non-real-people.
Well, to be truly fair, it’s much worse in that most are rapturist christians raised that there is one und only vun way to live one’s life and everything else is satanic and that one way happens to be default white male middle class suburban christian or white female broodmare to white male middle class suburban christian. Thus including the stories, experiences, or viewpoints of non white male middle class suburban christians or those unwilling to extoll the virtues of being a white male middle class suburban christian is not just giving aliens a strange propaganda weapon, but allowing literal demons to try and recruit from the perfect world of white male middle class suburban christians to a side they know is immoral and designed to destroy true society.
Combine that with the fact that it’s getting harder and harder to hide the realities of everyone who doesn’t fit and you get the right wing freakout about the media spreading into a full frontal assault on reality itself.
Mike in NC
I wanted to puke up breakfast after seeing Grover Fucking Norquist’s fat smug face on the TV. Not sure when MSNBC introduced this segment with idiot Chuck Todd and the bimbo seated next to him, but they sure spend a great deal of time airing Republican talking points. Apparently MSNBC needed to “balance” Morning Joe & Mika and their right wing propaganda. Not to mention how they seem to dedicate 50% of their time to whatever Cheney and Palin have to say. Bravo MSM!
kay
@demkat620:
I think voters feel as if they’re supposed to say the deficit is a huge concern. How can you not answer that question affirmatively? “Are you concerned about the budget deficit?”
It’s so easy, too. “Don’t cut anything I rely on, and don’t raise taxes, but half the deficit”. Okey-doke.
It’s a stupid question. It’s a given that people don’t want to borrow money, or operate outside a projected budget, as with the deficit. The only question that matters is how they want to narrow the deficit.
But that would be a real debate, and we can’t have those.
Montysano
@John Quixote:
Her “For a hypocrite, you seem like a nice guy” takedown of Rep. Schock on MTP yesterday was a thing of beauty. Love the Rachel. I’ll post a link if I can find it.
Edit: video here (apparently), good stuff at 2:20.
rootless_e
I’m concerned about the deficit.
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/ir/ir_expense.htm
A lot of money.
Brian J
@Mike in NC:
I guess you are going to be pissed to find out that MSNBC is devoting another hour to Fred Hiatt, William Kristol, and Pat Buchanan. Actually, their show is going to be two hours.
Uriel
@El Cid:
And their “super villains” ended up being just about as ridiculous and over-wrought in the process.
Kryptik
@Brian J:
Not cool. There are some things you just don’t joke about.
rs
@Brian J: Before Eric Alterman there was The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian and Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky (naturally) & Ed Hermann.
Robert McChesney is also a good source for critical media analysis.
Cerberus
@ChrisB:
I think that’s sort of always been the case. Liberals in general base the world on reality and such recognize the diversity of human experience, viewpoints, and inequalities and try and figure out how best to solve it, whereas conservatives strive to retain the “old way” of doing things, retaining familiarity. However, familiarity, consistency is often at the expense of new evidence. A world focused only on white people was indeed how it used to be done, but there have always been brown people and they do have to be acknowledged at some point.
Thus you have nostalgia versus facts, which invariably leads to people armed with evidence battling “everyone knows” anecdotes and “common wisdom” aka the social biases we are all raised with that aren’t actually true.
This is also why I suspect the young always end up more liberal on a whole. More knowledge gained ends up being more knowledge passed on and thus less space for some of the old “everyone knows” to penetrate into the nostalgic spaces of hazy childhood remembrances of each new generation.
It’s probably also why the media was so prone to the charge in the first place. Just by doing their jobs and reporting facts they are guaranteed to end up supporting knowledge and inevitably end up skewering “common wisdoms” and other right-wing frames far more often and more finally than they do with left-wing frames. When the left-wing is wrong, they change with evidence, see also how pretty much every feminist these days has dropped gender essentialism.
So it can seem to the bosses that the stories seem to be shooting down right-wing theory after right-wing story and “leaving alone” left-wing theories, just because one was based on facts and the other on hearsay and cultural bias.
Overall, intriguing sociologically, though hideous to deal with for anyone who likes having reality dictate policy and be given precedence in our media by virtue of being actually true.
Max
Fear Not BJ’ers!
I just heard on MSNBC that Joe the Plumber said that John McCain ruined his life and President Obama is a very honest man.
The rapture is here! Dogs and cats living together.
Brian J
@Kryptik:
It’s funny because you can imagine it being true, despite it wanting to make me and you put an ice pick through each eye. And you just know the first show would have incredibly original guests like St. John McCain the Maverick, Peggy Noonan, Michael Steele, Joe Scarborough, and then Joe Lieberman, for balance.
joes527
@Montysano: I’ve been critical of Rachel in the past for wasting her talent on infotainment. I cringe whenever she goes into her funny voice mode.
But she has been on fire lately.
kay
@Max:
Obama ruined his life. He was going to be a plumbing contractor, and earn 250k in income, but Obama destroyed his incentive to do that, with an imaginary tax increase on Joe’s imaginary income.
Why he didn’t become a plumbing contractor in the 8 years prior is not clear, when he was presumably all fired up by the Bush tax cuts.
I’m starting to think he lacks follow-through.
rootless_e
evan bayh is retiring.
El Cid
Going a bit further, something that was established very openly during the Bush Jr. years was that “conservatives” are opposed to journalism itself, not just its ideological themes.
I.e., you write stuff which is useful — you don’t do the processes of journalism like investigation or fact checking of any substantial nature (i.e., outside someone’s title or educational background), you don’t weigh the interest of a source (on or off the record) versus their comments.
In the conservative mindset, journalism is PR. That’s what it’s supposed to be.
This is different than suggesting that journalists and publications / broadcasters could have an ideological outlook. They still can. But to ground it in some sort of empirically based, logically consistent, falsifiable work — that they view as a liberal imposition.
Montysano
@joes527:
I’m with you. But I think she has to do some of that. If her show was an hour of policy wonkery and truth-telling, you and I would watch, but many wouldn’t.
Montysano
@El Cid:
Spot on. Which is why those of us with a reality-based view have such a hard time grokking the wingnut mind.
Tsulagi
Yeah, our political parties now are kinda like bad sitcom. On one channel you have As The Democrats Turn and on another, Mad Republicans.
liberty60
I was one of those who did.
I was arguing with a winger about the notion that Obama is bascially a centrist Democrat in the JFK mold (as opposed to a So-shul-ist Kenyan Kommie) and looked up the 1960 Democratic Platform.
What amazed me is the openly, proudly liberal sentiments there, which today would cause a general freakout in the Rupert Murdoch empire.
Unrestricted immigration…full employment…government health care..
When I was a conservative, I only felt that the media was biased, because there would be a general framing of issues, a very slight edge of seeing things as “expansion of rights” versus societal responsibility.
But the slight framing, the arched eyebrow, the shaving of the dice to one side or the other is dwarfed, though, by the relentless shrill partisanship of the Fox News team.
It isn’t an exaggeration to see Fox as the Pravda of the Republican Party.
liberty60
@El Cid:
Shorter version:
“Reality has a well known liberal bias!”
PeakVT
and if anything, lazy and insulated.
You’re still right about that part.
deadrody
Ah, so the fact that media is in the tank for Obama and has a marked liberal bias goes unnoticed.
What you REALLY want is for them to be ULTRA liberal and in the tank for the progressive movement. They shouldn’t just be in favor of Obamacare, they should be actively helping to get the public option included.
That you couldn’t see just how far left the media was when you claim you were a “right winger” (which you never were – you flirted with libertarians) should have been an indicator that you really had no clue, even then.