Saturday Must Reads

Daniel Larison is always a must read but this certainly is.

Conservative Media’s Propaganda Problem

There is a difference between strenuously objecting to a particular policy or appointment and completely distorting the content of that policy or the views of the appointee. If most movement conservatives genuinely hate the idea of improved relations with Russia, for example, that’s their choice, and they can protest against efforts to improve those relations. What they can’t do, if they still want their arguments on policy to be taken seriously by others, is to impose absurd, impossible standards for judging the policy or simply lie about what that policy is.

So why are we still in Afghanistan again?
Afghan security forces attack US base in Kapisa

Earlier today, uniformed Afghan security forces attacked a US military base in eastern Kapisa province, killing a civilian contractor. Three Afghan troops are also said to have been killed in the incident.
A statement issued by ISAF today said: "Individuals wearing Afghan National Army uniforms turned their weapons against International Security Assistance Force members in eastern Afghanistan today, killing one ISAF-contracted civilian."

So why are we still in Afghanistan again II?
Blast Hits Afghan Capital Shortly After Hagel Arrives

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber wearing a vest bomb struck outside the Afghan defense ministry on Saturday, killing at least 10 people in a blast just hours after Chuck Hagel, the new United States defense secretary, arrived here in Kabul.

And the NRA must love this:
Officer Who Fired Shot In New York High School Suspended

HIGHLAND, N.Y. (AP) — A New York town that began assigning an armed police officer to guard a high school in the wake of the Connecticut massacre has suspended the program after an officer accidentally discharged his pistol in a hallway while classes were in session.
Lt. James Janso of the Lloyd police department tells media outlets Officer Sean McCutcheon will be suspended while an investigation continues.
McCutcheon was assigned to the high school in the Hudson Valley town of Highland in January. Janso says the program has been suspended for now.
There were no staff members or students nearby when the weapon went off just after 1:30 p.m. Tuesday. Nobody was hurt.

And this was a well trained police officer.

Why Fox News dropped Sarah Palin

Why Fox News dropped Sarah Palin (via The Christian Science Monitor)

When the history of US politics in the early 21st century is written, two figures will stand out: Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. The election of Mr. Obama to the highest elective office – the first African-American to win the presidency – did not necessarily signal a new era of post-racial politics…

Media Fail!

Dan Froomkin explains:

How the Mainstream Press Bungled the Single Biggest Story of the 2012 Campaign

Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, photo by Kevin Featherly

So what is the biggest story?  The fact that the Tea Party dominated Republican Party is a train wreck.

Post-mortems of contemporary election coverage typically include regrets about horserace journalism, he-said-she-said stenography, and the lack of enlightening stories about the issues.
But according to longtime political observersThomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.
Mann and Ornstein are two longtime centrist Washington fixtures who earlier this year dramatically rejected the strictures of false equivalency that bind so much of the capital's media elite and publicly concluded that GOP leaders have become "ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

 So why does the media do this?  The editors are terrified of being labeled as biased.  Of course as a result their reporting becomes biased when they ignore the outright lies and detachment from reality of the Republicans.

"I can't recall a campaign where I've seen more lying going on -- and it wasn't symmetric," said Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who's been tracking Congress with Mann since 1978. Democrats were hardly innocent, he said, "but it seemed pretty clear to me that the Republican campaign was just far more over the top."
Lies from Republicans generally and standardbearer Mitt Romney in particular weren't limited to the occasional TV ads, either; the party's most central campaign principles -- that federal spending doesn't create jobs, that reducing taxes on the rich could create jobs and lower the deficit -- willfully disregarded the truth.
"It's the great unreported big story of American politics," Ornstein said.

Democracy is in trouble when the press is unable to do it's job of informing the electorate.  The broken media is a greater threat to this country than al-Qaeda.

Clear Channel And Bain Capitol

Portland's only progressive talk radio station just went silent and guess who is responsible? If you guessed Bain Capitol you would be correct. 

Clear Channel quietly pruning scores of staff 
Owner of Toledo’s WSPD owes billions to Bain Capital

Clear Channel, the largest radio station operator in the country, is partially owned by Bain Capital, which is the company founded and previously run by former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Debt-ridden Clear Channel, headquartered in San Antonio, has been quietly pruning its corporate structure since late 2011.
On-air talent and behind-the-scenes employees have been shown the door or programming has been eliminated in markets that include Los Angeles, Boston, Tampa, San Diego, Madison, Wis., Springfield, Mo., Oklahoma City, Nashville, and, most recently, Toledo.
“Obviously they are trying to pay down their monster debt with Bain Capital,” said Tommy Butter, who was laid off from top-40 station WRVW-FM in Nashville in March. “Obviously, they are trying to fire their way to pay that debt down.”

They have been laying off people since 2011, just a few at a time.  I suppose it would have looked bad for Romney if it became obvious that Bain Capitol was responsible for  hundreds of layoffs just before the election.
Portland's KPOJ was making money but the on air personalities and staff were let go and FOX sports radio is now broadcast instead.  But it wasn't just progressive radio but conservatives that got the ax as well.

If you live in the Portland area go to Save KPOJ.

They finally figured it out

The Democrats that is; having a debate on FOX News is like having it at the Republican National Committee headquarters and makes about as much sense.
Debates: DNC Announces Six; Two On CNN, Two On NBC/MSNBC

The Democratic National Committee has officially announced "the dates, media sponsors and cities for the six DNC sanctioned debates."

CNN and NBC get two and ABC and CBS get one each. Fox News isn't included. Here's the list:

July 23, 2007: YouTube/Google and CNN in Charleston, SC

August 19, 2007: ABC in Des Moines, IA

September 26, 2007: NBC News/MSNBC in Hanover, NH

October 30, 2007: NBC News/MSNBC in Philadelphia, PA

November 15, 2007: CNN in Las Vegas, NV

December 10, 2007: CBS in Los Angeles, CA

Notice that FOX is missing - the wingnuts did.

• Democrats Strike a Blow for Censorship (and Cowardice)
• Dems Run Scared From The Boogey Ma...., er, Fox News
• Dems Will Only Debate on Friendly Networks - Ok, they should debate on unfriendly networks?

I do wonder how the FOX talking heads will react when Murdoch orders them to start saying nice things about Hillary.

Why it's not going to get any better!

I have a reading assignment for you today. It's over at the Libertarian site LewRockwell.com. It's Evil Empire: Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America? by Chalmers Johnson and comes with an introduction by Tom Engelhardt. It's a long read but well worth. Johnson explains why we should not expect things to get any better when we a a Democratic president in 2009.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term – and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy – or remedies – ought to be.

The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.

If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."

We have wondered why the opposition party has failed to reign in the rouge resident of the White House. The reason of course is they simply want to replace him and claim those super constitutional powers for their own. The Hillary Clintons have no more respect for the constitution than George W. Bush.

Johnson also takes a shot at the US Media.

One major problem of the American social and political system is the failure of the press, especially television news, to inform the public about the true breadth of the unconstitutional activities of the executive branch. As Frederick A. O. Schwarz and Aziz Z. Huq, the authors of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, observe, "For the public to play its proper checking role at the ballot box, citizens must know what is done by the government in their names."

Instead of uncovering administration lies and manipulations, the media actively promoted them. Yet the first amendment to the Constitution protects the press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is the bureaucrat's most powerful, self-protective weapon. As a result of this failure, democratic oversight of the government by an actively engaged citizenry did not – and could not – occur. The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives – including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment – essentially hijacked the government.

Some respected professional journalists do not see these failings as the mere result of personal turpitude but rather as deep structural and cultural problems within the American system as it exists today. In an interview with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for forty years one of America's leading investigative reporters, put the matter this way:


"All of the institutions we thought would protect us – particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress – they have failed… So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring…. What can be done to fix the situation? [long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives."

Veteran analyst of the press (and former presidential press secretary), Bill Moyers, considering a classic moment of media failure, concluded: "The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations [on February 5, 2003] seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student's thesis, downloaded from the Web – with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with 'plagiarism.'"

As a result of such multiple failures (still ongoing), the executive branch easily misled the American public.

As we have said here many times the US electorate cannot make educated choices if the media won't educate them.

There is much more and you should read all of
Ending the Empire
by Tom Engelhardt and Chalmers Johnson

New lows in tabloid "journaism"!

And this time it's going to get people killed.

The non stop coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre was bad enough but it did indeed reach new lows today.
Gunman sent package to NBC News

Sometime after he killed two people in a Virginia university dormitory but before he slaughtered 30 more in a classroom building, Cho Seung-Hui mailed NBC News a large package including photographs and videos Monday morning, boasting, “When the time came, I did it. I had to.”

Cho, 23, a senior English major at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, killed 32 people in two attacks before taking his own life.

And of course the network news and the cable tabloid networks are showing the pictures and videos with glee. If every nut case in the US wasn't already thinking I want to be like Cho they were after seeing his picture and words non stop on the TV screen. This is the kind of publicity many people like Cho are seeking when they take their own lives and the lives of others. Broadcasting the material contained in the package received by NBC is irresponsible. Of course these are the same networks that are cheerleaders for war because it's great for ratings. Expect to see copycat incidents as a result of this media attention.

Update
For once I have to have a little respect for NBC's Brian Willaims. According to the New York Times he was upset they broadcast as much as they did.

In an interview last night on MSNBC, Mr. Williams said NBC had been concerned about the sensitivities of broadcasting as much of the material as it did.

“This was a sick business tonight, going on the air with this,” he said.

via memeorandum

So where is all the good news?

Make no mistake, this is a tragedy.
Massacre at Virginia Tech:
33 Confirmed Dead

April 16, 2007— At least 33 people are dead in what may be the biggest mass shooting in modern American history.

Police at Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Va., said that the shootings happened at a dormitory and a classroom on opposite sides of the university campus.

As one would expect there is nothing else on the Cable Tabloid Networks. Of course they fail to mention that this is a normal day in the hell on earth the lust for power, greed and incompetence of the Bush/Cheney cabal has created in Iraq. Larry Johnson asks:
Now Do You Understand?

The next time you hear Dick Cheney or George Bush blame the public attitude regarding Iraq on the media's failure to report "good news", examine carefully our reaction to the shooting at Virginia Tech. Look at our collective shock. Our horrified reaction. The public sorrow. Yet, in truth, this is an exceptional, unusual day in America. It is not our common experience. But we cannot say the same about Iraq.

The people of Iraq are living in a Marquis de Sade version of Groundhog Day. It is like the Bill Murray movie--the same horrible day repeated with some new, bizarre twists--only not funny. Multiple body counts and explosions and shootings are the daily experience of the people of Iraq. They have been living this hell for four years. Just keep that fact in mind as you mourn the deaths of 22 American students slain in Blacksburg, Virginia.

There must have been some good news today. Why aren't the cable networks reporting it?

Where's the beef?

I thought I was the only one who had noticed that the battle for the presidential nomination between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had little substance - little policy - little ideology - few solutions. But no, Paul Krugman has noticed.
Substance Over Image
The title of Krugman's column refers to what we need not what we have.

Six years ago a man unsuited both by intellect and by temperament for high office somehow ended up running the country.

How did that happen? First, he got the Republican nomination by locking up the big money early.

Then, he got within chad-and-butterfly range of the White House because the public, enthusiastically encouraged by many in the news media, treated the presidential election like a high school popularity contest. The successful candidate received kid-gloves treatment — and a free pass on the fuzzy math of his policy proposals — because he seemed like a fun guy to hang out with, while the unsuccessful candidate was subjected to sniggering mockery over his clothing and his mannerisms.

Today, with thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead thanks to presidential folly, with Al Qaeda resurgent and Afghanistan on the brink, you’d think we would have learned a lesson. But the early signs aren’t encouraging.

This brings us to 2007 and the battle for the Democratic nomination. For the front runners - Hillary and Barack - it's all about image once again.

“Presidential elections are high school writ large, of course,” declared Newsweek’s Howard Fineman last month. Oh, my goodness. But in fairness to Mr. Fineman, he was talking about the almost content-free rivalry between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — a rivalry that, at this point, is mainly a struggle over who’s the bigger celebrity and gets to lock up the big donors.

Krugman suggests we demand some substance and ask some questions.

First, what do they propose doing about the health care crisis? All the leading Democratic candidates say they’re for universal care, but only John Edwards has come out with a specific proposal. The others have offered only vague generalities — wonderfully uplifting generalities, in Mr. Obama’s case — with no real substance.

Second, what do they propose doing about the budget deficit? There’s a serious debate within the Democratic Party between deficit hawks, who point out how well the economy did in the Clinton years, and those who, having watched Republicans squander Bill Clinton’s hard-won surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy and a feckless war, would give other things — such as universal health care — higher priority than deficit reduction.

Mr. Edwards has come down on the anti-hawk side. But which side are Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama on? I have no idea.

Third, what will candidates do about taxes? Many of the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. Should they be extended, in whole or in part? And what do candidates propose doing about the alternative minimum tax, which will hit tens of millions of middle-class Americans unless something is done?

Fourth, how do the candidates propose getting America’s position in the world out of the hole the Bush administration has dug? All the Democrats seem to be more or less in favor of withdrawing from Iraq. But what do they think we should do about Al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Pakistan? And what will they do if the lame-duck administration starts bombing Iran?

The point of these questions isn’t to pose an ideological litmus test. The point is, instead, to gauge candidates’ judgment, seriousness and courage. How they answer is as important as what they answer.

He concludes with this:

Over the last six years we’ve witnessed the damage done by a president nominated because he had the big bucks behind him, and elected (sort of) because he came across well on camera. We need to pick the next president on the basis of substance, not image.

As I read this I can't help but think that Paul Krugman is as delusional as Dick Cheney. Substance will continue to take the back seat to image. The candidates don't employ policy makers they employ image makers. One of the major reasons for this is the nature of the media. Joe Gandelman had a good post yesterday, Should News Entertain Or Inform — Or Both?.

–The tabloidization of the American news media. The biggest 20th century shift came with the advent of the evening newscast, a bullet in the head to many afternoon newspapers which either shut down or merged with morning papers. But the BIGGEST shift in content came in the 1980s, after the Gart Hart/Donna Rice scandal that transformed Hart from a symbol of the future to a laugh-assured punchline. It was the National Enquirer, under aggressive, new leadership, that got the pix of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap on the boat Monkey Business. It looked like a photo that had been photoshopped — but it wasn’t. This was the Golden Age of the American Supermarket Tabloid. And the news media scrambled to compete with the supermarket tabs on that one and never looked back. Now you didn’t only have to beat the Times and Post, but you had to beat the Enquirer, the Star and the Globe.

And Joe has more, I'll just give you the bullets.

• –The rise of talk radio


• –The 24 Hour News Cycle and Fox News’ impact


• –The decline of truly high profile journalistic role models


• –The dominance of personality over issues in politics and news

  If you look at all of the above, the common denominator is the injection of personality into politics and news coverage. In the end, the personalities involved drive the narrative more than the ISSUES. Whether it’s news, talk radio, blog posts or blog comments, it now comes down to taking an issue and turning in into something linked to a person. (Note how in many comments on blogs if someone disagrees with a post they immediately turn it into a personal attack or a personal characterization — one that upon examination often proves to be wrong, oversimplified or simply just lashing out).



• –News editors and corporations can’t just ignore the competition and do 100 percent their own thing

The bottom line is that if the media is more interested in image than substance it's image we will get. And don't forget image is cheaper than substance, you don't have to pay people to fact check or analyze. So image it will be not substance. That's what will bring in the bucks and get a candidate face time on the tube.

Goofy News

As a follow up to this post I have to wonder what happened to the network of the great Peter Jennings There were several reports of Moqtada al Sadr's alleged flight to Tehran but the one from ABC "News" was the only one that asked no questions and appeared to have been written by the White House itself. Just look at the opening paragraph:

While members of the U.S. House of Representatives take turns weighing in on President Bush's planned troop surge in Iraq, the focus in Iraq is not on the arrival of more U.S. troops, but the departure of one of the country's most powerful men, Moqtada al Sadr and members of his army.

Pure and simple political propaganda designed to be critical of those who oppose Bush and his surge. That includes over 60% of the American people, most Democrats and Independents, many Republicans and much of the military. Of course what would you expect from a network that rewrote history in order to shill for Bush and the Republicans. The once proud ABC news organization has no more credibility than the Bush administration itself and has become the "Goofy News".

It can't be easy

It can't be easy being George H.W. Bush. You watch as your oldest son becomes the most powerful man in the world and then screws up everything he touches and threatens the United States, the world and the relevance of the Republican Party in the process. To make matters worse the media, which for the most part only reported White House spin for better than half of Jr's term suddenly starts reporting the truth and the reality of what a mess he's made of things. So what do you do? Attack the messenger of course.
Bush's father complains of news media "hostility"

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's father accused the news media of "personal animosity" toward his son and said he found the criticism so unrelenting he sometimes talked back to his television set.

"It's one thing to have an adversarial ... relationship -- hard-hitting journalism -- it's another when the journalists' rhetoric goes beyond skepticism and goes over the line into overt, unrelenting hostility and personal animosity," former President George Bush said.

So it's "unrelenting hostility and personal animosity" when the media reports the facts. The facts are not the media's fault, as Joe Gandleman said so well:

This administration seems to have more chickens coming home to roost now than one of Frank Purdue’s poultry factories.

Very little that’s coming out about the adminsitration is positive and it isn’t a case of bad media. The Libby trial and Rove involvement? It entails credibility. President George Bush’s newest assertion of himself as “the decision maker”? A seemingly innocent comment, yet it solidifies a view taking hold among many Americans in both parties that the administation disparages Congressional “advise and consent” and believes it’s the “boss” and Congress is iits underling.

I have to wonder if the corporate giants who control the media are getting very nervous about a "decider" or "decision maker" who seems to make all the wrong decisions. No George H.W., it's not the media's fault.