Category: The Media

Context

Apparently it is no longer required in quotes printed by conservative columnists, just as it is not required for videos ran by conservative bloggers (let alone for them to be taken seriously by the administration).

Of course conservatives in the media or elected office attacking Democrats or progressives through an out-of-context-to-the-point-of-falsification quote is not new. Only recently, the targets picked by the right have been so absurd that they have fallen apart within themselves. But it’s not any different than finding a single user-submitted video out of tens of thousands and claiming that MoveOn ran ads comparing Bush to Hitler. Nor is it any different from the massive promotion of a couple of numb skulls who claim to be Black Panthers who tried to block voting at a predominantly black polling place on election day in 2008 (let alone then blaming the Obama administration for the Bush administration choosing not to prosecute them). Nor is it different from nut picking a crazed commenter on Daily Kos or Huffington Post who attacked Joe Lieberman along anti-Semitic lines and claiming that Ned Lamont’s supporters were all anti-Semitic.

Taking quotes out of context or finding non-representative individuals and promoting their views as representative of an entire political campaign or party is stock in trade for the conservative movement.

The only remarkable thing about the Breitbart/Sherrod and Zuckerman/Obama instances of missing context is that they are being called out as the dishonest smears that they are.

Alterman & 12 Dimensional Chess

At the end of a long, thoughtful and dare I say, Must Read piece in The Nation on the structural hurdles in American politics and the media that prevent a truly progressive presidency from being realized, Eric Alterman writes:

What’s more, one hypothesis—one I’m tempted to share—for the Obama administration’s willingness to compromise so extensively on the promises that candidate Obama made during the 2008 campaign would be that as president, he is playing for time. Obama is taking the best deal on the table today, but hopes and expects that once he is re-elected in 2012—a pretty strong bet, I’d say—he will build on the foundations laid during his first term to bring on the fundamental “change” that is not possible in today’s environment. This would be consistent with FDR’s strategy during his second term and makes a kind of sense when one considers the nature of the opposition he faces today and the likelihood that it will discredit itself following a takeover of one or both houses in 2010. For that strategy to make sense, however, 2013 will have to provide a more pregnant sense of progressive possibility than 2009 did, and that will take a great deal of work by the rest of us.

In effect, Alterman writes twenty some odd pages of thoughtful analysis as to why Obama is and will continue to be a serial compromiser and throws it out the window. Nothing in Alterman’s analysis suggests previously that Obama is forestalling meaningful change to remain electorally safe and then will act boldly once he is a lame duck. And there’s nothing in the Obama administration’s rhetoric in the first year and half of his term, nor the two year campaign which preceded it, wherein Obama has suggested that he’s simply holding fire until he gets past 2012.

Moreover, not only are we not seeing this plan put forth by Obama, there are no predictions that I know of that suggest that between now and January, 2013, the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate will increase nor that there will be meaningful filibuster reform. In fact, Alterman has already identified filibuster reform as a necessity for political change, while he bemoans that Senate leaders have not gotten behind it. So not only is Obama not out there saying he’s holding fire deliberately, but the congressional landscape he will need to actually open fire is likely to erode from where it was in January, 2009.

Alterman does a tremendous job explaining why realizing progressive change is hard. But it makes absolutely zero sense for any progressive to hold out hope that President Obama is in fact playing twelve dimensional chess and waiting an entire term to do Really Big Progressive Things. Rather than hold out any hope that President Obama will improve his behavior if re-elected, progressives need to focus on (1) improving the political and media landscapes that currently impede change and (2) forcing the Obama administration and Congressional leadership to govern as progressives now.

A Lot In A Little

My good friend and former co-blogger Austin sends along this dissection of a piece from Ezra Klein that is so sharp that I feel the need to post…Take it away Austin:

Ezra Klein just published a post that has so much going on in it that exemplifies the state of the world, US politics, and the media, that I just had to pass it along:

Full text:

Normally I’d tweet something this short and trivial, but since Twitter appears to be blocked in China, I’ll just blog it: Wedding Crashers, which I watched on the plane, is a much more plausible-seeming moving [sic] in the post-Salahi era.

Let’s break that down:

“Normally I’d tweet something this short and trivial…”

This is a reporter/blogger/twitterer/newsweekly writer. He recognizes that all three are important, and that each has its own role.

“but since Twitter appears to be blocked in China”

The greatest threat to oppression is the free flow of ideas; China is oppressive.

“I’ll just blog it”

Suck it, China. Also: MUST.NOT.MISS.OPPORTUNITY.TO.POST.TRIVIAL.EPIPHANIES.

“Wedding Crashers, which I watched on the plane”

No comment really, other than for a guy up to date on everything, this is an odd, weak movie choice.

“is a much more plausible-seeming moving” [He means movie]

No, it isn’t.

“in the post-Salahi era.”

Our media have made politics so, so small that even jackasses get an era.

Seriously, in the New Media Matrix, that’s a Neo-quality posting.

Can’t Get No Satisfaction

As Eric Boehlert points out, it should not be surprising to anyone that when Clark Hoyt, public editor of the New York Times, responds to the paper’s horrendous reporting on Dick Blumenthal’s military record that he would defend the paper and excuse admitted mistakes. I don’t know Hoyt’s politics or why it is that he has shown a great willingness to be responsive to Republican criticisms of the paper while simultaneously explaining away anything critique Democrats raise. But when I wrote him last week, I knew that the odds of him actually doing his job and policing his paper’s journalism were slim to none.

Matt Gertz also takes apart Hoyt’s defense and finds more inconsistencies and holes in the piece. At the end of the day, the point of the Times’ original reporting was that Blumenthal had a “long and well established pattern of misleading his constituents about his Vietnam War service.” But everything that we have seen since the story was printed is that this is not, in fact, true. Hoyt has done nothing to reconcile his paper’s reporting with the work done over the last week by the Connecticut press that flatly undercuts the Times’ central thesis. Quite simply, there is no long-standing pattern, no systemic misleading, and not permanent public falsification of his record. Blumenthal has now apologized for the times when he misspoke, which is certainly the right step to take for the few instances when he did so, but the real apology should be coming from the Times for their inaccurate smear of Mr. Blumenthal, a military veteran and man who has served the American public for most of his life.

WTF NYT?

There’s been a big uproar going on all week about the New York Times Page One, above the fold expose on CT Senate candidate (and current Attorney General) Dick Blumenthal’s apparent misstatements on his military service record. Blumenthal volunteered to serve in the Marine reserves during the Vietnam era, but never served overseas. The Times identified a speech in 2008 where he said he served in Vietnam, as well as a small number of Connecticut news reports where Blumenthal was identified as having served in Vietnam. Given the Times initial report, you would likely think that Blumenthal was systematically and deliberately trying to represent himself as a Vietnam combat veteran. This is anything but the case. His campaign website does not say he served in Vietnam and reporters who have covered Blumenthal over decades of public service have stated they never had the impression he served in country during Vietnam. Moreover, the Linda McMahon campaign has taken credit for being the source for the Times’ reporting.

Yesterday it emerged that in the very speech the Times based their attack around, Blumenthal had previously accurately referred to himself as someone who served during the Vietnam era, but not calling himself a combat veteran or saying he served in Vietnam. The natural question was, who edited the video the Times posted: the New York Times or the McMahon campaign? Keep in mind, this video is basically the only evidence the Times has of Blumenthal misstating his record (Colin McEnroe of the Hartford Courant has rightly pointed out that this is an incredibly thin hit piece).

After questioning on the full video by reporters, the Times responded to Greg Sargent with this incredibly petulant statement:

The New York Times in its reporting uncovered Mr. Blumenthal’s long and well established pattern of misleading his constituents about his Vietnam War service, which he acknowledged in an interview with The Times. Mr. Blumenthal needs to be candid with his constituents about whether he went to Vietnam or not, since his official military records clearly indicate he did not.

The video doesn’t change our story. Saying that he served “during Vietnam” doesn’t indicate one way or the other whether he went to Vietnam.

This line reads like it could have been written by either McMahon or Simmons’ press shops:

“Mr. Blumenthal needs to be candid with his constituents about whether he went to Vietnam or not, since his official military records clearly indicate he did not.”

In fact…

Rob Simmons press release:

Too many have sacrificed too much to have their valor stolen in this way. I hope Mr. Blumenthal steps forward and forthrightly addresses the questions that have arisen about this matter.

Another Simmons press statement:

While I’m not surprised that he ‘regrets’ that his misstatements have been called to the public’s attention, what he owes is an apology to the veterans, who served and sacrificed in Vietnam.

Linda McMahon flack quote:

It’s become increasingly clear to us over the past weeks and months as we’ve researched Mr. Blumenthal in earnest that there are some deeply disturbing disconnects between the image he’s sought to portray and reality

I wonder why the NYT sounds just like the GOP candidates running against Blumenthal?

The reporting is clearly thin. Whether or not the Times was given a stack of research and an edited video from McMahon’s campaign, at this point, is less relevant than the simple reality that the reporting is for shit. It is not an accurate piece. Yes, Blumenthal has on at least one occasion misstated his military record.  But he did serve in the military and he has been forthright in effectively all documented instances that he did not serve in Vietnam. The Times needs to stop defending this crappy reporting and be transparent about where the story originated.

I’ve written a letter to Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor at the Times, regarding this story. I have yet to receive a response, but expect that Hoyt will find some way to paper over his paper’s bad reporting, as he so often does.

NYT’s Ed Board Should Read the NYT

The New York Times editorial board, “Will the Real Chris Dodd Stand Up? 1/7/10:

That coziness — especially the V.I.P. cut-rate mortgage he received from the now-defunct subprime lender, Countrywide Financial — is one of the reasons his state’s voters have turned against him. [Emphasis added]

The New York Times’s David Herszenhorn, “Senators Are Cleared of Ethics Complaints,” 8/7/09:

The committee noted that the Senate’s gift rules allow lawmakers to obtain loans provided they are made at terms available to the general public. And that seemed to be a crucial factor in its decision.

“The loans you received,” the committee wrote, “appear to have been available industry-wide to borrowers with comparable loan profiles.”

It’d be great if the editorial board at the New York Times read their own paper’s reporting.  According to both the New York Times and the Senate Ethics Committee, Dodd did not receive a “V.I.P. cut-rate mortgage.” He received on “at terms available to the general public.”

To be precise, when the Times editorializes that CT voters turned against him because he received a “V.I.P. cut-rate mortgage,” what they really must mean is that voters turned against him because Republicans and a lazy press accused him of receiving a special deal, when there was zero evidence to support it. It was a media swarm that had no bearing on the truth — a truth that even the New York Times reported in the end.

Taibbi on the Marginalizing of the Republican Base

Matt Taibbi, writing at True/Slant, has a must-read analysis of the mainstream media Village culture, as it pertains to Sarah Palin. Or, more specifically, how groupthink by Beltway journalists regarding when to promote a politician and when to aim for their head has coalesced behind further marginalizing Palin and by extension her Teabag supporters.

While Taibbi does provide a stinging and pointed analysis of how Beltway Conventional Wisdom is made in the journalist clubhouse, he really shines through in his take on what this means for the Tea Party “movement.”

What the people who are flipping out about the treatment of Palin should be asking themselves is what it means when it’s not just jerks like us but everybody piling on against Palin. For those of you who can’t connect the dots, I’ll tell you what it means. It means she’s been cut loose. It means that all five of the families have given the okay to this hit job, including even the mainstream Republican leaders. You teabaggers are in the process of being marginalized by your own ostensible party leaders in exactly the same way the anti-war crowd was abandoned by the Democratic party elders in the earlier part of this decade. Like the antiwar left, you have been deemed a threat to your own party’s “winnability.”

And do you know what that means? That means that just as the antiwar crowd spent years being painted by the national press as weepy, unpatriotic pussies whose enthusiastic support is toxic to any serious presidential aspirant, so too will all of you afternoon-radio ignoramuses who seem bent on spending the next three years kicking and screaming your way up the eternal asshole of white resentment now find yourself and your political champions painted as knee-jerk loonies whose rabid irrationality is undeserving of the political center. And yes, that’s me saying that, but I’ve always been saying that, not just about Palin but about George Bush and all your other moron-heroes.

What’s different now is who else is saying it. You had these people eating out of the palms of your hands (remember what it was like in the Dixie Chicks days?). Now they’re all drawing horns and Groucho mustaches on your heroes, and rapidly transitioning you from your previous political kingmaking role in the real world to a new role as a giant captive entertainment demographic that exists solely to be manipulated for ratings and ad revenue. What you should be asking yourself is why this is happening to you. Even I don’t know the answer to that question, but honestly, I don’t really care. All I know is that I find it extremely funny.

I certainly agree with Taibbi that there is a delightfully comic side to the shift to discredit the rabid Republican base as…rabid.  Of course I think he sells his understanding of the situation a bit short. Just because the analysis by Beltway journalists on the danger posed by the anti-war left to Democratic electoral hopes was fundamentally wrong (and conclusively proven so in 2006 and 2008) doesn’t mean that the analysis of Teabaggers as a group who can cost the Republican Party elections is wrong. Take NY-23 — a seat that Democrats hadn’t won since Reconstruction was won by a conservative Democrat after an independent Teabagger candidate forced the GOP nominee out of the race. Teabaggers cost the GOP that seat. While one race is by no means determinative of a political movement, this is certainly not a time to sell your Teabagger stock.

As it relates to Palin, she has thrown herself into the Teabagger mix with all her energy. She came out strongly for Hoffman in NY-23 and is building a brand running in support of these radical rightwing candidates. When she put herself all-in on NY-23, she also took on some of the consequences from that loss. The most notable one, obviously, being that Teabaggers didn’t win.

It’s also important to note that Taibbi isn’t saying that Democrats or liberal pundits shouldn’t help push the Beltway journalist stone down hill onto the Teabaggers. There is real value in this group being marginalized as a decisive voice in American politics. It was the influence of the Republican base that helped win George W. Bush and Dick Cheney two terms in office, along with quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, a massive recession, and an assault on the US Constitution and Bill of Rights unseen in the last two hundred years of American history. If any group deserves to have their influence marginalized in American politics, it is the base of the Republican Party (well, them and the Beltway journalistic set).

Watching this cohort of angry Americans fail at political success, while being treated for what they are by the establishment press, is satisfying on many levels. Sure, part of this is schadenfreude, but a good portion of it is watching the politically privileged group in American politics other than the super rich live life like the rest of us DFHs for the first time. The result is one of the leaders of their political movement, Sarah Palin, turning offense into a cottage industry and the other, Glenn Beck, making on camera tears book-ended by conspiracy theories of persecution into the path to gold advertising glory. As Taibbi said, it’s funny stuff.

Benen on Milbank

Steve Benen is pretty spot-on in his spanking of Dana Milbank’s idiotic column attacking Harry Reid for caving to the left on the public option. Benen writes:

Obviously, Milbank is entitled to his opinion. If he thinks Reid agreed to a public option compromise — a public plan with a state opt-out — primarily to make MoveOn.org happy, Milbank is welcome to the make the case.

But it’s not exactly a persuasive pitch, and Milbank doesn’t bolster his assertions with much of anything.

Reid had to reconcile two committee bills — one with a public option, one without. To merge the two, the Majority Leader went with a compromise that enjoys the backing of most of his caucus and most of the country.

Milbank sees Reid as caving to liberal groups who don’t care that, as he sees it, the measure doesn’t have 60 votes. I see a Majority Leader going with a proposal that Reid, the White House, most congressional Democrats, and most Americans have already embraced. And incidentally, it happens to be “good public policy.”

In fairness, I believe progressive activists definitely played a role in getting the Senate’s reform bill to where it is. Indeed, I don’t think there’s anything especially wrong with Democratic leaders shaping a public policy plan in a way that meets the expectations of the voters who elected them.

But Milbank makes it sound as if the Majority Leader yelled “How high?” because “liberal interest groups” told him to jump. And that’s just not what’s happened.

Liberal interest groups, labor unions, progressive bloggers, and Democratic voters have all spent a lot of energy convincing the Senate Democrats of the importance of including the public option in the underlying Senate bill. But frankly, I think the number one reason it’s there now is because it’s damned good policy that is easy to explain to the public. It would be great if groups like MoveOn, DFA, SEIU or AFL-CIO could dictate the actions of Harry Reid and the Senate Democratic caucus. But anyone who has spent more than a passing minute watching political dynamics between the left and elected officials in Washington know that this simply is not the case.

Holy Crap

I really don’t know what the New York Times’ editors are doing with Ross Douthat. Publicly pushing for a religious war between the Anglican-Catholic church and Islam is just nonsensical. It’s offensive. It’s stupid. And it’s clear that Douthat has absolutely no conception of the meaning of the words he puts to page. Calling for an escalation in the war between European Christian power bases and Islam could have real human consequences.  The Times should be embarrassed.