Category: The Media

Who’s Responsible?

Reading Peter Daou’s post at his new project, Consider This News, on the bipartisan repudiation of the left wing of American politics, I caught this line:

I challenge anyone to envision a President Barack Obama without the unrelenting defiance of the netroots during the Bush years.

While I personally agree 100% with Daou’s sentiment that the defiance of proud progressives in the netroots, especially in the period of 2004-2008, lead to the conditions that allowed Obama to win, I think there are many people – especially here in DC – that would disagree with it.  For example, I can imagine any number of campaign operatives I’ve worked with in professional politics who could recast that sentence as such:

I challenge anyone to envision a President Barack Obama without the unrelenting efforts to defeat Republican incumbents with centrist candidates by Chuck Schumer of the DSCC and Rahm Emanuel of the DCCC.

Do I agree with this statement? Certainly not as much as I agree with Daou’s postulation on the importance of the netroots, but it sort of makes clear that looking at politics in absolutes as if in a vacuum is very difficult.

More importantly, while Daou may well be able to issue his challenge, the fact that there would so readily be a cement block of Conventional Wisdom standing in the way of it being accepted proves his point that both Republicans and Democrats have worked efficiently to marginalize voices from the Democratic left in accepted political discourse. Were we in an environment where the massive contributions the online progressive community has made to electing Democrats — often regardless of where they fit on the Democratic political spectrum —  I would expect to see a far greater appreciation of the concerns and critiques of activists online. That appreciation simply doesn’t exist now and as a result the netroots is treated by Democratic politicians at best like a demanding ATM machine and at worst like a group of whack-jobs who should be marginalized to show your friends in DC how Serious you are.

No Lone Wolves

Dr. Slammy of Scholars & Rogues has what I think is a very important piece that urges the media to stop describing acts of domestic terror as being perpetrated by “lone wolves.” Doing so circumscribes the problem of right wing extremism within the physical agent conducting these assassinations. Dr. Slammy points out that this phrase as used “asks us to accept that these people have no context, no community, no ideological fellow-travelers whipping them on. Which is bunk.” This is perpetuated by the media, leading to an increased lack of understanding of the dangers facing America:

In the end, the reader comes away with the idea that these killers are, as a matter of fact, solitary agents. Both agencies lend credence to this misinformation by failing to challenge the underlying factual inaccuracy, and in doing so they inadvertently serve the cause of the “leaderless resistance.“ When our most reliable news institutions say that these incidents are isolated, that they’re not part of a larger movement, that there’s no collective organization behind the attacks, it provides cover for a thriving, blood-thirsty community of wolves.

The simple point is that America has a serious, growing problem with right wing extremists turning to violence. They are not acting alone and continued assertions of such in the press is tantamount to causing the public to ignore a present danger.

NYT Takes A Mulligan

Or at least it appears that after their god-awful, factually inaccurate product of failed due diligence editorial, the Times is giving space for columnist Gail Collins to make up for their bad behavior. Her Saturday column was a great run-down of the yeoman’s work Chris Dodd has done thus far in the Obama administration, essentially presenting the case that Dodd has been the peoples’ most active and involved legislator thus far this Congress. Collins’ look at Dodd and AIG is one of the few times I’ve seen a traditional journalist recognize how unwarranted the attacks against him were:

During the bank bailouts, he was blamed for protecting the A.I.G. executives from bonus payment caps. This is deeply ironic since Dodd was one of the very few people in the Senate to show any interest whatsoever in salary caps until the cameras came on and our elected representatives began frothing with rage and demanding to be allowed to beat leaders of the financial industry with brooms and sticks.

Dodd’s role was complicated, but at bottom, the A.I.G. charge was so unfair that we can only hope he did something really, really bad at some previous point in his career and got away with it, thus balancing the scales of justice.

Collins goes on to look at what Dodd is busy doing during a tough campaign season:

While Dodd was busy watering down bankruptcy laws, he was also establishing himself as a leading progressive voice on a raft of other issues.

He resisted the siren call of Republican tax cuts in the Reagan and Bush administration. He was a persistent champion of quality early child care — an issue whose importance is matched only by its complete and total lack of vote-getting or donation-collecting potential. He authored the Family and Medical Leave Act. And he developed a close working relationship with his ailing friend Ted Kennedy, who designated Dodd as his surrogate on the health care legislation. In Kennedy’s absence, there is really no other Democrat in the Senate with so much ability to reach across the aisle and negotiate with Republicans while still keeping his eyes on the prize.

Like most seasoned political animals, Dodd’s response to his plummeting polls is to Do Stuff. Run around your home state. (He had a listening tour!) Make a splash in Washington. (Four bill-signing ceremonies in four months!) Find new ways to reach out to the masses. (Oh, Lord! He’s Twittering.)

Meanwhile, by his estimate, he spent 30 hours this week alone talking with Republican senators about the health care bill. On the phone, he sounded exhausted, but you can tell he sort of loves it. “It’s what I do,” he said.

Actually Collins is flat-out wrong in her first clause: Dodd is one of the strongest advocates for protecting strong bankruptcy laws in the US Senate. During the presidential campaign eRiposte of The Left Coaster did an intensive analysis of all the Senate Dem candidates records on bankruptcy reform legislation in 2000, 2001, and 2005. Concluding a ranking of Dodd, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama

Senator Chris Dodd has the best, and a near-perfect, voting record on Bankruptcy legislation. He has been consistently and strongly progressive on the topic of Bankruptcy “reform” at least since 2000.

Also, it’s a small point of pride that Chris Dodd has been using Twitter since 2007 – one of the first politicians to do so at the federal level.

But beyond these two quibbles, Collins really lays out the hard work Dodd is doing. There are a lot of bombs being thrown at him now in an effort to make one of the Senate’s liberal lions seem vulnerable at home. But the political barbs just don’t match the reality of what Dodd has actually done and is continuing to do in his role as one of the Senate’s most effective legislators.

Unfortunately while Collins’ column shows Times’ readers the great work Dodd is doing, it doesn’t undo the crap that the Times threw at Dodd earlier this week. But at least it’s an improvement…and a sign that someone at the Times is still paying to what Chris Dodd is actually doing and not merely the attack press releases Rob Simmons and the Connecticut GOP are putting out on a near-daily basis.

Rush Is Their Leader

Mike Stark has posted on his new blog, The Crooked Dope, an audio clip of his call in to Joe Scarborough’s radio show. In the clip, Stark takes down the GOP complaints that Rush Limbaugh is subject to a standard that liberal comedians (why these two are comparable is beyond me) aren’t held to. Mike makes clear that the reason Limbaugh is subject of criticism is because he is the leader of the Republican party, whereas no Democratic politicians turn to Jon Stewart or David Letterman to get pointers on how to vote or how to act towards the opposition. Go listen to the clip on The Crooked Dope.

Where’s the Due Diligence, NYT?

The editorial page of the New York Times today attacked Senator Chris Dodd for his receipt of fundraising contributions from pay day lenders and, according to them, subsequently not acting to reform pay day lending laws to cap interest rates.  They write:

Forget what it looked like, this was a private fund-raiser by Mr. Johnson for his friend Mr. Dodd, not payday lenders wooing a senator whose committee was considering a bill that could seriously cramp their business.

That bill, sponsored by Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, caps interest rates on consumer loans at 36 percent. That’s the reasonable limit that Congress placed on loans to members of the armed forces.

Mr. Dodd, who was recently praised after Congress passed a bill limiting abuses by credit-card companies, should follow the same crusading impulse to go after the egregious exploitation of payday loans. He should avoid even the slightest hint that he is cozying up to it.

Unfortunately, the Times has gone off more than half-cocked.  Dodd not only supports reforming pay day lending and has voted for it repeatedly in the past, but he’s a cosponsor of the Durbin legislation in question.

On May 13th, Dodd voted was one of only 33 senators to vote in favor of Bernie Saunders amendment to provide even stricter interest rate caps than the Durbin legislation.

On May 23rd, the Hartford Courant reported:

In a conference call with reporters Friday, Dodd said there are still two major issues that remain unfinished business: a cap on interest rates and limits on fees that merchants pay when a customer uses a credit card for a purchase.

You can go back in history and see many other votes and other statements that have shown Chris Dodd’s commitment to protecting worker Americans’ interests when it comes to usurious lending. But what is most stunning is that the Times ran an editorial criticizing Dodd for being so close to pay day lenders that he wouldn’t support legislation capping their interest rates when he is a cosponsor of the legislation in question.

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I don’t know if the NY Times knew that Dodd had cosponsored this legislation when they chose to run their op-ed. I hope that it’s the case that they simply failed to do their basic fact checking before running it. Because if the Times knew that Dodd had cosponsored this legislation yesterday, it would mean that they ran an op-ed attacking a senator for giving undue influence to contributors and not sticking up for working Americans when they knew that he in fact was doing the exact opposite of what his contributors want and is standing up for working Americans.

It’s quite common elected officials to receive campaign contributions from corporations and industries that they’re trying to regulate. The act of them receiving this money, while not always savory, does not in itself constitute any form of obligation for the official to act on the corporation or industry’s behalf. In fact, it can be an opportunity for a public servant to show that they are beholden to no one other than the interests of the voting public.

That’s precisely what Chris Dodd has done when it comes to any number of financial players who have contributed to his campaigns over the years. From banks to credit card companies to the insurance industry and now, especially, pay day lenders, Dodd has held true to his Democratic values of protecting the interests of working Americans and not been swayed by campaign lucre.

What’s so unfortunate is that the New York Times is unwilling or incapable of identifying the clear difference  between the people who give Dodd money and the interests on whose behalf Dodd legislates. The two aren’t even in the same ballpark.

The simple fact is that the New York Times fundamentally missed the mark in their editorial attacking Chris Dodd. At best the attack comes from a failure to do their due diligence before publishing. At worst, the Times has maliciously attacked a man for doing precisely what they say he should be doing.

Update:

Tparty at My Left Nutmeg adds more:

As both Chair of the Banking Committee and a  vulnerable incumbent up for re-election, Dodd will continue to be a huge target for those looking to influence politics and/or policy on all sides, and sorting through competing arguments and knocking down spurious claims is apparently going to be a challenge for a traditional media still largely uninterested in doing that type of real work. But at the very least, Dodd deserves accurate reporting and praise when he does the right thing, even if that means re-writing an editorial before it goes to press – or printing a correction after it does.

I’d have to imagine Senator Dodd is pushing for a correction to the editorial. Who knows if they’ll get it? But unfortunately more people will read this editorial than will read the correction, even if it is forthcoming.

Kristof: Prolong Dictatorship!

Any reader of this blog knows that I think New York Times columnist Nick Kristof is one of the most intellectually dishonest and profoundly unserious members of the American press who write with any regularity on China. That’s why I found it quite surprising last night to read Kristof’s column on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. Kristof was the Beijing bureau chief for the Times then — something I did not know — and was covering the protests. His retelling of the protests and the zeitgeist in Beijing in 1989 is powerful and it seems Kristof is walking down what for him is a rarely walked path: criticizing the Chinese government and ruling Communist Party. Of course I was wrong to get excited about the first half of his colum, as what followed in the second half was Grade A wankery.

I saw it coming when I read this line:

One stocky rickshaw driver had tears streaming down his cheeks as he drove past me to display a badly wounded student so that I could photograph or recount the incident. That driver perhaps couldn’t have defined democracy, but he had risked his life to try to advance it.

Yes, because obviously an uneducated worker in a totalitarian state has no idea what democracy looks like. No idea what his basic rights are or why it is fundamentally wrong for a government to respond to mass protest by rolling out armed troops and giving them the order to fire on peaceful students. How could this man possibly know that a government must be accountable to its people and not the other way around? Naturally Kristof’s column only got worse from here.

So, 20 years later, what happened to that bold yearning for democracy? Why is China still frozen politically — the regime controls the press more tightly today than it did for much of the 1980s — even as China has transformed economically? Why are there so few protests today?

One answer is that most energy has been diverted to making money, partly because it’s a safer outlet. One of my Chinese friends explains that if he were to protest loudly, he might be arrested; if he were to protest quietly, it would be a waste of time. “I may as well just spend the time watching a pirated DVD,” he said.

Another answer is that many of those rickshaw drivers and bus drivers and others in 1989 were demanding not precisely a parliamentary democracy, but a better life — and they got it. The Communist Party has done an extraordinarily good job of managing China’s economy and of elevating economically the same people it oppresses politically.

Living standards have soared, and people in Beijing may not have the vote, but they do have an infant mortality rate that is 27 percent lower than New York City’s.

Kristof apparently was the lone member of the press who covered the lesser-known Tiananmen Square protests for government action to increase infant mortality that faced a brutal crackdown leaving hundreds dead in June of 1989.

Kristof asks “Why are there so few protests today?” First, Kristof is clearly unaware of the country that he is writing about. Earlier this year The Strait Times reported on the number of mass protests in 2005:  “China’s Public Security Ministry reported 87,000 mass incidents in 2005, up 6.6 per cent over the number in 2004, and 50 per cent over the 2003 figure.” To put it differently, in 2005 in China there were on average of 238 mass protests every day. What Kristof likely means, though his word choice does not make this clear, is why are there so few protests of the scale of Tiananmen that garner international attention? That’s a much harder question to ask, but I would hazard that the Chinese government has learned how to stifle these protests, detain dissidents, and jail advocates for democratic reform prior to any boiling point. Tiananmen Square is surveilled by countless video camera, armed guards, rooftop sentries, and undercover security officers. There have not been protests there on this scale because China has created the ultimate security state where the government monitors and restrains its citizenry dramatically.

Not all is sweet: The environment is a catastrophe, an ugly nationalism is surging among some young Chinese and even nonpolitical Chinese chafe at corruption and at Web censorship (including the blocking this week of Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail). Balancing that, their children now get an education incomparably better than in earlier generations — better overall than many children get in the United States.

When you educate citizens and create a middle class, you nurture aspirations for political participation. In that sense, China is following the same path as Taiwan and South Korea in the 1980s.

Yes, except that on the same timeline of censorship and political repression and economic liberalization, South Korea and Taiwan actually became vibrant democracies. On the same scale, China became more repressive and less free for political discourse.  While the governments of Taiwan and South Korea moved intentionally towards democracy, the Chinese government has deliberately stopped political progress.

Some of my friends are Communist Party officials, and they are biding their time. We outsiders also may as well be similarly pragmatic and patient, for there’s not much we can do to accelerate this process. And as we wait, we can be inspired by those rickshaw drivers of 20 years ago.

Kristof’s closing line really gives away his bias. The outside world – governments, the media, people of conscience – really should just keep our mouths shut and not do anything to unwind 20 years of silence and repression in China for those who seek democracy. We cannot do anything about the jailing of political dissidents, nor the deliberate steps towards eradicating the culture and thus political legacy of Tibet and East Turkestan. We cannot do a thing when it comes to stopping the persecution of people for their religious beliefs, be they Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, or practioners of the Falun Gong. There is simply nothing to be done about the Chinese government shooting Tibetan refugees as they try to flee to Nepal or India. How can the global community possibly stop the Chinese government from using secret trials to sentence dissidents to long prison terms for thought crimes, let alone stop killing cell phone networks, internet access and popular online communities every time a politically threatening anniversary arrives (See Wired’s reporting on this for more)?

Kristof preaches complacency and do-nothing-ism. Leave the Chinese government to its own devices and all will be alright in the end. Sure, they’ve had two decades to listen to the wills and desires of Kristof’s ignorant rickshaw driver, but maybe in another twenty years they’ll magically decide to listen to the sentiments of the populace forty years prior.

Unfortunately what Nick Kristof does is ensure that his readers will continue to ignore the moral imperative to help people achieve freedom and democracy. The Tiananmen Square protests are one of the great inspirations of nonviolent political action in pursuit of freedom, a symbol for the best of what we can do for our beliefs akin to the work of Gandhi, Otpor, and the work of the Dalai Lama. When Kristof looks at this heroic activism, his response that we should all do nothing is simply bizarre. It is thoroughly disappointing that the editors of the New York Times continue to allow Kristof to write about China, as this sort of writing will someday be a monument for how Western passivism in the face of the Chinese economy lead to the prolonged tenure of a totalitarian government.

Stupid Attacks

Suzy Khimm is listed by The New Republic as a “reporter-researcher.” I haven’t yet waded through her three page article on Chris Dodd and his coming perilous reelection campaign to judge her overall ability as a reporter, but by the second paragraph it’s pretty easy to see that she’s not a researcher. Khimm writes:

Today, Dodd–five-term senator, established Washington powerbroker, the man whose “magnificent handshake,” The New York Times gushed two years ago, is “the grip of a pro, a … political pro, which he is”–has been reduced to shoring up his liberal bona fides by railing against credit card companies on a blog called My Left Nutmeg (motto: “Where Connecticut Dems Scratch That Progressive Itch”).

Senator Dodd’s first diary on My Left Nutmeg was on March 7, 2007, over two years ago. I know because at the time I was a front-page contributor and administrator of the site. I bumped his post from the diary section to the front page.

About two months later I joined Dodd’s presidential campaign’s internet department. Our campaign frequently posted updates from the campaign trail in diaries on MLN, so Nutmeggers could continue to see the hard work Dodd was doing both for our country and for Connecticut as a legislator, using his heightened profile as a presidential candidate to get more done for us all in the Senate. Additionally, during his frequent live chats with blog readers on the campaign trail, Dodd engaged with readers on My Left Nutmeg. Dodd wasn’t alone in the CT delegation in engaging this community from the campaign trail – Congressmen John Larson, Chris Murphy, and Joe Courtney all recorded strong endorsements of Dodd that we posted on MLN.

All of this is to say that Dodd has not been “reduced” to anything this cycle. He is doing what he’s always done – engage constituents in meaningful ways. He’s long viewed MLN as a key part of the Connecticut progressive-Democratic infrastructure and that he’s continuing to engage it not is not only not a shocking, bad thing, but a positive note that augurs well for his reelection prospects. It’s unfortunate that the TNR’s “reporter-researcher” didn’t bother to fact check one of her first sentences, as even the most cursory research would have proven her premise wrong.

Blind Squirrel / Nut

Depending on the day, I think Gail Collins’ opinion columns are either a step above or a step below Maureen Dowd’s level of vapidity. For some reason Collins made the decision that rather than writing serious columns befitting her former role as an editorial writer, she thinks trying to out-Dowd Maureen is a worthy use of her column inches. As a result, I almost never read Collins’ columns and consider them a waste of space. Why should I spend 5 minutes reading Collins or Dowd when I could read Christy Hardin Smith or Digby and actually learn something valuable.

With that in mind, I will say that a column on Bristol Palin’s re-emergence as a main advocate for abstinence sex education piqued my interest and I actually clicked through to read Collins’ column. Buried within a predictable column are these lines, which had me laughing out loud at their poignant accuracy and humor:

“It’s not going to work,” said her ex-boyfriend, Levi Johnston, in a dueling early-morning interview.

If you have ever watched Levi Johnston on TV for two minutes you will appreciate how terrifying it is when he has the most reasonable analysis of a social issue.

Yep, that’s about right. And a solid reminder that someone who got pregnant while in high school because she and her boyfriend didn’t practice safe sex and use condoms is not exactly a role model for abstinence-only education. In fact, Palin is an example of what is so dangerous about abstinence-only sex education. Maybe doing this work will keep Bristol Palin in her the media spotlight and let her mother point to her charitable work for a Christian cause, but it will likely result in the prolonging of abstinence-only education as a respected alternative to comprehensive sex education, thus leading to more unwanted teen pregnancies.

Those With Knowledge…

Glenn Greenwald has had personal interactions with Judge Sonia Sotomayor in his work as a litigator. Here’s what he says about her:

My perception of Sotomayor is almost the exact opposite of the picture painted by Rosen.  I had a generally low opinion of the intellect of most judges — it’s one of the things I disliked most about the practice of law — but I found her to be extremely perceptive, smart, shrewd and intellectually insightful.  The image that has been instantaneously created of her as some sort of doltish mediocrity, based on nothing but Rosen’s water-cooler chatter, is, at least to me, totally unrecognizable.  Of the countless federal judges with whom I had substantive interaction over more than ten years of litigation, I would place her in the top tier when it comes to intellect.  My impressions are very much in line with the author of this assessment of Sotomayor, who had much more extensive interaction with her and — unlike Rosen’s chatterers — has the courage to attach his name to his statements.

It’s noticable that contrary to Jeffrey Rosen’s TNR smears, people who know and have worked with Sotomayor find her extensively qualified for consideration as a Supreme Court justice.