“This time, the FWP could begin by documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession; chronicling the transition to a green economy; or capturing the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion. Like the original FWP, the new version would focus in particular on those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media.” In the wake of the turmoil engulfing the newspaper industry at the moment (see also: The Wire, Season 5), journalist Mark Pinsky argues in TNR for a 21st century revival of the Federal Writers’ Project. Given the woeful state of the academic job market during this current downturn, I bet there are quite a few historians out there who’d give this a “Huzzah!”
Tag: Media
Fleeing the Festering Corpse.
“So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.” Old news by now, but just to get it on-the-record: Shown the door by the editors of his late father‘s magazine for his recent prObama apostasy, columnist and satirist Christopher Buckley bids farewell to the conservative “movement”. “While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of ‘conservative’ government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.“
Along the same lines, see also former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s most recent WSJ column. (Noonan, remember, is also on the outs with the stark-raving fundies because of her recent open-mic remarks regarding Palin on MSNBC.) Buried under the obligatory (if fanciful) McCain-won-the-debate lede is this telling passage: “In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It’s no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism. I gather this week from conservative publications that those whose thoughts lead them to criticism in this area are to be shunned, and accused of the lowest motives…In all this, the conservative intelligentsia are doing what they have done for five years. They bitterly attacked those who came to stand against the Bush administration. This was destructive. If they had stood for conservative principle and the full expression of views, instead of attempting to silence those who opposed mere party, their movement, and the party, would be in a better, and healthier, position. At any rate, come and get me, copper.”
All McCain’s (Former) Base Are Belong to Us.
“We thought this election would be a serious fight over the future of this country, but only one candidate showed up…Not even the presidency is worth what it’s made John McCain do to himself.” While it’s been quiet here, Ted of The Late Adopter has been keeping tabs on big newspaper and magazine endorsements. Announcing for Obama of late: The Denver Post, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Seattle Times, The New Yorker (shocking, I know), the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune (its first-ever Dem endorsement), and Esquire (its first-ever endorsement, period — the quote above is from them.)
Keep in mind, though, that the mainstream media hate Republicans (except, of course, when they’re starting wars of choice.) And really, who in the hell do these bigheads think they are, trying to confuse us with their words?
Palin: More Lundegaard than Gunderson.
“For the reasons explained in section IV of this report, I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.” Well, golly. Just in case anyone didn’t already think she was Cheneyesque enough, the Branchflower Report, i.e. the Alaska state inquiry into Sarah Palin’s firing of her public safety commissioner, finds that the Governor (and her husband) abused her powers of office to pursue a personal vendetta. “‘Gov. Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda.” In regards to Palin’s early defense that said ex-brother-in-law was a physical threat to her family, “‘I conclude that such claims of fear were not bona fide and were offered to provide cover for the Palins’ real motivation: to get Trooper Wooten fired for personal family reasons,’ Branchflower wrote“
It should be noted, by the way, that the Branchflower inquiry was not only initiated and authorized by a GOP-run state legislature, but released on Friday thanks to a unanimous vote by a committee of 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats. This seems to be in keeping with what we’ve seen in recent days, where any right-leaning talking head with even a modicum of intellectual honesty, from Chris Buckley to David Brooks, is now repudiating and rejecting Palin as “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.” That she is…although, not to assail Brooks’ NYT-and-PBS-certified powers of punditry, it really shouldn’t have taken him over a month to realize it.
Round One: Obama by Decision.
“John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007. The war started in 2003…You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shia and Sunni. And you were wrong.”
I doubt y’all missed it (even if the ratings were surprisingly low.) Nonetheless, Senators Obama and McCain held their first of three debates Friday night in Mississippi, ostensibly on foreign policy matters (although the economic situation on Wall Street took up the first half-hour.) [Transcript.] And the verdict? Well, to no one’s surprise, I’m going to go with Obama on this one. I’m just not going to pretend to be as fair and balanced as John King, David Gergen, and the other seemingly randomly selected poobahs of our Fourth Estate (who was the Aussie guy holding court next to Christine Amanpour?), who went out of their way on CNN to convince me that McCain seemed knowledgable, spry, and at ease during this event. Nope, I think I’ll side with the polls, which have a cool, level-headed, and magnanimous Sen. Obama winning the event handily.
The thing is, even more than with Sen. Hillary Clinton, whom I agreed with most of the time on the issues even when I disagreed completely with her GOP-lite campaign tactics, I just can’t take John McCain at all seriously at this point, and particularly after both Palin and the non-suspension suspension. So, when McCain tries to tout a career ostensibly spent in the service of congressional ethics, my inelastic brain just keeps thinking “Uh…Keating 5?” Anybody watching the past few years knows that McCain was as AWOL in the fight against Boss DeLay as he has been in countering Dubya these past two terms. And, whatever happened to McCain since 2000, speaking-truth-to-power is not something that comes readily to him anymore, if it ever did. So most of his early “I’m a proven maverick” speel Friday night fell on deaf ears from jump street in this household, and thus I can’t speak to how it might’ve played to those still-undecideds out there willing to buy into his craven sham.
That being said, I had a sense while watching — and the polls seem to bear this out — that McCain was making a critical error with his oft-repeated “Sen. Obama doesn’t understand” routine. That might’ve worked if Obama had seemed greener up there next to McCain, or if Obama was as inarticulate and incompetent as, say, Sarah Palin. But as it was, Sen. Obama came across as unruffled, competent, and conversant on all the issues the mythical maverick tried to paint him as naive on (and/or lie about.) And thus the strategy (or was it a tactic?), imho, backfired massively. Instead, McCain — missing the soft touch of Ronald Reagan, who turned age to his advantage against Mondale in 1984 with a joke and a smile — basically came across as a cantankerous old coot, dripping with undeserved contempt toward that damn whippersnapper in his yard.
It’s mainly for this reason that I think, however much the debate is being painted as a draw by the punditariat, Obama came out the clear victor: Sen. Obama did not seem callow or inexperienced in the slightest, but lordy did McCain — squinting, smirking, and drowning in derision — come across as aged. And I may be wrong about this, but I just don’t think the Old Man Withers strategy plays with the undecides. I know that many lefties out there wanted to see a more forceful Obama on the attack Friday night, but I don’t think that was his mission: It was more important that he, like Kennedy in 1960, seemed presidential, level-headed, and the very opposite of the risky gamble that the McCain folks would try to make him seem. In that, I think, he succeeded, particularly in contrast to the snarky old man standing across from him. Advantage Obama.
Unfair, but Balanced!
“Of all the shortcomings of the establishment press today, none is more central to the corruption of the profession than the decision to prioritize balance over accuracy. That corruption is visibly on display in the current coverage of the McCain campaign’s policy of deliberate lies…This is what gives liars a clear strategic advantage over non-liars. And it’s an open question whether McCain’s level of dishonesty turns out to be so great that it overwhelms reporters’ unwillingness to report accurately on it.” Over at TPM, Josh Marshall rails against media complicity in the McCain campaign’s recent embrace of blatant falsehood as a political strategy. (You know it’s bad when even the Post‘s Richard Cohen is renouncing his McCain-love.)
The other night, I caught the tail end of Bob Schieffer, Jonathan Alter, and Paul Begala on Charlie Rose, and Alter, Schieffer et al were blaming the pathetic, pathetic job by the mainstream media in this election on, of course, the blogosphere (much as Schieffer did in the interview here.) “We can’t be responsible for all these bloggers. The Internet is the only vehicle to convey news…that has no editor. Even the worst newspaper has an editor.” (Schieffer, 44:30) Uh, Judith Miller wasn’t writing a blog, nor was the Gray Lady bereft of editors, when the NYT and the rest of the mainstream media basically inhaled the Dubya administration’s lies about the Iraq war without complaint. And the same goes for the MSM’s dancing around the obvious tripe emanating from the McCain campaign here in 2008.
Look, blogs aren’t the problem right now. As Marshall and many others have noted, the problem is that all too much of the MSM, once again using “balance” as a cover for its cowardice, spends the majority of its time trying to ascertain — and then straddle — the exact middle point between the facts as they stand and McCain-Palin’s recent spate of ridiculous deceptions. To paraphrase Colbert: If, as it has in recent weeks, the truth has a definite Obama bias, then it befalls the Fourth Estate, as the self-appointed referees of the political ballgame, to set the record straight. And if televised poobahs like Candy Crowley refuse to do their jobs, and even talking heads who should know better, such as my old employer, roll over like puppies in the name of McCain’s presumed maverickness, then it’s definitely up to the blogs out there to fill the void. (See for example, Andrew Sullivan, who’s been compiling a sadly expansive list of the lies of Sarah Palin.)
The depressing slide of our major media institutions into frightened, ratings-fueled irrelevance didn’t start with this election, or course. But the stakes are too high right now to sit back and let their abysmal erosion pay any more dividends for the McCain campaign. We need to fight back, and hard. (Ad below via Ted at the Late Adopter.)
A Rare Moment of “Straight Talk.”
“You know what’s really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism, and this is cynical.
Oops. When they’re on the air, of course, most right-leaning pundits have very little criticism — indeed, judicious praise — of the Palin pick. Meanwhile, the media talking heads just nod along and pretend there might possibly some merit to such a ludicrous choice by the mythical maverick. Off the air, however, it’s a different story. Just listen to Chuck Todd, Peggy Noonan, and Mike Murphy discuss their real feelings about Palin in-between segments on MSNBC. (They got busted by an open mic.) Says Noonan of the election (when she’s not shilling for the right): “It’s over.” Update: In print this morning, Noonan scrambles.
RIP, AP.
Well, 162 years is a good run…but, sadly, the lowest-common-denominator, hyper-partisan idiocy derailing so much of the media these days seems to have now infected one of our oldest and most venerable American media institutions, the Associated Press. The handwriting’s been on the wall ever since conservative ideologue and almost-McCain-employee Ron Fournier moved up the pecking order. But, in the past two days, AP has completely embarrassed itself no less than twice. First, the AP analysis (by some stone-hearted fellow — paging Sinclair Lewis — named Charles Babington) bashed Obama’s nomination speech in purely Republican terms. Then, check out Fournier’s headline on McCain’s grotesque Palin pick: “Analysis: Palin’s age, inexperience rival Obama’s .” Uh, yeah.
Update: “As many of you know, some political groups and left-leaning blogs have aligned to organize a newspaper letter-writing campaign against AP Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier…Below you will find some talking points to help guide you as this issue plays out.” The AP issues CYA talking points to its affiliates defending Fournier.
The Chameleon, Undercover.
For those looking for movie news amid the politics: While enjoying an outdoor microbrew last evening, I happened to notice Jeffrey Wright walking down the street, and — while political pundit types like Ron Brownstein were getting swamped by onlookers — it seemed exactly nobody else noticed him. (I would’ve snapped a pic, but the camera was out of juice.) I mean, c’mon people, that’s Colin Powell! Journalists and pols come and go, but I still get excited whenever I happen to see an honest-to-goodness movie star.
From a Dead Man…Greetings.
“What I have wanted most to do…is to make political writing into an art.” By way of Return of the Reluctant, it seems George Orwell’s diary entries will be posted online in blog form beginning August 9, seventy years after he initially wrote them. Welcome to the political blogosphere, George! (And good luck breaking into the TNR-Politico-Atlantic-TPM mutual-regard society.)