Media Watch

Media Hypocrisy and James Fallows

2012-01-19T21:33:00.002-05:00

In 1997, James Fallows wrote a damning treatise on the media titled "Breaking the News." Fallows outlined six problems why the American public had turned on the news media in the US. 1) Treating politics like a game, 2) The revolving door where people in partisan politics moved into the media (Stephanopoulis), 3) Punditry that was more like professional wrestling than reasoned debate, 4) No mechanism to hold the press accountable for the mistakes they make, 5) Reporters were more like the elites they cover than the public they are supposed to represent, and 6) They were hypocritcal--for instance, they were quick to condemn politicians who go and speak before lobbying groups--while getting handsomely rewarded--while not holding themselves to that same standard. This was something Fallows referred to as "Buckraking."
I write this because this hypocrisy reared its head just this week. If you are following the Republican nomination fight, you know that Mitt Romney has gotten into a bit of hot water for not releasing his tax records. This past Tuesday, ABC News's Diane Sawyer was speaking to Jonathan Karl, who informed her that Romney had earned "374,000" in speaker fees alone. Here is what Sawyers said in response:
Sawyer: "Nearly $350,000, Jon?"
Karl: "374,000."
Sawyer: "Wow!"
If you go to the talent agency representing Diane Sawyer, you find that her appearance booking fee range to be "$30,001-$50,000." Now Romney claimed that he made his money in 8 speaking engagements, which means, on average, he made about $47,000 per speech. That falls within the $30k-$50k that Sawyer commands. For the same 8 speeches, she would make anywhere between $240k to $400,000k--possibly $25k more than what Romney made for his eight speeches.
Like Sawyer said: "Wow!"

Why Mitt Will Be The Nominee

2011-10-28T17:51:00.000-04:00

The press has made a big deal about the lack of Republican enthusiasm for Mitt Romney to the point that they have focused on the ABM (Anyone But Mitt) candidate--whether it was Michelle Bachmann back in the summer, "Wild" Rick Perry in September, the "non" candidate Chris Christie, and now the "Herminator" Herman Cain. Each candidate was evidence that Romney was done for in the race to be the nominee. But in each case, this "flavor" of the moment focus by the media has been to the benefit of Mitt. Here's why.

The Pew Research Center released their study "The Media Primary" looking at how the candidate have fared in the press and in the blogosphere. They found that the Republican candidates, with the exception of the barely mentioned Gingrich and Santorum, have received more negative coverage in the press and in the blogosphere, though Paul was the only one who had a net positive rating online (no mystery there). For the most part, Bachmann and Perry--the two frontrunners at different points of the study, earned more and more negative coverage the more they lead the pack, resulting in a destruction of their campaigns and a free fall back into the pack. The only candidate who had consistent ratings throughout was Romney--his positive and negative numbers changed very little throughout the entire study. And Obama, who enjoyed fawning treatment in 2008, has the highest negative numbers of any candidate in the race, though Republicans won't believe it.

And now is Cain's turn. In the Pew Study, Cain was emerging as the frontrunner of the moment. In an example of media priming, Cain started to earn positive treatment back in late August, which had the effect of positive public evaluations by October--repetitive media coverage has the effect of influencing public evaluations of the candidate. In this case, a chorus of positive coverage leads to Cain as the frontrunner. So just as he starts to break from the pack, the media throws on the brakes. This Howard Kurtz article is typical of the recent coverage of Cain ("'Tired' Cain Campaign Slows Down). In it, Kurtz documents the number of gaffes Cain has recently committed:

He claimed he was against abortion even in rape and incest, but then told Piers Morgan that it was up to the woman and her family to decide whether they want an abortion or not--"not some politician. Not some bureaucrat." He then walked back the statement when the criticisms flew as a statement made because he was tired;
He told Wolf Blitzer that he would consider exchanging Gitmo detainees for US soldiers held hostage. Again, it was a mistake the came from a lack of sleep;
He supported an electric fence to kill immigrants seeking a better life in the US--a joke, but then it wasn't;
His 9-9-9 plan turned into a 9-0-9 plan

Expect to see more just like this.

So back to Romney--this strategy of allowing other candidates to take the hits means that the media is spending no time tearing him down. All the negative coverage of Cain's weirdness, Perry's lack of message discipline, and Bachmann's campaign destruction is no time about his support for liberal causes in the past or the issues that he has flip flopped on recently. It means he goes into the start of the primaries relatively unscathed. Not too stupid.

Angry White Man Need Not Apply

2011-10-20T19:05:00.000-04:00

It is a common tactic during an election to try to make your opponent look unstable or "angry", the suggestion being that to be president, you must not only be sane (see the book "Night at Camp David") but also level-headed (see the movie "Fail Safe"). Thus in the 2000 Republican Primary and again in 2008, there was a common suggestion that John McCain was not fit for office because his torture while held as a POW during the Vietnam War had left him mentally unbalanced.

We're seeing the same kind of thing today, only directed at Rick Perry. This NYT article caught my eye--it is a focus on the "bad blood" between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry that dates back to the time when both were governors. If you watched the debate from Tuesday night, you saw up close how little the two men liked one another, which explains why CNN decided to place both of them next to each other on the stage.

So Romney was changing planes the other day, and his "aides" were asked to comment about Perry's aggressive approach to the debate. Here is the money quote:

But other aides public accused the Texas governor of acting like a bully at the debate. "I don't think road rage is a quality people are looking for in their next president..."

Get it. Road rage activates a particular image in the minds of the audience that reads or hears it--we have all experienced road rage--the irrational waving of fists, the profanity, and perhaps the vehicle riding up on your bumper or even swerving at you. Irrational. And that is exactly why the term was used.

Get ready for more just like it in an effort to paint Perry as a crazy, ill-tempered jerk.

Media Irresponsibility

2011-07-13T11:25:00.001-04:00

It is interesting the lynch mob mentality created by the media in response to the jury ruling in the Casey Anthony trial--the woman acquitted for killing her daughter Caylee. The MSM had framed the story in a way that made it impossible for the public not in the courtroom to see her as anything but guilty--an immature/selfish/out of control mother, a dysfunctional familial relationship, and the hint that the father of the child was her brother. Further there were stories about an incompetent defense attorney, non-credible defense witnesses, and a "slam dunk" prosecution strategy. So when the jurors returned a "not guilty" verdict, the public blew up.

The climate has become so volatile that the judge has sealed the name of the jurors, refusing to allow the media to report who these 12 people are. But the press--seeing an opportunity to cozy up to a public that has loathed them for the past two decades--is doing what it can to reveal the identities of the jurors. For instance, there is this CBS story: The story is about Juror 12, who has become so fearful for her life that she has left her job and fled town. Here is what CBS wrote: "Juror No. 12, a red-haired woman in her 60s, told the court she worked at a Publix Grocery when she was questioned as a potential juror." Publix is a large grocery chain in the Southern US. If you are a regular shopper at this grocery, it won't be hard to figure out who this person is, in particular now that she is no longer showing up for work. CBS could have simply reported: "Juror No. 12, a red-haired woman in her 60s..." There was no reason to identify her place of employment other than helping the viewing public figure out the identity of a juror while also not violating the judge's ruling.

Trump the Chump

2011-04-27T20:10:00.002-04:00

The President decided--two years into his presidency--to releasehis official birth certificate as a way to quell the "birther" debate over whether Obama is a "real" American. This on a day when Obama shook up his national security staff, which of the two got the most coverage? ABC News ran a story, featuring George Stephanopoulis, that was obviously spoon fed from the White House. The story, featuring Senior Administration Officials who tried to talk Obama out of releasing his official birth certificate, but he disregarded their advice and put the issue to rest (yeah right).

It seemed odd at first as to why Obama even bothered. Clearly this is not going to put this issue to rest. The next round of recriminations will focus on whether the copy is authentic and/or whether Obama coerced Hawaiian officials to doctor a fake certificate. Remember these accusations are from the same group of people convinced today that Bill and Hillary Clinton murdered Bill's White House counselor.

So why bother? I think Obama and his campaign advisers are engaging in a bit of 2012 gamesmanship--perhaps by elevating this issue they elevate Donald Trump as a serious contender AND they elevate an issue that most Americans believe is nutty. If Obama can help Donald into the Republican Primaries, where Trump can use his bags of money and media attention to contend, then Obama can hopefully drain the funds of the eventual nominee to nothing just to win the primary. Think of what happened to Bob Dole in 1996--by the time the nomination was secured, Dole was so broke that he could not afford advertising to respond to the tsunami of ads coming from the Clinton/Gore campaign team and their allies among affiliated groups. The sum: A trouncing of Dole in the 1996 election.

And Trump, the Chump, has zero chance of doing anything other than inflating his own sense of importance. Just like Ross Perot, Trump will receive kid glove attention among the mainstream media before the primaries begin, but once the 2012 race takes off, the media will begin to pick him apart just like they did with Perot--remember, he dropped out of the race in the summer of 1992 because the media scrutiny got too intense (and because George H.W. Bush was planning on sabotaging his daughter's wedding). And Trump has a lot of dirt to offer. To get a taste of what is to come, take a look at the recent Daily Beast profile by Howard Kurtz. What I like best of the profile, and what will make for a great ad, is this comment by Trump regarding the multiple bankruptcies he has filed: "I do play with the bankruptcy laws--they're very good for me as a way of cutting debt."

Wow! Can you say tin ear? Or perhaps the same people who produced this ad against Arlen Specter are already on it!

You Can Say That Again

2011-04-20T20:32:00.001-04:00

On today's "Talk of the Nation" on NPR, conservative Ralph Reed, former boy wonder of the evangelical movement in the US and now head of the "Faith and Freedom Coalition" was enthusiastic about the prospects of Donald Trump running for the Republican nomination--which should show you the state of the conservative movement. But here is the money quote from Reed about Trump. Host Neil Conan asks Reed if he could support Trump, Reed answers:

Well, I'm - because of my Faith and Freedom Coalition hat I'm unlikely to endorse pre-nominations or support pre-nomination. But I will say this. I'm intrigued by Donald Trump. He took a look at this in 2000. I think this is a much more serious look. I'm very pleased, and I think a lot of other social conservatives in the party are pleased that he is pro-life and pro-family and pro-marriage.

Of course he is pro-marriage. He has been married three times. What was disappointing is Conan did not pounce on the statement, instead a caller had to ask the question Conan wouldn't.

But apparently "The Donald's" sins have been absolved because he went on the Christian Broadcasting Network and did an interview, explaining that his three failed marriages is precisely "what this country needs." How so? He was a crappy husband and a crappy father because he "worked all the time." And this: "I'm here, I'm there. I'm home at 10 o'clock in the evening. It's not an easy, traditional thing for a woman but that's what the country needs. It needs somebody that really works and that knows what they're doing."

Totally eyes wide shut.

New York Times Bullshit

2011-02-03T16:46:00.000-05:00

So where is the objectivity in this? Where is the sense?

Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times writes this article about the selection of the 2012 of the Democratic National Convention, which will be held in North Carolina this go round. The White House got to make the final decision as the head of the Party, and chose North Carolina (vs Cleveland, Minneapolis, and St. Louis) as a signal that the Party believes NC is a place where Democrats can make in-roads. And Zeleny makes this point in the second paragraph:

The selection was the White House’s first major strategic decision of the presidential race, and displayed the desire of Democrats to retain some of the states they carried in 2008 for the first time in a generation.

They also note that St. Louis did not get selected because:

The state has slipped out of the Democratic Party's reach in recent presidential elections and it is not expected to be among the top tier of places where Mr. Obama will compete in 2012.

Now the inexplicable happens. Based on "party officials familiar with the selection process," Senator Claire McCaskill--a Democrat representing MO. in the Senate--was privately telling the White House that she did not want the Convention held in MO because "her re-election would be complicated if the convention were held in St. Louis."

What?

Again, what???

Zeleny does not explain precisely how this would complicate her re-election bid. It seems readily apparent that the "party officials" speaking on anonymity were more likely Republican Party officials and not Democrats, because there is no angle to this story where McCaskill is helped by losing the Convention, nor is the administration helped by putting an important ally in danger by going public with such an awful story.

So Mr. Zeleny--who are these sources? Speak up. Or at least explain why McCaskill is helped by pushing the administration to skip her State in 2012.

Complicity

2011-01-09T16:13:00.000-05:00

The "New York Times" had a good expose yesterday on law schools in the United States and how "corrupt" many of them have become--fudging statistics on post-graduate employment, for example, to create a higher percentage of graduates in the job market than what really exists. The "Times" characterized their fudging of numbers in terms of "Enron-like" manipulation, referring to the defunct energy company that had cooked its books to the point of leading hundreds of thousands of individuals to bankruptcy.

The "Times" also was critical of the ratings system in "US News & World Report," which knowingly publishes these fudged figures on the best and the worst law schools--ratings, by the way, that are used by thousands of individuals every year to determine where they want to spend their hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition. Here is the part of the story that I liked the best, and most applicable to this blog:

And what about U.S. News? The editors could, but won’t unilaterally demand better data from law schools. “Do we have the power to do that? Yes, I think we do,” said Robert Morse, who oversees the law school rankings. “But we’d have to create a whole new definition of ‘employed,’ and it would be awkward if U.S. News imposed that definition by itself. It would be preferable if the A.B.A. took a leadership role in this.”

So much for our media--the "watchdog" meant to protect our interests.

The Network Schadenfreude

2010-12-28T11:53:00.001-05:00

It appears that the networks are exacting a good bit of schadenfreude against the Fox Network for ruthlessly bilking Gabe Okoye and his girlfriend Brittany Mayti--contestants on the game show "Million Dollar Money Drop"--who lost $800,000 on a question they answered correctly. The couple has appeared on the morning news shows explaining how they would use the money to pay for their upcoming nuptials. The show even offered to bring the couple back--in essence--giving them a redo to make amends and quell what has become a public relations disaster. The couple has demurred, claiming they aren't sure they could withstand the pressure.

But what this episode has demonstrated to all of us is the power of media framing--by highlighting certain facts while downplaying others. In this case, highlighting the aggrieved couple while downplaying other facts that casts a doubt on whether they should really be aggrieved.

The way the show works is as follows: "Each team...is given a million dollars at the start of the...game. They answer seven questions, each time deciding how much they want to wager on three possible answers. Whatever they wager on the right answer is what they get to keep. Wager nothing on the right answer and they're out of the game."

So back to the controversial episode. The couple was asked a question about what came first. they had $880k, where they put $80k on the Sony Walkman and $800k on Post-it notes. The show said the Walkman was first, which technically is not the right answer because the 3M, the company that makes Post-it notes, had sold them a year earlier than the Walkman, only under a different name. Here is where most newscasts end their story. In reality, they still kept playing, only with $80k and not $800k. The next question they came to, they lost it all. So let's pick it up here from the game's host, Kevin Pollak (what he is doing hosting game shows is beyond me):

"They never had a chance to win that money. Ever. No matter what. They got the last question wrong. None of the clips show the last question."

Which is right. Had the screw up not happened, they would have taken their $800k and blown it on the next answer, coming out of it with less than they have now--at least now they have an invitation to return and try again.

Why The Times Is Wrong

2010-10-22T17:01:00.000-04:00

The New York Times has an editorial--one of many editorials--urging the Supreme Court to allow televisions to broadcast live from the Court. This is a popular position, and one the Congress has been pushing for years. Leading the charge has been Senator Arlen Specter (D. PA), who has made this a key issue for years, asking potential Supreme Court nominees if they would support bringing television to the Supreme Court. Currently. Specter has a resolution (S.Res.339) expressing the "sense of the Senate in support of permitting the televising of Supreme Court proceedings." And the Times editorial says that "Senator Specter was right when he argued that the rights of all American would be 'substantially enhanced' if we could watch the court...."

To bolster the point about opening the Court, the Times editorial writes: "Many state appellate courts have been televising oral arguments for years. The new Supreme Court of the UK does so, to high praise in Britain." These are false equivalencies. First, the media system in the UK is not the media system in the US. The extensive public broadcasting system in UK and Europe consistently presents politics in a different way than the commercial system in the US--here in the US, politics is pitched as a game or battle between "players", in a frame that has been known to increase public cynicism. The way in which our media covers Congress and the Presidency has led, in part, to the decline in trust in those two institutions. As for the state appellate courts, they are not the Supreme Court. They are not likely to attract the attention that the Supreme Court will. Furthermore, the evidence on television coverage of state courts shows that it does nothing to enhance public understanding of what the courts do--the coverage trends to the coverage of other issues--void of context and focused on those cases that are most violent or unusual. And what gets covered is the opening arguments and closing arguments. The Times doesn't mention that.

So there is the argument in the abstract that you should have more transparency in the representative institutions to make sure democracy functions like it should. But in reality, television coverage of our representative institutions has actually hurt democracy. The Supreme Court knows this. The Times should as well.

Soft News

2010-09-12T15:50:00.000-04:00

For anyone who studies the American media system or for anyone who consumes it, you know all to well that the content is full of information designed to entertain us or overload our senses--or in academic terms--there is just too much soft news in our media.

Soft news, according to leading academics, is news that contains sensational story presentation, lots of dramatics, human interest themes, crime and violence, and is generally devoid of content that makes us capable of either keeping those who exercise power accountable or making selections about who best represents our interests. Soft news has been on the rise since the early 1970s as our media system has lurched towards more and more profits. Since soft news is easy to produce (it doesn't require analysis or context), it can be done with minimal staff and resources.

Television is by far the greatest user of soft news given what can done audio-visually--the display of crime while accompanying the story with ominous musical tones--it is not alone in allowing more soft news in. For instance, in a study conducted by Thomas Patterson ten years ago, he found that over a 20 year period, print news had included substantially more and more soft news stories--gossip, crime, etc.--than at any point in the past.

To give you a sense of how prevalent soft news is, the Associated Press (AP) more or less demands it of the freelancers looking to get published. For example, the AP Minnesota tells its potential contributors that it wants:

Train wrecks, airplane crashes, fatal auto accidents, and unusual deaths;
Riots, demonstrations, strikes;
Unusual bank robberies (?);
Human interest stories. The odd, the offbeat, the heart-warming.

At a time when the news industry is struggling, there focus should be on less soft news and not more. As Patterson argued, soft news is responsible in part for the decline in the audience for the MSM. And yet, in the face of the evidence to the contrary, the news industry seems compelled to continue giving us more.

Much Ado About Nothing

2010-07-29T12:14:00.001-04:00

I got this link from mediabistro, which sends me news from the day. It is a great service. The link hyped another round of sparring between the White House and Rupert Murdoch--sparring which began in Obama's first year over whether Fox News was a mainstream news network or a partisan appendage to the Republican Party. This link was to a Politico piece titled: "Rupert Murdoch to White House: No Free News." The first paragraph reads:

"It looks like Rupert Murdoch has finally figured out a way to make the White House pay--literally. The Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has jacked up the rate it charges the administration's news clipping service a jaw-dropping $600,000 per year--and is steering the White House towards a direct deal with News Corp., according to an administration official."

You see, the White House--regarding of occupant--has a digest of the daily newspapers delivered to it each day to try to gain a sense of what has happened over night and what sorts of things will be driving the daily news agenda, and whether the White House needs to get on top of it. It used to be that staffers did this for the administration, but paying an executive branch officer to read newspapers ended up being more expensive than simply contracting out to news aggregating service. Currently the White House contracts with a Virginia service known as "Bulletin News." It pays the company around $100,000 (according to the story) for the service. NewsCorp has decided to charge services like Bulletin News more for access to the Wall Street Journal which the Bulletin News will pass off to its subscribers, which includes the White House. Now NewsCorp has its own service known as Factiva, which it is working with the White House to win its business.

So what was billed as an ideological battle between the Democratic White House and the conservative Murdoch is really all about business. And to top it off, the figures cited don't seem to be correct. Further, the White House could still use the Bulletin News sans Wall Street Journal, and instead subscribe to the paper and read it daily on their own.

Much ado about nothing.

Mr. Stone

2010-06-24T11:35:00.001-04:00

The Portland, Oregon Police Department has the full, redacted, report regarding the allegations of sexual assault a licensed massage therapist made against former VP Al Gore (the .pdf's are here and here). The allegations involve Gore's 2006 stay at a post Oregon hotel while on his global climate change tour. Gore, who allegedly registered at the hotel as "Mr. Stone" asked the hotel to send a masseuse to his room, to which "Jane Doe" got the call. From there the 73 page report documents an inappropriate "hug" when she walked into the room, an insistence that she massage his "privates", and her being tricked into his bedroom under the ruse of looking at his "Ipod."

So far the MSM is not biting on the story due to the numerous problems:

The woman refused to come and talk to the police in 2006, and waiting until 2009 to file the report;
There are numerous problems with the story--chief among them are the several opportunities to leave the hotel room. For instance, she told the police that when she tried to leave, Gore blocked the door, pressed her close, "stuck his tongue" down her throat, and reached under her blouse. But then he retreated to the bedroom and somehow convinced her to come into the room and sit on the bedside, all by tricking her to look at his Ipod;
The language she uses in the report seems coached or rehearsed. She refers to Gore as a sex-crazed "poodle" (?) and a "predator" among other terms that seem out of place in normal conversation, let alone conversation involving a traumatized sexual assault victim.
The Police Department are not following up on the allegations.
The coup de grace: She offered to sell the story to the National Enquirer for $1 million.

The only thing that gives the story legs is it comes so close the announcement that the Gore's are splitting up. And that there is a blogosphere, which will have a field day with the story.

Bridging the Divide

2010-06-08T22:06:00.000-04:00

There is an interesting article in the May/June issue of The Columbia Journalism Review that wonders why political scientists and political beat reporters don't seem to speak with one another? It begins with a sleight by Mark Ambinder's early review of the 2008 campaign book Game Change Ambinder apparently did not think that political scientists would like the book because it portrays politics "as it actually is" rather than in the numbers and theories preferred by political scientists. The author of the article, Greg Marx, goes on to describe the nature of the divide and some attempts at bridging it--by using the Internet and blogs written by political scientists for an audience of journalists and the general public. Though I am not mentioned (!), I was able to use this blog back in January 2006 to draw in reporters interested about the signing statement and the unitary executive, so I know just how useful the Internet has been to accomplish this very purpose.

There are a couple of things I would add to Marx's article not mentioned or understood in his analysis. First, this view that political science is all about numbers or theories could only be made by someone who has not dipped their toe into the research by political scientists in the last decade. Almost 10 years ago, there was a fierce debate, if not movement, that rebelled against the domination of numbers in our discipline to the detriment of qualitative research--interviews, case studies, etc. This movement lead to a new flagship journal--Perspectives on Politics--that seeks to highlight qualitative research over quantitative research/formal modeling. Furthermore there are far more journals that focus on particular aspects of political science, many with the mission to attract a readership beyond just those teaching at a university. For instance, in my research area--the US Presidency--there are three journals that focus in total or in part on the presidency--"Presidential Studies Quarterly" (the flagship), "White House Studies," and "Congress and the Presidency." These three allow more researchers the ability to get their research published, which has been a huge bonus given that prior to the offerings, the only thing that got published were quantitative pieces and those that agreed with the Neustadt hegemony. Furthermore, other premier journals made a deliberate attempt at attracting journalists as regular readers--"Political Science Quarterly," "Foreign Policy," and "Foreign Affairs" are a few that leap mind.

As to the relationship between journalists and political scientists--In addition to those mentioned in Marx's article as problems separating the two, I offer the following, mostly from personal experience:

First, journalists often are unwilling to look beyond the top tier institutions for comments or sources. When we do get attention, it usually comes from the usual suspects--Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Michigan to name just a few. This leaves a lot of us doing interesting research in the wilderness. And given how important attention from the press can be to our careers, reporters might find that we are more willing to spend time breaking apart complex ideals or walking a reporter through a process. Or we may have ideals not found at Harvard or Princeton. My own research on the signing statement for instance. Prior to the stellar rise of the signing statement in the Bush attention and the attention it received, there were only two of us doing any work on it at all--me, at Miami University, and Phillip Cooper at Portland State University. But even with this example, when the attention to the signing statement by everyone went white hot, journalists often turned to the usual suspects of political scientists for quotes about their significance--to people who had never even heard of the device prior to their use, thus in the end doing their readers a tremendous disservice because some of those quotes were inaccurate or just wrong.

Second, political scientists may be weary of speaking to journalists because of a lack of attribution after the interview. I know of a couple of instances where a political scientist spent a great deal of time sharing data and time with a reporter only to find their name written out of the final piece. I can also say from particular experience in 2006--where for a short period of time I spoke with dozens of reporters about the signing statement--often times for hours at a time--only to find when the final piece went to print or air I was nowhere to be found. It would be blasphemous for us to use information that came from elsewhere without attribution, thus we expect the same from other professions. I am sorry to say that it isn't always that way. That is not to say that all journalists behaved this way. In fact, I found some who went way beyond the pale to give me a lot of attention even after the attention subsided (Dan Froomkin, for example). But for some of us, once bitten...as the old saying goes.

Third, also from personal experience, reporters come to us with narrative already set in stone and with a script we're expected to read from--"All I need from you is a quote saying..."--is what I mean. Who wants that, particularly when you disagree with the statement and that narrative? This has happened to me on a number of occasions where I simply decline the offer to participate in the story. There is also a big negative to this because once you refuse to participate generally means you refuse to participate forever with that particular reporter since they will move on to someone else. It happens.

So I appreciate what Marx has written, in particular in a forum likely to be read by reporters. It is my hope that it actually helps in bringing political scientists of all stripes and at all locations closer with reporters covering politics, both domestic and international.

Leaving It To The Professionals

2010-05-17T22:17:00.002-04:00

It is never clearer to me the value of skilled public relations professionals than when a controversy has erupted. When their is a controversy or a crisis, it is important NOT to speak to the media unless you know how to speak to the media. A couple of cases--one national/international and one local gone national brings this truth home.

The first involves the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with the blown up oil rig owned by British Petroleum that continues to spew oil. This is clearly a crisis that should be handled by the PR folks working for BP. Yet the CEO for BP continues to feel the need to get his side of the story to the media, only making the problem worse and himself sound callous. Here is what Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, had to say to the Guardian:

The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.

That is true. But the daily pictures of dead fish, oil covered water fowl, and the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of people placed in peril, not to mention the frame that has been established demonstrating BP's negligence in dealing with this problem pre and post-disaster drowns out this obvious--and stupid--fact.

The second controversy--and one hitting closer to home--involves the idiotic and depraved behavior demonstrated by two sororities on my campus at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The first, Pi Beta Phi had a totally out of control formal where they trashed a recital hall, were caught fornicating inside and outside the hall, and costing untold damages to a facility owned by a Miami grad who has informed Miami that their business in any form is no longer welcome. The second sorority--and more shocking--involved the Alpha Xi Delta sorority, who held a formal at the National Underground Railroad Museum in Cincinnati--a museum that honors Cincinnati's special place as the gateway to freedom for slaves fleeing the South. This formal was held in March, and yet somehow Miami kept the lid on it until last week, when the President of Miami University released a public letter of apology(.pdf) to the Freedom Center (I am sure a very generous financial contribution was also made to insure the Museum's cooperation in keeping the episode hush until such time as MU decided to go public with it--my speculation only). Just to give you a feel for the level of debauchery on display is this description (.pdf) of a student who was attempting to pee on a slave artifact on display at the Museum:

I observed one young man duck under the stanchions around the slave pen. In catching up with him, I found him about to relieve himself on the corner of this priceless and sanctified artifact.

But that is the dates. What about (.pdf) the sorority women?

The buses arrived at 6:40 p.m., at which point everyone unloaded to come into the Freedom Center. There was one young woman who was so inebriated that she was unable to stand up and even hold herself in a sitting position. Friends of hers held her up as she vomited into a trash bag...

6:40 p.m. And apparently this particular sorority has already been banned from holding their parties at other locations.

So totally inexcusable behavior, and for Miami's part, there has been no offer to defend or qualify the incident as something that shouldn't cast a pall on the whole campus, as was my example above of the BP CEO: "Sure this is two sororities, but there are hundreds of student groups on the campus--it is a big campus." Nothing like that. No, instead the defense has come from one alumnus who was a member of one of the sororities. She would have done better in keeping her mouth shut. Here is what Katey Clark, a "2006 Miami graduate and Alpha Xi Delta member" (the group who held the formal at the Freedom Center). Because her defense was so tone deaf, the reporter was generous in quoting her. And here are the things she said:

"I don't think their actions were responsible at all (good). But they're (the media) making it sound like they burned the place down...with the hype it's getting. This has been going on for years now. I just didn't appreciate how these two sororities were targeted. They acted like these students were criminals." To this the reporter adds: "Someone left a pile of human feces outside Lake Lyndsay Lodge at the Pi Beta Phi formal and a male was stopped short of urinating on the historic slave pen at the National Underground Railroad Museum during Alpha Xi Delta's event."

Katey: "They do wonderful things all the time" regarding to their time and money they donate to charity. Then Katey blows it when the reporter adds that she "read the letters from the businesses and was surprised they did not anticipate the behavior with so many college students coming to the events." Translated: It's the businesses fault that students shit on the floor and fornicated in the bathrooms.

But it doesn't end there. No, Katey is allowed to make matters worst by attempting to defend indefensible actions:

"Clearly lessons are to be learned here from everyone involved, but I truly hope it doesn't affect the way that [MU] Greek system is looked at...My colleagues (you have to love that) and I who participated in Greek life at Miami acted very similar to to the actions in the letter and are now lawyers, doctors, business owners, work for the U.S. government...I am confident most all of them who will spend their college years combining hard work and too many $1 drafts on a Tuesday night will be successful individuals in the real world. They will join the thousands and thousands before them who got too drunk at a formal."

So truly some things are better left unsaid, or left to people who know how to speak to the media. I can understand the frustration of someone involved in a controversy or close to the controversy feeling the need to temper the media's love for scandal and controversy, but these are battles you will never win. There is no way to make the controversy less than what it is if you are not skilled in speaking to the press.

These two controversies are case studies in just how true that is.

Manufacturing the News

2010-05-05T22:28:00.004-04:00

Howard Kurtz writes in today's "Washington Post" of a disturbing battle in Washington DC between two local television stations--the ABC affiliate WJLA and the NBC affiliate WRC--over who got to cover the heartwarming story of a Marine surprising his Washington Redskin Cheerleader wife as he returned from Afghanistan without her knowledge. You've seen these kind of stories a million times--something that is typical for local television--but what you haven't seen is perhaps how these stories often end up on local television. It is this behind the scenes machinations that is the focus of Kurtz's story. I think Kurtz should have added an extra point to his focus, which I will get to below. But first, the facts.

Lt. Denver Edick had done a tour in Iraq and was scheduled to return when he agreed to an extra tour in Afghanistan. He wanted to stay longer, but military rules ordered him home, which is how the television stations got involved.

Edick's wife--Kristin--had just earned a spot as a Washington Redskins cheerleader. The two lived in North Carolina, so Lt. Edick contacted the local ABC affiliate where he lived to arrange the reunion, but since Mrs. Edick was now in DC, they contacted WJLA, offering the story in exchange for the video to show to their audience back home in North Carolina. Great. Now something so simple turns dastardly.

WJLA contacts the Redskins for permission to stage the reunion while Mrs. Edick was working out with her team, as you can see by this video. Problem is that the Redskins have a contract with with WRC, the NBC affiliate, thus pitched the story to them, which of course they jumped at. To further rub their nose in it, they barred ABC from gaining access to the stadium to talk to the two love birds, and they told Mrs. Edick that if she dare speak to WJLA, she was off the team! And to add insult to injury:

"WRC made the footage available to the Asheville station the next day but with one key condition: that the tape not be fed back to WJLA."

For being a media critic, Kurtz sometimes gets too cute for his own good. The piece is filled with football references. For instance, the line that followed the quote right above is: "This, of course, kept its Washington rival off the playing field." Or in the opening: "...the network that pitched the idea, wound up barred from FedEx Field, while the team handed the ball to the NBC station in town..."

In the end, the Redskins blamed overzealous individuals in their PR department for the mix up.

But what the story clearly illuminated--if you haven't thought of it before--is just how cutthroat and mean-spirited local television is. Something akin to the Pulitzer-Hearst newspaper wars, but on an entirely different level.

Now, what is missing from the story? And this is what is disappointing given Kurtz's eye for media foibles. Isn't the nature of journalism, when done in a perfect environment, to uncover information that gives all of us a better understanding of each other? Of our country? Of our politics? And isn't the Rosetta Stone of journalism objectivity? To be neutral in all things and allow the events to play themselves as they normally would unimpeded by the journalist? So why couldn't Kurtz spend part of the time focusing on the problems/dangers of manufacturing the news? None of the reporters stumbled upon this event happening, but instead they orchestrated it a priori. For me, the whole thing makes me sick. And so it should to you.

It Ain't Fair

2010-05-04T19:16:00.000-04:00

I have two books, a PhD, teach on both the presidency and the media, and idiots like that Bieber kid gets into the White House Correspondents Dinner. There is no Justice

Meet the Yuck

2010-05-03T13:40:00.000-04:00

You want some insight into just how exclusive a club the Republican Party has become, then look no further than Congressman Mike Pence (R. IN) and his stint on yesterday's "Meet the Press."

But before that, for all of the talk of the "shrinking newshole," "Meet the Press" dedicated the last 10 minutes not to the oil spill, not to the midterm elections, not to health care, but instead to their new hi-tech studio, with a look back at how the studio has changed in the 60 years since it has been broadcasting. Totally worthless and flying in the face of crocodile tears about a shrinking newshole.

But on to the theme. The last part of the show--the roundtable (common to every Sunday show now)--had a stacked guest list of Republican congresspersons and Democratic lightweights and outsiders. For the Republicans, it was Senator Lamar Alexander (TN) and Representative Mike Pence (IN), and for the Democrats, it was Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico and Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, who actually is decent but not an insider. To the point of how much a lightweight the two Democrats were, Mike Pence offered up an easy softball that the Democrats should have seized upon. Here is Richardson after a conversation about Governor Crist's switch from Republican to Independent:

Well, I think the case is, with the exception of our two Republican guests who I know are moderate, this is a Republican Party that is basically driving moderates like Charlie Crist out of the party. I mean, these--this was like an ideological litmus test, and there is a dramatic increase in independent voters throughout the country. I think as an outsider, the true outsider in this race, Governor Crist, has a chance. But I want to say that we have some very strong Democratic candidates, and I believe that the entrance of Governor Crist has helped candidates like Congressman Meech--Meek, who has been very active, criss-crossing the state. But he certainly, Governor Crist, has, has turned the tables around in Florida. It's a wide open race.

Context: Governor Crist has decided--like Senator Specter--to forgo a primary race and run instead in the general election as an Independent because the primary has been infused by ideological purists who are there to root out and run out any Republican who dare compromise with Democrats on anything. So why miss the opportunity provided by Pence. Here is Pence in response:

Well, David, I'm still trying to recover being called a moderate by Governor Richardson. You know, I'm a, I'm a conservative."

And instead of jumping on it, Governor Richardson said this: "I was trying to nice to you."

Why didn't he take the opening and frame Pence as an ideologue who is bent on driving the Republican Party as far Right as possible? Why not use his comment to paint the entire group of Republicans with this brush, and instead making Crist's choice the sensible one? The answer of course is that the two Democrats don't have the rhetorical fire in their guts. If MTP was going to pick outsiders, why not instead invite Carville on? I am sure he would not passed on the opportunity.

Junk Reporting

2010-04-12T13:44:00.000-04:00

Andrew Ferguson has penned a column ostensibly to inform his readers about the regulatory process, but in reality to attempt to score political points by deliberately misinforming them.

His article starts by covering the regulatory process and the role of the president--arguably one of the more boring areas to write about but one of the most important since it affects nearly every aspect of our lives.

Back at the start of Obama's presidency in 2009, he rescinded Bush's Executive Order 13,422 and reinstated Clinton's Executive Order 12,866. 12,866 had been established in 1993, overturning two Reagan era orders and enhancing the president's ability to influence the regulatory process. When it was passed in 1993, conservatives howled at the notion that it incorporated qualitative, as well as quantitative variables into the cost-benefit process required when considering new rules (if the rule cannot make the case that its benefits outweigh the costs, then it doesn't go forward. The person who gets to make that decision is the Director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, who resides inside the Office of Management and Budget). By employing qualitative standards, Clinton could incorporate more evidence to allow for regulating areas of social significance--ergonomics, for example--which often never got considered because it was hard to make the case that the costs of new chairs, keyboards that put less strain on wrists, etc. outweighed the benefits because it was hard to quantify the stresses to the back, wrists, eyes, and so forth.

Yet when Bush came to office he kept the order, largely because it had given the president greater influence over the entire executive branch--including the independent regulatory agencies and commissions. Bush simply ordered OIRA to drop the qualitative measures. He only changed the order because he lost control of the Congress following the 2006 midterm election. His new order, for the first time, placed White House minders inside the regulatory agencies--thus oversight would no longer be abstract but real.

In the article, Ferguson claims Obama is doing something entirely different with the order because he is relying upon a type of social science he calls behavioral economics that is produces in such works as Freakanomics and Nudge. He focuses upon Nudge because it was co-written by Cass Sunstein, the person who heads up the OIRA--the president's muscle inside the Executive Branch--and thus spends the entire article attacking behavioral economics as little more than pseudo-science, similar to astrology or palm reading. In reality, if you pull the screen back, what this science is really advancing, according to Ferguson, is Big Government.

It is his attack on the science that is so depressing because it plays upon his ignorance, and the ignorance of his readers, about the process and value of the social sciences. He first argues that the science is flawed because it relies on something called experimental design, whereby you randomly select a study group and then conduct a series of experiments to see how they react. Based on that you try to generalize your findings to the population in general. Ferguson argues that this is flawed because the control group is not anything like the general population:

The vast majority come from behavioral experiments that are completely artificial in their construction. Most take place in labs at elite universities, where graduate students and professors pay undergraduates a pittance to sit for varying periods of time and fill out questionnaires of varying length. Sometimes the subjects are asked to interact while the grad students watch them, other times the questionnaires alone suffice to produce the data. “Behavioral economics,” Thaler likes to say, “is the study of humans in markets.” Actually, it’s the study of college kids in psych labs.

This may be true for some, but in reality most experimental designs try to elicit findings from diverse populations, and not just college students at elite universities--which plays right into the misconception that many Americans have about the research we do. I wonder if Mr. Ferguson would say the same thing about data gathered by the marketing firms employed by the "Weekly Standard" to better maximize its audience share? In large part those studies come from focus groups, where the population is not paid all that well and in some instances are not all that diverse.

The next problem I have with his piece is his argument that Behavioral Economics draws much of its generalizations from one article:

An example: In his recent OMB report, Sunstein insists that regulators take account of a cognitive bias called “probability neglect” in finding ways to impose their soft paternalism. Probability neglect is defined like this: “When emotions are strongly felt, people may focus on the outcome and not on the probability that it will occur.” Which is to say, when you really want something you tend to be unrealistic about your chances of getting it. Surely that’s true for all of us sometimes, and always true for some of us. But is it a universal pattern of behavior, one reliable enough to enshrine in a one-size-fits-all government regulation?

Who knows? Behavioral economists trace their detailed understanding of probability neglect to a study from 2001. In three separate experiments, a pair of graduate students from the University of Chicago Business School asked undergraduates from Chicago and Rice University to complete questionnaires. The 40 students from Rice, in Texas, were asked whether they would prefer to receive $50 in cash or “the opportunity to meet and kiss your favorite movie star.” The methodological details aren’t worth describing here—we can stipulate that the experiments were conducted with the utmost rigor and elegance. What’s notable is that the experiments were thereafter assumed by social scientists to have established “probability neglect” as a consistent principle guiding human behavior in the marketplace. All thanks to 40 kids from Texas, filling out a form in 2001.

This is nonsense. Social sciences, while sometimes highlighting interesting finds from one article, does not publish findings nor act on findings that comes from a single, solitary article. It may be very likely that Ferguson is reading something in the popular presses where the academics refer to a single article because of its interesting findings, but in the end, I am sure if he were to review any of the studies written in this field he would find that none use only one source as the basis for its findings.

As an aside, it is also funny that Ferguson criticizes the Behavioral crowd for using catch phrases, yet in his own piece it is filled with politically loaded catch phrases like "soft paternalism" or "New Kind of Democrat".

In the end, Ferguson takes a subject that deserves a lot of scrutiny--how regulations gets made--and instead throws it aside for something that is nothing more than a political screed. And coming from "The Weekly Standard," entirely predictable.

How Good Is A Shield Law?

2010-03-17T13:44:00.002-04:00

I got this story from Greg Korte at the Cincinnati Enquirer via his Tweet posting today. Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Shirley Strickland is holding a reporter from the "Cleveland Plain Dealer" in contempt of court for failing to show up to court and answer for who is source was in leaking a psychiatrist's report on serial killer Anthony Sowell, who was recently found with as many as 11 dead women buried in and around his home. The report is what sprung Sowell from prison for attempted rape, and concluded that he was not likely to attack any women once released. Sowell has a long history on incarceration for crimes of a sexual nature, and thus there is a glaring spotlight on the justice system that allowed for his release and subsequent murder spree.

Strickland sent a Cuyahoga County Sheriff's deputy down to the "Plain Dealer" to arrest the reporter--Gabriel Baird--but he was not in the office. An interesting aspect about this action--the "Plain Dealer" is not the only media to report on the leaked document--a local news station also reported on it and included it on its website.

This action by the judge is also interesting given that Ohio has a fairly comprehensive shield law protecting a reporter and her sources. According to this site, Ohio has one of the stronger shield law protections in the country, with protections from a court order, among other things, to reveal a reporter's sources "regardless" of who is requesting it. Furthermore, Ohio sits in the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals jurisdiction, and the 6th Circuit has recognized a constitutional right (something the US Supreme Court has not) to protect a reporter's sources.

It may be that the judge's actions were designed as a "shot across the bow" to prevent future leaks of this kind, given how little protection she seems to have in the law.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to keep an eye on, particularly if the Judge isn't just posturing and is serious about throwing this reporter in jail. You may have read Mark Bowden's 2004 "Columbia Journalism Review" piece where he challenged a court order for information in Pennsylvania, citing Pennsylvania's comprehensive shield law that ended up going against him, thus weakening the protections of the shield law. It is not out of the blue that something similar could happen here.

2010-03-16T14:18:00.002-04:00

For those who love C-SPAN, the network has given you one more reason to love them. The network has posted all of its video material online for the taking, which is terrific material for anyone who researches or teaches American Politics. Kudos to C-SPAN!

Citizen Kane Lives

2010-03-11T18:39:00.000-05:00

You have heard the stories--probably apocryphal--of how William Randolph Hearst got the US into the Spanish-American War by demanding from his skeptical photographer in Cuba, "You supply the pictures and I will supply the war!"

One of the lectures in my media and politics class involves the way that powerful owners interfere with the news production or news delivery process as a form of bias. While I use the Hearst case as an example, one of the problems is that it leaves the students with the false impression that those were days long past. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.

Case in point, Robert Feder relays a memo delivered to the staff at the beleaguered Tribune Company by CEO Randy Michaels with a list of 119 words or phrases that they must excise from their vocabulary. If the image of micromanaging leaps to mind, you wouldn't be wrong--especially when you look at the list:

"5 a.m. in the morning"
"Youth' meaning 'child'"
"Authorities"
"Bare naked"
"Campaign trail"
"Close proximity"
"Death Toll"

And on and on.

And if that isn't bad enough, the memo also encourages employees to monitor each other's behavior, and report on those who are violating the banned list of words. And how are you supposed to remember these 119 words? Well Michaels has handed out bingo cards with the list of words on them.

While this is no way to help a company that is marred with problems (bankruptcy being one), it is not hard to have some sympathies for Michaels goal. Who here wouldn't want a day to be able to rule over local television news, for instance? The first thing I would ban is the inane giggling by the anchors, the locker room behavior of the weatherperson and sports person, and the stupid human interest pieces that seem to end each day's broadcast. But having fantasies is one thing, writing them down as a memo to be taken seriously is quite another.

Keep your eyes peeled. If Michaels doesn't receive the help he is looking for in the newsroom, he may turn to you, the audience of Tribune products. Perhaps a free year's subscription to the Chicago Tribune for outing a reporter not sticking to the list? A day as "guest producer" for turning in the reporters at WGN?

Moonie Bound

2010-02-19T13:13:00.000-05:00

I have finally made the pages of the "Washington Times." Reporter Kara Rowland spoke to me this weekend in great length about signing statements, so imagine my amusement when the article contained nothing about signing statements, and instead was about executive orders! Is it April Fools Day?

Rich Is Right

2010-02-15T21:01:00.001-05:00

Today's column by Frank Rich should be required reading for Democrats.

2010-02-07T16:05:00.002-05:00

Sarah Palin has captured the media's attention (and apparent adoration) as political independent, grassroots "speaking truth to power" n'er do wrong. And the grassroots conservatives have lapped her up as the solution to all the problems in this country, underscoring a fear by the founders of giving the masses political influence because of their propensity to follow demagogues.

A fine example of demagoguery is Palin's numerous contradictions that go unquestioned by her loyal followers:

She criticizes President Obama for his lack of political experience, yet her resume is small town mayor and governor for less than a full term;

Her Facebook outrage and demands for removal of Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel for calling Democrats "fucking retards" for their plan to run ads against conservative Democrats, yet her brush off of Rush Limbaugh's criticism of liberals as "retards." Said Palin: "They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh. [He] was using satire...". So it is wrong to call people "retards" in anger, but if you making fun, then it is ok?
She characterizes herself as talking straight and lambasting the evils of government, yet during her time as governor, she consistently looked for ways to fly her family at taxpayers expense and asked staff to figure out a way to fudge the electrical use in the Governor's Mansion in order to hide her tanning bed--a luxury she would have had to pay for but instead was content to shirk off on taxpayers;
She has taken Obama to task for using a teleprompter when speaking to the public, because it represents a "phoniness" and a lack of knowledge for policy details, yet whenever Palin speaks off-script, she makes little to no sense. And apparently the teleprompter is to high tech as her Q&A at the last day of the Tea Party convention had her reading notes from the palm of her hand, as the picture below shows.

The epitome of Palin as a walking contradiction comes from this CBS story on the way VP Palin was handled by the McCain people, regarding the issue that her husband, Todd, is a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, which advocates seceding from the Union. Palin wanted McCain's folks to issue press releases both denying that he was a member and then explaining that he mistook the "check your party" box for an American Independent, which he claims to be. McCain's campaign manager stopped short of calling her a liar. Nonethless, she claimed Todd was a Republican then , and now pivoted 180 degrees at the Tea Party Conference to claim Todd is "much too independent" to consider himself a Republican. Isn't saying different and contradictory things to different groups the very epitome of what Palin is supposed to be against? Isn't it what her supporters find most attractive in her?

The Founders worried that in times of crisis, the mass public would turn to anyone who promised to make it better without taking a good and close look at who that "anyone" was--thus they tried to protect the political system against the very kind of hysteria that Palin feeds upon--and with the help of one of her biggest boosters--the mainstream media.

Representative Talkingpoint

2010-01-31T18:24:00.002-05:00

Frank Luntz, Republican pollster and conservative language guru, released a nearly-30 page memo (.pdf) last year to help Republicans challenge the Democrats generally, and Obama specifically, on the issue of health care.

If you do not know Luntz, he was the father of the Republican "Contract with America" that Republicans, and the press, believed to be instrumental in the Republican victories in the 1994 midterm election that swept Democrats out of power in both the House and the Senate--the former after more than 50 years of being a minority party. Luntz has his own PR firm and a best selling book of a couple of years ago, Words that Work.

Point #5 of Luntz's memo says: "The healthcare denial horror stories from Canada & Co. do resonate, but you have to humanize them. You'll notice we recommend the phrase 'government takeover' rather than 'government run' or 'government controlled."

If you have been paying any attention to Republicans recently, you will see what great students of Luntz they have been. For instance, listen to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R. Tan-land) any chance he gets to speak to the press and you can see just how disciplined Republicans are at talking points like "government takeover."

* October 31,2009, Boehner gives a response to President Obama's Saturday radio address, where he used the phrase twice in back to back paragraphs: "We now have a choice. We can come together to implement smart, fiscally responsible reforms to improve Americans' health care or we can recklessly pursue his government takeover that creates far more problems than it solves" and "The debt to be paid by our kids and grandkids is exploding. And now Speaker Pelosi's 1,990-page government takeover of health care?

*November 5, 2009, Boehner hosted a conference call with those opposed to health care, and the media, where again he used the slogan multiple times in just a short span of space: "The bill is the greatest threat to freedom that I have seen in the 19 years I've been here in Washington. Taking away your freedom to choose your doctor. The freedom--the freedom to buy health insurance on your own. It's going to lead to a government takeover of our health care system with tens of thousands of new bureaucrats right down the street making these decisions for you." (The talking point about a bureaucrat making medical decisions instead of your doctor is a Republican talking point from Luntz's memo again. If Americans think that doctor's are making the decision on health care now, then they are sorely mistaken--who do you think approves or denies procedures?) And "This is my copy of the Constitution. And I'm going to stand here with our founding fathers who wrote in the preamble, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident--that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'" (Apparently Boehner's speechwriters do not know the difference between the Preamble to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, because their quote above is from the Declaration, not the Constitution).

And then today, John Boehner appeared on "Meet the Press" right after David Axelrod, and the talking points were in full swing, as you can see for yourself in the transcript provided by NBC on MTP's website. Boehner was on for around 10 minutes, and in that short span of time he got off five separate takeover talking points:

"Whether it's his budget with trillion-dollar deficits for as far as the eye can see, their national energy tax that they call cap-and-trade, or his government takeover of health care..."; And when it comes to issues like health care, the president did his best to blur the differences, agreeing with us on five or six points, but didn't refer to the other 100 commissions, boards, mandates that are in this government takeover of health care.";"...most of America has already said no to this big government takeover."; and "We've seen all week, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid continuing to scheme and plot, trying to find some way to get their big government takeover of health care enacted." Then just two sentences down in the same paragraph: "And what we need to do is scrap the big government takeover bill and let's start over."

If you think that Boehner was challenged for his repetition, you don't know our media. Clearly repeating the same slogan five times tells you the latitude with which newsmakers have over our press, because Gregory, the host of MTP, could have easily pointed to Massachusetts and their plan, which the current national plan is modeled, and asked him just which part of that plan, with wide popular support, is a government takeover?

It is a real shame that these Sunday news programs, which had a history of holding newsmakers' feet to the fire, has devolved into nothing more than a platform for empty talking points, roundtable speculations and predictions, and a way to make extra money during a time during the week when few people are watching television.

Whither Objectivity?

2010-01-27T11:45:00.000-05:00

The news site Politico is reporting a poll by the Public Policy Polling organization that surveys levels of trust for our nation's television news networks, and ranking #1 as the most trusted news source is Fox News. The networks (ABC, NBC, & CBS) all ranked lower than Fox News (1) and CNN (2). What does this say about the news now in the 21st century? To me it should signal an end to the norm of objectivity, which has constrained reporting about candidates, policies, and issues for the better part of nearly 100 years. Fox News, while boasting "Fair and Balanced" news is overtly partisan in its production of information. And what has it gotten for its conservative tilt? More viewers than any other cable news station, and now a signal of trust among folks surveyed. Now let's hope the rest of the media gets the hint and lose the objectivity norm when covering politics.

The Liberal Media's Fault and Other Stuff

2010-01-26T21:05:00.000-05:00

Pay attention to Fox News, where I am sure you will hear a lot about the liberal media's attempt to get back at the ACORN heroes with this story making the rounds.

You remember James O'Keefe (the 3d), the conservative college graduate who, along with his conservative girl friend, posed as a pimp to her prostitute (young love) and visited a variety of ACORN offices to see if they could get help on getting federal loans for their prostitution business, which was caught on undercover camera and went viral immediately, with plenty of play first on the conservative website biggovernment.com, and then on the rest of the media. Apparently the 15 minutes of fame was so intoxicating that he looked to top it. And he got his wish, though I am sure not the way he intended it.

Mr. O'Keefe and three of his friends posed as telephone repairmen, and entered the offices in New Orleans of Senator Mary Landrieu (D. LA). It is unclear what they were up to, but they have now been charged with "entering federal property under false pretenses to commit a felony." It appears that while they were in the office, they were "filming from [O'Keefe's] cellphone." As he was leaving jail, O'Keefe told reporters assembled: "The truth shall set me free."

Like I said, in the end this will be the media's fault.

Item #2

CPAC--the Conservative Political Action Conference that attracts conservatives from all over the US every year will hold its annual meeting this year on February 18-20. This Conference, which usually attracts the most high profile conservatives in the US, particularly those vying for public office, missed out on a big "get" in Sarah Palin, who was invited to address the organization as a keynote speaker but declined. Why? Well Palin agreed to speak before the National Tea Party Convention, which is meeting also in February. You may wonder whether the decision was to go for the Tea Party because it represents the "grassroot" conservative movement while CPAC is more aligned with the establishment conservatives in the Republican Party. That isn't it. Her decision was motivated by money. CPAC asked her to speak gratis while the Tea Party apparently is paying her $100,000.

The press has consistently reported this movement as a "grassroots" movement from the start despite its collusion with established Republican advocacy groups like Dick Armey's "FreedomWorks," which was responsible for astroturfing some of the early Democratic Townhall debacles held last summer to discuss health care. Thus for a grassroots movement, the Tea Party Convention is charging $549 a ticket, which also includes a $10 handling fee, just to attend this convention.

This New York Times article discusses how dissension has grown in the movement from those who believe that the Tea Party is either fronting for the Republicans or is simply looking to make a profit in place of principles. Really?

Paying the Piper

2010-01-20T21:41:00.002-05:00

PR Watch has a piece on the controversy surrounding MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who had worked in the Clinton Treasury Department and who also has been highly visible in the media defending the Obama health care plan from its infancy back in the summer to the present. Gruber also has a $400,000 contract with the Department of HHS for "consulting" work he has been doing since the Obama administration took office a year ago. The controversy? He never disclosed that he is accepting money from the same agency and administration pushing health care reform. It appears that he only disclosed after he published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, which required full disclosure of any money he receives outside of the paycheck that MIT gives him.

Some on the Right and Left--and others not politically affiliated, like the folks at PR Watch--argue that what is going on is the same thing that generated a lot of heat several years ago when the Bush administration was outed for paying columnists to tout Bush policy--in particular No Child Left Behind, which the Bush administration's Department of Education paid conservative columnist Armstrong Williams to praise the program in his syndicated columns and on his talk radio program. I don't think they are the same thing.

First, to be clear, I am not condoning Gruber. It is inexcusable as an academic what he has done--he should have disclosed that he had taken money from the Obama administration for contracting work and then made the case that his contract had nothing to do with being a propagandist. Clearly he had more moral authority to do that ahead of time rather than once the cat was let out of the bag. Because his argument now simply rings hollow.

Now on to the comparison. It appears that Gruber was paid to provide the administration "estimates on various health reform proposals on health insurance coverage and cost" among other advice. The administration, I am assuming, used that to guide the Congress in the drafting of health care reform legislation as well as to defend their plan vs. doing nothing or adopting provisions from other plans they did not like. The contract is not paying Gruber to go out and use his position to flak. In the case of Williams as well as Maggie Gallagher, another conservative columnist, they were paid outright to sing the administration's praises. You may think this is all semantics, but it is not. Gruber would have, it appears, continued to receive the $400,000 even if he did not speak to one reporter or write one OpEd or letter to the editor defending it. That is the critical distinction. Though a minor one. The big point is disclosure is always better in the end when it comes to politics. It seems that an administration bent on transparency would have encouraged its supporters to be transparent as well.

Personal Jesus

2010-01-20T21:11:00.001-05:00

You gotta love stuff like this. ABC News reports that a private contractor to the US Military, selling high powered rifles, has been inscribing the scopes with biblical references from both the Old and New Testaments. Setting aside the First Amendment questions of separation between church and state, or military law preventing proselytizing, there seems to be a larger issue in that the Islamic terrorists we are fighting have been using this issue--known to many given that the issue has turned up on YouTube and other Internet discussion groups since 2006--as propaganda, claiming that the US is killing them with "Jesus rifles".

None Are Safe, Even In Cyberspace

2010-01-03T20:57:00.001-05:00

There was an interesting article linked off Slashdot today regarding the lengths that law enforcement will go to get its man. Actually the focus on the article is the use of new technology by law enforcement to track a criminal when it should have been on the marriage between private corporations and law enforcement to spill personal information without private individuals knowing a thing.

The story involves Alfred Hightower, a drug dealer in Indiana who the police were after but unable to catch after a number of years of looking. On a tip the police in Indiana learned that their man was living in Canada under the assumption that no one would come looking for him. The tipster also told the police that Mr. Hightower was a big fan of the online fantasy game World of Warcraft. Now here is where the reporter should have focused his attention, but didn't. The Sheriff's Department in Howard Co. Indiana issued a subpoena to Blizzard Entertainment, the corporation that manufactures the game and is the host for online play. Blizzard Entertainment also resides in California. The Sheriff's Office never believed the company would comply, but did. The company sent to the Sheriff a "package of information" that revealed, among other things, Mr. Hightower's username, "his IP address, his account information and history, his billing address, and even...his preferred server." From there the Sheriff used Google Earth to zoom in on the longitude and latitude and "Boom! I had an address."

They contacted the US Marshals who contacted the RCMP who went to Hightower's home, arrested him, and sent him back to Indiana, where he is now waiting for his court date.

Here is a perfect example of how the frame of the story matters a great deal. The reporter, Patrick Munsey, is dazzled by the use of technology to bring a fugitive to justice. The exploitation of World of Warcraft coupled with Google Earth makes for the kind of quirky human interest stories that the media prove suckers for. But what about a private company that you gave a lot of personal information to turning over that information without a fight? Without notifying you ahead of time? Without knowledge aforethought?

The kicker to the story, buried deep into it, is the surprise by the local law enforcement agency that the company turned over the information at all:

“They don’t have to respond to us, and I was under the assumption that they wouldn’t,” said Roberson. “It had been three or four months since I had sent the subpoena. I just put it in the back of my mind and went on to do other things. Then I finally got a response from them. They sent me a package of information. They were very cooperative. It was nice that they were that willing to provide information.”

How nice.

From Little ACORNs Grown...Not Much

2009-12-29T21:00:00.001-05:00

If you have never heard of the organization the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, chances are you have heard of the acronym that stands in its place: ACORN. ACORN, which has been around for a number of years, works on behalf of individuals who are homeless, jobless, or largely de facto disenfranchised in an attempt to get them reconnected to the American system--economic, social, cultural, and political.

Since the work that ACORN does largely benefits the Democrats, it has been the subject of Republican attention since its origins in the early 1970s. Republicans have long claimed that the organization wastes taxpayer money (in some cases steals taxpayer money) and it violates the electoral process by registering and voting illegal immigrants, felons, and those who do not exist. In fact, the controversy a couple of years ago regarding the federal prosecutors who were fired by the Bush Justice Department centered, in some cases, on federal prosecutors who would not bring charges against local chapters of ACORN after investigations determined that charges were not warranted (i.e. David Iglesias in New Mexico).

Recently--as in September 2009--ACORN was in the news--really in the news--when an undercover video surfaced, shot by two young conservative activists dressed as pimp and prostitute, who seemingly got individuals working at local ACORN chapters to discuss how to go about getting federal money where it was normally prohibited by law. Those videos drove the coverage on national and local television, newspapers, and talk radio for days and weeks. Over at FoxNews it was issue #1 used to attack the Obama administration given President Obama's ties with the group from his earlier days as a community activist. In fact, in response to all the negative attention, the Congress cut its ties with the organization, which meant that millions of dollars were suddenly no more. But what has happened as a result of the investigations into the wrongdoing?

It appears there is a different story that has not gotten much attention, which is curious. There has been allegations that the two activists were deceptive in what they presented, or more to the point, using the conduct on the margins to indict the whole. As far as I am concerned, that is beside the point. Instead, the House Judiciary Committee has released an investigation into ACORN by the Congressional Research Service that finds "no instances of individuals" who were illegally registered to vote nor attempting to vote by ACORN despite the fact that there are numerous investigations into their activities. Further, there is no evidence to suggest that ACORN is using taxpayer money in anyways different from the contracts it receives. And the CRS Report finds, which has been upheld by a federal district court judge in New York City, that Congress's denial of funding to ACORN constitutes an illegal bill of attainder, something you do not hear much about today. A bill of attainder is an attempt by government to declare an individual or organization guilty of wrongdoing without their having a chance to have their day in court. Furthermore, the CRS study finds that the two activists appear to be guilty of federal and state laws that ban recording anyone without their knowledge--even if it is done, ostensibly, to serve the public interest.

Regardless of these findings, you cannot convince Republicans otherwise. Lamar Smith, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, asked, and received, a request from the Justice Department to get the federal courts to reconsider their finding of a bill of attainder. And, despite the numerous investigations that have failed to come up with a conspiracy or systemic wrongdoing, Representative Steve King (R. IA) says that the ACORN issue "is bigger than Watergate." That has to qualify for some end of the year list of the "Whoppers of 2009" don't you think?

Robo-Excitement

2009-12-10T21:56:00.000-05:00

For those who do not pay attention to politics, there is a political marketing tool called the robocall, which is an automated call made by a computer and a pre-recorded voice. This is borrowed straight from marketing and is an inexpensive way to reach thousands of (consumers/voters). They are also incredibly annoying to the point that numerous states have banned them, and the federal government has assisted by creating a national do not call registry, though political robocalls are generally exempt from the prohibition, though this seems questionable.

First, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee (aka the "Toothless Tiger") against Senator John McCain for recording a robocall promoting an amendment he has added to the Senate's health care bill. The call is being paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and has ran in five states of vulnerable members of the Senate.

The complaint cites a Senate rule which prohibits senators from "using private donations to support official Senate activities." It is not uncommon for senators to cut robocalls during an election, using money from their campaign committees. But it is unusual to cut a robocall to promote your own legislation by targeting vulnerable colleagues.

And, according to the founder of the National Political Do Not Call Registry, the robocalls are running in some states where they are illegal--for instance, in Arkansas, targeting Democrat Blanche Lincoln.

This leads me to the second robocall story, and one that shows a bit of Republican hypocrisy.

A conservative political action committee, or (PAC) has requested an opinion from the Federal Elections Commission seeking to get the FEC to toss out state laws banning robocalls when they are made for purposes of a federal election.

The group, the American Future Fund PAC is a political action committee for the American Future Fund, a conservative 501 group "formed to provide Americans with a conservative free market viewpoint" because these "free market principles" are under attack. The organization, which is based in Iowa, apparently has veterans of the Swift Boat and Willie Horton campaigns from previous elections.

Because federal law preempts state law, the PAC has asked the FEC to use federal peremptory power to nullify robocall bans in 41 states. The reason: "These calls can help to increase voter participation and encourage interest in government (not likely)" and "political speech [is] protected by the First Amendment..." The hypocrisy? If they claim to be a conservative in the vein of Ronald Reagan, than state law is sacrosanct and the federal government should keep its nose out of state business. But that applies, apparently, only so long as it suits these conservatives.

Starfucking the Secret Service

2009-11-28T17:24:00.003-05:00

If you have not heard, the starfuckers are at it again. Starfuckers are regular schlubs who do anything to receive the attention normally assigned to celebrities--those who crave their 15 minutes of fame, to borrow from Andy Warhol. Unfortunately, television has energized this group of people in greater droves than ever before. Why? Because television, and its desire to make as much in profits with little investments has turned into reality television--television supposedly not scripted but real! It all began back in the early 1990s with MTV's Real World, which put together a group of GenX 20-somethings to see what happened when personalities collided. Nearly a decade later, CBS struck summer gold when it aired Survivor, which replaced the copy cat game programming wars started by ABC's Who Wants to be a Millionaire? with the copy cat reality TV programming wars.

Since Survivor, there has been nothing but reality programming--and this extends beyond the networks to the cable channels--shows like Project Runway or (horror of horrors), Jon and Kate. Since there are so many of these programs, it means that average people can get the fast track to stardom without suffering the grind of trying to make in big in Hollywood. Thus the public no longer needs an agent to get them gigs, but instead can use the media itself as a surrogate talent agent. They do this by playing on the media trend known as soft news, or news that is heavy with crime, violence, drama, human interest, and/or scandal. Soft news, so to speak, acts as the "golden ticket" to a spot on a reality show. So far we have:

A woman on public assistance, unmarried, and six fatherless children of her own somehow convinces an OB-GYN to give her fertility treatments, which produced eight children (Octuplets) so that she can bump Jon and Kate off the air. The press calls her the "Octomom" and gives her far more than the 15 minutes she deserves.

Then there was the "Balloon Boy" incident. Again, parents, who were marketing their own reality television show after appearing on the ABC reality show "Wife Swap," called the police claiming that their six year old son had somehow gotten trapped in a giant helium balloon that was released into the air. When the family appeared on a CNN segment, and when their young son was asked about the incident, he let loose the truth--he had been hiding at his father's insistence so that they could fabricate the story in hopes of getting their own reality show.

And now it is Michaele and Tareq Salahi, who somehow got into the White House last week for the state dinner for the Prime Minister of India. Though the two were removed before they could sit down and eat, they did manage to shake the hand of President Obama, get a group photo with Vice-President Joe Biden and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel (as well as with other celebrities in attendance). And who are these two:

The Salahis, who are clearly not short of chutzpah, are fortysomething socialites described by friends as “unabashedly pursuing the spotlight”. Salahi has played polo with the Prince of Wales and they are pictured with him on their Facebook page. The couple managed to persuade the Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy to speak at their wedding, which they described as “the wedding of the century”, with 28 bridesmaids and 46 chefs.

Isn't that priceless? These people keep getting weirder and weirder.

Most importantly, these two were attempting to juice their cred with the folks at the Bravo Network, who are looking to begin shooting their next reality series The Real Housewives of Washington D.C. It appears that Bravo was shooting the couple up to the point when they entered the White House.

For me, the money quote on this whole sordid business comes from Professor Robert Thompson, a communications prof at Syracuse University, who said: "The media business is the new Ellis Island: Give me your talentless, give me your hoaxes and I will put anything on my air..."

The other side of this story of course is how in the world did these two get close enough to the president to shake his hand, to mug with the vice president as well as the chief of staff? And that is a real cause for concern. I am fairly certain that some conservatives will use this hole in security as some kind of narrative on Obama's job performance. Before they do, they should reflect back to the scandal known as "Gannongate".

A couple of years ago, during President Bush's second term, he held a press conference where he called on a reporter who asked:

Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock-solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you said you're going to reach out to these people -- how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?

The "reporter" we all learned 1) didn't work for a news organization, but instead worked with an activist organization connected to the Republican National Committee, 2) was using an alias and 3) oh yeah, moonlighted as a gay porn star. The mere fact that the "reporter," Jeff Gannon/James Guckert had supplied the White House with a fake ID should have raised all sorts of alarm bells, though the Secret Service were not entirely at fault since the White House Press Office had fast tracked Gannon's press credentials application (after it had been denied by the Congressional Press Credentialing authorities).

This recent incident at the White House is a legitimate news story and the press should be asking the Secret Service and the White House tough questions. The Secret Service at first tried to figure out whether the two could be charged with anything (that strategy won't last long, though it is a shame they cannot be charged as deplorable human beings). I doubt this mishap will be investigated by the press given that the story has already been bumped by the incredibly "important" story involving Tiger Woods's "accident."

Context

2009-11-22T11:37:00.005-05:00

Someone should by the press a dictionary so that reporters and many bloggers can look up the meaning of the word "Context." If you have been paying any attention over the last week to news coverage of President Obama (Barry to his critics), you see the massive amount of coverage (coupled with glee from conservatives) that his polling numbers are heading south of the 50% approval line. This from Google Trends shows the spike in coverage influenced by the drop in approval (an inverse relationship):

The aggregate poll at RealClearPolitics has President Obama at 50% approval and 43% disapproval (and not reported, the Generic Congressional Vote has Democrats at 45% and Republicans at 43%). All of the reporting is focused on just a few polls, notably Gallup (49%) and probably Fox News (46%). The ABC News/Washington Post poll has him at 56%. But bad news always drives out good, so the press focuses on just those few polls that show him below 50%.

Context.

Also, all the attention does not compare Obama with previous presidents. All presidents have a tough time during that first year and a half to two years of their first term. But what about Bush43? He had approval so high he had nose bleeds throughout his first term! First, comparing Obama or any other recent president to Bush's first term--or even his first two years in office--is not a fair comparison given the massive bump that came from the 9/11 attacks. But if you want to compare Bush43, fine. Compare Obama to Bush43, January 20, 2001 to September 10, 2001, and you see the exact same story line now hung on President Obama, only it was written in more dire terms because it fell before Bush43 reached his first year in office. President Bush was heading below 50% on September 10, 2001, and the narrative was he would repeat his father's example as a one-term president.

Context.

Even scarier to conservatives, compare Obama with Reagan, who conservatives seem to remember his polls leaving office, but not his polls during his first couple of years in office. At the same point in President Reagan's tenure in office, his polling numbers were right where Obama's is today. During the period November 11 to 16, Reagan's poll number was at 48%, then briefly 54%, and after below 50% (including a stint in the 30% range) until November 1983. So Reagan's entire first term was consumed with poll numbers below 50%.

Context.

It is the nature of the modern presidency that the press coverage he receives is overwhelmingly negative right from the outset--including coverage of the Obama administration--and this tears down his public approval numbers. Add to this the rotten economy, massive debt, and the two wars, and you get bad approval numbers. In Reagan's first term, the problems were much the same--economic recession, high unemployment, international disorder. Thus if the press would cover these poll numbers with greater context, it may calm the unease among many Americans who do not pay attention to the president in the long term who believe that this is the first president who faced tough times and saw a decline in approval numbers.

Not the first. Not the last.

Context.

Fool Me Twice

2009-11-19T21:15:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, Sean Hannity got busted by John Stewart, who showed video of the previous night's show where Hannity marveled over the crowds of teabaggers who came to DC, which Stewart found the video was stock footage from the summer before, where the crowds were much bigger. Hannity owned up to it as an honest mistake, which those certainly do occur. But twice? This from The Swamp, the Chicago Tribune's blog of sorts:

Today, FOX News host Gregg Jarrett was talking about Republican Sarah Palin's book tour and the crowd she is drawing at the start of it - no small turnout, with some 1,500 people lining up early this morning for a chance to get into this evening's premier book-signing for Going Rogue in Grand Rapids.
"Sarah Palin continuing to draw huge crowds while she's promoting her brand new book,'' FOX's Jarrett told his viewers. "Take a look at -- these are some of the pictures just coming into us... The lines earlier had formed this morning.''

But just like the mistake on Hannity, the footage showing the big crowds fawning over Sarah were not from her book tour, but from the 2008 election. And just like the stock footage came a stock answer:

"This was a production error in which the copy editor changed a script and didn't alert the control room to update the video...''

Yeah, right. It is only a mistake if you get caught. If you don't get caught, it is working for the team...

Shield Laws and Presidential Behavior

2009-10-31T22:42:00.000-04:00

You may not know what privileged communication as a term is, but i am sure you have heard it mentioned before. If you're a fan of "The Sopranos," you remember that the relationship between Dr. Melfi, the psychiatrist, and Tony Soprano, was their protected conversations (so long as they didn't involve discussion of crimes that had taken place or were about to take place). This protected information is privileged communication. The government protects certain relationships--priest and parishioner, doctor and patient, husband and wife, and lawyer and client. The reporter and source/information has historically not been given this protection. Reporters have argued that they do not need statute to give it protection because of their special status in the Constitution. Reporters have argued that the Founders meant for them to be an independent watchdog on power, and one way to insure that independent power is to get people with information to talk under the promise of anonymity. If reporters could not give sources this protection, then their ability to access the kind of information to check power would dry up. Despite this argument, the Supreme Court has never bought it. Since the 1972 Branzburg v Hayes decision, the Supreme Court has argued that a reporter is no different from other citizens when asked to divulge information critical to an investigation. Thus for a reporter, if he or she is compelled to give information to a law-enforcement agency or in court, the only protection the source has is if the reporter is willing to face jail time under a contempt charge--jail time that can be significant.

Thus reporters have worked their case in the states and in the Congress to provide them with privileged protection--something that 31 states have done in some form. But not the Congress. Since 1978, reporters have tried to get the Congress to pass a federal shield law to no avail. And one reason why they have failed is because reporters have opposed nearly every shield law introduced in the Congress because it defined who a reporter is too narrowly. Thus reporters have been at the mercy of federal prosecutors who work for presidents with little to no respect for reporters and their sources. For instance, during the Clinton administration, there was a standing order in the Justice Department that directed federal prosecutors to only go after a reporter if they could not get the information in any other way. When the Bush administration took over, the rule changed, making reporters fair game for federal prosecutors.

In 2007, journalists got their best chance yet to get a federal shield protection passed after the Democrats took control of the Congress. The Free Flow of Information Act broadly defined a reporter as a "person who regularly gathers, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes information concerning matters of public interest for dissemination to the public..." This bill also had bi-partisan support, but in the end, a disagreement between the Congress and the White House over national security related information could not be worked out as the 110th Congress, and Bush administration came to an end. Reporters were hopeful last November when Barack Obama won the election as he was a co-sponsor to the 2007 Senate version of the bill. But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House....

Gerald Ford had an interesting quote about being a member of the two institutions and what it does to your sense of politics--to your sense of what is and is not important. Ford said: "When I was a member of the House for 25 years I used to look at the president and the vice president as those dictators at the other end of Constitution Avenue...Then when you shift from the legislative to the executive branch of government you're at the other end of Constitution Avenue and you look at the Congress and you wonder why all of those house and senate members are so irresponsible."

The Free Flow of Information Act of 2009 was introduced into the 111th session of Congress, and for the most part is has been DOA. Is it because the Republicans in the Congress are denying the Democrats any kind of victory, or is it because the Republicans in Congress hate the media for its liberal bias? The answer is neither. It has been DOA in large part because the Obama administration has threatened a veto if it gets to his desk for his signature. It seems the Obama administration has had the same objections as the Bush administration--that the Act, as written, would not cover information related to national security. The Obama administration had been firm on this point such that most believed the shield law dead. That is until just a couple of days ago, when the Obama administration, the Congress, and representatives from media-related organizations have come to an agreement to allow some information to escape the reporter privilege when it is related to national security/terrorism.

So maybe the privilege gets passed this year. The more important point, for me that is, is just how much institutions matter on the individuals who occupy them--particularly the presidency. For too long the research on the presidency has focused on the individual who occupies the Office and what he does or does not do during his time there. For my money, at least since Ford, it is all about how certain norms get institutionalized, and how those institutionalized norms affect the behavior of the occupant regardless of Party. This is particularly true with the unitary executive theory and its affect on Democratic presidents.

The End of Rhetoric

2009-09-06T11:34:00.001-04:00

Matt Latimer, a speechwriter in the recently vacated Bush White House, has an interesting and provocative article in today's Washington Post that urges the president--any president--to fire his speechwriters.

The "rhetorical presidency" is an outgrowth of the technological advances of the 20th century that enable presidents to use mass communication to reach the American public in ways that were impossible in the 19th century. In fact, in the 19th century, it was an impeachable offense as the Congress leveled one of the 10 articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson's "swing around the circle" as he addressed the public directly during congressional midterm elections in an effort to put pressure on the Congress to back away from its interference into the affairs of the presidency.

The advances in technology--first radio and then television--created a residuum of power that presidents gleefully exploited against their opponents--domestic or international. Presidents had the sole command to speak before millions of people in prime time, leaving his opponents with just minutes to rebut. And for the longest time we worried that perhaps the power of the mass media was a power that unbalanced our system of checks and balances. That worry dissipated with the rise first of cable and then the Internet, which challenges the command of the president to reach millions of Americans, as we have seen abundantly in this presidency and the second term of George W. Bush.

For Latimer, he takes his experience from the inside of the Bush White House to detail just how much the president has lost in command of attention. He argues that Pols advising the president push him to speak before the public as often and as much as possible. They do this because the president remains inherently newsworthy, but without recognition that "newsworthy" is a double edged sword. On the positive side, he can focus the public attention to programs and policies important to him and his administration. On the negative side, he can become overexposed leading to confusion about his programs and policies. As Latimer writes:

The age of the Internet and cable news has opened the world to an onslaught of ideas, opinions and information. It also is stripping away the grandeur -- and power -- of the highest office in the land.

It is the latter where President Obama finds himself, which is the same place, according to Latimer, where President Bush found himself. He has experienced a free fall in his opinion numbers, and his advisers are telling him the only way to fix that is to make public speeches and to go on TV--even, as Latimer argues, "if no one is listening."

What Obama should have done all along--where health care is concerned and the subject of his upcoming address on Wednesday--is to focus the Congress on his plan rather than allow Congress to deliver a plan to him. The president should have delivered his plan for health care to the Congress in the spring and then used the mass media to force them to his position. Instead he has worked in reverse, and is paying dearly for it.

Going After Rails On The Crazy (S)Train

2009-08-16T13:23:00.002-04:00

Rick Perlstein has nailed the attention given to crazy conspirators on the Right--from the "Birthers" who question President Obama's citizenship to the "Death Panels," those who claim that a provision in the Democrats health care reform plan would put to death the elderly and the disabled.

Perlstein traces this "crazy strain" as endemic in US political history--first as an outgrowth from fear of foreigners (the anti-Catholic "Know-Nothing Party of the 1840s and 1850s)--and then a response to the liberal regimes of the 20th century, from New Deal to Civil Rights to Clinton. The point is that what we are seeing at the present is not new--and of course for those who remember the Clinton presidency, from the Black Helicopters to the UN-army ready to take over America to the various "militia"--you know it is not new.

What is new and different is the access to the public that crazies have. And the reason they have that access is because the media is willing to hand it over to them. Pearlstein writes:

Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.

And:

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.

Part of the problem lays at the feet of the administration. Health care reform failed in 1993-94 because, in part, the Clinton administration bungled it by closing out everyone with a stake in reform and for allowing itself to get snookered by the Health Insurance Association of America's "Harry and Louise" ads. So far, 16 years after the fact, it has failed because the Obama administration suggested reform and left it to the Congress to figure out the best plan to send to the president. The Congress is like domestic cattle. Unless you successfully corral them, they will wonder aimlessly and eat everything. So Obama should have, from the outset, used his high public standing to tell the Congress what health care reform would look like.

But the other problem lay with the media--because it thrives on conflict and, in part because it has been cowed as a result of the systematic cries of liberal bias, it runs these claims over and over, often without any context. Rather than dispelling these claims inside the story itself--such as highlighting the claims of death panels for what they are--sheer craziness--and then forcing Republicans inside government to either stand by them or draw distance, the media simply finds a political figure to do their dispelling for them. For instance, on today's "Meet the Press," moderator David Gregory (how many wish for the days of Tim Russert?) put up one crazy claim after the next, and then let his panel fight it out. On the Right, Dick Armey and Tom Coburn, and on the Left, Tom Daschle and Rachel Maddow. To anyone sitting at home, each issue seemed to be more about partisan differences than the nonsense they were. Hence, as Perlstein writes:

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision."

So true.

So Obvious

2009-07-23T17:45:00.006-04:00

Did you see last night's press conference, billed as a conversation with the American people over the all important issue of health care? Didn't see it? So obviously you turned on your channels this morning to hear all about what President Obama had to say about health care, right? You mean you turned on the news and didn't hear much about health care? Then what was covered?

It was so obvious last night what would dominate the national televised media when, at the end of the conference, Obama's arch rival, the Chicago Sun Times, went fishing:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Recently Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge. What does that incident say to you and what does it say about race relations in America?

Obama took the bait--hook, line, and sinker:

Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact.

What should have given Obama pause lay right there in the opening line of this answer: "Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts..." He was not there and he does not know the facts. It may be that racial profiling is at the heart of this case. That is not the point. What is the point is that Obama, who had been speaking for nearly 50 minutes on health care, gave away his message by jumping right into a local controversy. His answer, of course, should have been: "We are monitoring this situation and are in contact with the Cambridge police department. While we abhor racial profiling, which happens (x%) of cases in the US, we also support our police, who lay their lives on the line every day, blah blah blah." Such a milquetoast explanation would never have gotten in the way of his message on health care reform. Unfortunately, Obama couldn't resist the bait.

And the results?

Here is a sample of the frontpage of national television media, taken earlier today.

ABC News:

CBS News:

MSNBC:

And then finally, Fox News, which could not help itself:

Only CNN did not contain some blaring headline with picture at the top half of its frontpage. All others--with Fox News taking up the entire display--led their viewers to believe that the press conference was all about racial profiling, and not health care.

The Obama administration really can't point their finger of blame. This incident fits the age old tale of the frog and the scorpion: "Why did you do this? Because it is our nature."

And question #1 at today's press gaggle with press secretary Robert Gibbs? You betcha:

Q Robert, some people thought it was a little unusual that the President waded into the matter between Professor Gates and the Cambridge police -- a little uncharacteristic of him -- when the facts are in dispute. You know, this is the sort of thing he might ordinarily say, I don't -- you know, I don't know all the facts...

In fact, every question but three at the press gaggle had to do with that final question and answer at last night's press conference! The press wanted to know if Obama was calling the police stupid? At one point, when Obama was trying to personalize what happen by saying "what if" it happened to him, he made light at the fact that if he were trying to break into his current home, the White House, he would probably get shot. It was clear to everyone that is what he meant. Yet here is one reporter hoping to expand the controversy:

Q Can I just ask you to clarify one quick thing that he said last night? When he was talking about "I would get shot trying to, you know, break into the house," he was talking about the White House or was he talking about his home in Chicago? He wasn't talking about Chicago or the Chicago police...?

Again, this is the nature of the press. Obama is smart enough to know better than provide the opening to a "shit storm" of controversy like he did last night. But to the press--when you complain that the president cuts off press access and the president refuses to hold press conferences, as they all do, can you really not understand why? Really?

RIP

2009-07-17T20:52:00.001-04:00

RIP Walter Cronkite

Ding-Dong The Witch is Dead

2009-07-10T22:39:00.000-04:00

I am sure Peter Bronson of the Enquirer never thought the day would come when he would be released from the paper, but as they say--"never say never." As far as I am concerned, this strikes a blow in favor of journalism. You can search his name in this journal to read into the background of this posting.

Peter, don't let the door hit you on the way out...

The Friday News Dump TNG

2009-06-29T15:33:00.008-04:00

The Bush administration had excelled in what is called the "Friday News Dump," which stipulates that any bad news or news that the White House would rather get little attention is released Friday, preferably in the afternoon, so that it receives little attention as everyone heads out of town for their weekend get aways. By Monday, it is considered old news and likely will receive no coverage.

President Bush released all sorts of negative information on Friday afternoon, so much so that he nearly burned out the strategy--media insiders and watchdog groups began paying very close attention to the White House press office on Friday to see what sorts of information would shake loose.

Well that was the Bush administration. What about the Obama administration? Put aside what conservatives have said about the MSM sitting in the President's lap, and what you find is a media strategy that is sophisticated, and one that blends together the use of new media with old techniques that work--including the Friday News Dump.

As you may know, I pay close attention to the use of the signing statement, so I usually visit the White House webpage daily to see if I can uncover a recent statement. Since the signing statement has received heightened attention, the White House is sensitive to the prying eyes of those outside the administration, and thus have tried to frustrate the ability to monitor their use--by not regularly placing them in the "Featured Legislation" section of the webpage and by only listing their bill number in the Statements and Releases section. But that aside, they have also turned to the news dump by using a method similar to a bait and switch.

Here is what I mean.

Last week, President Obama signed a supplemental appropriations bill that in part funded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in part dealt with international institutions. I was sure there would be challenges wrapped into this bill because bills with foreign or defense implications almost always draw a challenge. So I was surprised when, last Wednesday, June 24, the only thing that came from it was a press release from the White House Press Secretary:

The President released a statement today after signing HR 2346 in the Oval Office:

"I want to thank the Members of Congress who put politics aside and stood up to support a bill that will provide for the safety of our troops and the American people. This legislation will make available the funding necessary to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end, defeat terrorist networks in Afghanistan, and further prepare our nation in the event of a continued outbreak of the H1N1 pandemic flu."

Sort of a let down.

On Saturday, I was running down the various things I get sent to me, and imagine my surprise when I find a link to the signing statement issued by the White House on the supplemental appropriations bill, though this time released on Friday, June 26, and, as expected, contained challenges to several provisions of the bill! I am sure this was not an oversight.

So to all those who bemoaned (or marveled at) the media manipulation of the Bush administration, hold your horses. It appears that the Obama administration is up to the task of continuing to obscure, distort, hide (choose your terms) information that it either wishes no publicity or wishes the utmost of control. And the Friday News Dump is just one of the many methods that this new administration has already seemed like an old hat at using.

Where In The World Is The Honduras?

2009-06-28T22:20:00.001-04:00

Back in the 1980s, it would have been hard not to have read or watched a story about the troubles of many Central American nations. Central America was considered one of the "front lines" of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union pumping money into Cuba, and then into Nicaragua, which at the time was run by the "dictator in designer glasses" Daniel Ortega, the head of the FSLN Movement/Party. Ortega left with the end of the Cold War and is now the Nicaragua's democratically-elected president (you may have recalled the news blurb back in April when he "lashed out" against the United States in a meeting attended by President Obama).

The United States pumped billions of dollars into Central America, propping up many right wing governments in an attempt to thwart a Western Hemisphere "domino-effect." One of those countries receiving US (military) aid was the Honduras. President Reagan even ordered National Guard troops from all over the US into the Honduras as part of a series of "military exercises." In fact, there was a high profile show down between Reagan and some Democratic Governors--including Ohio's own Dick Celeste (famous for the phrase from Republican critics: "Dick Celeste before he 'dick's' you")--where the Governors refused to send their national guard troops in protest to Reagan's foreign policy.

Then the Cold War ended, and with it the media's interest in Central America. And outside political science departments across the US, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who could locate a country like Honduras on the map. I bring all of this up because trouble is once again brewing in Central America, and this time it is the Honduras that has experienced a military coup that used to be as common as the changing days. And yet the press in the United States could care less. First, some background.

The Honduras had a "democratically" elected President named Manuel Zelaya, elected in 2006 to a "constitutionally" limited four year term in office, had moved for a referendum to amend the Constitution in order to limit the presidency to two terms, enabling him to run for a second term. This move apparently was opposed by the Congress, the military, and the Court, yet Zelaya pushed forward anyway with a vote set to today, but in the dead of night, the military busted into Zelaya's residence, roughed him up, and exiled him to Costa Rica, with nothing more than the PJs he was wearing. The military was apparently acting on the request of Honduras Supreme Court (I can imagine our own Supreme Court would envy such power). In his absence the Honduran Congress named the Honduran vice-president the "interim" President until the next election.

There is a bit of irony at play here that doesn't seem to be overt in the coverage I have read--the military kidnaps and exiles the democratically elected president because it believes he is acting in contradiction to the democratic process! But then again President Reagan once referred to the US supported resistance military in Nicaragua--deemed a terrorist organization by the Nicraguan people--the "moral equivalence" of our Founding Fathers.

So despite all the goings on, wouldn't the US media be interested in it? It doesn't appear so. If you look at Google News, the first several media sites listed are all foreign news outlets--the BBC and Reuters (which has a reporter based in the Honduran capitol of Tegucigalpa, and even filed a story that reads as an "Honduran-coup FAQ page"), followed by the Xinhua news service out of China. And a look at the television media sites, they aren't much better. On CNN's frontpage, titled "Breaking News"--there is a giant photo of Papa Joe Jackson. On the side, under the banner "Latest News", three links down in little letters you find "Honduran Congress names new president." To the person who knows nothing of the events, they may not think much of a story that a congress names a new president.
ABC News does a little better, with a picture of Zelaya that makes him look like Cesar Chavez, and a link titled "illegal' Honduran Coup has Obama 'Deeply Concerned". CBS News has a giant photo of Michael Jackson, circa-1984, and like CNN has a side bar with a headline that reads "Top News" and five links down in litle letters it reads: "Coup' in Honduras: Army Expels President." So you might learn something if you can get past the blaring headlines to the "King of Pop". NBC News runs from Brazil's defeat of the US in soccer to Michael Jackson to the Madoff scam. Down at the bottom of the page under a small banner that reads "Explore Other Top Stories" there is a litle link titled "Honduran President Ousted in Coup." But right beside it in a bigger box it reads: "Reader Tributes, Michael Jackson: 1958-2009". And finally, Fox News has a giant artistic photo of a "Jackson 5" Michael Jackson and a title that reads "Artists Pay Tribute to Jackson". Other stories are about Governor Sanford of South Carolina, who has his own "Latin America" problem and a story about fallen pitchman Billy Mays. Like NBC, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, under a link titled "News Happening Now," you go two links and find "Honduran Military Ousts President During Siege." You could be forgiven for missing it because right next to it is a link that reads, in bold lettering, "Florida Mayor Arrested After Found Nude at Campsite." What is worse is that each of that 3/5 sites all point to the same source: AP, though CBS tries to distort the sourcing by crediting CBS/AP.

This is dismal. There is no mystery that foreign news has all but dried up in the US press, but this is not news that takes place in a remote place on the other side of the world, but instead right in our own backyard. And given the US commitment to supporting democratic regimes the world over, you would think that the US press would find it interesting that one is being threatened in our hemisphere. But if anything highlights the pitiful state of US media, it is the fact that Michael Jackson, who died days ago, continues to get above the fold, front page treatment, and not the exile of a country we call an ally (though given that Zelaya is cozy with Hugo Chavez and the military isn't, I doubt you will hear much protestation from the Obama administration--just check the White House frontpage to see what I mean, which could also be a reason why there is muted coverage in the US).

The Boogie Man Is Real (if you are a Republican)

2009-06-24T22:09:00.000-04:00

Republicans, knocked completely out of power for the first time since 1994, are looking for a foothold to relive those glory days leading up to the 1994 election when everything seemed to break their way. Having lost in 2006 and 2008, and gaining no traction in the first 6 months of a new presidency, they have come up with the solution to their problems: They are doing nothing wrong, but instead have been conspired against by the liberal media.

First, to "operationalize" their terms: The liberal media equals ABC, CBS, and NBC. It also sometimes includes the NY Times and the Washington Post, but to be honest, the newspaper industry has been so devastated, it seems that they are no longer directly in the sights of the conservative right. Not included in the media is Fox News, talk radio like Rush, Hannity, and others, and conservative opinion writers such as George Will and Charles Krauthammer. And, to add to the hypocracy, none of these Republicans raised a peep when George Bush or Dick Cheney camped out on Fox News when they wished to spin a negative story or attack their opponents, or when the Bush administration fed disinformation to conservative outlets like the Drudge Report. AND, to make their case about liberal bias, they did so on Fox News, all with the nodding approval of the morons who anchor Fox News segments.

Here is what I mean. In early June, intellectual heavy weight and Texas Republican Representative Lamar Smith announced the formation in the Congress of the "Media Fairness Caucus" because of concern surrounding "unfair reporting by the mainstream news media." And, for those of you who think there are limits to Republican hyperbole, try this one on for size--Representative Smith told knucklehead Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer that the danger of liberal media bias is a greater threat than "a recession or another terrorist attack..."! Worse than 9/11! This is how eyes wide shut some Republicans and conservatives have become.

The goal behind the MFC is similar to the goals of the "Conservative Opportunity Society" of the 1980s--then it was the goal of backbench Republicans to be as outlandish as possible and to pick high profile fights with the Democratic Leadership in order to draw media attention. Once they garnered the media attention, they could then use that platform to highlight their policy differences with the Democrats, and if successful, parlay that into wins at the ballot box. Thus if you are looking for a rationale behind "liberal bias is more dangerous than terrorism," there you have it.

The most recent high profile fight (with conservative media providing as much attention as possible) is with ABC, and its devotion to the Obama health care reform plan. The MFC has begun to run ads attacking "a national TV network," or ABC, for turning over control of the network news to the Obama administration. The MFC sent off a letter to ABC News President David Westin, complaining of the "exclusive arrangement from which the President and his viewpoint stand to gain." To his credit, Westin came back swinging:

Sadly, some inside government and within the private sector see every issue as material for a sort of political high theatre, to be used to gain votes or energize political bases or simply to raise funds. I would have thought that a subject as important as the health care received by the American people would rise above this sorry spectacle. Our citizens need and deserve more.

Smith's MFC began with a dozen lawmakers signing on, but have since grown to 40--good luck reading most of their names!

What's Worth Reading

2009-05-29T17:29:00.000-04:00

Are you interested in the topic of interest groups and American politics, both from a theoretical and practical level? Robert C. Lieberman of Columbia University writes in Foreign Affairs an abbreviated, annotated syllabus of major readings designed to bring you up to speed. It is worth collecting, particularly if you are an undergrad or grad student who is looking for a short cut to comprehensive examinations.

While it is a decent list, there are a couple of readings that are missing--readings that I think make an important contribution to the research on interest group theory, American politics, and, from Foreign Affairs standpoint, the making of American foreign policy:

Theodore Lowi's The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States. Norton, 1979. This book is a muddled mess to read, but its central theme is spot on--the Great Society program, and its aftermath, opened up the political process to interest groups in a way never before seen in American history, and in so doing ended the democratic experiement started by the Founding Fathers and continued through the Great Depression, New Deal, and WWII.
Dennis Chong's Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement. Chicago, 1991. One of my favorite books on interest group theory. It seeks to explain collective action when concepts such as fairness and justice are at play and when there is very little personal benefit to be gained. Collective action theorists in the vein of Olson and Axelrod would tell you that where a person was likely to receive little personal gain in a voluntary commitment, collective action would be difficult to obtain, yet in the case of the Civil Rights Movement, it happened. So there must be something beyond personal gain that motivates individuals into collective behavior. It is one of the few rational choice tomes that I could stomach.
Jonathan Rauch's Demosclerosis. This originally appeared as an article that was turned into a book. Rauch builds upon Lowi's work on the danger that interest group behavior presents to a democratic system such as ours, where interest groups latch on to the body politic like ticks, but unlike ticks, do not fall off once satiated. Eventually, just like plaque in the arteries will eventually cause the heart to seize and the body to collapse, interest groups clog up the political system, rendering it unable to do innovative programming and eventually death.
Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry's The Nature and Sources of Liberal International Order (Review of International Studies, 1999). This article explains why the United States is a different type of hegemon in the international system--different from those of the past (Rome, Great Britain). The key is our open political system, that allows foreign governments to employ lobbyists to effect US foreign policy, thus effecting the behavior of the United States in the international system. The term the authors employ to explain the US is penetrated hegemony, and because of this you should not see the sort of conflict that was present in earlier international systems dominated by a single hegemon.

This is a selection of my favorites, and it certainly does not include the comprehensive list. These are important works that I felt were left out of the collection listed byLieberman. Feel free to add on to his and my list!

Does This Suprise Anyone?

2009-05-05T20:46:00.000-04:00

Mark Milian, blogging at the LA Times, has a blurb today about the Sunday news program Meet the Press may be losing its lead to its competitors, ABC's This Week and CBS's Face the Nation, and the question I ask is if anyone is really surprised?

Gregory, who got the job in large part because of his posturing (some say "Peacocking") as a member of the White House Press Corps during the Bush administration, is not an appealing figure as a moderator (and certainly nowhere near the man whose shoes he stepped into). Some would say that any host of MTP was doomed given the larger than life personality of Tim Russert, but I disagree. There are others in NBC's rank who would make decent moderators (and there are certainly a number of reporters who don't work for NBC but could have been recruited for the job).

Gregory is an abrasive character, and for it his questioning is less like prosecutor-grilling-defendant and more like noone-is-really-interested-in-your-answer-because-they-are-all-wowed-by-me. Thus I was sure that NBC would lose out to either ABC or CBS (it was ABC that was the at the top of the heap in the 1990s that caused NBC to shift from Meet the Press to Meet the Press with Tim Russert. It seems that NBC may be better off going back to a roundtable of reporters asking questions to invited guests. At least it would jive with the title.

At the end of the posting, Milian notes that many in the business feel we have reached a "golden age" of television with the Sunday morning public affairs programs, but I would disagree. The Sunday programs have devolved in response to the live action roundtable babbling that is Cable News programs. All of the Sunday programs now leave just 30 minutes for interview, and then 30 minutes with a roundtable gathering of reporters and pundits, whose volume may be just a bit below that of "Crossfire" but is equally inane. Why is Sam Donaldson still on television, if not for his colorful opinions (and terrible rug)? These 30 minute segments add nothing to our basic understanding of what is going on in politics, and is instead nothing more than pad one liners from the politicos to inside gossip from reporters, fresh from Saturday evening cocktail parties. If this qualifies for the "golden age," then I dread what the future will bring.

Senator Switch

2009-04-28T13:14:00.001-04:00

That is how Fox News described Senator Arlen Specter's switch today from the Republican Party to the Democrats. The Hill has a lengthy post from Specter on why he has come to this decision, which for many seemed obvious years ago:

Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.

When I supported the stimulus package, I knew that it would not be popular with the Republican Party. But, I saw the stimulus as necessary to lessen the risk of a far more serious recession than we are now experiencing.

Since then, I have traveled the State, talked to Republican leaders and office-holders and my supporters and I have carefully examined public opinion. It has become clear to me that the stimulus vote caused a schism which makes our differences irreconcilable. On this state of the record, I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate. I have not represented the Republican Party. I have represented the people of Pennsylvania.

For Democrats, this must be the kind of news you sit and savor, having had a number of their Party members bolt ship over the past several decades. And for the Republicans, this speaks to the kind of trouble they will have in the Rustbelt States, where evangelical partisanship of any stripe does not fly.

And for the Democrats, they probably should contain their glee and continue to monitor their vote from Connecticut. With news of Specter's defection and with Senator Al Franken set to arrive anytime now (or as soon as Norm Coleman does what Al Gore did in 2000, and face reality about winning without any chance of winning), I would not be surprised to hear that Senator Lieberman decides it is time to join the Republican ranks.

There are some questions set to be answered, such as where does Specter stand via seniority, for instance? What will be his standing in Committee? Despite his recent outrage about the exercise of presidential power, this was a guy who bent to White House demands that no witness (either nominee or official) be required to swear to tell the truth.

Journal Nerd

2009-04-25T15:06:00.000-04:00

Jay Cost, writing yesterday at Real Clear Politics, doesn't help those of us who teach higher education for a living by equating reading an academic journal with being a nerd: "As a politics nerd, I have several subscriptions to very nerdy academic journals." Oh yes, blogging on a political website for a living is the epitome of machismo and verve. But that is not why I write here today.

Cost has been wowed by an article appearing in the most recent issue of "Political Behavior" that examines the political effect that Jon Stewart has on his audience. The article is written by a former colleague of mine, Jonathan Morris, who, along with Jody Baumgartner (both at East Carolina University) have cornered the market on the political effects of Jon Stewart, David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Fox News on our political system.

In this particular article, the author wants to know if Stewart was more critical of Republicans than Democrats during the 2004 party conventions and if so, whether that caused his audience to become more critical of the Republican nominee--George W. Bush. The findings? That Stewart (and his cast) were far more critical of Republicans than Democrats (which really is no mystery), and that the audience did indeed turn more critical towards Republicans during their convention than they did when the Democrats held theirs.

In Cost's analysis of the paper, he notes that one should not take this finding too far since Stewart's audience size is "fewer than Adult Swim on Cartoon Network and just 1.2% of the total number of people who voted for President last November." And that most of his audience is predisposed to be critical towards Republicans anyways.

While the caveats are warranted, there is something that Cost leaves out. There is an impact that is not considered in his analysis. It is what Matt Baum calls the "watercooler effect." The conversations that individuals have with friends and co-workers based on what they see or hear that interests them. So what of the network of the individuals who watch Stewart everynight? This "secondary" or "ripple" effect of individuals who may the cherished "Independents" of American politics, whose vote could go either way and look to important cognitive shortcuts to make their decision? At the voting booth, do they recall what their (best friend/girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse/brother/sister/boss/etc) had to say about Republican policy based on what they saw from "The Daily Show"? Or, what about the individuals--again the "Independents"--who see a posting of Stewart on YouTube after they were sent there via email from a friend?

All I am saying is that, sure, there are limits to the influence that Stewart has, but while we should caution against over-estimating, we should also caution against under-estimating.

Online Conference, 4/16/09

2009-04-15T21:20:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow at 8 a.m. EST, there will be an online conference (appropriately so) covering YouTube and the 2008 Election in the United States--One of the first of many conferences to come to assess the role of new media technology on elections here and abroad.

Given the candidate-centered nature of campaigns here in America, all candidates try to exploit the newest and best technologies to give them the needed edge over the opposition, and thus sets the trends for other democratic countries where the political party plays a greater role over campaigns.

The information about the conference can be found below:

Tomorrow’s YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States Conference will stream live for the duration of the conference at the following URL:

http://youtubeandthe2008election.hosted.panopto.com/CourseCast/Student/Default.aspx

User: guest
Login: youtube

A complete program is available here: http://www.umass.edu/polsci/youtube/final_program.pdf

Things get started at 8:00 am EST

Fairness Doctrine Electric Boogaloo

2009-04-14T20:54:00.001-04:00

The Federalist Society as a very nice primer on the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine is something of a boogie man used by conservatives (particularly talk radio) to whip up support among conservative Republicans and Libertarians--a boogie man because there is little reason to expect that it will ever be reinstated. Instead, it seems to me to be another indicator of the problems within and among conservatives in the US to find legitimate issues with which to rile Americans toward their side.

The Fairness Doctrine, which was designed to force broadcasters to broadly explore all angles of cultural, political, social, and religious issues, was put in place in the 1940s by the FCC and lasted until the mid-1980s, finally falling victim to a Reagan veto of a bill supported by congressional Democrats, who attempted to override a FCC decision to abandon it.

Democrats have, from time to time, attempted to reinstall the Fairness Doctrine, not because there is a real need to force commercial broadcasters to offer more diverse and heterogeneous programming, but because the moment that the Fairness Doctrine was vetoed, political talk radio (read: Rush Limbaugh) exploded across the country, and for Democrats, neutralizing talk radio is one more way to make politics difficult for Republicans.

Origins of The Daily Me

2009-03-19T17:20:00.001-04:00

Nicholas Kristof has an OpEd in today's NY Times about the problem of increased polarization as a result of the death of newspapers and really conventional news in favor of "online" news. He refers to Nicholas Negroponte, at MIT, who he says has come up with a concept known as "The Daily Me." This is a tendency to only seek out news that conforms with our pre-existing beliefs about politics, culture, etc. And he is right--this is a big problem as the news media becomes fragmented. The problem though is the ideal of "The Daily Me" originated first with Cass Sunstein, former law professor at the University of Chicago and now Obama insider. In 2002, Sunstein published "Republic.com," a treatise warning about the effects that online communication would have on civil discourse. In fact, his first chapter is titled "The Daily Me."

You're So Pretty. Can I Come In Now?

2009-03-08T20:36:00.000-04:00

As I tell my students, one of the biases that is profound upon the news gathering/news production process comes from the media "beat" system, put in place long ago as a way to bring efficiencies to the news. You assign a reporter to a particular agency/institution/corporation where news is highly likely to happen. From this all sorts of problems emerge: For instance, the reporter comes to identify with the source and over time (and not a long span of time), comes to like the person, thus is not as likely to write critical stories. Or, even worst, as a result of the competitive nature of the news business, the source can leverage the reporting by threatening to cut access to one reporter if the reporter refuses to play ball. Rather than all reporters on the beat standing together, the opposite works. And then, there is the problem of the Beat Sweetner.

Because a reporter is told by his or her employer to gain access to his or her new beat, they feel flattery is the best way in--hence the sweetner. As this article by Michael Calderone in "Politico" argues: "The problem...is that beat reporters 'are kind of captives to this bureaucracy, [and] they know that some laudatory pieces at the outset will pave goodwill in the future.'" The problem? Jonathan Alter, of "Newsweek" argues: "It's emblematic of the way Washington journalism often works. The problem is when a reporter puts the ease of their working relationship ahead of the interests of the reader."

The problem begins at the outset of a new administration, or when new control comes to the Congress. All reporters look to buy future cred with the power structure by writing puff pieces or flattering profiles. One way to break the conflict of interest is to have a reporter who is not covering the beat write the piece (or better yet, why write puff pieces anyway? Aren't they supposed to be the watchdogs?) Another way to break up the symbiotic relationship is to term limit reporters. Break it up by cycling reporters every year or two.

As Calderone notes, it is not a problem that this is done during the honeymoon period of a new administration, but anything after the first 100 days (although it would be great to get away from the "first 100 days metaphor") or the first six months, whichever your prefer, is doing a disservice to the reader or viewer.

Assistance

2009-02-28T20:36:00.002-05:00

I am in need of a bit of help locating video from President Bush's address to the nation regarding the invasion of Afghanistan, October 7 2001. I was unable to find it at the White House, and the American Presidency Project only has the audio.

I will throw it out to all of you. Anyone know where to grab the audio/video of this?

Confused

2009-02-10T20:35:00.000-05:00

There has been much made about President Obama calling on Sam Stein at last night's press conference. For those who did not watch, Stein is a blogger at the liberal Huffington Post and is not a traditional reporter. Obama called on 13 different people last night, and the nod to Huffington was both designed to throw a bone to the liberal bloggers AND to an important constituency in helping secure his November win. Clearly the Obama Internet campaign had everything to do with his win over Clinton and McCain, so it is natural that one would be in the audience.

What has puzzled me is the media's hype that this is a first. For instance, this article in Time notes that this is a first and not Jeff Gannon, the conservative reporter/gay porn star who was exposed in 2005 for lobbing softballs to President Bush during a press conference. Gannon represented Talon News Service, which was a Republican front.

But what about Garrett Graff? Doesn't ring a bell? Graff was a 23 year old blogger writing for Mediabistro's Fishbowl D.C. He was credentialed in March 2005, and attended both press briefings and press conferences. And there was a lot of fanfare at the time about the appointment.

So what gives? Is it one more example of the liberal media?

Scalia 0, Undergrad 1

2009-02-04T21:46:00.000-05:00

I am no fan of bringing television cameras into the Supreme Court. I have a mountain of evidence about the damage that cameras have done to all other aspects of American politics, and would no doubt do massive damage to the Supreme Court, should it allow them inside. But on the otherside, there is something to facing the press and their questions. It makes the person consider how his or her answers will resonate with the American public. Thus the millions that are spent keeping the PR industry in business.

To underscore this point, consider the ass Associate Justice Antonin Scalia must have made of himself when he barked at a legitimate question asked of him by, of all persons, a junior political science major at Florida Atlantic University. To set the stage, Scalia is on tour promoting a new book geared towards new trial lawyers. He gave a talk in Palm Beach that was attended by 750 people, including Sarah Jeck, the junior political science major. Here is how the South Florida Sun Sentinel described what came next:

Student Sarah Jeck stood in front of 750 people and asked Scalia why cameras are not allowed in the U.S. Supreme Court even though the court hearings are open, transcripts are available and the court's justices are open enough to go "out on book tours." Scalia was at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in part to do a book signing and wasn't happy at the question.

Scalia sneered that the question was "nasty" and "impolite," and ordered that someone ask the next question. It is hard to see just what part of the question was nasty or impolitie? It seems perfectly legitimate--a spin on "eating your cake and having it too." It appears that Scalia did get around to addressing the question once he had time to process her meaning. He told the audience that he opposes cameras in the courtroom because of the "30-second takeouts," which led to this conclusion: "Why should I be a party to the miseducation of the American people?" Clearly comments without a care in the world of public perception, since we are all too dim-witted to understand in the first place.

I doubt Scalia gave this a second thought considering his actions in the past, but he should. The Congress has been increasingly pushing for greater access inside the Supreme Court, and the last thing that I think Scalia and his colleagues want is a public that actively sides the Congress.

Oh Jake, How Could You?

2009-01-20T21:34:00.002-05:00

Some of you may be suffering from inauguration overload (particularly if you have watched even the smallest amount of network/cable news coverage of today's event, where each news station tried to outdo all the competitors with delivering the greatest commentary on the "levity of the moment" or to show how today's event had international implications (ABC broke away several times to Indonesia, where a group of elementary-aged students stared bleary-eyed at a television set, at nearly 12 in the morning their time, all the while feigning interest of their own). If you could stomach it, you turned to cable news, where MSNBC tried desperately to signal to the new administration that they were ready to carry their water, much in the same way Fox News did for the Bush administration (Chris Matthews paused on the image of Dick Cheney being wheeled out of the White House as a metaphor for the way the Bush administration was leaving the presidency). I stayed with C-SPAN for much of the day--if you are a political junkie, C-SPAN is where it is at. There you could tell your kid who the important folks were assembled on the inaugural stand or you could pipe up that Obama made a mistake by declaring that 44 men had stood where he did, taking the oath of office (43 men have been elected president, though Obama is the 44th president--Grover Cleveland is the discrepancy).

I waited until 6:15 p.m. to turn the local news on. By that time, it was safe that the locals were talking weather and sports. There is very little more aggravating than watching local news readers attempt to supersede their network peers. At 6:30, I turned to ABC News, which is flush in money and thus could afford a prolonged, 90 minute special on the days events (6:30 to 8 p.m.). It was then that I heard something disappointing from a reporter I normally like (there are so few). Jake Tapper, who will be covering the Obama White House as the White House correspondent for ABC, made a crack about keyboards missing their "W's" when the Bushies left office today. If you didn't understand the significance of the inside crack, turn your clock back eight years. Then it was George W. Bush moving his things into the White House. The Republicans controlled Congress, and the Clinton administration had just tarnished its reputation further by granting a last minute pardon to a millionaire fugitive from justice whose wife had dumped a pile of money into the Clinton library. Furthermore, there was a moment late in the day on the 20th, 2001, that the Clinton administration might not vacate the premises. Clinton held a number of "goodbye" ceremonies that some saw as an attempt to upstage the incoming Bushies.

That set the tone for a series of stories that ran for several days about rampant vandalism/theft/debauchery by the outgoing Clinton administration. Here are some of the highlights that drew the press right in, lock, stock and barrel:

Numerous keyboards were missing the letter "W"--in fact, an business supply store sent the Bush administration 500 "W's" to help make up for the losses;
The cords were cut to telephones, fax machines, and computers at a cost of at least $10,000 just to get the phones back up and running;
Desks were turned upside down and file cabinets had some gooey substance dumped into them that appeared to be a mix of glue and vaseline (and symbolically as a stand in for semen);
Above one office hung a sign: "White House Office of Strategery," a play on a SNL skit during the election;
The message machines contained the outgoing message: THIS IS AL GORE'S OFFICE. DUE TO A CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS, I'LL BE OUT FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS;

And then there was Air Force One. The stories about what the Clintons did on their way home on board Air Force One were hysterical. Supposedly the Clintons walked off with everything that was not nailed down--wine glasses, robes, soaps, seat cushions, paintings--this followed a similar theme of the things they managed to cart off from the White House before they turned over the keys to the Bush's.

And given the nature of the MSM in America, this fit in precisely for what is regarded as newsworthy--conflict and sensationalism.

Andrea Mitchell, a correspondent for NBC titled her report: Transition of Power to Bush Administration Marred by College Pranks and Vandalism by Departing Clinton Team. She referred to "sources" who said that "phone lines were cut, drawers filled with glue, door locks jimmied so that arriving Bush staff got locked inside their new offices, obscene messages left behind on copying machine paper."

Other sources told the White House Press Corps that "Air Force One" would "replace glasses and hand towels taken by passengers traveling with the Clintons" to which Sean Hannity blustered: "They strip Air Force One of the china and everything else that wasn't bolted down."

Even Tipper Gore, wife to VP Al Gore, phoned the Bush administration and apologized for all the damage down by the outgoing staff.

If you recall, this was an administration that won the presidency under the worst possible circumstances. And it was taking over for an administration that was popular with most Americans. How best to shift public opinion than to let the American public see what the Clinton's were really about. The Republican Congress, ever willing to help out, demanded that an investigation be done and the taxpayers reimbursed for the money it would take to fix all the damages. Republican Bob Barr, one of the leaders in the Clinton impeachment, ordered the GAO--then called the General Accounting Office and changed in 2004 to the Government Accountability Office--to undertake such an investigation.

And what did the GAO find out? That this "scandal" was an invention of the Bush White House, part of a strategy (used over and over again) to snow the MSM in the United States. At the center was Ari Fleischer, master manipulator, who used "unnamed sources" to lure the press in, and outside conservative media (Drudge Report, Fox News, and Talk Radio) to keep the story going as part of an "echo chamber" effect--that as it bounced from one conservative outlet to the next, it eventually found its way onto the pages of our newspapers and onto our television stations.

As Fleischer and the rest of the Bush communications operatives understood it, and rightly so, the media has a strong taste for the unusual, a strong desire for being first, and a very short memory. Just days after taking office, Fleischer told the White House press that they would be cataloging all of the abuses that took place, which signaled to the press that this incident went beyond a simple "prank":

The cute story that had appeared in the Post earlier in the week had officially ballooned into one more tawdry Clinton scandal. Now, according to the Post, "Bush officials described serious damage that has taken taxpayer money to repair." There was a full accounting of the pranks that some Democrats now, on background, confirmed: the missing "W" keys, the placement of phony signs on certain doors with titles like "Office of Strategery," "Office of Subliminable Messages" and "Division of Uniting," and reports that Clinton staffers had "interspersed blank photocopy paper with a fake Time magazine cover -- widely circulated on the Internet during the Florida recount litigation -- featuring a photo of an unhappy Bush saying "Oh shit."

Allen's front-page story included even more damaging allegations, quoting one unnamed Bush official who accused Clinton staffers "of taking White House paintings and trying to have them shipped to themselves. Others are said to have steamed official seals off office doors and tried to have them shipped." In fact, according to the story, "the incoming Bush administration ordered all packages X-rayed starting at noon" the day it moved in.

By the time the GAO got around to releasing their report--months after the fact--other matters had moved in that were far more important. There was a massive energy crisis coupled with a burgeoning collapse of major businesses who had been caught cooking the books. There also was an international incident with the Chinese and a crisis involving stem cell research. Thus the Clintons were never really cleared, as far as the press was concerned, evidenced by the comments today of Jake Tapper.

I doubt you will see a replay of that episode in the new Obama administration. It is unfortunate that more was never really said about it in the first place, because it clearly was evidence of things to come--using the media to completely dupe the rest of America. It is one of the reasons, I think, of why the administration will get high points from communications strategists while simultaneously receiving low marks from those who judge such things as a "legacy."

But in closing, it is disappointing that Tapper repeated this low point since he was one of the firsts to catch on to the dubious nature of Fleischer and the White House Office of Communications.

Bah

2009-01-18T20:55:00.001-05:00

Not that I mind getting comments from yahoos, but I wish it was for justifiable reasons. A reporter with the Cox News Service picked up the press release from Miami regarding my recognition by the House Judiciary Committee for my work on the signing statement. The reporter simply reposted the press release verbatim, which isn't unusual. But he changed the title, and in so doing attributed my work as something that it is not.

The Miami press release says: POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR NOTED IN JUST-RELEASED HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE REPORT, which is right. In this mammoth report very critical of the administration, some of which is partisan attacks, I have a blurb whereby it makes reference to my work on the signing statement.

The Cox News Service article's title is: MU PROFESSOR CLAIMS BUSH ABUSED POWER IN REPORT. Now that is entirely different. This now has me co-writing the report with Chairman Conyers. Overall, the tone suggests not an academic examination but rather a partisan jab. Now for those who read my blog postings, you know that from time to time I have been critical of the Bush administration and its use of the signing statement, and it is a statement of fact that he blows the lid off using the signing statement to challenge provisions of law. But that is my blog. To suggest that I use my academic writing to make partisan attacks is a swing at my reputation as a researcher. Thus I take issue with the posting and have written the reporter to say as much.

What I love are the comments that this news posting as received, telling me to return to my "Ivory Tower" (I live in a modest two story brick house) and, despite clearly noting that I am employed at Miami University, one commentor suggests I "get a job." Suppose he or she has one to offer?

The Top 25

2009-01-12T21:14:00.001-05:00

Jacob Weisberg, who has made a good living off of President Bush's destruction of the English language, has published what he feels are the top 25 "Bushisms"--those crazy sentences the come from President Bush speaking off the cuff and not off the teleprompter.

I am sure that Weisberg has gotten tons of email from fans who quibble with his picks. I don't intend to do that here. Instead, I just sat back and soaked it all in while listening to President Bush's final press conference (more below). Some of my favorite Bushisms from Weisberg's list:

#2. "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."—Greater Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, Jan. 27, 2000.

#4. "Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."—Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004.

#5. "Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican."—declining to answer reporters' questions at the Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001.

#17. "People say, 'How can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil?' You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002.

#21. "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000.

As Weisberg accurately notes:

Being able to laugh at yourself is a rare quality in a leader. It's one thing George W. Bush can do that Bill Clinton couldn't. Unfortunately, as we bid farewell to Bushisms, we must conclude that the joke was mainly on us.

No lie there.

The "joke on us" line comes into clear view if you listened to the final press conference this morning. Keep in mind that this is an administration that made no bones about the way it felt about the national media. They used every technique--including inventing a few new ones--to muzzle and control the press that covered them. Who can forget Ari Fleischer's threat to a reporter who had written a story that he didn't like, that the reporter had been "noted" in the White House? Or who could forget demanding that the press corps provide their questions in advance back in March 2003 in Bush's press conference before our march to war in Iraq? And who could forget the way Helen Thomas had been treated or the way in which conservative hacks were given a prominent place during the rare press conference that Bush actually gave?

With all this in consideration, Bush gave a "no holds barred" press conference, and opened up with this whammy:

Through it all, it's been -- I have respected you. Sometimes didn't like the stories that you wrote or reported on. Sometimes you misunderestimated me. But always the relationship I have felt has been professional. And I appreciate it.
I appreciate -- I do appreciate working with you. My friends say, what is it like to deal with the press corps? I said, these are just people trying to do the best they possibly can.

And did the reporters finally give it to the President? Here are some of the questions, so you be the judge:

Q. Well, a couple years ago, Charles Krauthammer, columnist and Harvard-trained psychiatrist, coined a term, "Bush derangement syndrome," to talk about your critics who disagreed with you most passionately -- not just your policies, but seemed to take an animosity towards you. I'm just wondering, as you look back, why you think you engendered such passionate criticism, animosity, and do you have any message specifically to those -- to that particular part of the spectrum of your critics?

Q. Mr. President, thank you very much. Since your philosophy is so different from President-Elect Obama's, what concerns you the most about what he may attempt to do?

Q. Mr. President, you spoke of the moment that the responsibility of the office would hit Barack Obama. The world is a far different place than it was when it hit you. When do you think he's going to feel the full impact? And what, if anything, have you and the other Presidents shared with him about the effects of the sometimes isolation, the so-called bubble of the office?

It boggles the mind. Which brings me back to Weisberg's list. Number 25 on the list says it all:

#25. "I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."—Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008.

A Moment of Silence, Please

2009-01-06T23:20:00.001-05:00

Don't ever think that the administration missed a chance to either change the subject, when things were bad, or to go in search of new supporters. For instance, if you have been browsing the White House "News" page, you would see for January 5--under the announcement regarding President Bush's meeting with the government officials from Sudan and above the memorandum for the Secretary of State--the announcement that "President, Mrs. Bush, Barbara, and Jenna" are "Deeply Saddened by Passing of Their Cat India ("Willie"). We learned that the cat was 18, named by daughter Barbara when she was 9, and got the name "India" after Texas Ranger ballplayer Ruben Sierra, who was nicknamed "El Indio." It appears also that when the Bush twins went to college, the cat got a name change by those at the White House, who "affectionately called" the cat "Kitty."

But what about those of us who need more information than just this? The White House doesn't disappoint here either. Another link, which takes us to the White House website for kids, has a complete biography for India, or Willie, or Kittie. This page tells us about India's "Dream" job ("presidential historian") and favorite book, assuming he could read (If You Take a Mouse to the Movies by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond).

So please take a moment, when saying your prayers tonight or tomorrow, to say one for the First Cat, who lived a long life despite the multiple names.

The Power of the Internets

2008-12-28T22:14:00.000-05:00

There is a pretty good article today in the "Washington Post" on the potential the Internet has to transform the manner in which politics in the United States plays itself out. Under the title: "Politics is no Longer Local. It's Viral," Jose Vargas argues that the Internet has the potential to bring together individuals in a way no other technology in the past has--to connect individuals spread out distances great and small, and organize them into a political force. From "Facebook" to SMS to "YouTube," it is a force that is only in its infancy, which means great things lie ahead for those of us who carefully watch politics.

The writer, who tells us that he was hired by the "Post" in 2007 "just before" his 26th birthday, to cover "the marriage of Internet and politics." We also learn that he "majored in political science" but is in fact "no political expert." He let's us know that the Internet is transformative to politics as usual, with the usual being television, because television is all about "being in control and staying on message." The Web? It is "an uncontrollable, freewhelling medium" that allows individuals a voice in the process.

The only downside to the article in large part comes from the writer's declaration that, while being a political science major, he was never interested much in politics at a deeper level. And since all he has known, in his young age, has been the Internet and people telling him that he (or his generation) is special. Thus the technology that is his (or his generation) is naturally bound to tear up the old order and the old way of thinking. So the article underscores the ideal that the traditional media is dead.

To make matters worst, what he understands about the new technology has come from technophiles--and for his money, the best book on the subject--drumroll--is Al Gore's The Assault on Reason. And we all know how measured Al Gore is when it comes to something like the Internet. It would be like writing about democracy in America, and the only thing you know about it has come from the collected writings of Dennis Kucinich.

Vargas, to bolster his point that we have a way around the media block, points out the "wall-to-wall coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's provactive homilies" where the MSM "coverage consisted mostly of sound bites, replaying and replaying a 20-second or so clip of what Wright had said" while Netizens could have their own conversation by watching Obama's speech on race on YouTube while also forming discussion groups on the topic at other "social networking sites." He also notes that the media were forced to take notice of Obama prior to the start of the primaries because he had brought together so many people, who had contributed less than $200, but together had raised serious money. In the pre-Internet period, the MSM may not have given Obama any notice because he didn't attract those with deep pockets.

But before we get carried away, we should temper our enthusiasm by considering:

The candidacy of Ron Paul, who raised, in one quarter, as much as anyone and who had a viral network of thousands of die hard fans who would show up in droves at rallies. Despite this outpouring of netroots activity, Paul's campaign got either zero or negative coverage by the MSM, and we saw how far he got;
How much was Obama helped by the 1) novelty of the candidate and 2) the lack of decent slate of presidential hopefuls?
How much did old fashion, traditional politics play into the way the 2008 election unfolded? Obama built organizations in smaller, off the beaten path states and placed organization in Iowa while Clinton placed all her eggs in the first several races, planning on wrapping up the nomination by early- March? Thus when Clinton stumbled out of the gates, her strategy left her behind the eight-ball once the race wound its way through March and then into April, she quickly ran out of money and options. Had her plan worked, it is not likely that Obama would have ended up the nominee.
How much did the race come down to money? If Obama had come into the general election struggling to raise cash, how much different might this race had been? What did money do for Obama? It enabled him to buy advertising in more states than just the battleground states, thus forcing McCain into defending areas that should have been naturally for him. It enabled Obama to run those informercials and to run some positive ads, thus when the question came down to who was more negative, money bought him positive press coverage there as well. Money, money, money. Nothing new about it.

I don't wish to come off as a Luddite here. I am just not willing to write off 1) television or 2) the powerful force of the MSM on politics and elections in the US. New technology has always been powerful at the margins, and the Internet is no different in that respect. It may, one day, replace how Americans learn about politics and become engaged in the process, but that day is not here yet. People still get their information from television and newspapers, and when they venture online for information, it is mostly to the brick and mortar media sites like Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and the networks, as well as the major newspapers. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

But I do agree with one of Vargas's central points--any candidate in the future who does not have an Internet/new technology component to their campaign will start the race well behind those who do.

One More Thing Re: Fox News Interview of Cheney

2008-12-23T20:12:00.001-05:00

I have one more thing to add to yesterday's post regarding the interview Dick Cheney had with Fox News's Chris Wallace, which was conducted on December 19 and ran this past Sunday, December 21.

Cheney got in a number of licks against critics without any, or much of a response from Wallace. One of the glaring criticisms that went unchallenged was this one regarding Cheney's response to some recent criticisms (really extensions from the campaign) by Joe Biden against Cheney and his view of executive power.

Wallace asked Cheney what he thought of this Biden criticism made on the campaign trail in October as well as Wallace's characterization:

"Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous Vice President we've had probably in American history." Transition officials say that Biden plans to shrink his office; that he is not going to meet with Senate Democrats the way you did every week with Senate Republicans; that he is not going to have his own "shadow government" in the White House. Biden has said that he believes you have dangerously expansive views of executive power. "Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous Vice President we've had probably in American history." Transition officials say that Biden plans to shrink his office; that he is not going to meet with Senate Democrats the way you did every week with Senate Republicans; that he is not going to have his own "shadow government" in the White House. Biden has said that he believes you have dangerously expansive views of executive power.

Cheney scoffed by questioning Biden's intelligence regarding the Constitution (suggesting that if he did not understand the most basic parts of the Constitution, how can we ever trust him as the number 2 guy?):

Well, I just fundamentally disagree with him. He also said that all the powers and responsibilities of the executive branch are laid out in Article I of the Constitution. Well, they're not. Article I of the Constitution is the one on the legislative branch. Joe's been chairman of the Judiciary Committee, a member of the Judiciary Committee in the Senate for 36 years, teaches constitutional law back in Delaware, and can't keep straight which article of the Constitution provides for the legislature, which provides for the executive.

That struck me as surprising, and I wondered why Wallace didn't pursue it by looking at what Biden actually said and then asking Cheney whether he really watched the debates himself or did he allow staff to fill in the blanks? Here is Biden's response during the debate to a question he got from moderator Gwen Ifill regarding Cheney's interpretation of the vice presidency:

Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.
And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit.

The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he's part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous.

In the first paragraph, it really isn't clear precisely what Biden is saying, but by the final paragraph, it comes into focus what the meaning was behind the first paragraph. Biden says: "The ideal he's part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive and look where it has gotten us..."

You may recall a minor kerfuffle a year or so ago where Cheney was trying to battle a requirement by the "Information Security Oversight Office," or ISOO, to turn over information regarding its classification process. During that dust up, Cheney made the remarkable claim that he was exempted from the policy because it demanded that executive branch entities turn over the information, and he was not an executive branch entity. Instead, the vice president was an Article I officer. Cheney made that argument. Publicly, I might add.

So would it not behoove Wallace to remind Cheney that it was he, and not Biden, who needed the constitutional lesson as it was Biden, maybe not clearly, who was chiding Cheney's interpretation of the Constitution?

So much for liberal bias.

Enough of Fein and Anyone Else

2008-12-22T20:40:00.000-05:00

Bruce Fein, a former attorney in the Reagan administration, has gotten more than his say when it comes to the press and its need for reflections on the Bush administration or presidential power in general--especially since some of what he says is wrong. I am not sure anyone would have listened to Fein had he not had the Reagan connection. It would be nice to see Washington-based journalists adding more than just his name to their Rolodex.

Case in point is this article by Lisa Mascaro of the "Las Vegas Sun" titled "Will Lawmakers Reclaim Power?" The article examines presidential power under the current Bush administration as well as presidential power with the incoming Obama administration--using this open letter from Senator Russ Feingold to Obama asking him to throw a bone to separation of powers in his inauguration speech. For my money, that should tell you about the current ability of Congress to uphold its end of the constitutional bargain when it requests the new president to take it easy on them.

As for Fein, here is an example of where he is wrong about the record of presidential power. Mascaro quotes Fein, reflecting about separation of powers during Clinton, saying this:

"Congress...did not protest when the Clinton administration engaged in military action in Kosovo without full congressional approval required under the War Powers Act..."

Nothing could be further from the truth. Congress passed legislation requiring US troops to remain under US command, and not NATO command. Congress even conditioned appropriations on Clinton's use of troops in the Balkans. To say that the Congress sat back and allowed Clinton to run roughshod over them is just wrong. What is puzzling about the Congress under Clinton and Bush II is that the Republicans from 1995-2000 were very aggressive in seeking to grant itself a greater role over domestic and foreign policy and then played dead from 2001-2006.

What Congress should be prepared for once Obama takes office in 2009 is that it will need to fight to maintain its role in this constitutional system and not sit back and hope that the new president will grant them anything. Only then will Congress live up to its responsibilities under the Constitution.

It's That TIme Of The Year Again

2008-12-14T10:55:00.000-05:00

June Kronholz, a reporter for the "Wall Street Journal," has a very good substantive article about the Electoral College, which most Americans are woefully uninformed about the process involved in electing the president. Most Americans assume the race ends in November, when they go to the polls to select the candidate of their choice. In reality, the voters go to the polls to select the electors, who will cast their vote for the President of the United States.

The Electoral College was the result of a compromise at the Philadelphia Convention surrounding who got to select the President--Congress or the voters. The Founders worried--with good reason--that if Congress was allowed to select the President, as one plan called for, then checks and balances would be fundamentally upset because this person would owe his or her selection to the Congress and thus would be in a position to do its bidding. But no one at the Convention favored allowing the voters to decide (they didn't even favor giving everyone the right to vote), for fear that they would be swayed by emotion and select demogogues instead of statesmen. In walks the Electoral College. It was designed to negate the choice of the voters should they make a "wrong" selection.

The Constitution mandates that the Electors in the states meet the first Monday following the second Wednesday in December--which means that this meeting will take place at noon in every state capitol this coming Monday, December 15. Because it is up to the states, the process happens differently state to state. In some states, there is a great deal of pomp and circumstance that accompanies the choice the electors make--for instance, in my own state of Ohio, there will be a "color guard and musical interlude" that leads up to the elector vote. In other states, such as Vermont, the three electors will meet in "Room 10 of the statehouse" and be done "20 minutes" later. Once the vote is counted, it is transmitted to Washington D.C., where Congress, meeting in a joint session (and covered only by C-SPAN) will recount the vote and the President of the Senate (VP of the United States) will announce a victor, bringing the 2008 election to an end. This vote will take place on January 8--not January 6, which s the date that the new Congress (111th) comes into session.

In 24 states, there is no law binding the Elector to the vote that took place in November. Thus an Elector can vote for someone different than the person one--so-called "Faithless Elector." We have seen a Faithless Elector in each of the previous two elections. In 2000, the Elector for D.C. cast no vote to protest D.C.'s lack of statehood. In 2004, a Minnesota Elector cast his vote for John Edwards as President. President Nixon is the only U.S. President to have a Faithless Elector in each election he ran--1960, 1968, and 1972. In each election, an Elector voted for someone more conservative than President Nixon.

Check your own secretary of state's webpage for information about the meeting this Monday in your state. Some are providing live webcasts of their vote. They also have a list of who these faceless Electors are, such as the case of Ohio.

Winners and Losers

2008-11-28T19:48:00.001-05:00

In my American Government class, I spend a great deal of time on the effect that McGovern-Fraser reforms had on the American political system, including the enduring effects on the current political system. McGovern-Fraser ended the party hold on nominations, thus removing from the political party an effective mechanism of control on candidates. This meant that the candidates would need to figure out their path to nomination minus the party, which meant developing their own strategy of engaging voters and managing the press. And from this was born the campaign strategy, and now bachelors and graduate degrees in campaign management.

Once a campaign manager established him or herself as a winner, he or she was in great demand and could charge boatloads to work on a campaign--thus contributing to the high cost of elections in the United States. Furthermore, many of these individuals--and the firms they started--worked for the candidate regardless of party--and thus had no incentive on advancing a cause or the larger questions of governing--what is in the best interest of the citizenry or democracy took a backseat to winning at all costs. And all costs is what it has become.

So my students--some encouraged by the possibility of having a political science degree that also makes money--ask how do the candidates know the best from the worst? Is there some scorecard that shows wins and losses? Well there actually is--and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

Campaigns and Elections magazine has just published its list of the winners and losers in 2008, broken down to the state and local level as well as national elections, and where applicable, by political party. So if you are interested in working as a campaign manager or thinking about your big run in 2010, these lists may come in handy.

Channeling FDR

2008-11-16T09:53:00.001-05:00

FDR was partly successful in office because he exploited the power of radio to bypass the national media and speak directly to the American people in a series of fireside chats. But radio had it the national scene long before FDR came to the presidency. So why didn't earlier presidents recognize the power of radio?

The answer lies in FDR's understanding of how people listened to the radio. Some of FDR's predecessors did attempt speaking to the American public over radio, but they did so as if they were speaking to all assembled in a large hall. Many Americans complained that when the president spoke, he was so loud that the speech came across garbled. FDR noticed, when visiting the homes of friends, that when a favorite radio show came on, they gathered around and listened in a way that showed they forged an emotional attachment with the voice on the radio. It drew them in as if they were part of the story. Thus when FDR spoke during his fireside chat, he spoke as if he were talking one on one with his audience.

Successful presidents are those who think of ways to get around the press, either by thinking about how the White House communications is organized (Nixon, Bush II) or think of ways to engage media of all types (Reagan) or think of ways to exploit new and emerging technology (FDR, Clinton). Into this third category we may now place President-elect Barack Obama.

Obama, who used new media as an essential instrument in his campaign, has taken that thinking to the White House. President Obama plans to replace the Saturday Radio Address--a staple since FDR but listened by a tiny fraction of Americans--with the YouTube Saturday Radio Address. Obama has already been using YouTube to explain to Americans what he plans to do in tackling the economic problems facing the country, and to explain how they plan to limit lobbyist access to the Executive Branch. And to reinforce these addresses, Obama has brought in several bloggers who wrote positively of him during the campaign to serve inside the White House Office of Communications. The White House Office of Communications has traditionally worked to move the president's message through or around the national press, and now it seems it will also seek to move the president's message in the blogosphere.

Time will tell to determine if this matters, but clearly taking into account the online community is a way to reach millions of potential supporters who do not use the traditional media to say informed. If it works, then historians will look back on Obama the way we look back on FDR and his strategy to reach Americans directly.

McCain on the Couch

2008-11-05T21:31:00.001-05:00

I have heard a great deal from my conservative friends who blame McCain's loss on the press--that the press had a love fest with Obama unlike anything we have ever seen, with some claiming that he was anointed as the second coming. These conservatives were blithely unaware of the similar recriminations in 2000 and 2004 when the Democrats were in the same boat.

This Slate article by Christopher Beam is a great primer on how McCain can "rebrand" himself, pointing out that a sizable chunk of his loss lays with him and his campaign. And that is true. Thus if the media treated McCain poorly (and in many respects they did), it was not motivated by partisan bias so much as it was motivated by the candidate and his campaign.

In the 2000 election--one that parallels this election--there was a poll taken on the Bush campaign bus before the election, asking the traveling press corp who would win the election. Bush's own traveling press picked Gore over Bush. But the Bush campaign did not flinch. Why? 1) They had run a campaign with a unified message while the Gore campaign started and stopped with different messages (Remember Gore 2.0, 3.0, etc.?). 2) They went out of their way to make the traveling press feel special. Remember all those nicknames that Candidate Bush had for various members of the press? Stretch, SuperStretch? And yet the Gore press corps hated the candidate. He denied them access, and when he did grant access, he lectured them like they were school children. So when they filed their stories, the tone was down right hostile, including complaints about what they were being fed day to day. The interesting thing is that in 2004, when the Bush campaign was tighter in access and where the Democrats could have made in-roads, the Kerry campaign made the same mistake as the Gore campaign. A candidate who rarely interacted with his traveling press and when he did, do so as a lecturer. The press didn't like Kerry any better than they liked Gore. Thus the stories continued to be filed with a hostile or critical tone. And Kerry also fell into the trap of appearing to lack a unified message, thus it appeared as if he was banking on a wing and a prayer.

Enter John McCain, who once claimed the press as his "base." He allowed his campaign staff to run the kind of campaign he is not comfortable running. After McCain had a rough couple of interviews early on in the election, his campaign staff shut him down. And when his running mate, Sarah Palin, blew the softball interviews with Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson, and Sean Hannity, the campaign shut her down as well. Thus when the press was shut down, they went looking for stories, like the $150,000 wardrobe shopping spree for Palin, which generated several days of bad news. Furthermore, McCain never had a unified message. From the start of the campaign back in September, he seemed to adopt a new message every week. And if your message changes week by week, it is easy for your opponent to sell the press on the narrative of erraticism. And when external conditions turn as poor as they have, the candidate who seems erratic in a time of crisis is going to pay the bigger price.

Here's hoping that McCain rediscovers his mojo.

Hardball, Local Style

2008-10-26T15:47:00.002-04:00

One of the techniques of modern presidential campaigns to bypass the national filter and reach the citizen unfiltered is to give interviews to local television, which often are so glad to get the attention that the reporters accept the questions ahead of time from the candidates themselves. Apparently this Orlando station did not get the message. And the interview is also instructive to those who bring up the "liberal press" boogymen in general or the McCain-Palin campaign specifically.

The reporter, WFTV's Barbara West is a "health reporter and anchor" during the noon and 5:30 broadcasts. By looking at her bio, it shouldn't be hard to guess her politics, and after listening to her interview, it shouldn't be hard to see that she has a difficult time hiding her politics.

Her bio says: "When Hillary Clinton attempted to reform our health care system, I traveled to Canada to examine the Canadian national health care system as a possible model for the U.S.

In her interview with Senator Biden, she uses language very similar to the McCain-Palin campaign about "redistribution of hte wealth," and for emphasis, she asks Senator Biden: "From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs" which she followed with "that is a quote from Karl Marx. Is Obama's comment to 'Joe the Plumber' about spreading the wealth wasn't being Marxist."

Biden chuckled, thinking that her comments were a joke, and asked if this was some kind of joke. Ms. West sat there stoicly, in fact there wasn't any evidence in her questions that she gave any thought to them, instead simply reading what was put in front of her.

The Obama campaign responded by cutting the station off for any future interview. A spokesperson for Obama told the station they were pulling Mrs. Biden from an interview, and that the "cancellation is non-negotiable, and further opportuniites for your station to interview with this campaign are unlikely, at best for the duration of the remaining days until the election."

One has to wonder if the Obama campaign did their homework ahead of time. Given the comments on this webpage about West's war with national health care, it should have been obvious where her politics rested. And if that wasn't enough, shouldn't the Florida Democratic Party told them which news stations were likely to be sympathetic?

The Expectations Game

2008-09-28T21:39:00.003-04:00

On today's Fox News homepage, there is an article, picked up from the AP, with the title CONSERVATIVES BEGIN QUESTIONING PALIN'S HEFT. This is Fox, remember. Not just "America's Election HQ, but also the Republican's greatest cheerleaders. The article starts:

A growing number of Republicans are expressing concern about Sara Palin's uneven--and sometimes downright awkward--performances in her limited media appearances. Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, a former Palin supporter, says the vice presidential nominee should step aside. Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing for the conservative National Review, says "that's not a crazy suggestion" and that "something's gotta change."

And here is a kick in the pants--That article, which was an AP wire article, was taken down after I had published this Blog. Fox News--"Fair and Balanced" or "We Report, You Decide"--has taken that article down, giving only an error message if you click on the link. There is a phrase for this Fox--Chicken Shit. You can see the cached version of the story here or the snapshot I took of the page here. One more time. Chicken Shit!

Later on, Fox News posted another article, this time in house, titled: ANALYSIS: PRESSURE BUILDS ON PALIN AHEAD OF VP DEBATE. Under the headline, it continues that Palin has to show that she is a leader when she "faces off in the vice presidential debate against Washington veteran Joe Biden..."

My question: Is anyone buying this? The expectations game is the secret code underlying the US media coverage of elections, and certainly when covering a presidential election. The press speaks of the candidates as if they are running a horserace (i.e. why we call it "horse race journalism") and they speak of debates as if it were Friday night at the fights, as in this story the The Detroit Free Press titled: NO KNOCKOUT, BUT MCCAIN SHOWS STRENGTH IN EXPERIENCE.

The strategy for the debates is to drive up the expectations for your opponent while lowering them for you--thus if the press bites, your opponent will have a much harder time trying to beat the house. This came front and center in the 2000 election when Al Gore allowed the Bush campaign establish impossible odds for Gore's performance, all the while allowing the bar for Bush to be set at its lowest possible wrung--"all he needs to do is just survive..." and we all knew where that ended. In 2004, the Kerry team tried hard to sell the press on lower expectations for his performance, but in the end it never worked given how much Kerry reminded everyone of his mastering of domestic and foreign politics.

In this election cycle, the press is on to the "expectations game" by the two candidates and have even reminded its audience when one of the campaigns is trying to move the bar up or down. Which brings me to this huff about "Palin Must Go" among some Republican die hards--as well as from conservatives who immediately jumped on the Palin bus after her convention performance.

In their new book Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment,

Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N Cappella describe the close alliance between conservatives in the media and conservatives in government to the point that each reinforces the other--that political strategy from the conservative insiders is shared with the conservatives in the press to make pushing the conservative cause that much easier.

Thus is it a stretch to consider the possibility that all the noise from conservative pundits about the need to bump Palin off the bus is designed simply to fawn on Friday--the day after the debate--about just how much they are wowed and blown away by how well she did against the better experienced Biden--repeating exactly what happened following her acceptance speech at the Convention a couple of weeks ago. And in a very tight race, with just a couple of weeks ago, it could very well be the bump that pushes the McCain team across the finish line first. It certainly is what pushed McCain ahead of Obama following the conclusion of the RNC, so why not again?

James Fallows, writing at Atlantic Monthly, has the same theory as I do. Fallows writes:

I'm not joking about this: in the wake of her catastrophic performance in the Katie Couric interview, Sarah Palin has set expectations so low that she is very like to do "suprisingly" well against Joe Biden on October 2.

There is of course the possibility that she does as bad as her performances with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric (which is truly amazing given how much of lightweights those two are), but then again there is as much a chance that Biden will head off the reservation as Biden is known to do.

You Gotta Fight, For the Right

2008-09-25T22:39:00.000-04:00

Leave it to conservatives to never give up, never surrender. They won't stop until the entire country has finally seen the light and tilted Right. Or perhaps they are trying to recapture heady days of yore, when the "Contract with America" was vogue and the media actually took seriously these idiots who wore camouflage and ran military exercises on the weekends because they considered themselves the state "militia," and not the national guard?

All kidding aside, conservatives have been stunningly successful at neutering the Left in the country all because the Left failed to take conservatives, and their ideals, seriously. There has been some great books documenting the rise of conservative ideals in a variety of different areas:

The Media: In no other area have conservatives been more successful than in pushing the media into adopting the conservative cause all because they feared being called liberal. And given the dearth of evidence that demonstrates no liberal bias in the press, because conservatives have repeated enough, most Americans believe that the mainstream media are liberal, and some even believe they are "dangerously liberal."
The Law: In this area, as a result of some very well funded legal foundations and think tanks that push such things as "tort reform," conservatives and their ideals have excelled. Organizations such as the "Federalist Society" and the "Heritage Foundation" have pumped millions of dollars into grooming conservative attorneys for the sole purpose of placement in the federal judiciary or in politics, in such places as the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel and Office of Legal Policy. And organizations such as the American Tort Reform Association, or ATRA, have fooled a number of states into believing that the civil judicial system should be abolished because it represents nothing more than a pot of gold for charlitans who feign injury--such as driving with their feet, talking on the phone, and applying make-up at the same time drinking McDonalds Coffee.
Academia: There has been a concerted effort over the last 20 years to force college campuses to be more conservative by playing on the narrative of the typical college professor, stuck in an ivory tower, who wears hemp and Birkenstocks, and ride bikes or drive tiny little cars with bumper stickers that say things like "Mean People Suck." More so, the college campus is also a place where America, masculinity, God and Country are things to be despised. The typical college course tells the story of how White Men came to dominate the world at the expense of minorities and indigenous cultures. And is also a place where free markets are to be denigrated first and foremost. Thus, there have been organizations such as Accuracy in Academia, created by former Yippie turned Conservative David Horowitz, who wish to expose the Marxist orthodoxy that has seized most college campuses (yet doesn't seem to apply to the business schools, which often are showered with the most money).

It is the final point where I jump off. This week, the "New York Times" ran a story on how conservative activists are changing strategy regarding its approach to turning the college campus. It seems that the full frontal assault of the last couple decades has not panned out, has not made "much of a dent in the way undergraduates are educated." Instead, these conservative groups have decided to buy programs outright by funding centers and "endowed" chairs, and other organizations right on the campus itself, where programs such as "Western Civilization and American Institutions" or the "Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy." There, the classics or "dead white men" are once again part of the curriculum. In many cases, the cash goes right to the top of various colleges, to the deans and provosts, who are responsible for selecting faculty to teach in the programs.

Faculty may scoff as such an ideal, but they need only look at what happened with the media and the law to see just how dominating the conservative view may become and what it may mean to their place in the university. The lesson should be to take the threat seriously and look for funding and programs to balance--or to simply not participate in the first place. The fact remains--the conventional wisdom that colleges are hostile towards conservative ideals is a myth, and that faculty who do their job will be more concerned that the student sees a subject from all sides and not just one. Most faculty know this, but must not be satisfied that the public knows this as well. Folks like Horowitz have an easy time garnering media attention to push the fiction that the social sciences is really the socialist sciences.

Ghost Writers in the Sky

2008-09-24T22:25:00.002-04:00

In 2004, there was many examples where letters to the editor were written by "our servicemen and women" that actually was written out of the Pentagon press office, stumping for the

Bush/Cheney ticket. It seems that 2008 is no different.

In this Salon article, the author writes of her time as a "ghost-writer" for McCain/Palin. She sits down and writes a letter to the editor on a topic sure to motivate Republicans leaning on the fence, and then the letters are collected by the campaign and sent out to battleground states such as Ohio or Pennsylvania, where they are given to "real citizens," who copy the letter verbatim, and put their own signature at the bottom.

In this example, the ghost writer (not to be confused with the awful movie "Ghost Rider" with Nicholas Cage) spends time on Palin, how she also sent a son to Iraq and how she is the right choice because you can feel it in your heart (and not your head).

So open up the OpEd this election season and test your skill at picking out the ghost writers.

The Choice

2008-08-29T20:46:00.002-04:00

I will admit that my guess for who McCain would pick as his running mate was wrong, although I was not too far off. Yesterday, I told my class of mostly first year students that McCain would likely choose someone that we are not hearing about and someone that would help build a bridge to the conservative base, who is distrustful of McCain and has not warmed to him yet despite the backing he has gotten from the administration.

I thought the pundit list that included either Romney or Joe Lieberman were way off base. Despite Mitt Romney's willingness to help the Republicans, and the McCain campaign, in any way he can--which included falling on his sword several months ago and withdrawing from the race--the fact of the matter is, McCain never liked Romney. He did not trust someone who could change core positions as easily as Romney could--someone who would say anything to get elected. And I am sure that McCain realized that if Romney became his VP, he would always be looking over his shoulder to be sure that Romney was not leaving "the reservation" to help Romney. And the pick of Lieberman? Come on, did anyone really think that was possible? McCain can get more mileage out of letting Lieberman travel the country--including a stop next week in Minneapolis--to flak for McCain without adding him to the ticket. All you need to do is revisit the tapes from the 2000 election to see what a disaster Lieberman can be as the VP nominee. He sabotaged Gore's chances in a number of instances--during his tepid debate performance against Cheney, which included an unwillingness to challenge Cheney's assertion that the success he had in the private sector following his stint as Bush I's secretary of defense had nothing to do with the government--and of course his blunder on "Meet the Press" to agree to have any military ballot counted even if it had no date stamped or even though it came in well past the election. We will never know just how many ballots the Republicans stuffed in Florida by managing to count military ballots while not counting any other "overseas" ballot.

I had my money on Eric Cantor--an unknown by anyone outside of conservative circles, where he is a darling. He is young, has service in the House of Representatives, and is rising quickly up the leadership ladder. I figured he would be a natural choice. I have to be honest. I have never heard of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who McCain announced today at Wright State University's Nutter Center in Dayton, Ohio (and just miles up the road from where I grew up).

She is the kind of selection that Dan Quayle was for George H.W. Bush--someone no one knew and someone who has the necessary conservative credentials to overcome the suspicion that conservatives had of Papa Bush. Governor Palin is a social conservative, who is solidly anti-abortion, who favors drilling in Alaska's ANWR reserve, and who is also a "fundamentalist protestant." It is clear that McCain has chosen her for the following reasons: First, to try to send a message to disaffected Hillary voters that he hears their concerns--although it would seem to me that his selection stands for everything the typical Hillary voter loaths. Second, he desperately needs the base to make him competitive in the election. If you remember 2004, the credit that Bush gets for winning a second term was his willingness to abandon the swing voter and beat the bushes for as many conservatives as possible. His victory in Ohio came as a result of motivating rural conservatives to come out and vote in greater numbers than in any previous election.

But it would appear that McCain's pick has some problems--and may become a liability more than a help. First, there is the obvious. She has little political experience, let alone experience at the national/international level. I agree with other critiques I have seen so far--if McCain wanted to make the argument that Obama does not have the experience to lead, it seems that his choice makes that argument seem silly. Sure, she is just the VP, and probably will never be called on to make those important decisions, but given McCain's age...

Second, there were a number of potential landmines identified by someone who knows something about her. Today, the "Washington Post" hosted a discussion with Gregg Erickson, a reporter with the "Anchorage Daily News." Here is a list of problems:

* She favors drilling for oil in ANWR, she favors hunting wolves from the air, and she favors pulling the polar bear off the endangered species list. In fact, her Department of Fish and Game went so far recently to take wolf cubs from their den and shoot them in their effort to improve moose survival. She also apparently is a critic of those who support the dangers of global warming, a la Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma. Given how much the environment may play in this campaign, her opposition to so many different environmental issues makes her ripe for attack.

* She is under investigation for something called "troopergate," where she is accused of using her position as governor to have her sister's ex-husband fired from his job as a state trooper.

* She told everyone gathered to hear her acceptance speech today that on the federal money that was wrapped in an earmark to fund Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere," that she told Congress "Thanks, but no thanks." Erickson said: "...she didn't send the federal money back. It's available for use in other projects elsewhere." So she should have said to Congress: "Thanks for the money. I am not going to build a bridge to nowhere, but I will use the money to fund projects X, Y, and Z."

* She may favor teaching Creationism in public schools.

* She has a hard time not micromanaging and in taking marching orders from someone else. If she goes off the reservation and is reined in by the campaign, what does that do to "Straight Talk?"

* It appears she has problems back in Alaska. Her approval rating has fallen twenty points, from a high of 80 to 60%, and if you take a poll of Alaska reporters and legislators, it appears her approval is even lower. What's more--she will be put out there for a positive record of an executive who knows how to work a budget, but according to Erickson, the "Republican chair of the Alaska State House Finance budget subcommittee on Health and Medicaid says he can't find anyone in Palin's executive office who cares about helping bring that budget under control. He is furious with her about that." And that is from a Republican!

*She apparently struggles with complexity. VP candidates usually do not matter, in the long run, to the outcome of a campaign. No candidate has ever won based upon their choice of a VP. But the VP can be a liability if they go off message or if they run the danger of gaffes, since gaffes is a love of the media during a campaign. When Governor Palin has been asked about the troop presence in Iraq, her answer has been that she "knows only one thing about that: no one has attacked the American homeland since George Bush took over the war to Iraq." In a debate against the more seasoned Senator Joe Biden, she could be made to look amateurish and a liability. But then again, many said the same thing about Governor Bush when he was set to battle against Al Gore in 2000.

If you don't think some Republicans are worried (but not Rush Limbaugh, who thinks she is a "babe"), then how do you explain the massive edit of Palin's Wikipedia's page starting yesterday morning? It appears that some of the more troubling problems--including the fact that she was once a beauty queen--have vanished from her Wikipedia page in the moments before she was announced as the VP choice?

The Everywhere Man

2008-08-23T21:54:00.002-04:00

I was reading coverage about Barack Obama's choice for VP of Delaware Senator Joe Biden, who was a candidate for the presidency in this 2008 election cycle, and also as a candidate in 1988. Biden would have won the nomination in 1988 had he not pilfered the speeches of a British MP as his own (and, for my money, decided to postpone hair transplants at the start of the primary season in 88). Biden also might have won the nomination in 1992 had he not made the political calculation (as so many other top shelf Dems) to wait until 1996 because Papa Bush was invincible in the beginning of 1991.

Biden is a sensible pick, and he was chosen for all the reasons that veeps are chosen--to "balance" where the nominee is weakest. That means it can be a geographical balancing, as was the case of LBJ and JFK, or it can be a "inside-outside" balance preferred by governors, to use their "outside" Washington status to win over the masses, but also to pick a DC insider to sell him to Congress, the interest groups, the media, the DC social scene, etc.,such as Walter Mondale to Jimmy Carter or Al Gore to Bill Clinton, or to balance ideology--someone who is a representative with the "base," as was the case with Dan Quayle or, quite possibly, the person that John McCain chooses.

For Barack Obama, the choice of Biden satisfies two of Obama's supposed weakenesses--lack of experience and in particular, lack of foreign policy/national security experience. Outside of the balance that the VP choice brings, there is little by way of influence that the VP has over voters' decisions, but to the candidate, the danger that a VP can bring is to generate news on his or her own. And Biden is perfect in that respect. He has caused himself all sorts of trouble over the years by speaking off message, and in the race for the presidency, with every nanosecond scripted for the press, any variation from the "message" generates a "feeding frenzy."

The feeding frenzy, as one commentator noted, is easy to get into and stunningly difficult to get out of. Thus Obama must make certain that Biden is chaperoned until election day so that his mouth does not make trouble.

One of the stories on the selection of Biden that caught my attention was this one in the trade magazine "Campaigns & Elections." Usually a thoughtful magazine that deconstructs campaigns of all sorts. This particular story, however, was nothing of the sort. It decided to make light of the time when Obama's decision was announced--3 a.m. this morning. Granted, this was not the time the Obama campaign intended--it was their hope to make the announcement later in the morning to take advantage of the early newscasts (although they did achieve this), but a leak of the name meant they had to make the decision much earlier so that they would be ahead of the information. The 3 a.m. announcement also gave John McCain time to shoot an ad showing Biden, as candidate for the nomination, criticizing Obama's lack of experience as a reason you should not trust his candidacy.

But what got me is the criticism that the message going out at 3 in the morning disturbed folks from their sleep? Some people chose to be alerted of the decision by phone "text messaging," and the article notes: "A number of people on Twitter reported being awakened by the message..." If you chose to be notified by phone message, and you left your phone on and by your bed, doesn't the fault lie with you?

It was the article's quoting of Larry Sabato that really got me. If you don't know who Larry Sabato is, you haven't been reading any newspaper or magazine in the last twenty years. He is a media whore, willing to offer a quote on anything just for the sake of being quoted. On the Biden decision, Sabato says (and he is quoted a number of times in this article alone): "There was too much build-up for Biden. He lacks a 'wow' factor. I don't think anybody is bowled over after all this drama. And to have a text message go out and disturb many people in the middle of the night?" Is he serious? Anyone who was "disturbed" by this message--arriving in the dead of the night--either deserved to be disturbed or are themselves, "disturbed."

With respect to getting quoted, the drill is usually as follows: someone in the University's PR department contacts you and asks if you can offer a quote on whatever the theme of the article is. For instance, I got an email from our PR folks at Miami asking me to make a comment on Paris Hilton's response to a John McCain ad.

I said that I drew the line at commenting on Paris Hilton. Apparently Professor Sabato has no line, commenting on everything as often as humanly possible.

I decided to do a Lexis search of newspaper article over the past week to see how often Larry Sabato's name pops up in news stories, and I was not left wanting. The boy gets around.

For this coming Monday (!), he has a quote in a trade magazine American Banker on donations this election cycle, where he states that Obama is outraising McCain in donations--a theme that reoccurs through last week.

In today's Boston Herald, Sabato hits the jackpot of quotes: on McCain possibly selecting Romney for VP:

"They couldn't be more different in personality and outlook." "McCain is loosey-goosey and Romney is buttoned-down business. Romney tends to be programmed and McCain is anything but." "If McCain asks Romney to be his VP, it will be for the same reason JFK asked LBJ--because he thinks he can win, not because he loves him. They don't have to hug. They can have offices in different buildings.

Loosey-Goosey!?!

On Friday, he appeared in the Christian Science Monitor talking about the bounce candidates receive in debates, the Cox News Service about the "losers of landslides," a reference to Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and George McGovern who are also given a speaking slot at the Dems pow-wow this week. He has two quotes for Cox, including: "If there's one thing Dems appear to be good at, it's losing presidential elections they ought to have won." The Washington Times on First Ladies where he scored three quotes, with this dandy: "The first lady is, in some ways, more influential than the secretary of state. She has the president's ear and knows all the secrets."

On Thursday, he was at the Los Angeles Times talking about Obama campaigning in southern states, the Tampa Tribune, where he can hit the trifecta with three different quotes on the possible selection of Governor Crist of Florida/the difficulty of guessing correctly who gets the VP nod, with this bon mot: "Of course, we comply--like Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy's football." He also appeared in two different articles at the Virginian-Pilot: One article, where he provides three quotes, on the candidate's funding and the second on the candidates visiting Virginia, which says that if the candidates come to Charlottesville, the things they should put on their list to visit is Thomas Jefferson's places of interest, and Larry Sabato."

On Wednesday, he was quoted again in the trade American Banker. This on the choice of Vice President to the banking industry: "You always want people in power who understand your industry, so it would be good news for banking. On the whole, though, banking is so critical an industry that neither party and no officeholder at the highest levels can afford to alienate it."
He also found his way into the Dayton Daily News, which quoted him about McCain's visit to the Greater Dayton (OH) area and a potential VP pick. The reporter asked him if McCain might use the visit to select former Representative and Bush Budget Director Rob Portman as his VP. The Great and Learned Sabato's response: "It's a possibility." Do we really need an expert to tell us that?
He also found his way into the Hartford-Courant about the possible selection of Joe Lieberman as McCain's VP. This solicited more than just "It's a possibility." This featured these two quotes from Sabato:

"I'll be shocked if it happens. The convention would be roiled. There would be a walkout."
McCain wants a VP pal. That's why he is looking at Ridge and Lieberman. We'll see if his staff can explain the political consequences to him."

Sabato also appeared in the Orlando Sentinel, about an article on Bush's speech defending the war in Iraq to a veteran's group in Florida. This article wanted to know how a lame duck president gets attention. Sabato's response: "If Bush is lamer than most lame ducks, it's because his popularity is so consistently low, and the Dem majority in Congress has no intention of passing much of anything he proposes.

On Tuesday, he appeared in the Connecticut Post Online about Obama's need to pick a VP, and Sabato correctly notes that he will need to select someone with foreign policy experience and that Biden would be a good pick, but so would Bayh, Sam Nunn, and Governor Kaine.
Sabato also spoke to the Cox News Service about the coverage by television of the conventions, where he says that nobody wants to watch the conventions because they are "essentially a...propaganda show," (despite the fact that audience size increases for C-SPAN which does gavel to gavel coverage). In this particular story, Sabato lands four quotes, with the final one noting that the only real interest is for the VP/Presidential acceptance speech, and everything else "is just cotton candy." [As an aside, it is fun to do a Google search of "Sabato" and "cotton candy" to see how many places this quote popped up].
He also appeared in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, noting that McCain is likely to win Florida because their two reliable voting blocs are veterans and seniors--two groups likely to vote with McCain.
Finally, Sabato appeared in the Voice of America about the boost in public opinion numbers that come from the convention. See if you can see an inconsistency: "The reason why conventions still matter is because millions of voters are distracted. They are busy. A convention is a wonderful opportunity for both parties to [tele]scope into just four days their major arguments on behalf of their candidate and their party." [Didn't he just get done saying above that no one watches these things?]

On Monday, he appeared again in the Voice of America discussing important issues other than the economy: international issues like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the War on Terrorism (but no Russia?), and then such "tertiary" issues like the environment and education.

On Sunday, he appeared in the New York Daily News on the difference in the size of the campaign war chest between Obama and McCain and the gap in donations between the two, with Obama outraising McCain 2:1.
Finally, a couple of quotes appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review on Obama's choice for VP and the Hillary Clinton factor: "Hillary is not stupid, and neither is Bill, and they are not going to give their critics fodder to attack them. They will recite their lines and project their smiles. It does not matter in the slightest whether or not they do it through gritted teeth."

If you can find a political scientist that is quoted more often then tell me. Sabato appears to be the Wal-Mart of quotations, offering them up on any subject under the sun all for the low, low price of what it should mean to have specialized knowledge--or at the least, at the expense of the rest of us awaiting our chance. By the way, my number is....

What's The Matter (with Lemann's Argument)?

2008-08-16T22:27:00.001-04:00

A recent issue of "The New Yorker" contains an article written by Nicholas Lemann titled "Conflict of Interests." It is a very good article that contains some minor flaws. Despite this, the article accomplishes two important things: First, it exposes readers to the positive side of interest groups AND it attacks the stupidity that suggests changing your position, as a politician, is a bad thing, or a "flip flop."

Lemann begins his article with a discussion of an important book about interest groups that has long been forgotten, if it ever did really enjoy the attention it deserves. The book is Arthur Bentley's "The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures," which was published in 1908. Hence Lemann is writing on what is the 100th anniversary of the book's publication.

Bentley, according to Lemann, divided political groups into two categories: organization groups, which would be the typical type of interest group that comes to mind, and "talk" groups, which include journalists, academics, activists, and so forth.

For Bentley, it is a natural part of government that partisan forces clash and from that clash we get the necessary compromises that moves politics forward. It was the original design of our system to contain conflict within the "black box" of government. Thus the clash of these various forces would produce moderate politics simply because all would see that it was beneficial to win some objectives versus coming away with nothing, something that is lost on the "liberal" and "conservative" forces today. Lemann argues that the two major candidates--McCain and Obama have "have disappointed some of their early, ardent supporters by modifying many of their positions to accommodate the established and organized interests of their parties. Much of the conversation about the Presidential election over the summer has been about how censorious we should be about their 'flip-flops.'"

Bentley's argument about interest groups fits into a theory known as pluralism--that individuals generally do not bring about change in policy, but instead groups do. Because politics is a struggle over such things as precious resources, and because these precious resources are scarce (hence "precious"), everyone has an interest in how they are distributed. Thus when a decision needs to be made, groups provide the better vehicle to secure individual benefits (AARP, NRA, etc.). Once the decision has been made, new groups arise for and against. Thus interest groups operate in the public interest, not against it. Lemann argues that any politician who says he wants to clean up politics and change how things get done is "really saying that he'd like to adjust the correlation of forces among interest groups, bringing some into greater positions of power, and relegating others to lesser positions."

This article is roughly five pages long. By page three, I was happily absorbing a fairly lucid discussion of a theory of politics that you don't expect to read about in a popular magazine, even "The New Yorker." And just as I was happily reading along, I realized that Lemann had an ulterior motive for writing it: To lob a critique against Thomas Frank's new book, The Wrecking Crew. Thomas Frank, you may remember, wrote the bestseller What's the Matter with Kansas? where he asked how folks on the lower end of the SES ladder could vote for politicians who stand for things against the voter's own interests--that is, how could these poorer voters vote Republican in the numbers that they do?

In Frank's new book (I haven't read it), he documents the collusion between the Republicans who controlled Congress from 1995 to 2007 and big business. Frank apparently uses, as illustration, the 1996 Telecommunications Act, where big communications interests virtually wrote the law that was the most massive overhaul in communications law in a 60+ year history. These interest groups essentially pushed through legislation to their benefit and not to the benefit of the public. But Lemann argues that it is unfair to claim all interests are the same, even if they represent "big business":

You’d never guess from this that the Telecom Act pitted one group of telephone companies and their lobbyists against another group of telephone companies and their lobbyists—or that business-versus-business battles of this kind go on constantly in Washington.

Lemann argues that Frank's argument has the same problem as Karl Marx, who also wrote about the benefits of groups--the "Proletariat"--in fighting for their day against the capitalist owners of the means of production, the "Bourgeoise"--a lack of differentiation. Assuming that all interests are the same: "Frank, viewed from a pluralist point of view...tends to characterize the Republicans and the Democrats as representing business and workers, period, rather than as ever-mutating coalitions of groups with differing motives..."

The problem, for me and other folks I spoke to who know something about interest group theory, is Lemann does not give his readers any ideal of how pluralism has fared "empirically" in the 100 years of its existence. So what of the question: do interest groups come and go in a way that maximizes the public interest? The answer is no, not really. Instead, what we know about the role of interest groups in the US is that some interest groups seem to prevail most of the time--thus we have biased pluralism, or as one political scholar has suggested, the "flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent."

Those groups with the most resources are those whose needs get met, whose voices get heard--not all of us. Time and again it is the groups with the most money, with the best in communicating its needs and concerns that stifle government action. When the public trough is opened, they are the first in line. Whatever is left over is for the rest of us to struggle over. We have very good data--both qualitative and quantitative--that this is so. So sure, there is a difference between the interests representing radio and the interests representing telephone companies. But that is a difference that matters only to the well-heeled. I suspect that Lemann left this out because it would make Frank's point--a point that Lemann was desperately working to critique.

The Worst

2008-08-06T11:41:00.000-04:00

I am a subscriber to XM Radio, and one of the programs on XM is POTUS 08, which covers all things presidential election.

On today's morning show, host Tim Farley interviewed Bill Adair, who runs the website Politifact.com, a service that checks the veracity of candidate statements and is associated with the "St. Petersburg Times."

Fact checking is an important component of what the press should do during a campaign, but up until recently simply stopped doing because it drains resources to have to check the veracity of a candidate's statement--it is much easier to describe who is up and who is down. And because the press stopped checking facts, a host of independent organizations popped up (as a result of the information superhighway) to provide this important service--organizations such as Spinsanity and Factcheck.org. And because these services began to get a lot of attention and a lot of traffic--think of the VP debate in 2004 when VP Vader made reference to "factcheck.com"--media began to have their own factchecking segments--even local television media began to provide this service. All is well and good.

Back to today's segment on POTUS 08. Tim Farley, the host, and Bill Adair, the guest, started talking about what is new at Politifact, and what is new is their "Flip-O-Meter"--which is designed to provide a number to how many times a candidate flip flops. You know about flip flops, right? In the 2004 election, at Bush campaign events, the enthusiastic crowds would wave their flip flops in the air to describe John Kerry's changing positions (I voted for...before I voted against it). The "flip flop" claim is a pejorative that one campaign uses to attack another. And now the St. Petersburg Times is going to provide a meter to guage which candidate is the bigger schemer.

Farley asked the right question of Adair--how do you tell the difference from a political calculation and a genuine change in thinking? And that is precisely right.

As far as the media is concerned, candidates running for presidency have perfect information--they know all of the answers to all the nation's questions and needs. Thus when they say "NO" to offshore drilling or "100 years" to US troops in Iraq, they must know what they are talking about. It is up to us to decide which one is telling the truth since they both cannot be right, right? Hence when one candidate says something that is different from a previous statement, it must be because of a political calculation. Why? Because the media assumes that all candidates are in it for themselves--are political manipulators seeking to serve their own selfish interests. Hence there can never be a genuine change of mind.

Yet in answer to that question--how can you tell the difference between a political calculation and a genuine change of mind? Since we should want a candidate who, in the presence of the right choice that is different from his beliefs, will choose that right choice rather than take a hard headed approach down the wrong path. Isn't that what we have experience these last 8 ears? A president who refuses to admit he is wrong even when all the evidence is lined up against him.

Mr. Adair's answer was as follows: We don't make value judgments about whether a candidate has had a true change of heart. And while most believe that the term flip flop is a negative one, well not everybody does. When they hear that, they think of a true change in beliefs. I am not making this up, this is what he said. We don't make value judgments and some people do not think of flip flop as a negative. And what is worst, Mr. Farley didn't break out laughing. Didn't shout: WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN NOT EVERYONE THINKS THE TERM FLIP FLOP IS A NEGATIVE????

This segment to me represents the worst in the media. It should be the media that 1) deflates this notion that the person running for president must be all knowing and 2) that it is a good thing when a candidate admits he is wrong and has come to learn something about America and its needs and is willing to change his position. The reason the press doesn't do that is because it has a mental framework about political campaigns that boldy states that no candidate can ever change his mind without a hidden motivation for doing so. And so long as the media has this mental framework, they are never going to 1) help raise participation in elections and 2) restore their relationship with the American public.

Smells Like?

2008-07-24T18:15:00.001-04:00

My thanks to my buddy Bernie for this one. NPR did a story on the baby who covets the front of Nirvana's album "Nevermind." The "baby" is Spencer Elden, and he is 18 years old. The focus on the story is to ascertain what it feels like to have been seen completely naked by millions of people. However it was Elden's quote regarding the 90s that got me:

These days, Elden says, his peers concentrate on "playing Rock Band on Xbox, like, that's not a real band! That's the difference between the '90s and kids nowadays; kids in the '90s would actually go out and make a [real] band!"

Is he serious? The 90s was the decade of garage bands working together to make the big time? This the era of Back Street Boys, Minnili Vanilli, and Spice Girls to name a few (plus that idiot band that both Justin Timberlake and the former Mr. Jessica Simpson belonged)?

Rushing To Judgment

2008-07-17T21:27:00.001-04:00

If you want a classic case of why legislation in response to hysteria and public pandering almost always leads to problems, look no further than the state of Georgia. In a move to show just how tough the state is on sex offenders, it has increased the limits on where sex offenders can live--which includes distance from bust stops--to a number that makes it difficult to live anywhere in the state, which is precisely the purpose, according to Georgia House Majority Leader Jerry Keen, a former head of the state's Christian Coalition. Keen declared: "Candidly, senators, they will in many cases have to move to another state."

Of course no one of decency supports making it easy on deviants and perverts. But in the rush to show the public just how tough one politician is over another on criminals--and sexual criminals at that--no one is left to question the problems when the law is applied.

Enter Wendy Whitaker, who as a 17 year old high school student performed oral sex on a 15 year old male classmate (not against his will, mind you) and got caught. She was convicted of violating Georgia's anti-sodomy law (the one involved in the Supreme Court case, Bowers v Hardwick) which was rendered unconstitutional a couple of years ago via the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v Texas. This whole episode occurred ten years ago (Whitaker is now 27) and despite the fact that the law she was convicted of has been wiped clean, and more terribly an act involving two teenagers, who conviction as a sex offender still haunts her. She and her husband have been forced from their home because they live close to a church which operates a day-care center, and now they are being forced from their temporary housing (and quite possibly the entire state) because this "get tough on crime and deviants" legislation (which had overwhelming bi-partisan support).

What this episode shows--unlike the picture of reality painted by politicians and some in the press--is that "everything" has shades of grey. Unfortunate for Whitaker is that she will unlikely find a positive resolution to her case because there is not a politician in the country--let alone in Georgia--that wants to face the prospect down the road of an election-cycle advertisement claiming that "Senator X even championed leniency for sexual predators." And the reason that threat is real is because the day that this ad runs, there will be no one in the press fact checking for accuracy.

Power To The Internet

2008-06-17T22:20:00.001-04:00

The Pew Internet organization has just released a report about politics and the internet, and some of the findings are interesting. Just as background, the organization has been actively researching the emerging role that both the internet and (instant) electronic communication is having upon politics in all forms, from elections to participation to governing. And this particular report confirms what we have seen in the past--that with each passing election, Americans are coming to rely more and more about the internet and electronic communication when compared with previous elections, with interesting results.

This particular study has found that almost half (46%) of adults use the internet, email, or text messaging for political purposes--which means getting their news about the political campaigning for this election cycle, to use email to discuss the campaigns (and in particular to spread disinformation about certain candidates), or using their cell phones for purposes of text messaging friends about the campaigns. Furthermore, to show the importance of emerging technology, 35% of Americans have viewed political videos online rather than on television and 10% are engaging in political activity on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. And one final thing--more and more Americans are giving money to candidates online. As we saw with the 2004 election, the Dean campaign was resilient because it was able to raise a bunch of money from online contributions, which generally are $200 or less. This brings more people into the campaign and can thus sustain you when your campaign is not getting much coverage from the MSM. In this election cycle, Senator Obama was able to best all others in large part from the online, small money contributions it has received--same was true, to a lesser extent, with Ron Paul. The energy that drove his campaign was powered by his online base, who flooded any news organization or political blog's comment sections with information about Representative Paul.

And as the internet and electronic communications become more important in political campaigning, it appears to be benefiting the Democrats over the Republicans--something that the Republicans have been very slow to acknowledge. This means that the emerging generation of voters are selecting Democrats as their preferred brand over the Republicans, with long-term ramifications to the Republican Party. As these young voters become wedded to the Democrats, it will be much more difficult for the Republicans to reach them as they get older. And clearly one area where this has been significant is in contributions. The Democrats have been able to outraise the Republicans in hard money contributions--something it has not been able to do at any period prior to 2006.

As the internet becomes even more important in how people consume political information, the benefit clearly goes to the candidate. First, the internet allows the candidate to skirt many election laws (at least for now). Second, the internet and email allow the candidate to post advertising at very low cost. And third, the internet and email allow the candidate to interact with the voter without any interference from the press. The strategy in the days before "online" meant trying to invent new and better ways to get around the press. Fortunately for the candidate (but not the media), the internet and email have solved that problem. It is disappointing that the MSM have not been effective in figuring out how it can once again be the intermediary between the two (and thus we should continue to see the dominance of misinformation in political campaigns).

Read the report for more juicy insights than provided here.

Weak!

2008-06-16T15:24:00.001-04:00

Did you watch ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" this past Sunday? A couple of interesting things came from it. First, in their "weekly roundtable," they wanted to at least give a nod to the passing of Tim Russert but also not dwell on their rival given how "Meet the Press" has buried the "This Week" for nearly a decade now. So they invite Sam Donaldson onto the roundtable, and Donaldson declares twice how MTP kicked "This Week's" butt. And to show just how insincere the eulogy was, they spent a total of around 7 minutes talking about Russert before they moved on to bigger and better things.

But more important was the segment that had on former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson, who was acting as a McCain surrogate (Thompson followed former NC Senator John Edwards, who was asked if he would consider another VP nod. Despite Edwards swearing off any consideration of acceptance, ABC News had a link stating that Edwards would consider a VP run. Shameless.

But the Thompson piece was telling given the trouble that Republicans are in up and down the ticket this election cycle. For instance, read this Gannett post about Ohio Representatives Steve Chabot and Jean Schmidt, who have sent out nasty "give me money" letters that either distort or lie about their opposition. The desperation comes from the fact that both of these candidates are running for re-election in districts that are considered toss ups in 08. And what is worse is that the two of them are behind in money, which is a problem for all Republicans in this election cycle. Just as it happened in 06, in 08 the Democrats are outraising the Republicans in both hard and soft money contributions, which is miraculous to say the least.

So to bring the base (and the money), the Republicans are dredging up familiar boogeymen to scare the Right into participating. On yesterday's "This Week," Thompson used the word "liberal" five times in a segment that lasted less than 8 minutes. And in the fund raising letters, you see again the use of the term "liberal" as a hopeful "push button" to engage the Republican base. But it is tired and in this election not likely to work. So tune your ears because you are likely to hear more of the "liberal" boogeymen lurking in fundraising letters and television advertising as November draws near.

RIP Tim Russert

2008-06-14T16:31:00.001-04:00

It still pains me that "Meet the Press" will no longer have Tim Russert at the helm--that political journalism will be without Russert. He was by far my favorite of the Sunday talk show hosts and I faithfully watched him when he took over the helm in the early 1990s to make MTP competitive with "This Week with David Brinkley." He didn't just make it competitive, but instead set the standard, leaving all other talk shows in the dust. In fact, the other talk shows now have an advantage in the fact that NBC lost such an asset, and while the choice to replace Russert has not been announced, I am willing to bet that I know one person in the hunt, and I can't say if he gets the nod that I will watch the program any longer. But this point does not intend to be critical.

There are a lot of praises about the passing of Russert and it shows just what kind of presence he had throughout the world. Probably one of the better newspaper pieces is this one by Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times. Rutenberg notes how the sort of power that Russert had which is unrivaled by any other reporters--that President Bush had his dinner interrupted last night while dining with the French President to be told of Russert's passing. Now that is importance. Russert noted that the Oval Office interview he did with President Bush back in 2004 was one of the toughest he had ever done not because of the brilliance of Bush but because of being present in the Oval Office. It was an interview deliberately designed by the White House to give Bush an advantage.

What I found interesting about this article was a passage regarding how the Bush White House had its own staff to track and prepare for the Russert interview. Rutenberg writes:

Mr. Bush’s White House eventually assigned a press aide, Adam Levine, to focus specifically on preparing its officials for interviews with Mr. Russert. Mr. Levine was an expert on Russert interviews, which included the now widely used presenting subjects with their words and asking them about apparent contradictions.

What other journalist anywhere in the World has a division in the White House devoted to reading and watching every interview in order to give your side an advantage when you go toe to toe with him or her? That was Tim Russert.

I certainly hope that other hosts of their political talk shows look to Russert for guidance, but I seriously doubt it. I think the Russert era is one that will fade to the annals of history as television talk shows move towards flash over substance.

RIP Tim Russert

Willie Horton 2.0

2008-06-10T18:41:00.001-04:00

One of the truisms regarding campaign finance reform is that it never works. The moment that campaign finance reform is passed, lobbyists and politicians finds ways around them.

Another truism of political campaigns is that misinformation seems to spread faster than facts and have greater recall. A sub-part of this truism is that misinformation spreads mostly with the help of the mainstream media AND that it is in the best interest of campaigns to figure out how to exploit the cutting-edge technology of the moment in order to boost the spread of misinformation.

With this in mind, Wired Magazine's Sarah Stirland reports on a viral campaign against Democratic nominee Barack Obama that is actively in the works. You will recall the earlier version of this campaign that spread misinformation about his religion and patriotism. This campaign reported that Obama was Muslim, that Obama grew up in a madrasah (which most Americans view as a Muslim school designed to train young minds in radical Islam and to recruit future generations of suicide bombers), that Obama, when he was sworn in as a US Senator, took the oath on a Koran and not on a bible, and for added impact, this campaign used Obama's full name--Barack Hussein Obama (this was parroted on the Fox News Network and on conservative talk radio).

Now that Obama has secured the Democratic nomination, conservatives are set to unveil a new campaign to spread misinformation, and to do so in a way that skirts campaign finance laws. And to make sure it is done right, they have recruited Floyd Brown, one of the brains behind the Willie Horton ad that torpedoed Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign.

These conservatives have created a website, ExposeObama.com, that is designed for a "viral marketing" campaign, which Ms. Stirland claims is "more influential than TV ads in swaying voters' perceptions of candidates." She doesn't really claim why it is more influential, simply citing "studies" that have proven this. She also includes an email from the website's executive director, who triumphs: "This is a radically new and innovative approach to political marketing...and it has the added benefit of not being limited by McCain Feingold!" Ms. Stirland follows with a description of McCain-Feingold, and this: "The implication of the message is that this underground peer-to-peer advertising campaign falls outside the boundaries of the law, and so won't have to abide by the rules that prohibit political action committees from certain kinds of activities." But what does that mean?

First things first. The reason why this new kind of "political trench warfare" works better than say the traditional television advertisement is because it encourages all the visitors to send the misinformation to anyone and everyone, including all of those who might be in the address book of the sender. The misinformation then is sent to those who may not be politically attentive, thus influencing their perception of the candidate. Further, it also encourages those people to send out the misinformation to everyone in their address book plus anyone else they might think of, and so on and so on. Pretty soon you have this misinformation influencing hundreds if not thousands--if not hundreds of thousands--of individuals who are not committed to one candidate or the other. And because they are not likely to seek out information that challenges the misinformation, the intended effect of the viral campaign succeeds! Thus when a TV news account mentions the misinformation--even if it is in a story designed to correct it--all the viewer is likely to hear and pick up on is the original misinformation sent from a "trusted" source. And once the misinformation settles, there is little that the opposition can do to shake it.

Recall the consistent parroting that Al Gore invented the Internet in the 2000 political campaign or that John Kerry was a flip flopper--or even worse--the Kerry decision in the summer of 2004 not to challenge the Swift Boaters, who successfully undercut Kerry's service to the country, making him look like a fake and a phony. So these campaigns--which are only going to increase and become more sophisticated as technology involves--are going to become more influential AND harder to defuse because it comes at a time when the resources of news organizations are in decline (not that news organizations were all that effective against these campaigns when they did have resources).

But what of the current campaign finance regime? It does more than limit the influence of money--it also tried to bring transparency to shadowy groups who sling mud and provide cover for the candidate. For instance, the Willie Horton ad that proved so effective in the 1988 campaign was run not by the Bush-Quayle campaign, but rather the National Security PAC, an organization whose members were hidden from prying eyes. This group was able to introduce negative information into the election which the Bush-Quayle campaign could then recite in stump speeches, all the while claiming innocence. In fact, as we know today, the membership of the National Security PAC not only had included individuals who also worked for the Bush-Quayle campaign, but there was also a great deal of coordination between the two.

McCain-Feingold required that any organization who spent a certain amount of money on television advertisement had to also make public all those who were members. Further, it limited the airing of ads that attacked or promoted a candidate in a federal election 30 days before a primary election and 60 days before the general election. And any ad that was run by the candidate had to include a tag line whereby the candidate acknowledged that he or she approved of the ad. Thus no more of this business where candidates could say that some rogue staffer aired a vicious ad without the knowledge of the candidate.

But this only applies to television. The Internet is essentially the Wild West when it comes to campaign regulations. Thus candidates and their "hit men" have moved their operations online with deadly effect. Since more and more Americans are receiving their information from electronic sources, the Internet has now become a potent weapon designed to undercut those in opposition, and the exchanges happen with very little cost to the campaigns, unlike the costs imposed with traditional advertising.

So look for this election cycle to feature stories about the damage to campaigns coming not from television but from the misinformation spread online. I can personally attest to the misinformation spread about Senator Obama as I have relatives who continue to believe--despite my burying them in facts to the opposite--that Senator Obama is a radical Muslim with his sights on making American the new Mecca. And I bet you know someone like this too!

Free Ride (Book Review)

2008-06-03T22:36:00.002-04:00

I have just finished reading David Brock and Paul Waldman's book, Free Ride: John McCain and the Media (Anchor, 218 pages). It is an exceptionally good book if you go into it noting that some things you will simply need to disregard because both authors are liberal partisans. But despite their partisan identities, they also prove that you can take on a subject and to do so objectively. How do these two different concepts jive--that the book is both partisan and objective? Much of the focus on McCain is viewed through a partisan lens, but the way in which the media has covered McCain is dead on, and it is this subject that makes this book a valuable addition to your books on the 2008 election.

The book looks at McCain's political life, which began following his return from Vietnam where he was held as a POW--a fact that anyone who even remotely pays attention to politics knows all too well. The authors demonstrate how the media will use a line about McCain's POW status even if it has nothing to do with the subject at hand. For the authors, this is a strategy cultivated by McCain to make him immune to political attack. The authors note how often McCain brings up his imprisonment when he is being grilled by political opponents or the press, which usually is captured in the following: "I haven't had this much fun since my last interrogation."

McCain got into politics after his first marriage ended and after his second marriage to Cindy, whose family was wealthy and a political force in Arizona. His father-in-law was owned a beer distribution plant, which is where his money was made (if you recall, McCain fought to the last to keep his wife's tax returns from going public because of how much money she has, which could be a political liability in the general election). In 1982, McCain ran for an open congressional seat in Arizona even though he lived outside of Washington D.C. He was able to use his father in law's political connections to get the Republican influentials in Arizona to back him over more established candidates in Arizona politics. Eventually McCain would move to the Senate when Barry Goldwater retired from the seat he had held for decades. McCain's first burst onto the national scene was not a positive one--it was via his connection to the "Keating Five"--a group of senators who had helped Charles Keating beat back federal regulations of the savings and loan industry that ended up in scandal. Following that, McCain has a transformation into the "maverick" crusader that we know today. Or do we? The authors' main argument is that much of what Americans know about McCain is a myth.

The authors argue there are three key foundations to the "Myth of McCain"--His Vietnam experiences, his advocacy for campaign finance reform, and his style when dealing with the press. Each of these things effectively neutralize the possibility of McCain being covered in the same way as any other political figure. They use the book to explain how McCain has exploited the national press to create a larger than life personality.

There are a couple of places where the authors are dead on. First, their discussion of (though they do not call it this) meta-narratives by the press can blind reporters to the truth. And the need to label candidates is an important part of the formation of these narratives. In the past, we have seen what a meta-narrative did to the candidacy of Al Gore, who the press characterized as a "schemer" or "opportunist" or a "liar." Thus the press often would report things that Al Gore purported to say when in fact the candidate did not say--"I invented the Internet" was never uttered by Gore. "I discovered Love Canal" was never uttered by Gore.

The same is true with McCain. The "maverick" or "crusader" means that the press drops its normal description of a political candidate as a "doing anything to get elected" and putting in place a lens that sees McCain as a savior or hero or crusader. Thus McCain gets no critical coverage of lobbyists involved in his political campaigns--from donating large sums of money to working outright on his campaigns--because of his role in campaign finance reform (which really was not reform at all). Thus the media does not cover the influence he receives from the telecom, gambling, and alcohol interests.

A second place where this book is important--and should be an important lesson going into the 2008 election--is the need to consult the newspapers of the state where the candidate is from to get the real skinny on who this person is. The state media often knows the candidate the best--particularly when you have a candidate who has been involved in national politics for more than 25 years as McCain has. The problem is that most Americans get their information about the election either from their own local media or the national media (which often supplies the local media with stories of national importance).

The most critical coverage that McCain has received has gotten has come from Arizona media, where several outlets are either banned from his events or never get calls returned or interviews with the Senator. One outlet has to ask other news media when McCain's press people announce an event so that they can also attend, and one had been banned from McCain's campaign bus, the "Straight Talk Express" and was forced to rent a car and travel behind the bus during McCain's campaign stops.

The important point made by the authors is that not one member of the traveling press made mention of this story. This "dog eat dog" atmosphere on the campaign bus was one of the more useful insights that came from Alexandra Pelosi's 2000 campaign documentary, "Journeys with George." It seems to me that the journalism course CAMPAIGN COVERAGE 101 (that is not taught anywhere) should make it lesson #1 for reporters covering presidential campaigns to first go through a "Lexis" search and read what the state and local press has written about the candidate, and once accomplished that, to contact reporters directly, buy them a beer or dinner, and get as much useful information as possible about what is not being said about the candidate you have been assigned to cover. You might be surprised what you find. For instance, in the 1988 election cycle, if any of the national press had bothered to ask any reporter in Massachusetts about the Willie Horton advertising that was being run by the "National Security PAC," they would have learned that almost every fact of the ad--and every fact the Bush-Quayle campaign parroted from the ad--was a lie. Yet no one bothered and the rest, as they say, is history.

There is a pretty good review of this book at "The New York Review of Books," and you can even read a chapter at the Media Matters website that was added after publication to take into account the most recent information regarding McCain, the media, and the 2008 election.

I encourage you to pick up the book and give it a read. It is a quick read and you will be astonished at what information is not reported about McCain that would be reported if it were any other candidate.

The Baltimore Sun

2008-06-02T13:28:00.002-04:00

The "Sun" used a quote of mine regarding the new McClellan book (which I am still waiting for my copy to arrive). The question was whether the public is really interested in "tell all" books such as McClellan's, and my longer answer was, despite most of the public won't read it, they are interested in reports about the internal machinations of the White House. And when you talk about Fortress Bush, it is like pulling the curtain on the Wizard of Oz (a sound bite that I was sure to get used, and I was right).

Shouting Guards and Smoking Guns

2008-05-29T14:54:00.000-04:00

By now, if you pay any attention to the news, you are aware of the controversy stemming from the upcoming publication of Scott McClellan's new book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. The press has described this as a "tell all" book "attacking" the administration for engaging in "propaganda" in selling the War in Iraq, as well as any other policy it pushed upon the American public.

And on the other side has come the denials and counter-attacks, from the White House Press Secretary Dana Perino ("disappointed" and "puzzled" in their old friend who know appears like a "disgruntled" former employee) to former Press Secretary Ari Fleischer ("stumped and stunned" who spoke with McClellan who told him "that his editor tweaked a lot of the writing...). Fleischer had his own book about his years as the Press Secretary, which was about as boring, scripted, and uninformative as they come.

A lot of different things regarding McClellan's coming out party. First, I cannot comment on the book itself since it won't be out until next Monday. What the news media has gotten is advanced tidbits about the juiciest parts of the book designed to drive up interest (and sales) of the book. And by commenting, I suppose I am contributing to it.

First, expect to see the "echo chamber" in action over the course of the week. The "echo chamber" is a near perfect connection with the Bush White House Office of Communication and external conservatives, either activists or media, to coordinate a response to McClellan that will isolate him as deranged or disgruntled or his writing was massaged by a liberal press looking to make the Bush administration look bad. Keep in mind, while all of this is occurring, the attacks will not be coming from the White House. If the White House says anything more on the matter, it will come only from Dana Perino, the only person authorized to speak directly to the press. Anyone else in the White House will have a "no comment" posture to the press.

Second, the "disgruntled" line of attack has merit. McClellan was a lousy press secretary who did not blush when telling the White House press corps outright lies. He was a partisan hack, and because he was unable to keep the White House press corps happy (thus leading to a steady stream of negative stories) he was tossed overboard. It is no wonder that he just got off the lecture circuit with a former press secretary who was just about as bad as him--Dee Dee Myers. At least in Myers defense, she was sabotaged by her own team--Stephanopoulis and others who opened up a door around her that allowed the press to get the straight skinny without the help of her. McClellan was just awful. I think that Jay Rosen summed it up best when he wrote this blog entry upon the resignation of McClellan: "The Jerk at the Podium: Scott McClellan Steps Away." Thus if you listened to McClellan talk about this book, you can already see he tries to have it both ways--attacking the administration without accepting the responsibility of attacking the administration. He claims "propaganda" but then in the next breath says that he does not think the selling of the War in Iraq was deliberately designed to mislead the American public! You can engage in propaganda without deliberately trying to mislead? Accidental propaganda? That is a new one.

Clearly if McClellan was as stunned and upset at the misleading of Americans regarding foreign and domestic policy, the right course of action was to resign then and there. Take the approach George Schultz, President Reagan's former Secretary of State took upon learning about Iran-Contra. Rather than stay in office in order to help the administration weather the storm, he very publicly declared: "I have washed my hands of this administration!" McClellan could have done the same thing. Instead, he waited until the administration pushed him out the door, thus writing this book not to inform Americans about the most dangerous administration ever, but instead as a score to settle with those who pushed him out. The truth--if such a thing exists--is not going to come out. If anything, the administration probably ends up looking sympathetic.

On The Move

2008-05-22T11:01:00.001-04:00

The White House has been on the warpath against the media this week for what they charge as sloppy editing and fabricated information hidden behind anonymous sources.

The first target is NBC and the interview President Bush gave to Richard Engel (for my money, if the White House wanted to complain, they had better standing in attacking Engel for being a pompous ass) while the President was in the Middle East. The White House News page this week has placed three links to the interview in case you missed it.

In the link "Setting the Record Straight," White House Counselor (and head of Communications) Ed Gillespie includes an email he sent to Steve Capus, the head of NBC News. The beef the White House has with the interview is the way in which it was edited:

NBC's selective editing of the President's response is clearly intended to give viewers the impression that he agreed with Engel's characterization of his remarks when he explicitly challenged it. Furthermore, omitted the references to al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas and ignored the clarifying point in the President's follow-up response that U.S. policy is to require Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment program before coming to the table, not that "negotiating with Iran is pointless" and amounts to "appeasement."

Gillespie continues, calling the editing "deceitful" and designed to "further a media-manufactured storyline." In Gillespie's rage, he stumbles on a second issue to take exception with--that is Engel's characterization of Iraq's internal strife as a "civil war":

NBC's selective editing of the President's response is clearly intended to give viewers the impression that he agreed with Engel's characterization of his remarks when he explicitly challenged it. Furthermore, omitted the references to al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas and ignored the clarifying point in the President's follow-up response that U.S. policy is to require Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment program before coming to the table, not that "negotiating with Iran is pointless" and amounts to "appeasement."

But it doesn't stop here. Gillespie, and his email, are on a roll, because he moves on to take issue with the way in which NBC--and I assume other news media--describes the state of the American economy--that we are in a recession. He brings up Commerce Department data that shows growth--"0.6% for the first quarter...but growth nonetheless."

He concludes by blasting NBC News for the "blurring" of the lines between the News Division and the opinion divisions of the various talk shows hosted on MSNBC, and taking a swipe at Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, both of MSNBC. Olbermann in particular spends each night excoriating the Bush administration in an attempt to rise to the same partisan noise level of those over at Fox News.

Gillespie also publishes the response from NBC News to his email. He begins by stating: "NBC News responded to our objection to their editorial decision to misleadingly edit" the interview between Bush and Engel. NBC News posted the entire interview--unedited--on the MSNBC website. Gillespie notes his disappointment with this option because it requires the individual to go online and root out the particular video, which he concedes--rightly--that most will not. Interestingly enough, Gillespie does not post a link to the video on this particular link, which would help any individual who truly wanted to see the difference between the edited and unedited interview. Gillespie also notes his disappointment that NBC News did not bother to answer his concerns regarding the use of the terms "civil war" and "economic recession." My guess is he will have to go on being disappointed.

In a second statement--this time from the White House Press Secretary--the White House takes offense at an article appearing in the "Jerusalem Post." This article quotes "unnamed sources" regarding a position the president has taken on Iran. The Press Secretary charges that the quote--or the story--"is not worth the paper it's written on." This statement also does not include a link to the offending article, and if anything it piques our interest in the article--a strategy that seems to work against the White House's interest.

What Did That Facial Tic Mean?

2008-05-18T11:41:00.000-04:00

Several years ago, when Dennis Miller was given a talk show on CNBC, he made a comment that I thought was so outlandish that I put it into a lecture on media bias as a demonstration on how ridiculous the "liberal" media bias claims were. Miller said, in a promo for the short-lived show that he would be the balance to the wildly liberal Peter Jennings--whose views come across in "the raised eyebrows, the arch tone of the voice." I thought this was laughable, but apparently some took it seriously.

In the December 2007 issue of Visual Communications Quarterly, three communications scholars--Andrea Miller, Renita Coleman, and Donald Granberg--test this argument that body language and facial cues can communicate a liberal bias among television anchors even when their verbal communication is neutral.

The article, "TV Anchors, Elections, and Bias," focuses upon audience responses to the facial expressions of the anchors of the nightly news at the Big Three Networks--ABC, NBC, and CBS. Fox News is excluded because it did not exist during part of the test of this study, which tests the 1996, 2000, and 2004 elections. Fox News did not begin until 1996.

The researchers ask: "Did viewers see bias in the nonverbal behaviors of the network anchors when reporting on presidential candidates in these three elections." These three journalists are examined because of their audience reach--some 26 million viewers every weekday night. The researchers do make the peculiar point that the "journalists may not intend to communicate nonverbal messages," yet still may be sending biased signals. To me, media bias is the deliberate manipulation of information for personal, organizational, and/or political purposes. Yet if the anchors are not aware their eyebrows arch or their voice intonation changes, how can we be sure it is not gas instead of a liberal cue?

Method

This is an experimental design that uses college students who are exposed to a sample of news stories that took place over an eight day period prior to the elections of 1996, 2000, and 2004 elections. The students, 45 for each election, come from different schools(midwest and southern universities) and from different majors (public administration, journalism, and communication). They claim this is a longitudinal study, yet longitudinal studies involve testing the same participants over an extended period of time to ascertain how time effects the individual and whatever is being tested (health, perception, partisan predisposition, etc.). Longitudinal for the researchers mean a test of three different presidential elections without using the same sample for each.

The participants were exposed to two different types of news clips--"Validity clips" are those "when the anchor discussed an unequivocally positive or negative event." This is done to "determine whether participants could successfully distinguish differences in the valence of the anchors' facial expressions during the discussion of events that would naturally elicit positive or negative emotional reactions." The second clip--"Candidate clips"-are those when "the anchors referred to presidential candidates--Dole or Clinton, Gore or Bush, Bush or Kerry."

Hypothesis

The researchers were testing three hypotheses:

Viewers will perceive that network newscasters exhibit biased facial expressions toward a particular candidate in the 1996 election;
Viewers will perceive that network newscasters exhibit biased facial expressions toward a particular candidate in the 2000 election;
Viewers will perceive that network newscasters exhibit biased facial expressions toward a particular candidate in the 2004 election;

Results

For the first hypothesis regarding the 1996 election, they find partial support, with two of the three anchors exhibiting a bias in favor of Dole. For the 2000 elections, there were significant differences with all three anchors. They claim Brokaw and Jennings had favorable expressions toward Gore over Bush with Dan Rather having favorable facial expressions towards Bush (does that sound plausible?). For the 2004 election, Rather again had more favorable facial expressions towards Bush while Brokaw and Jennings favored Kerry.

Discussion

Their conclusion--the findings "show that nonverbal bias by anchors tend to balance out over time." To explain the inexplicable--how can Rather's facial expressions be supportive of Bush over two elections, they claim that his could be the case of the "bending over backwards effect," where the anchor tries "to balance his own personal bias by wshowing bias for another candidate not of his choice." Yet in the opening salvo, they claimed that journalists "may not intend" to send non-verbal bias cues, yet in Rather's case, he is deliberately sending biased facial expressions to compensate for his disdain for Republicans! Seems convenient.

To explain Rather and Brokaw, whose facial expressions preferred Dole in 96 and the Democrats in 2000 and 2004, the researchers come up with the "Bush effect--their facial expressions had lent themselves to Republicans in one previous election year", but against the Republican candidate in 2000 and 2004. Why? The two anchors did not like Bush. Thus the bias was against "the candidate and not the party."

Conclusion

For me, this is what you get when you try to prove the partisan bias in the media. And for me, this attempt to prove facial expressions send off partisan signals take the cake. Not to denigrate the work, but for me, this is what happens when you get too tied up in the methodology that the you lose sight over relevance.

This research put individual students into a situation where they were to pay explicit attention to the video clips they were shown, and then to try and explain what curled lips, wiggling noses, and arched eyebrows meant politically--was it meant to favor a Republican or Democrat?

First things first--how many people, when watching the nightly news, spend 100% of their time watching the anchor deliver the news? To be influenced by a facial tic, not only would the individual have to keep his or her eyes glued to the TV, but also process the facial tic in the context of a political message. Yet most of us have the television on more as background than anything else. Thus we listen to the news while making dinner, doing homework, reading the newspaper, or pouring scotch after a long days work. The facial tic would then compete with other things vying for our attention.

This study came up with some paradoxical findings--and none more so than Dan Rather preferring candidate Bush over a Democrat, and then attempting to explain it as a deliberate attempt to compensate for his own personal preferences.

I have no doubt that non-verbal communication is an important area of study and no doubt that non-verbal communication has an effect over those who are exposed. If you watch Fox News, complete with the patriotic background images and music, it is difficult not to be persuaded. Or if you look at the effort that presidents and their staff put into meshing the picture with the message, you would be unable to wave away the effect that non-verbal communication has over its audience. But this claim that an audience member is influenced by facial expressions, well I just don't buy it. My guess is that if an individual believes that the smirk or crinkled nose is sending of partisan cues is an individual already predisposed to believe that the anchor is already biased in the first place.

What Is Missing

2008-05-03T21:28:00.002-04:00

The "New York Times's" Robin Toner writes today a story comparing the 2008 primary with the 1988 presidential election as far as the focus on symbols is concerned. What is missing from this story is the media's complicity in 1988 in allowing symbols to take over substance--a lesson, by the way, that has not been learned given the focus on Barack Obama's

decision not to wear a flag lapel pin.

In making her point, Toner compares the similarities between Obama and Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic-nominee who lost the election to Vice-President George H.W. Bush, which for my money was one of the worst presidential campaigns in modern history. Toner writes:

Like Mr. Dukakis in 1988, Mr. Obama is relatively new to the national scene, and thus vulnerable to being defined by Republican attacks. And like Mr. Dukakis, Mr. Obama lacks experience with the politics of wedge issues on a national stage.

She also writes that "one of the clearest strategic errors of 1988 was the Democrats' failure to realize that such attacks could stick and open the door to broader efforts to portray Mr. Dukakis as fundamentally out of sync with the nation's values." Dukakis made a pledge at the beginning of the campaign not to respond to negative ads, trusting the voters to see through the muck. Part of the trust was based on the assumption that the media would play the role of fact-checker, correcting any distortion of the records of the candidates running for the presidency. A stupid assumption that cost Dukakis dearly.

It is the complicity of the media to shy away from its sacred trust with the American public not to play proxy to any political campaign--and to keep Americans informed of the truths and falsities stemming from the candidates and their supporters.

To underscore this point, we need to return to 1988 to demonstrate just how the media helped candidate Bush win the presidency. What follows next is an examination of that election cycle, by first looking at the Democratic Primary and how Dukakis won, followed by an examination of how the press--moreso than the Bush campaign--rubbed Dukakis out.

Dukakis Becomes the Nominee

This would be an election cycle that was one bad mishap after another for the Democrats. It began with the choice of Dukakis as the nominee--a man not on anyone's radar at the start of the pre-convention process.

In 1987, looking ahead at who would be the likely nominee for both Parties, nearly everyone assumed that the Democrats would choose Gary Hart, a young and attractive Senator from Colorado who performed well in the 1984 race to the Convention. Many compared Hart to JFK, and when the Democrats failed to recruit Mario Cuomo, the popular Governor of New York, attention turned to Hart. In the spring, 1987, rumors circulated that Hart was having an affair with his secretary Donna Rice, which he not only denied, but also took the bold step of daring reporters to "(F)ollow me around. I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'll be very bored." a few days later, this picture appeared:

The woman on his lap is not Mrs. Hart. Thus Gary Hart's chances to be the nominee ended with the publication of his infidelity, though he did try and compete in the primaries but never mustered much of a following. Instead, the likely nominee for the Democrats turned to Senator Joe Biden (D. DE), who like Hart was also young and full of ideals. Apparently, some of his ideals were not his own. Biden had to leave the race after it was learned, despite his protests, that some of the speeches he had been giving were lifted from a Member of the British Parliament. And what was worse is that the plagiarizing was discovered not by the press itself (although if the press actually checked facts they may have caught it), but instead it came from the Dukakis camp. Dukakis fired his campaign aide, who fed reporters this information without the candidate's knowledge. The aide, however, was rehired once the Dukakis won the nomination.

The American Flag, the ACLU, and Willie Horton

The Democrats held their convention in 1988 in Atlanta, Georgia, where the Dukakis acceptance speech was overshadowed by 1) his choice of VP--Lloyd Bentsen--who many felt should have been the presidential nominee and not the Dukakis, 2) the ad naseum comparison to the 1968 Chicago Convention (20 year anniversary), thus there were numerous protesters who gobbled up a lot of media attention, and 3) the sex scandal involving Rob Lowe, who videotaped himself having sex with two women, one of whom was underage, in an Atlanta hotel room.

After the Convention was over--on July 21, 1988--Dukakis made an ill-fated decision to take some time off because he was exhausted from the campaign to win nomination. At the time, Dukakis had a double-digit lead in public opinion polls over George H.W. Bush.

The Republicans held their convention in New Orleans, August 15-18, 1988, and after it had ended, the Bush-Quayle campaign had a lead in public opinion over Dukakis-Bentsen that they never relinquished. As a result of the lead, the Bush campaign simply shut down media access, and instead scripted every moment of the campaign with carefully staged events. Instead of dealing with the issues, the campaign instead focused only on symbolic issues.

There were two issues that got the lion share of the coverage in 1988. The first dealt with the American flag, and from this were two sub-issues. The first subset dealt with the Pledge of Allegiance. The Bush campaign fixated on a veto exercised by Governor Dukakis of a bill that would have required Massachusetts school children to recite the Pledge in class. The Republicans attacked Dukakis for his veto of the bill at their convention and, as a August 29, 1988 "Washington Post" article noted, "Dukakis took the bait and responded...to (the) attacks...thereby keeping the story alive on network news for two nights. Dukakis argued the constitutionality of the case, Bush the symbolism." Thus in the criticism, the media--and in particular the networks--reported the Bush side and the Dukakis side, and never once questioned why this was an issue at all with so many more pressing issues left unresolved.

The second subset dealt with the burning of the American flag. At the time, the Supreme Court signaled that it would take on the issue in a case working its way up the ladder stemming for a flag burning incident at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas. That case would end up the landmark case "Texas v Johnson," with the Supreme Court siding with a protesters right to burn the American flag as a case of expressive speech.

Putting both together, the Bush-Quayle campaign, as well as the Republican Party, attacked Governor Dukakis not just as a Liberal (which turned into a dirty word that election year), but even worse--as a "card-carrying member of the ACLU."

The second major issue the Republicans pounced on was actually an issue dug up by the Democrats--"Willie" Horton."

William Horton was in MA. prison when he was released as part of a furlough program. While on furlough, he jumped ship, fled to Maryland where he kidnapped a married couple, stabbing and tying up the husband and brutally raping his wife.

Initially Al Gore, making his first bid for the presidency, tried to use the furlough issue against Dukakis, but to no avail (Gore ran as the conservative in the 1988 primaries). The Republicans picked up the issue, and used it against Dukakis. In order to keep Bush out of the mud, "Willie" Horton was introduced to American voters by this ad, ran by an organization that called itself the "National Security PAC":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC9j6Wfdq3o

This allowed Bush to follow up the ad with attacks or gimmicks of his own. As the "New York Times" story notes, Bush charged: "I simply can't understand the kind of thinking that let's first-degree murderers out of jail on a furlough..." In fact, this line of attack was a staple of any campaign stop the Bush-Quayle team made, often coupled with this yarn, told by Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg School:

Bush reinforced the notion that these were weekend events by averring that he says to criminals, "Make my day!" while Dukakis says, "Have a nice weekend!"

A gimmick common in campaign stops would feature some police union endorsing VP Bush, such as the Boston police union, which featured a police officer who explained why he or she supported VP Bush: "We're sick and tired of all these drug addicts and all these furloughs for murderers out in the state and we felt we had to send a message."

The thing about the Willie Horton controversy is that very little of the issue, as told by the Republicans and repeated verbatim by the MSM, was true. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman document in their very good book, The Press Effect, the Republicans completely distorted the issue for political gain and the news media--both the media from MA and the national media rarely offered a correction or criticism despite knowing the facts for themselves.

The Facts?

"Willie" never called himself Willie--William was his name and that is what he used. "Willie" was used to make him appear more "black," reinforcing the image that most Americans have of African-Americans (to the fault of local television) that they commit the majority of all crimes in the US.
He was not a murderer. Horton had been convicted as an "accessory to a felony murder" by acting as a get away driver in a robbery where someone ended up dead. In fact, VP Bush often claimed that Horton had been "found guilty of murdering and torturing a 17 year old kid" despite no evidence to support that claim. As Jamieson and Waldman note, the "Bush campaign whispered to the reporters that Horton had cut off the kid's genitals and stuffed them in his mouth."
Bush claimed that Horton had jumped furlough and killed more than once, which was not true.
The furlough program was not unique--there was a similar one in all 50 states and one at the federal level with the approval of the Reagan administration's Justice Department. Furthermore, the furlough program established in MA was not created by Dukakis, but instead was started by his predecessor--a Republican.

So why did either of these two issues work where in one case (Horton) the media knew that Bush and his surrogates were distorting the truth (and in some cases outright lies) and in the other case could have challenged the Bush campaign's emphasis on the symbolic by pressing them on the issues?

The answer? The media refused to be the heavy. When Michael Dukakis swore off slinging mud, and not answering lies with the truth, the media simply did not play the role public agent. This election, as mentioned above, was at the crux of the "liberal media" attack, and thus the media decided--seemingly as a collective--that they would not act in Dukakis's place, which ran the risk of confirming for the Republicans that they favor Democrats, which 1) certainly is not the case and 2) the conservatives already believed the bias anyway (my apologies--there was a sale on "which's" this week).

Hence it is no mystery that the Democrat who did win the presidency--Bill Clinton--established a War Room for the purpose of answering any and all Republican attacks against them, simply not taking on faith that the media would feel obligated under the First Amendment to set the record straight. And the Democrats who lost? Well look at the Kerry campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. They gained traction because Kerry refused to answer their attack ads until it was too late.

In conclusion, when you read Ms. Toner's "memo," keep in mind what I have written above, and ask yourself what is missing? Despite 20 years of case studies and other research pointing to the media effect in 1988, the media still refuses to accept that it is a variable to be exploited--and for 20 years, the Republicans have been far better at exploiting the media than the Democrats. Since the media won't do it, I encourage you to draw whatever lessons from this that you wish--and share, if you get the chance!

Seems Obvious

2008-05-03T15:26:00.001-04:00

Joe Nocera, the business reporter for the "New York Times" writes today about a new morning show produced by WNYC, a public radio station in New York City that produces and broadcasts "On the Media" (which is, for my money, one of the best critical media programs in the country).

The new show, which will run head to head against NPR's "Morning Edition," is titled "The Takeaway." In order to downplay the focus on the new show as a competitor to "Morning Edition," Laura Walker, the president and CEO of WNYC claims that they are only in it to offer listeners a choice because "Morning Edition" has reached the limits of what it can do and may not be the right sort of news program for the 21st century (again, not get the false impression that The Takeaway is striving to take its place).

If "Morning Edition" has any problems, it isn't one that has anything to do with being stale, but instead everything to do with trying to mimic the kind of garbage we get on any morning television news program, with funny banter between two cookie cutter hosts and a slate of stories that mixes the serious with the fluff. If you want verification that any loss in listeners that "Morning Edition" has suffered over the course of the last few years, then look at the growth in audience size for "The Bob Edwards Show," which is broadcast by XM Radio. In fact, one of the reasons I went to XM was to be able to continue listening to Bob Edwards, who NPR, in a decision that amplified its stupidity, threw overboard in 2004 for their younger, hipper anchors who represent to me everything that is wrong with the mainstream media--particularly electronic media. NPR dumped a sure bet for two airheads that the NPR execs figured would best position them to attract younger listeners (with their disposable income). I can't believe it is a decision that has paid off.

I would expect--and hope--that more and more competition to both "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" would come from NPR affiliates all over the country. Thus "The Takeaway" should not be seen as an anomaly but rather a glimpse of things to come.

On Language

2008-05-01T22:04:00.003-04:00

I will be sitting in as a guest tomorrow morning on the Friday Forum, a show sponsored by the local NPR affiliate in Oxford. You can catch it from 9-10 am (live) and 7-8 pm (repeat).

If A Tree Falls In The Woods...

2008-04-11T13:23:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I discussed the signing statement that President Bush issued to H.R. 1593, the "Second Chance Act of 2007" which was a reauthorization bill. I noted that this signing statement was what I call a "rhetorical" signing statement since it was purposively used by the administration to effect a wider audience--thus the signing statement acts as like a pebble dropped into a wading pool, with ripples emerging from where the pebble struck. The ripples, in this case, are the press releases that emerge from Congress and outside interests to generate far greater positive attention for the administration than simply working alone. And I was not disappointed. Since the bill was signed two days ago, a number of organizations have already issued press releases praising President Bush for his signature. A simple Google Search turned up these interest groups:

Many of these groups were then picked up in news stories about President Bush signing the law, thus reinforcing the positive press he received.

The Rhetorical Signing Statement

2008-04-10T14:59:00.003-04:00

For those who wish to see a rare event for President Bush, I have just the thing for you. You are aware of the signing statement and its use by the Bush administration. The President signs a bill and then either qualifies or challenges various provisions of it. All well and good. But what you have not seen much of, in the way of the Bush administration's use of the signing statement, are those signing statements designed for rhetorical purposes.

I have classified the signing statement into two categories: rhetorical and constitutional. The constitutional category covers all signing statements where the president "interprets" or "challenges" one or many provisions of the bill. The president asserts this right by pointing to some part of the Constitution that empowers him. The rhetorical signing statement, on the other hand, makes no constitutional assertions, but is designed to appeal to either a mass or targeted audience. The president may single out individuals for praise or scorn, or the president may highlight his role in bringing all sides together for an important legislation.

Yesterday, the President signed HR 1593, the "Second Chance Act of 2007" which is aimed at giving "prisoners across America a second chance for a better life." Who could be against that?

This signing statement was accompanied with a formal signing ceremony and directed at a mass audience. How do I know this? First, where the ceremony was held. It was held in Room 350 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is a large room designed to accommodate a lot of people, as indicated by this picture:

These formal signing ceremonies that are geared towards mass consumption also contain two other important ingredients: "real" people who benefit from the president's efforts and a smiling group of congresspersons standing behind the president as he signs the bill into law, demonstrating the legislative process by pictures

Real People:

And the smiling congresspersons:

The Bush administration, unlike their predecessors, have not had much use for the rhetorical signing statement which is odd given how it perfected the "staged" event. Nonetheless, the president may be attempting to change the perception that it is doing nothing while the economy falls down around it. Thus this opportunity was designed to make the president look both "presidential" and a "leader."

Hillary's Character Problem

2008-04-06T14:26:00.001-04:00

We all know how dominant character is for press reporting in the general election. Character trait--as giving an insight into the behavior of the future president--became central after James David Barber's seminal publication "Presidential Character" correctly predicted Nixon's malevolence. Barber argued that if you can correctly identify what type of character traits the candidate has, you can uncover governing tendencies once that person wins office. Thus reporters, attempting to uncover those traits by probing all aspects of a candidate's life--what sort of student he or she was like, what publications or speeches he or she has written or given, etc--in an effort to predict the next Nixon. But Barber was right just once. What personal experiences the candidate has had does not always translate into the type of president he or she may be. But from a journalist's standpoint, talking about background or rowdy behavior is much easier than trying to distill the essence of a candidate's position on health care, international relations, or the budget deficit. And for the candidate, it means that it is more important to gloss over your past and stay free of gaffes for fear that the minor slip of the tongue can become a frame to evaluate your slipping chances to be the next president.

This comes to mind in looking at the problem Hillary has created for herself by embellishing her role in events from her past, and how much it parallels a different Democrat who had a similar problem.

Back in 2000, Al Gore was known to misconstrue some events from his past to the point it became a character problem. This was evaluated in Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman's 2002 book, "The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories that Shape the Political World" (Oxford University Press). They argued that character was the dominant story of both candidates in the 2000 election--for Bush, it was his intellect that was questioned and for Gore, it was a "dishonest schemer who [presented] a false image to the public in order to advance [his] quest for power."

Thus early embellishments such as his role in bringing the Internet to the public and his grandmother singing the "Look for the Union label" song to him when he as a child would work towards the press framing Gore as saying anything to get elected--even if some things that got attributed to him were things he never said. This of course worked for the Bush campaign because they could use the frame against Gore--such as in the debate when Bush challenged Gore's numbers over Medicare, and claimed "fuzzy math" and said:

Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers. I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, but he invented the calculator.

But what we learned after the fact was the narrative blinded the press to the facts. First, Gore never said he "invented the Internet." He claimed that when he was in Congress, he took the initiative in creating the Internet, which is true. As a Senator, he led the drive to "democratize" the Internet, which at the time was available only to the government and some universities. And yet, as Jamieson and Waldman show, the claim that he "invented" the Internet showed up in 1700 articles between 1999 and November 2000.

Furthermore, the "New York Times" and the "Washington Post" both ran stories deflating claims that Gore supposedly made at an event before High School students that he was responsible for discovering and fixing the "Love Canal" environmental disaster in upstate New York. The High School students called a press conference to challenge both newspapers, arguing that Gore said nothing of the kind. And finally, there was consistently stories that Gore supposedly bragged that he and wife Tipper were the proto-types for the two main characters in the Eric Segal novel, "Love Story." This also was untrue as it pertained to Gore. Instead, a newspaper in Tennessee made this claim--not Gore--and Segal came forward and confirmed that the male character in the novel was partially based on Gore, who was a college chum at Harvard.

Because Gore was never able to get ahead of this narrative, it defined his him and his campaign, which should serve as a warning sign to Mrs. Clinton. She has had back to back news stories where she has had to provide a mea culpa over embellishments. The first occurred when she claimed that, as First Lady, she landed in Bosnia and had to depart the airplane running for cover as bullets rained down upon her and her daughter (and comedian Sinbad). Video, which surfaced quickly after, was the total opposite. And now she apparently relayed a story about a woman who was denied hospital treatment because she did not have insurance, which ultimately cost her not just her life but the life of her unborn baby. It seems that the story, while compelling, is not true. A Clinton spokesperson said:

It's not always possible to fully vet [these stories], but we try. For example, medical records are confidential. In this case, we tried but weren't able to fully vet the story.

If Mrs. Clinton were to win the nomination, I wouldn't be surprised to see this narrative in full force during the general election, employed by Senator McCain and Republicans outside his campaign. And it is a narrative that once in force is difficult to combat. As Gore found out during the 2000 campaign, the narrative of a "scheming liar" goes to the heart of who you are, and unlike the narrative to describe Bush (dunce), Gore was not likely to grow out of it. Malevolence is embedded in our DNA.

A No-Winner

2008-04-03T22:55:00.002-04:00

A wise sage once warned that you must be careful when picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel when choosing to take on the press. Apparently the Bush administration has its reasons for singling out the "New York Times" today for a fight. I suppose at this juncture the administration is seeking to rally the base in order to awaken Republicans from the funk they have been in since the 2006 midterms.

The assault, which was linked right off the White House webpage, is titled "Setting the Record Straight: The New York Times Mistakes Its Own Blindness for Presidential 'Invisibility,'" and it even stoops low by referring to the Times as the "Old 'Gray Lady,'" a jab akin to "your mama wears army boots."

It seems that what got under Bush's skin was one article that appeared today by Sheryl Gay Stolberg titled "In Economic Drama, Bush is Largely Offstage" and attacking Bush for not being in tune with the economic hardships facing many Americans. An article, by the way, that was not even on the front page of the Times online. I suppose the administration felt this worked in its favor since anyone wishing to read the article for himself would probably give up after it was not located on the first page he came to in his online search. And the administration was not helping out by putting up a link of its own.

The article begins by citing Bush's surprise that gas prices were topping $4 a gallon, something he claims not to have heard from any of his "people." The article also cites Republicans who are critical of the President, including Kenneth Doberstein, who served as President Reagan's chief of staff in his second term. Doberstein says of Bush:

“He’s over there arguing about who should get into NATO, and the American people are focused on what’s in their pocketbooks. He has talked about the economy, but it is not viewed as being a satisfactory response. Unfortunately, the lasting image is of not knowing of $4-a-gallon gas.”

The administration makes no mention of Doberstein in their criticism of the article. Nor does it mention the criticism they received from another Republican--Peter King of New York--who blamed the President for allowing his surrogates to do the talking on the economy, something that also, in fact, has happened:

“I think for the most part the administration is doing the right thing in addressing the economic problems we have. But I think tactically it would be better if the president himself was more out front, rather than leaving it so much to Paulson. When there is a perceived national crisis, it’s important for the president to be the point man.”

I am not sure if the administration understood the point of the Times article--that the administration is doing any thing in order to avoid dealing with the hard questions of the economy, and it seems to me by attacking the Times publicly only makes their point. Those Americans who are suffering because of the terrible economy--with the Fed Chief declaring a recession--it really isn't going to matter much that the President recently took the heroic step in creating an "Advisory Council on Financial Literacy" that brings "together business experts and faith-based and non-profit organizations to develop recommendations to better educate Americans about matters pertaining to their finances and their future." Forgive us if we don't get off our repossessed couches and give you the credit you so "richly" deserve! And shame on the NY Times for not seeing your initiative!

Now You Can Be A Contender

2008-03-31T10:46:00.000-04:00

One of the chronic complaints from critics of the electoral process in the United States is that television advertising plays a disproportionate role in who wins an election, and since television advertising costs so much money, it means that election results are skewed towards the well-financed campaigns. If a couple of long time political strategists have anything to do about it, that might be about to change.

If you watch the talking head cable shows or Sunday talk shows very much, you will recognize the names of Michael Murphy and Bob Shrum. Murphy has long been connected to Republican campaigns while Shrum has been connected with the Democrats, and the two have teamed up with an online advertising agency called Spot Runner to sell generic pre-packaged political ads that are affordable to any campaign--local, state, or national. Depending on what you need and what your budget is, you can either buy a pre-packaged advertisement that touts your credentials of tough on crime for as little as $500. If you want to create your own ad from start to finish, you can spend a couple thousand dollars using Spot Runner, still cheaper than contracting with any other advertising agency.

As Shrum notes:

There are 500,000 elections each year across the U.S., but the truth is, most of those candidates can't afford TV advertising. For better or worse, you're going to start seeing a lot more political TV spots, and I think that's better because this will democratize the system and level the playing field.

Ideally it would be great to see the government step in and mandate free airtime for candidates running for political office, or at the very least air time that costs a nominal fee--$500. In European systems, the government hands over huge blocks of time to the political parties and in some countries it is illegal for an individual candidate to run his own television advertisement. And here in the US--since the government supposedly controls the airwaves--it certainly has the power to make our elections more affordable for anyone to participate, and not just the wealthy few.

My guess is this new venture by the political marketing gurus will be most effective at the state and local level, where campaign budgets are much smaller, and not at the national level where the big money resides. But it is a welcome step nonetheless.

ABC News Goodies

2008-03-23T20:13:00.001-04:00

I was watching ABC News this evening and was piqued by two different things that appeared as part of two different stories. Story #1 highlighted a return of the barter economy in the US. For anyone who has family members who either survived the Great Depression or spent a substantial amount of time going to garage sales, they may wonder why I am writing about the barter economy in the past tense. Bartering is simply an act involving an exchange between two or more individuals whereby the "true" cost of a good is realized (what the consumer is willing to pay and what the producer is willing to sell and still make a profit). For those who studied the Soviet Union, you will remember the statistic that 1/3 of the Soviet economy was kept afloat via the underground, or "barter" economy.

So on ABC News tonight, they highlighted upper middle-class individuals in a mall who find out that they can actually negotiate with the staff for a reduced price on a particular good--bartering. Many admitted to having no ideal you could do that, and those who were told about it admitting to being too embarrassed to try. Yet the journalist reporting the story noted that retailers were seeing more people who are negotiating the "suggested retail price," a result of what "some" call "the Ebay phenomenon." Since I generally pay attention to new theories surrounding human behavior, I wondered why I had not come across this particular "phenomenon," especially since so many ("some") were writing and talking about.

So I Googled the phrase "Ebay phenomenon," and I generally got a lot of hits to websites that tell you ways to make money on Ebay (hence anything whereby the average "schlub" can make a lot of money is regarded as queer or atypical, or as a "phenomenon"). A search of Lexis-Nexis turns up nothing related to a connection between using Ebay and bartering for merchandise, although it did turn up a similar story from a year ago--ironically enough on ABC News--about people making a lot of money after cleaning out their closets and selling their old stuff on Ebay.

No, this particular report, with its reference to "some" who are calling the new "bartering" phenomenon the "Ebay phenomenon" is actually a reference to one single story (sub. req.) that appeared today in the "New York Times." Titled EVEN AT MEGASTORES, HAGGLERS FIND NO PRICE IS SET IN STONE, reporter Matt Richtel explores this new trend in bartering, and even finds an expert to give him the full Monty. Richtel interviews "Nancy F. Koehn, a retail historian at the Harvard Business School (and they tell me that my research is too obscure), who tells us that

...the shift to bargaining in malls and on Main Street is a considerable change from even 10 years ago, Ms. Koehn said, when studies showed that consumers did not like to bargain and did not consider themselves good at it. “Call it the eBay phenomenon,” Ms. Koehn said.“The recession is helping to push these seedlings to the surface,” she added. “It’s a real turnabout on the part of the buyer and the seller.”

If I were to be a curmudgeon, I might think that this story was pushed onto ABC News by retailers battling a sluggish economy, looking at any way possible to bring bodies back to the stores, but I am not that cynical.

What should not escape notice, however, is how we should question any report that refers to the allusive "some" or "they," as in "they say..."

The second ABC News story focused on one crackpot scientist who is debunking global warming (and previously debunked Hazard waste residuals and second hand smoke science). The story gave us no sense of just how much evidence exists that separates the two (on one side those who ring the alarm bells about global warming vs. those who tells us to sit tight and continue to buy Hummers). In fact, the story shows a "scientific" conference where this individual was speaking, whereby the conference hall was filled by applauding audience members as this guy spoke.

But this isn't what got my dander up. What did get my dander up (and onto the shoulders of my black T-shirt) was a website used by a researcher for an environmental friendly to find out how much corporate money these "scientists" are taking for speaking out against those who raise the kind of alarm bells that result in regulations and lawsuits. Why is there a need for this kind of third party information in the first place? Because the US media--in their desire for "objectivity," tells only two sides of a story without giving their audience any context for the information. Thus there can be a mountain of information on one side and a penny's worth of information on the other side, and our media will present the two as if they are equal. So when you ask why the US seems to be so far behind the rest of the industrialized world on the issue of global warming is because most Americans have been falsely led to believe that the evidence on that issue is up for debate.

Back to the website. The reporter continued to talk about this website but never once gave its name. They did, however, show a couple of video shots while the "tree hugging" researcher brought it up on his laptop. It is affiliated with Greenpeace, and it is called "Exxon's Secrets" that in this case shows how much money Exxon pays out to hired guns in academia for PR purposes. Try it out. Results might surprise you. Granted, this is not to suggest that you should read the data uncritically, but instead strive towards the more information you have, the better off you will be.

Note of Appreciation

2008-03-19T18:26:00.002-04:00

My thanks to the Cincinnati Enquirer's Gregory Korte for giving me a mention in his Monday column. Korte referenced the signing statement, and didn't stop where nearly every other reporter does, and that is at Pulitzer winner Charlie Savage.

Thanks Gregory.

New Additions To Our Political Lexicon

2008-03-19T18:19:00.002-04:00

I came across two new terms while reading Al Kamen's "most excellent" column in today's "Washington Post." They are:

"Vulture Capitalism": A play on the 90s tech-related term "venture capitalism"--those with money to throw at upstart firms where the risk was high but the payoff even higher. Kamen was writing on a fundraiser held last Friday where President Bush was the headliner. Vulture capitalism are the same wealthy individuals who buy up debt held by Third World countries who then turn around and sue to force the country to pay back the debt. The debt has even been given a new name--"sovereign distressed debt"--apparently in an attempt to remove the stigma attached with the old nomenclature. The vulture capitalist use the debt to keep these countries from "nationalizing" foreign industry.

"Smurfing": This is the term used to describe those people who keep their bank transactions under $10,000 in order to keep banks from reporting to the Feds high dollar transactions. It apparently was not enough to keep the Feds from scrutinizing Eliot Spitzer's transactions, which were used in the pursuit of "Sniffing," as my uncle used to call it when men paid for female companionship. I am sure that Spitzer will continue to scratch his head in reasoning how the Feds still found him out despite his efforts to cover his tracks (and a story that I am sure we will all hear about sometime down the road).

One final mention of interest in Kamen's column is the effort the Treasury Department puts in keeping from complying with FOIA requests (this is true with all federal agencies and not just Treasury). The website the National Security Archive has given the Treasury Department the "Rosemary Award," named for President Nixon's secretary Rose Mary Woods, who demonstrated to reporters her contorted stretch that led to the deletion of 18 1/2 minutes of important conversations held inside the Oval Office.

Treasury has FOIA requests that go back 21 years. More commonly, Treasury will respond to FOIA requests with multiple "Are you sure you still need this information" requests, sent every two years or so until they get to a point where they ask for another copy of the original request because the original request has been lost. All of this is designed to wear out the requester or, get to a point far enough away that it isn't likely that another copy exists (Justice tried this very same thing with me when I requested information regarding their compliance with law to keep Congress informed about signing statements).

When The Cat's Away...

2008-03-08T16:39:00.000-05:00

I have written before about the Bush media strategy of releasing bad information on a Friday, so named the "Friday news dump" because it allows the information to hit the news over the weekend when most people aren't watching, rather than during the week when it has the opportunity of greater recognition AND a better chance of the opposition making it a bigger issue than it may be.

The news dump applies to any information released over the weekend and not necessarily on Friday--and this weekend, with a major blizzard hitting a large chunk of the country (including where I am sitting--we have roughly 13" of snow with 2-3 inches more on the way) is the perfect opportunity to release bad information. Case in point is the subject of President Bush's Saturday Radio Address, which he used to announce his veto of H.R. 2082--the "Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2008," which passed the House last December and cleared the Senate in the middle of February, and was officially sent to the President on the 29th--a full 8 days ago. Which means he could have vetoed it at any point during the week, but instead waited until the weekend to announce his veto. Adding to the evidence that this was designed to temper reaction is the way the announcement is displayed on the White House webpage where this type of news is announced. Through most of the day, all that was displayed was the link to the "Radio Address" and an special "In Focus: Defense" link. By noon, all that was added was a link: "Message to the House of Representatives." Nothing about this particular bill and his veto. In past vetoes, it was clear by reading the "News" section of the White House webpage that a veto was taken, as was the case with his veto last December of the Defense bill that drew a great deal of criticism because it came without any notice that a veto was coming.

Thus the White House is consistent to the end of herding potential negative information to the weekend, and I think when they have left the building, we will be able to conclude that it is another area where they have set a record (which includes, of course, the number of constitutional challenges spelled out in the signing statements).

There Is Nothing Greater

2008-03-06T23:13:00.002-05:00

John Ibbitson, writing for the "Toronto Globe and Mail" about Hillary Clinton's string of victories on Tuesday asks Senator Clinton and her supporters to look at this victory in its greater context--it is a nice testament, but in the end won't make any difference to the outcome. She is going to lose, barring some catastrophic event:

The Comeback Kid keeps coming back and back, at least in her mind and those of her supporters. Nonetheless, the conclusion of a cold-light-of-day analysis remains stark: Winning conditions are waning for Ms. Clinton.

He further notes that "Ms. Clinton cannot go to the convention in Denver at the end of August leading in pledged delegate support, she and her advisers must accept that her prospects for victory remain slim," yet her victories on Tuesday, despite the fact that it did not give her a lead in the overall delegate, gave her hubris: "“The people of Ohio have said it loudly and clearly, we're going on. We're going strong. And we're going all the way!”

A candidate who puts Party before personal ambition? That is John McCain, who despite his shoddy treatment by the Bush campaign in 2000, swallowed his anger and gave the Bush campaign his total support, both on the campaign trail and in Congress. But this isn't Senator McCain. This is a Clinton. And nothing--I mean nothing--comes before their ambition. You ask: "Even if it means the destruction of the Party's chances in November, if not the long term health of the Party overall?" The answer is yes. Nothing else matters.

While watching this unfold this week, I was reminded by a Political Science Quarterly article by Richard Pious*, the Adolph and Effie Ochs professor of political science at Barnard College, that appeared after the impeachment scandal. Pious argued that Clinton used the courts to defend his personal indiscretions at the long term cost to the institution of the presidency. In Clinton's legal efforts, each line of argument he used about how the institutional prerogatives protected the president (from civil immunity to executive privilege) were rejected by the federal courts, including, of course, the Supreme Court. Thus the president gambled with institutional prerogatives and lost, setting a precedent that disadvantaged those who came after. But not matter, in the end--in the political arena--President Clinton was able to beat the Republican Congress in the court of public opinion. And so long as a Clinton wins, all is right with the World.

Like her husband, the stark reality and the long term significance of her actions does not mean a thing. She only recognizes one reality--that Senator Obama bows out or accepts her "offer" to be her vice-president. And don't think for a minute that if she does lose--either via the elections or on the floor of the convention--that she won't leave gracefully. It just isn't her way.

See Pious, Richard. "The Paradox of Clinton Winning and the Presidency Losing." Political Science Quarterly. Vol. 114, no. 4. 1999-2000.

More Eyes Wide Shut

2008-03-06T21:49:00.002-05:00

Now that the War has disappeared from the pages of the American news media, the Pentagon can get back to doing the crazy stuff that we all know and love it for. Things may be bad in Iraq--there is still great portions of the country that does not have electricity and suicide bombings tear through civilian populations gathered in the cities, and yet our answer to their problems is to give someone over $2 million to devise a comic books that feature "insurgent-slaying, civilian-saving, bomb-defusing heroics by the country's security and special operations forces." And to show that we are taking this whole thing very seriously, a military contact overseeing the project said that the comic books will "paint a positive picture of the Iraqi security forces" and that it would definitely "mirror the cultural situation and event," but beyond that he would not "reveal any plot line, noting the operation was ongoing and, consequently, secret."

You can't make this stuff up.