Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Gasbag Audience

by digby

Pew has published its annual study of the American news habits and it’s as interesting as ever:

A sizable minority of Americans find themselves at the intersection of these two long-standing trends in news consumption. Integrators, who get the news from both traditional sources and the internet, are a more engaged, sophisticated and demographically sought-after audience segment than those who mostly rely on traditional news sources. Integrators share some characteristics with a smaller, younger, more internet savvy audience segment – Net-Newsers – who principally turn to the web for news, and largely eschew traditional sources.

Like web-oriented news consumers, Integrators are affluent and highly educated. However, they are older, on average, than those who consider the internet their main source of news. Overall, Integrators spend more time with the news on a typical day than do those who rely more on either traditional or internet sources; far more enjoy keeping up with the news a lot than in any other news segment. Integrators also are heavier consumers of national news – especially news about politics and Washington – and are avid sports news consumers. Television is their main news source, but more than a third cite the internet as their primary source of news during the day. This reflects the fact that a relatively large proportion of Integrators log on to the internet from work (45%). The 2008 biennial news consumption survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press was conducted by telephone – including both landline phones and cell phones – from April 30 to June 1 among 3,612 adults nationwide. It finds four distinct segments in today’s news audience: Integrators, who comprise 23% of the public; the less populous Net-Newsers (13%); Traditionalists – the oldest (median age: 52) and largest news segment (46% of the public); and the Disengaged (14%) who stand out for their low levels of interest in the news and news consumption. Net-Newsers are the youngest of the news user segments (median age: 35). They are affluent and even better educated than the News Integrators: More than eight-in-ten have at least attended college. Net-Newsers not only rely primarily on the internet for news, they are leading the way in using new web features and other technologies. Nearly twice as many regularly watch news clips on the internet as regularly watch nightly network news broadcasts (30% vs. 18%).

This web-oriented news segment, perhaps more than the others, underscores the challenges facing traditional news outlets. Fewer than half (47%) watch television news on a typical day. Twice as many read an online newspaper than a printed newspaper on a typical day (17% vs. 8%), while 10% read both. However, Net-Newsers do rely on some well known traditional media outlets. They are at least as likely as Integrators and Traditionalists to read magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and somewhat more likely to get news from the BBC.

Fully 82% of Net-Newsers get news during the course of the day, far more than the Traditionalists and the Disengaged, and slightly more than the Integrators. Nearly all who get news at this time go online for information (92%). Yet they do tap traditional sources at other times of the day; nearly two-thirds get news late in the evening and of these, more rely on television news than the internet. Despite sweeping changes in the news landscape, Traditionalists remain the largest segment of the overall news audience. Compared with the Integrators and Net-Newsers, Traditionalists are downscale economically – 43% are not employed and 60% have no more than a high school education. Television dominates as the favored news source among Traditionalists. And at each time of the day – whether morning, daytime, dinner hour, or late at night – overwhelming majorities who get news at these times cite television as their main source. Unlike the news Integrators, or those who mostly get news from the web, most Traditionalists say that seeing pictures and video, rather than reading or hearing the facts, gives them the best understanding of events. Most Americans fall into the three core news audiences – Integrators, Traditionalists, or Net-Newsers. The fourth group – the Disengaged – are very much bystanders when it comes to news consumption. They are less educated on average than even the Traditionalists and exhibit extremely low interest in – and knowledge of – current events. Just 55% of the Disengaged get any news on a typical day, and just 20% know that the Democrats have a majority in the House of Representatives.

Sadly, there are as many Disengaged as there are Net-Newsers, so they pretty much cancel each other out. That leaves the other two, the largest of which is the “traditionalists” who not only get their news from television, they mostly get it from the images not the words.

I know that most of you are far to busy and too well informed about the issues and the real news to waste time watching the crap the Entertainment Industrial Complex churns out for the rest of the folks, which is why both dday and I spend a lot of time dissecting the television gasbags. It’s partially to understand what they are all saying to each other in their tight little feedback loop, but it’s also to try to see what the TV news watchers are seeing. Keep in mind that these aren’t necessarily stupid people (although some are — they exist in all groups of humans) but that they simply choose to use television as their primary source of news, which, considering how much of it is available, isn’t all that surprising. People who don’t have jobs that feature computers or have the time to spend online, naturally put the TV on in the background or sit down to decompress for a bit when they can, and consume their news passively.

And that’s where the Village media really has an impact. Their willingness to allow themselves to be conduits — in words as well as pictures — for these phony GOP images and manufactured story lines makes them defacto tools of the right wing, who spend many millions developing campaigns for the consumption of fellow villagers — to disseminate to that 46%.

Here’s James Moore talking about Karl Rove a few years back:

He once told a consultant that we interviewed for “Bush’s Brain” that you should run every political campaign as though people are watching television with the sound turned down. And toward that end, you rely heavily on imagery and not very much on substance, knowing that if the President is photographed in a school of minority and ethnic children, and is interested in their future in that particular photo op, that people will trust that image. And they don’t go beyond that image to look at his policy, which is signing the “Leave No Child Behind Act” in a big, high-profile moment with Senator Ted Kennedy, and then gutting the heart out of that bill with the funding that he offers up for it.

The President has become very good at these phony linkages. For instance, you’ll see him running around talking about the tax bill, saying we need to get it passed so that we can create jobs for people. Factually, this tax bill -– there’s not an economist in America or a successful business person, Warren Buffet among them, who believes that getting rid of the taxation of dividends is going to create jobs anytime in the near future, and ostensibly in the long term. But if the President says it over and over enough, people will believe it, just as Karl Rove got him to say over and over that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11.

At time of the war in Iraq, the Pew survey showed 61 percent of Americans believed the canard about Iraq. So the whole concept is to speak as though you are a compassionate, sensitive, caring guy, and create these photo opportunities that prove that. But do whatever you want to do when you govern, because the public isn’t paying very close attention. And they’ve gotten away with it thus far.

Cheney famously said “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. This is our due” I think he actually meant Reagan proved the facts don’t matter, do what ever you want…

And they use the same willing tools to smear their opponents and these days the television types even dutifully run a chyron at the bottom of the screen to help those who aren’t paying attention know how to interpret the pictures they are seeing. Over the week-end, CNN had numerous segments featuring the Corsi book, all of them accompanied by little factoids on the bottom of the screen featuring the name of the book and some of the charges contained within it. It mattered not at all what the talking heads were blathering about to those who just saw the screen shot while they were passing by a television screen. They got the name of the book and the author and that it says Obama is a phony and a liar. That’s all the Republicans ever wanted.

Thank goodness for Media Matters and FAIR and others for doing the daily drudgery of tracking and compiling all this stuff — no pun intended. Their great columnists also like to discuss and analyze the effect TV news has on politics and what we might do about it, as do I. I’m not sure we are entirely successful, but I do think it’s necessary. There are still many more people who are informed by Brian Williams and Meredith Viera than by Josh Marshall or Glenn Greenwald. We need to understand what they’re being told.

Luckily, the other segments of the new consumers are growing and perhaps we will soon be in a world where more people get informed from the internet than TV. It’s certainly an improvement over the passive TV consumer model, even in the partisan echo chambers, especially since the TV gasbags have become parodies of themselves in ways that even Paddy Chayefsky couldn’t have imagined.

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The Other Consequence

by dday

I think Digby is definitely right in saying that the hostilities in Georgia will give the neocons another historical incident they will use in the future as an example of how we cannot abandon fellow freedom fighters. But there’s another consequence of this resumption of Cold War-era rhetoric – the resumption of Cold War-era weapons systems:

The Wall Street Journal’s August Cole had an interesting take on Russia’s invasion of Georgia this weekend: it’s great for Lockheed Martin, Boeing and other mega-defense contractors. A stock analyst is quoted as saying that the invasion was “a bell-ringer for defense stocks.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has recently thought out loud about cutting major weapons programs like Lockheed and Boeing’s $143 million F-22 Air Force raptor jet and Boeing and SAIC’s $160 billion Future Combat Systems. Gates has argued that they bear no relevance to counterinsurgency fighting that is currently taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Russia’s invasion of Georgia at least raises the possibility of a future U.S.-Russia conflict. according to Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), who said as much to the Journal.

As the piece notes, this is a bipartisan problem. There are pieces of the military industrial complex in every state and every Congressional district. The perceived threats we face in the world mean absolutely nothing to those who want to build weapons to face those threats. The mere appearance of a new Cold War is enough to build F-22’s and missile defense systems and plenty of other prototypes. The Iraq war has been a windfall for contractors and a new arms race would just open that up even more. This is going to be unbelievably difficult to beat back, and without a recalibration of the military budget providing the kind of investments needed in moving to a post-carbon future, providing health care to all Americans and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure will be next to impossible.

It’s the cherry on top of all the neocon warmongering.

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Little Mary Quite Contrary

by digby

So Mary Matalin is now saying that she is just a “consultant” to the Threshhold imprint that put out the Corsi garbage.

From Matalin’s email to Noah, published in an August 15 update to Noah’s August 13 article on Slate.com:

Appreciate your taking the time to talk about Obama Nation in your column. I sent your inquiry regarding future printings to Simon & Schuster because such issues are not mine to decide. I am sorry you did not receive a response. My title is somewhat misleading, but it is the one the publishing industry uses. I do not deal with any mechanics (like print runs, reprints, financial relationship with authors), or for that matter, editing of the Threshold books. I am more akin to a consultant relative to the issue of potential interest among political readers.

Her recent modesty doesn’t let her off the hook, obviously. Regardless of her official job description, that quote in the NY Times shows that she enthusiastically in the effort to put Corsi’s lies into the mainstream. And she certainly knew what the “potential interest” would be of rightwing neanderthals and the rich Republican propagandists who pay for bulk orders, in a book called “Obamanation.” All of her Villager friends in the media sure did help her get it “out there.”

Media matters also notes:

From the August 12 New York Times article:

Mr. Corsi, who has over the years also written critically about Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s probable Republican opponent, said he supported the Constitution Party presidential nominee, Chuck Baldwin, and had not been in touch with McCain aides. He called his reporting on Mr. Obama, which he stands by, “investigative,” not prosecutorial.

Ms. Matalin said in an interview that the book “was not designed to be, and does not set out to be, a political book,” calling it, rather, “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.” She said she was unaware of efforts to link it to any anti-Obama advertising

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It occurs to me that Matalin seems to be the big earner in the Carville family lately. She’s all over the place, working in the administration, shepherding books of lies, being a hard working member of the right wing hit squad. What’s James done lately?

It’s not that I think a woman shouldn’t be the breadwinner, particularly when she is far more successful at her profession. But I would have thought that James would keep his hand in, just for appearances sake. Their business model depends on them being the “even cats and dogs can get along” couple. It loses cache when one member of the dynamic duo fades into oblivion. The last thing I remember him doing was was co-producing that awful remake of All The King’s Men.

But hey, they’ve certainly made plenty of money over the years as the village’s favorite post partisan couple, so I guess there’s no need for both of them to keep working. Wingnut welfare pays far better anyway.

Update: Jonathan at ATR points me to this:

At three o’clock, Corsi hadn’t yet left the hotel, and he was dressed in his radio clothes: blue blazer, pocket square, light khakis, black lace-ups. He had an appointment to tape a segment for Anderson Cooper and, later, for Larry King, so he changed into a business suit, with a red tie. Then he and Bueler headed down to the lobby to await their black car for the six-block trip to CNN. Bueler listened to a message from Mary Matalin, at Corsi’s publishing house, who wanted to compare notes on the main themes of attack being levelled against them. (Corsi cited “nitpicking” and “name-calling.”)

She was barely involved at all …

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Believe Your Eyes

by digby

Kevin is right when he says that painting McCain as a rich, hypocritical warmonger is not going to get the job done. This country has proven more than once that it likes rich, hypocritical warmongers just fine. That line of attack shows that the Democrats aren’t merely playing the game less effectively than the Republicans, they aren’t even on the same playing field.

Kevin offers this advice:

Why not concentrate on character critiques that have some real grounding in reality? Just to give a few examples:

• McCain is old and gets confused occasionally.
• McCain is running an ugly, smear-based campaign.
• McCain has a legendarily short fuse.
• McCain is annoyingly self-righteous.
• McCain’s straight talk has evaporated in the face of his need to win evangelical votes.

I couldn’t agree more. He also treats women like chattel, is cozy with lobbyists even though he’s built a reputation as a reformer and has marched in lockstep with every one of George W. Bush’s bad policies over the past seven years.

But, let’s face it. That’s not likely to happen. The Obama campaign does not want to be involved in negative campaigning on this scale and perhaps, as the new, lesser known guy, Obama has to be more careful of such things.

That, needless to say, is why the independent expenditure groups would have been so important. It’s now rumored that the donors have been set free to finance some non-campaign related efforts, but it would be a miracle if they could pull it off at this late date. These things have to be planned — something I’m sure Freedom’s Watch and their advisor Karl Rove have certainly been doing for months.

We can hope that all these McCain character traits are self-evident and that nobody believes the onslaught of character assassination and outright lies about Obama. It could happen. People believe what they want to believe. But I’d feel better if there was something a little bit more that “hope” on this one.

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Showbiz For Smart People

by digby

I don’t know if anyone cares about this, but The Hill has published a schedule of events at the DNC. Check it out. It sounds … erm, riveting.

(I joke. I’m sure it will be a lot of fun.)

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They Did It

by digby

For several weeks I’ve been issuing joking disclaimers that my criticisms of McCain on completely unrelated subjects should not be considered an attack on his service in Vietnam. (I did it earlier today.) It never occurred to me that they’d actually go there but, apparently, the suggestion that McCain might have heard the questions before he appeared on stage at the Saddleback event — because he wasn’t in a “cone of silence” after all — is impugning his integrity as a POW.

For real:

Nicolle Wallace, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said on Sunday night that Mr. McCain had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions. “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.

Well ok then. The man is incapable of cheating because he was a POW. We shall hear no more about it.

(Of course his first wife and the shareholders in the Lincoln Savings and Loan might disagree, but far be it for me to bring that up.)

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Chutzpah

by digby

From Raw Story

The Real Truth About Obama Inc., a group formed by anti-abortion activists, is trying to establish a Web site and air radio ads. But the group’s attorney says his clients fear they will be prosecuted for breaking federal rules that restrict fundraising and advertising by political action committees, or PACs. The Richmond-based group argues it is not a PAC because it would be talking about an issue, not advocating Obama’s defeat or election. […]
“The Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed that you are free to discuss the petitions of candidates on issues and how officials have voted in office without being subject to campaign finance restrictions,” said the organization’s attorney, James Bopp Jr. of Terre Haute, Ind. The high court, in a 5-4 decision last year, upheld a lower court’s ruling that a Wisconsin anti-abortion group should have been allowed to air ads during the final two months before the 2004 election. The Real Truth About Obama wants to post ads on its Web site and on the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity talk shows in key states during the “electioneering communication” blackout period 60 days before the general election. The ad features an “Obama-like voice” saying he would make taxpayers pay for all abortions, ensure minors’ abortions are concealed from their parents, appoint more liberal Supreme Court justices and legalize the late-term procedure that abortion opponents call “partial-birth” abortion.

What do you suppose an “Obama-like voice” sounds like?

The good news is that John McCain will undoubtedly vociferously disavow any official association with this group. He will do nothing to stop it, but it’s important that we all know that he doesn’t personally believe in negative advertising. He is, after all, a man of deep integrity.

*Disclaimer: nothing in this post should be construed as impugning the character of John McCain‘s whose service in Vietnam still holds us in awe.

Update: Look at this. Can we all agree now that the anti-abortion movement shouldn’t be trusted? Obama should forget trying to fudge this stuff from now on. He should just be clear and make a good argument and the people who are willing to engage in good faith will do so. The rest will just believe the lies because they want to believe the lies.

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Debating Debating

by digby

Harold Pollack, pinch hitting for Ezra, reminds me that I need to call some attention to this must read article by James Fallows about the primary debates.

Pollack focuses on the fact that the debate moderators didn’t bother to ask important, fundamental questions about how government actually works:

Buried deep is a compilation prepared by Sidney Blumenthal and Daniel Freifeld for the Clinton campaign, in which they examined reporters’ questions in 15 debates. As they summarize it:

352 QUESTIONS
29 GOTCHA QUESTIONS
33 PUFF QUESTIONS
7 GOVERNANCE QUESTIONS
NOT A SINGLE QUESTION ABOUT A FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OR AGENCY AND ITS CONDITION UNDER BUSH…

This stuff matters. Both parties are assembling platforms with many new ideas for public policies. Republicans push school vouchers and medical savings accounts. Democrats push charter schools and health reform. During the campaign, we will debate these matters at the 50,000-foot level. At some point, we must confront the elemental reality that an idea is only a good idea when it can be well-executed.

Pollack’s point is well taken. But then there are so many things that weren’t covered in those debates because the moderators ran them as if they were some sort of junior high school sporting event.

Fallows gets into the weeds:

By the time I’d finished watching the debates, I had a similar impression to Blumenthal and Freifeld’s, but with a different organizational scheme. Here is my list of the Five Questions That Should Never Be Asked, with illustrations and reasons why they’re wrong:

1. The will you pledge tonight question, which is always about something no responsible politician could ever flat-out promise to do. For instance, a question to Barack Obama: “Will you pledge that by January 2013, the end of your first term more than five years from now, there will be no U.S. troops in Iraq?” Obama’s reply was the only realistic one: “It’s hard to project four years from now, and I think it would be irresponsible. We don’t know what contingency will be out there.” Hillary Clinton got the same question and gave a similar answer: “I agree with Barack. It is very difficult to know what we’re going to be inheriting. You know, we do not know, walking into the White House in January 2009, what we’re going to find.” The questioner looked as if these were witnesses evading a question. In fact, if they’d said anything different, they’d be indicating that they were too doctrinaire for the job. But that didn’t get Clinton off the hook. “Would you pledge to the American people that Iran will not develop a nuclear bomb while you are president?” she was asked at another debate. She replied, “I intend to do everything I can to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb,” to which the follow-up was: “But you won’t pledge?” Then to Senator Joseph Biden: “Would you pledge to the American people that Iran would not build a nuclear bomb on your watch?” Biden’s reply: “I would pledge to keep us safe.” Taking a pledge would mean news for the show but would either handcuff the politician if elected or create a flip-flop trap later on.

2. The gotcha question, involving any change of policy. A challenge to former Senator John Edwards in a debate last September: “Well, Senator, I want to ask you this because in 2004 when you ran for president, you said we could not afford universal health care, it was not achievable, and it was not responsible. You’ve changed dramatically on this issue.” Edwards’s perfect response: “That’s true, and so has America.” Some changes are suspicious; others reflect a recognition of new facts. The gotcha questioner treats them all the same.

3. The loaded hypothetical question, which assumes factors that can’t be known. One addressed to Hillary Clinton: “If Israel concluded that Iran’s nuclear capability threatened Israel’s security, would Israel be justified in launching an attack on Iran?” She replied, “I think that’s one of those hypotheticals that —” and, over the questioner’s interrupting “It’s not a hypothetical, Senator. It’s real life,” she went on to say “that is better not addressed at this time.” She, Biden, and Obama all challenged a similar hypothetical, straight out of 24, about whether they would torture a captive suspect who knew where a ticking bomb was stashed, saying that in reality torture didn’t work and the scenario was too pat. The most famous combination of the gotcha and the hypothetical was of course the question CNN’s Bernard Shaw asked of Michael Dukakis as the very first in a debate 20 years ago: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

4. The raise your hand question, for reasons of intellectual vulgarity and personal rudeness; and

5. The lightning round, in which the candidates have 30 seconds to address a point. After aggressive questioning in one debate, the moderator said, “We’re going to take a break and come back with our lightning round — 30 seconds to answer each question.” Senator Chris Dodd shot back, “You never got to the real round.” The transcript then shows: “SENATOR CLINTON: (Chuckles.)”

I think this is correct. but I think you have to change beltway culture before the substance of the debates would change. This is the subject matter these people care about.

Fallows makes the point himself:

Here we come to an awkward fact. The questioner in all the illustrations above, starting with the favorite verse of the Bible, was Tim Russert of NBC. (I called Russert’s office in Washington on a Tuesday to request an interview about his approach to debate questions. I was told that he was in Europe at the time and I should call back the following Monday. In between came the shocking news of his death.)

The generous personality that made Russert so popular, and the encyclopedic political knowledge that made him so influential, meant that he was imitated when he set a bad example as well as a good one. His questioning mode during the debates was mostly unfortunate. In two important, back-to-back Democratic debates last fall—in Hanover, New Hampshire, in September and Philadelphia in October—nearly every question he asked was from the categories above.

The candidates fought back, even when that involved defending their political rivals. A few months earlier, in a June debate in New Hampshire sponsored by CNN, all of the candidates had pushed back harder against the less magisterial Wolf Blitzer. When Blitzer asked for a yes/no show of hands on whether “the United States should use military force to stop the genocide in Darfur,” Clinton asked for details and then refused to answer. “We’re not going to engage in these hypotheticals,” she said. “I mean, one of the jobs of a president is being very reasoned in approaching these issues. And I don’t think it’s useful to be talking in these kind of abstract, hypothetical terms.” The transcript conveys the reaction after he asked for another show of hands and Biden, Edwards, and Clinton complained at once.

[…]

George Stephanopoulos of ABC, who moderated two of the three Democratic debates held on a major network rather than on cable, told me that the reason the debates became so process-oriented was that the policy differences among the main contenders were so small. This was especially true, he said, in the much-criticized final debate of the primaries, in which he and Charles Gibson spent the first 45 minutes grilling Obama and Clinton on “electability” issues like Obama’s failure to wear an American-flag pin in his lapel, before turning to policy matters in the second half. “To the extent that they have relatively small differences over health-care policies, if either one becomes president those would all be subsumed” in negotiations with Congress, he said. “And as to whether originally they were for war in Iraq—that difference had been debated.” The only thing left to discuss and for the party to consider, according to Stephanopoulos, was “which was more electable in November—that was the heart of the issue.”

By that point, and about that debate, he was probably right. When I’d seen this final debate in real time, I’d been outraged by its harsh tone and belated attention to policy matters (including Gibson’s little lecture to the candidates on why capital-gains tax cuts always paid for themselves). When I saw its place in the series, I realized it was like a late episode of The Sopranos in which nearly everyone gets mowed down. It was violent and dehumanizing, but it was the culmination of a long process.

I recall feeling a bit disoriented at the time by the shock and outrage at the ABC debate, not because it wasn’t shocking and outrageous, but because it seemed pretty typical to me. I think I watched all but one of them and I was dumbstruck each time by how horrible they were — and Russert really was the ringleader. From the very beginning, he and Matthews set a tone that was as illuminating as a dying birthday candle.

In fact, back in February I wrote an angry post called “How do we defeat Tim Russert?” in which I said:

From tax returns to Farrakhan to footage shown by “mistake” to the endless, trivial, gotcha bullshit, this debate spectacle tonight was a classic demonstration of what people really hate about politics. It isn’t actually the candidates who can at least on occasion be substantive and serious. The problem is Tim Russert and all his petty, shallow acolytes who spend their time reading Drudge, breathlessly reporting every tabloid tidbit … in lieu of doing any real work.

These people guide the way citizens perceive politics even if the citizens don’t know it. It’s hard for me to see how anything can truly change until this is dealt with.

Russert’s death doesn’t change that. (If anything, his style will probably be venerated as the “gold standard” now that he’s been martyred.) He was a product of beltway culture not the maker of it. This approach to politics will continue as long as DC journalists and columnists allow groupthink and friendships (and yes, careerist impulses) to overrule their integrity. The problem is best illustrated, perhaps, not by the debates themselves, but by the spectacle of these insiders gathering together in the studios to “analyze” them afterwards. You’d be hard pressed to find a more embarrassing group of fawning sycophants even in the crowd lining the red carpet at the Oscars.

I don’t know have the answer to this problem. It’s clearly due, at least in part, to the fact that success is measured by the entertainment model of ratings and advertising dollars. But perhaps it’s the lure of “celebrity” and fame that is most pernicious. There’s something about that which turns even good minds to mush after a while.

I do know that I believe that as basement dwelling, cheeto gobbling bloggers we have no such inducements and should be able to keep a consistent critique of these people. I continue to believe that the political media is a fundamental impediment to progressivism and one of the blogosphere’s primary responsibilities is to keep the heat on these people no matter whether they are pleasing us on a certain day or whether we want to throw our keyboards at the TV. It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it — and if it isn’t us, it will be nobody.

Fallows didn’t see the debates in real time (he was in China) so he was only able to get the full flavor of what was so wrong with them after the fact, seeing them all at once. Very few people wrote about this while it was happening, even in the blogosphere, until Gibson and Stephanopoulos went over the top on Barack and his online supporters lurched into gear. I consider that our failure too (me included — I didn’t make it the kind of focus of my blogging that I should have) and I hope we’ve learned our lesson.

This isn’t about having some people we like on TV or taking down one politician over another in a primary. The system itself is inherently antithetical to the kind of dialog we need to advance liberal politics in this country. We are at a huge disadvantage until we can figure out a way to change it.

Be sure to read dday’s exceptional post below, also on the subject of the media.

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If A Nose Grows In The Forest…

by dday

…and nobody in the media is there to hear it…

Last night, John McCain, he of the Pinocchio problem, retold the story for the Saddleback Church congregants about his time in the Hanoi Hilton (John McCain is very reluctant to talk about his POW experience), when a guard loosened his ropes and, later, on Christmas, drew a cross in the sand, in solidarity with McCain the prisoner, a simple expression of faith. The crowd loved it.

McCain has been telling this story since at least 1999, in his book “Faith of Our Fathers.” In 2000 he told the story and it involved the guard drawing the cross with a sandal. I guess the stick was better for the visual of the ad that ran this year:

Now there’s the revelation that the story of the cross is remarkably similar to a possibly apocryphal story attributed to the late Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. There are a number of Christian books that tell a similar tale about Solzhenitsyn’s redemptive moment with a drawn cross. Here’s one from 1997:

Along with other prisoners, he worked in the fields day after day, in rain and sun, during summer and winter. His life appeared to be nothing more than backbreaking labor and slow starvation. The intense suffering reduced him to a state of despair.

On one particular day, the hopelessness of his situation became too much for him. He saw no reason to continue his struggle, no reason to keep on living. His life made no difference in the world. So he gave up.

Leaving his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to other prisoners.

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.

As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.

Solzhenitsyn slowly rose to his feet, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Outwardly, nothing had changed. Inside, he had received hope.

[From Luke Veronis, “The Sign of the Cross”; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.]

Here’s the same story in a 2002 book. And here’s another from a book in 1994, which could be the original source. It seems to have spread like an email forward, and most authors source it to Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago, though it’s unclear whether the story actually appears there. But it was mentioned a number of times following Solzhenitsyn’s death this month. I can’t find McCain referring to this story before 1999’s Faith of Our Fathers, not even in this incredibly detailed account of his POW experience for US News and World Report published in May 1973.

It’s entirely possible that this type of scene happened at a prison camp more than once, and there are differences between the two stories (in McCain’s telling, the drawing is performed by a guard; in Solzhenitsyn’s, it’s a fellow prisoner). The similarities could be entirely coincidental. This is not something you can prove or disprove.

That didn’t matter in 2000. Al Gore said he invented the Internet and that he found Love Canal and that he and Tipper were the inspiration for Love Story. That’s what happened and there was no shaking anyone in the media off of that, and they were going to use those and other nuggets to build a story about Gore’s serial exaggerations, and make that character issue far more important than any policy or point of difference between him and George W. Bush.

Here’s my point. I don’t actually care about stuff like this. I find it much more relevant and vital that McCain was quicker to begin the invasion of Iraq after 9-11 than even Bush and Cheney, or that he believes in his personal grandiosity so much that he imagines skirmishes on the Russo-Georgian border to be world-historical events that demand action, or that his health care plan would literally cover about 5% of those currently uninsured, or that he wants to continue Bush’s policies of inequality by cutting taxes massively for the rich, or that he thinks anyone who makes less than $5 million a year isn’t rich, and on and on. Stories about politicians embellishing parts of their personal biography for dramatic effect are fairly routine and show little more than that they’re… ambitious politicians, looking to connect emotionally with voters to gain an advantage. Remember how Ronald Reagan convinced himself that he served in World War II? Hillary Clinton’s “sniper fire” in Tuzla? Barack Obama’s book actually admits that characters are invented and time compressed. So this is nothing new. And I wish ALL of it were ignored, because the thin strand connecting these gaffes and exaggerations to the actual character of the nominee is tenuous at best.

But the media goes ga-ga for this kind of stuff and offers little else, for the most part. I’m pleased that CBS is going to do 35 long segments on every aspect of the candidates’ policies this fall, but let’s face it, that isn’t going to drive the debate of the chattering class. They are uniformly uninterested in the issues, and they would much rather obsess over minutiae and speculate about character, whether the candidates “look Presidential” or “have what it takes” to win. In the LA Times today, there are two articles that speak to this. One is a critical review of broadcast news by media critic Mary McNamara:

SO MUCH has been said about the media’s handling of this campaign that it’s almost embarrassing to address the topic. But after watching hours, days, weeks of it on television, the cry of anguish cannot be suppressed: For the love of all that is holy, how did one of the most important presidential races in history, between two men who embody such disparate political possibilities, wind up looking like a montage sequence in a Will Ferrell movie?

“Bias” has been the watchword, but watching the nightly news loops, it seems less like bias than just plain old fear. Fear of missing the moment, of boring the viewers, of relying on the old-model thinking — who, what, when, why, where — while everyone yawns and returns their collective attention to their new iPhones.

“No, no, wait,” news outlets seem to shout like desperate screenwriters in a rapidly deteriorating pitch meeting. Nevermind those boring old proposed policies or the contradictory voting records or any of that stuff, look at this, you’re going to love it, it’s The Big Reveal.

Indeed, this is a major component of how the news media covers modern campaigns. The other way is through horse-race discussion, taking those gaffes and nuggets and bits of character effluvia and judging how they will “play” with core constituencies. The latest practitioner is Chuck Todd, and he comes out and admits that he’s a sportscaster:

Less than an hour later, Todd sat in a third-floor studio for his only practice run anchoring on MSNBC before the conventions. It was his first time behind the desk, and he anxiously checked with the floor director throughout the hour to make sure he was getting his cues right. “This is big-boy TV now,” he said.

The Miami native wasn’t looking for a television career when he first arrived in this city as a student at George Washington University, already fascinated with politics. “I thought I wanted to manage a presidential campaign,” he said. But after working on a few races, including Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin’s 1992 presidential bid, he decided “it was more interesting to do it as a sport than trying to be a hired gun.”

Here’s the thing, though – in the case of the Village, it’s more like a home-team sportscaster. The guy who is paid the Raiders to cover the game, and he hates every other team and has no problem shaping the story to benefit his guys. The refs are always against his team and the other guys are always cheating. Their draft pick is forever the savior of the franchise and the free agent they let go was a bum anyway. They give you the “inside story” without ever being critical of the guys who write the paychecks.

If there was an even spread from the media of damaging stories or unfavorable narratives on both sides of the political divide that’d be one thing. But the idea of John McCain as a serial exaggerator in the way that they painted Al Gore would be unthinkable, despite the fact that the evidence is the same, and actually even more so in the case of McCain. So we get media types arguing that infidelity like that of John Edwards disqualifies someone for higher political office without applying that to McCain or indeed several of the GOP field this year. We get them defending Republican military veterans from attacks they deem scurrilous and baseless yet not Democrats of the same rank. We get the same paint-by-numbers narratives of Democrats as weak and feminine and Republicans as strong and patriarchal year after year no matter who the candidate, no matter what the policy, no matter what.

I’m focusing on this gross double-standard in the comparison between Gore and McCain because I think it’s the most salient example and it shows to what extent their thumbs are on the scale. And when there was a perception on the other side of the aisle that the media was too liberal, they mounted an effort to relentlessly criticize them to make sure their perspective was represented. I don’t necessarily want a perspective represented; I’d like to see campaigns covered with a reliance on facts and not fiction, substance and not style. But if continuous, vigilant criticism is what’s warranted, well… have laptop, will travel.

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Setting The Table For Armageddon

by digby

Where do they get these crazy ideas?

Arab world sees Bush’s response to Georgia-Russia crisis as hypocritical

The U.S. president should be ‘too ashamed to speak about the occupation of any country, he is already occupying one,’ one observer says.

President Bush’s condemnation of Russia as a bullying intimidator in the Georgian conflict struck a hypocritical note in a Middle East that has endured violent reverberations from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and where the sharp White House rhetoric against Moscow echoes what many Arabs feel in turn about the U.S.

Many in the region are angered by what they see as the president’s swaggering style and frequent veiled threats of military force. His administration has been accused of alienating Muslims and instigating turmoil in a misguided war on terrorism.

At this point the single most important hallmark of American conservatism is hypocrisy. This, after all, is the man who stole an election and then invaded a country that had not threatened us in the name of spreadin’ democracy. You just can’t get any more hypocritical than that. (Well, actually you can — how about using febrile rhetoric about torture and “rape rooms” while operating his own torture regime and concentration camp. The list could go on.)

Meanwhile, little pitchers have big ears:

Georgia, Russia took a path of belligerence and bluster

Russia supported separatists and distrusted Georgian leader Saakashvili, whose mocking attitude and head-long rush to embrace the U.S. made matters worse.

These last few years have done grave harm, in more ways than we can imagine right now, to global stability. The US went out of its way to upend the delicate post war agreement against wars of aggression with this misbegotten Bush Doctrine of preventive war. It was an error of epic proportions. And it exposed something very ugly about us at the moment when we had the chance to transcend our own past sins and become an evolved, modern superpower devoted to international law and cooperation. Instead we proved ourselves to be no more responsible or mature than any other third rate empire with a chance to kick ass and prove its strength through brute violence.

This was a post partisan choice. The Democrats did not, as a whole, choose to fight this impulse. Most of them probably didn’t want to. But there are degrees of aggressive, blustery, belligerant hypocrisy and there is nobody who exemplifies it more than John Mccain, who makes even Bush look calm and deliberate by contrast.

This article should scare anyone with half a conscience right down to his or her marrow:

Response to 9/11 Offers Outline of a McCain Doctrine

Senator John McCain arrived late at his Senate office on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. “This is war,” he murmured to his aides. The sound of scrambling fighter planes rattled the windows, sending a tremor of panic through the room.

Within hours, Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.

“There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he added, on MSNBC. “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared,” he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”

Now, as Mr. McCain prepares to accept the Republican presidential nomination, his response to the attacks of Sept. 11 opens a window onto how he might approach the gravest responsibilities of a potential commander in chief. Like many, he immediately recalibrated his assessment of the unseen risks to America’s security. But he also began to suggest that he saw a new “opportunity” to deter other potential foes by punishing not only Al Qaeda but also Iraq.

“Just as Sept. 11 revolutionized our resolve to defeat our enemies, so has it brought into focus the opportunities we now have to secure and expand our freedom,” Mr. McCain told a NATO conference in Munich in early 2002, urging the Europeans to join what he portrayed as an all but certain assault on Saddam Hussein. “A better world is already emerging from the rubble.”

Frankly, I find that scarier than Dick Cheney, who I don’t think actually believes (or cares) about a “better world” just one that’s safe for multinational corporations. Bush is a vacant child who parrots talking points that make him feel like a man. McCain actually believes this drivel:

To his admirers, Mr. McCain’s tough response to Sept. 11 is at the heart of his appeal. They argue that he displayed the same decisiveness again last week in his swift calls to penalize Russia for its incursion into Georgia, in part by sending peacekeepers to police its border.

His critics charge that the emotion of Sept. 11 overwhelmed his former cool-eyed caution about deploying American troops without a clear national interest and a well-defined exit, turning him into a tool of the Bush administration in its push for a war to transform the region.

“He has the personality of a fighter pilot: when somebody stings you, you want to strike out,” said retired Gen. John H. Johns, a former friend and supporter of Mr. McCain who turned against him over the Iraq war. “Just like the American people, his reaction was: show me somebody to hit.”

Whether through ideology or instinct, though, Mr. McCain began making his case for invading Iraq to the public more than six months before the White House began to do the same. He drew on principles he learned growing up in a military family and on conclusions he formed as a prisoner in North Vietnam. He also returned to a conviction about “the common identity” of dangerous autocracies as far-flung as Serbia and North Korea that he had developed consulting with hawkish foreign policy thinkers to help sharpen the themes of his 2000 presidential campaign.

Just what we need. A president whose first reaction is: “show me somebody to hit”.

I remember writing a long time ago that John McCain is the man George W. Bush was pretending to be, right down to the flight suit. The Real Thing is actually far more dangerous than the cheap imitation. If he wins this thing, we could find ourselves in a very, very serious crisis, of both economic stability and national security —- and very likely of our government itself. This man is unstable.

The funny thing is that I don’t think the Big Money Boyz expect the Republicans to win this election so they didn’t think there was much danger in putting Buck Turgidson on the ballot. You can’t help but wonder if they are having some second thoughts about allowing for even that slim possibility.

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