Hard Work
Have you heard that it’s hard work?
It’s hard work.
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Let ‘Em Have It
If the post debate spin tonight is as unfair and absurd as it has been in the past, it would be helpful if people would call the networks in large numbers and complain. It usually takes a few days to gel and it might be possible to turn an incorrect spin if we make an issue of it. If they don’t hear from us, they don’t realize that they are living in their own little media echo chamber.
Don’t jump to conclusions. Wait and watch for a while to see how it plays out. The press corpse might just see the obvious, for once, and realize that Bush’s canned, robotic responses are not persuasive and that the public really needs to hear something more than bumper sticker slogans. Bush’s cockiness and arrogance may just go too far this time and even the media may be put off by it. We know that Kerry is by far more intellectually prepared to answer questions and win in a fair debate. Perhaps the media will finally wipe the stardust from their eyes and recognise that outtakes from “Bonanza” are simply not adequate answers to serious questions.
But, if they immediately say that Kerry lost then call and complain. Tell them that you thought Kerry did great and that what you saw was the next president of the United States. Don’t accuse them of bias. Tell them you wonder if they watched the same debate you did.
If Bush spin grows tomorrow, call again. (Use those free nightime minutes. They aren’t good for anything else.) Let the media know that we are watching and listening and that they will hear from us.
My reader jake in the comment below says:
This tactic was at the backbone of the right’s onslaught on the media for the last 20 years. This phenomenon didn’t happen overnight. Straightening it out won’t happen quickly either. But it’s gotta start NOW.
And don’t email. That gets no attention. You have to call. You have to express yourself verbally and forcefully. You have to be clear, strong and organized. Don’t engage in twit-speak about your “feelings.” You also have to write letters…Paper ones, delivered in the mail (gasp! horrors!). As I said, I know because I’ve been in the belly of the beast forever.
ABC News
www.abcnews.com
47 W. 66th St
New York, NY 10023
Phone: (212) 456-7477, 456-3796
Fax: (212) 456-4866, 456-2795
World News Tonight with Peter Jennings
Phone: (212) 456-4040
peterjennings@worldnewstonight.abcnews.com
Fax: (212) 456-2771
CBS News
www.cbsnews.com
542 W. 57th St.
New York, NY 10019
News Desk:
Phone: (212) 975-4321, 975-3691
Fax: (212) 975-1893
CNN
www.cnn.com
1 CNN Center
POB 105366
Atlanta, GA 30348
Phone: (404) 827-1500
Fax: (404) 827-1593, (404) 827-1784
Fox News
www.foxnews.com
Speakout@foxnews.com
Viewerservices@foxnews.com
1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Phone: (212) 301-3000
Fax: (212) 301-4224
MSNBC
www.msnbc.com
world@msnbc.com
One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453
NBC News
www.nbc.com
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112
Phone: (212) 664-5900
Fax: (212) 664-2914
NPR
www.npr.org
635 Mass Ave
Washington, DC 20001
Phone: (202) 414-2323
Fax: (202) 414-3324
PBS
www.pbs.org
PO BOX 50880
Washington, DC 20091
Phone: (800) 356-2626
Get your phone in hand. Listen to the democratic voices in the spin room and make note of their key words and phrases. Read your regular blogs after the debate.
Then get on the phone and make some calls. Tonight. If they fuck this up, the media need to hear from us.
Everyone needs to read this. George W. Bush is living in a fantasyland of spin, pretending that things are getting better. George W. Bush has turned a potential threat into an active threat.
Here is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal Reporter’s E-mail:
It’s hard to pinpoint when the ‘turning point’ exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq’s population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush’s rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a ‘potential’ threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to ‘imminent and active threat,’ a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.
Iraqis like to call this mess ‘the situation.’ When asked ‘how are thing?’ they reply: ‘the situation is very bad.”
What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn’t control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country’s roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health — which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers — has now stopped disclosing them.
Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.
We did not need to fight this particular war. We had a real war to fight and we did a half assed job of it in Afghanistan because certain members of the Bush administration used 9/11 as an excuse to go after an old enemy who was not an imminent threat. Invading Iraq played into our real enemy’s hands and gave their cause new life and many, many recruits. It lost us friends and allies throughout the world. We are less safe than we would have been if George W. Bush had fought the war we needed to fight instead of the war he wanted to fight.
The American people do not want to believe that our government could make a mistake of such epic proportions. But it did and the man at the top needs to be fired. He is not willing to change course and fix his mistakes, so the American people are going to have to do it for him.
Read the entire piece. Send it to the media and ask them why they are covering this election as if it were a sporting event when it is a matter of life and death. “The situation” is lethal and Americans may have to pay a very heavy price if we don’t take this war out of Bush’s hands while we have the chance. He and his comrades have shown that they cannot be trusted to wage the war correctly.
Pool Coverage
I wrote yesterday that Fox would be in control of the feed of the debate tonight and therefore could not be trusted to show Kerry in a fair light. As it turns out, each network will have a choice of various shots.
Fox News is running the “pool” coverage, feeding multiple streams of video to the other networks — and also feeding suspicion in the liberal blogosphere that somehow the choice of images shown would be biased toward Bush — but it’s up to each control room what shots to show.
In the past, the feed that went out was the feed that everybody saw. I guess that’s changed. So, if they play games with the reaction shots, it’s the fault of the particular network, not necessarily FOX.
That’s something we should complain about as well. Keep those phone numbers handy. Work those refs.
Who Cares What Grieving Moms Think?
Apparently, the Dan Rather debacle has the quaking mediaswhores completely cowed. None of them are going to talk about anything “controversial” going forward.
So far in this campaign, the surest way for political advocacy groups to grab some TV exposure is to create commercials (the more emotional the better), buy airtime in a handful of swing states and then hold a press conference to announce the spots. The first Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad that argued Sen. John Kerry lied about his war medals won free airtime for weeks on cable television. More recently, an anti-Kerry ad mixing a grainy picture of Kerry in among notorious Islamic terrorists was dutifully noted by most major news organizations.
The latest ad buy entry came yesterday when families of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq held a press conference in Washington, D.C., to announce two new emotional anti-Bush ads that are set to run in the crucial swing states of Florida, New Mexico and Nevada. Calling themselves RealVoices.org, the mothers of slain soldiers appear in the two ads, often in tears as they describe their loss and their anger over the war in Iraq.
Sounds like some pretty gripping stuff, right? Apparently not to TV news outlets. So far they’ve been overwhelmingly MIA on the story. Here’s an up-to-the-minute tally of the mentions that RealVoices.org has received so far:
CNBC: 0
CNN: 0
CNN Headline News: 0
Fox News: 0
MSNBC: 1
ABC: 0
CBS: 0
NBC: 0
*Sigh*
Write some e-mails folks. Work those cowardly refs. This is a powerful ad campaign and the goddamned gasbags ought to give it just as much coverage as they gave those swift boat bozos.
Here’s the CNN feedback page
or:
feedback@CNN.com
Crossfire@CNN.com
MSNBC:
hardball@msbnc.com
countdown@msnbc.com
joe@msnbc.com
FoxNews:
Fuggedaboudit
Rhymes With Wee-Ahtch
Spare me, dear readers, any more chastisement for making a very vague passing remark about Lynn Cheney’s backside. The nasty witch doesn’t seem to have a problem with mocking other people’s looks:
During a campaign stop in Minnesota yesterday, Mrs Cheney joined in the ridiculing of Mr Kerry.
As a group of volunteers moved into a crowd with microphones for a question-and-answer period, the vice-president told supporters to look for the people with dark orange shirts.
When Cheney paused as if searching to describe the shade of orange, his wife said: “How about John Kerry’s suntan?”
Live by Drudge, die by Drudge. If you want to be treated respectfully, you should probably behave respectfully — particularly if you have an ass the size of a love seat.
FYI
Wes Clark and Rudy Giuliani will be doing the live debate coverage with Jon Stewart tonight on The Daily Show: The place where the smart people go for their fake news.
When Will Bush Face The Grim Reality In Iraq?
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Three bombs exploded at a neighborhood celebration Thursday in western Baghdad, killing 35 children and seven adults, officials said. Hours earlier, a suicide car bomb killed a U.S. soldier and two Iraqis on the capital’s outskirts.
The bombs in Baghdad’s al-Amel neighborhood caused the largest death toll of children in any insurgent attack since the conflict in Iraq (news – web sites) began 17 months ago. The children, who were still on school vacation, said they had been drawn to the scene by American soldiers handing out candy.
[…]
“The Americans called us, they told us, ‘Come here, come here,’ asking us if we wanted sweets. We went beside them, then a car exploded,” said 12-year-old Abdel Rahman Dawoud, lying naked in a hospital bed with shrapnel embedded all over his body.
The day of violence, including insurgent attacks and U.S. airstrikes in Fallujah, left a total of 46 people dead and 208 wounded
[…]
Also Thursday, the Arab news network Al-Jazeera showed video of 10 new hostages seized in Iraq by militants. Al-Jazeera said the 10 — six Iraqis, two Lebanese and two Indonesian women — were taken by The Islamic Army in Iraq. The group has claimed responsibility for seizing two French journalists last month.
[…]
Hours earlier, a suicide car bomber struck in the Abu Ghraib area outside of Baghdad, killing the American soldier and at least two Iraqis, and wounding 60, Iraqi and U.S. officials said.
That bomb targeted a compound housing the mayor’s office, a police station and other buildings, police 1st Lt. Ahmed Jawad said. A U.S. Bradley fighting vehicle parked in front of the compound was hit, Hutton said.
“I saw people flying in the air and falling on the ground,” said Saad Mohsin, who was in front of the mayor’s office and was struck by shrapnel.
[…]
American jets, tanks and artillery units repeatedly have targeted al-Zarqawi’s network in Fallujah in recent weeks as U.S.-led forces seek to assert control over insurgent enclaves ahead of elections slated for January. The military says the attacks have inflicted significant damage on the network, which has claimed responsibility for a series of bombings, kidnappings and other attacks.
Doctors say scores of civilians have been killed and wounded in the strikes.
Jesus H. Christ.
Are the American people going to fall for the same old tired tropes tonight about freedom and democracy and being resolute or are they going to demand to know why our president has us stuck in a living goddamned nightmare from which we cannot awake in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11?
If you want more of this, America, vote for George W. Bush. He’ll stay the goddamned course come hell or high water:
In a TV commercial released Wednesday, Cindy Sheehan, a 47-year-old woman from Vacaville, Calif., whose 24-year-old son was killed in Sadr City in April, speaks directly to George W. Bush.
Shot in black-and-white, her soft voice cracking, she says, “I imagined it would hurt if one of my kids was killed, but I never thought it would hurt this bad, especially someone so honest and brave as Casey, my son. When you haven’t been honest with us, when you and your advisors rushed us into this war. How do you think we felt when we heard the Senate report that said there was no link between Iraq and 9/11?”
This is one of four new ads featuring relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq, produced by a new political action committee called RealVoices.org. At a time when soldiers’ parents have been arrested at Bush rallies and thrown out of the Republican National Convention for trying to make themselves heard, Real Voices was formed to broadcast the excruciating messages of those who feel that their loved ones’ lives were wasted in Iraq.
Real Voices is spending $200,000 on its initial ad buy while trying to raise more money. Each one of the spots is bitter and searing. In one, Raphael Zappala, whose 30-year-old brother was killed in Baghdad while searching a warehouse for weapons of mass destruction, says, “My brother died trying to make an honest man out of George W. Bush, needlessly. He was betrayed by the lies of his commander in chief. And the troops still in Iraq are being betrayed.” Another features a California mother named Jane Bright, who remains livid about Bush’s rash “Bring ’em on!” challenge. “Mr. Bush,” she says, “I have no way of knowing whether the insurgent who killed my son ever heard your foolish taunt. But thanks to you, Mr. President, I have the rest of my life to wonder about it.”
[…]
One might think that Sheehan’s sacrifice would protect her from assaults by the right-wing patriotism police, but one would be wrong. Since she started speaking out, she’s been attacked as a political opportunist and accused of treason.
“I have had people tell me that what I’m doing is supporting terrorists and that my son would be ashamed of me,” she says. “I was on a radio call-in show on Sunday morning, and I had a lot of people call me a traitor.”
This group is raising money to run these ads in swing states. If you have any left to spare, this is a good place to put it.
Brat Boy Debater
In case anyone’s wondering why Bush and company negotiated hard for the networks not to show cut-away or reaction shots in the debate, this little passage from “When George meets John” by James Fallows explains it:
The debate was held in a tiny basement room on the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso. The candidates’ families and a few local officials sat on metal folding chairs in the room; everyone else, including reporters, watched TV monitors elsewhere. Laura Bush sat a few feet away from Mauro’s children, whom she knew but (according to Mauro) did not speak to or acknowledge. According to the rules of this debate, insisted on by Bush’s team, the screen had to show only whichever candidate was speaking—that is, no cutaway or reaction shots were allowed
Therefore no one outside the room saw the miniature drama inside. Bush was halfway toward his presidential style, speaking more slowly and less gracefully than four years earlier, and with a more dismissive air toward his opponent. While Mauro was speaking, Bush would sigh, grimace, and send body-language messages of boredom or contempt. “It was incredible,” Mauro told me recently. “I almost can’t believe it in retelling it. Because the press was upstairs, they didn’t realize how aggressive he was on the stage—pulling the sleeve of the moderator, staring or winking at Laura in the crowd.” The moderator of the debate, Bob Moore, of the El Paso Times, told me that Bush actually grabbed him just before the debate: “In the hallway, Bush did grab me by the lapels, pull me close to his face, and say, ‘Bobby, you clean up real good.’ Typical Bush.” When Bush was on stage but off camera, Moore said, “there was that Bush smirk, rolling his eyes, all of which Bush is very good at.“
Now, supposedly the networks are not going to follow the negotiated restrictions:
And the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, which is not a party to the agreement, said it could not be expected to enforce strictures on network coverage of the four debates.
At issue are rules that bar the networks from airing “cutaway” shots of either Republican President Bush or Democratic challenger John Kerry while they are waiting their turn to speak during the debates.
[…]
Fox News Channel, whose turn it is under a rotation system to operate the “pool” cameras for all the networks in the first debate on Thursday in Coral Gables, Florida, said it would follow its own editorial judgment in operating its cameras.
“They don’t want reaction shots,” said Fox News spokesman Paul Schur told Reuters. “We’re not going to bow to outside pressure. We’re not going to follow these restrictions.”
Yeah, sure.
This is a problem. FoxNews has a very bad track record of signalling GOP propaganda in debates. In the January 22 Democratic primary debate, they cut to their panel for immediate spinning by William Bennett before the debate was over.
Fox News is going to follow it’s own editorial rules all right. And, I think we know what they are, don’t we?