Category: Media & Journalism

In a follow-up to the follow-up, the Associated Press revealed that the restaurant owner had been left a tip which through some mistake had not been shared out, and it was not a bad one: $100 on a total bill of $157! So no story. And yet … the NPR piece had also followed-up a terribly sad case of a woman whose brother is suffering from cancer and who had turned up at a Barack Obama rally looking for solace. The candidate had addressed her, and held her hand. He kind of promised to write the brother a note as well (“if I have time”) but, you guessed it, the note never came. And yet this woman refused to be even slightly cross. “I do the same thing with friends of mine,” she said.

Now here is the point: the Clinton story has the candidate looking bad even though she actually behaved just fine; the Obama story ends with the candidate genuinely forgiven and honoured though, frankly, he fell down on the job. Does this tell us something bigger and more important about charm and politics? Such as, you either have it or you don’t and money (or even a good tip badly administered) cannot buy it?

Justin Webb

Or just possibly, it tells us something bigger and more important about the news media — at least if you accept The Daily Howler view. The “conventional Washington wisdom” is that Hillary could win the presidency, so the MSM needs to emphasize her negatives. And Obama can’t win the presidency, so the MSM needs to build him up so he’ll take the nomination from Clinton and lose to the Republican a year from now.

Just sayin’. If you don’t believe me, ask Al Gore.

Update: NewMexiKen wrote the above before seeing today’s Daily Howler:

Sadly, the facts are clear: Your ‘press corps’ is full of trivial people, and trivial people love trivia. They don’t give a sh*t about how health care works. Readers, they already have it! Instead, they like to tell stories about people’s character. There’s an older word for this trait. They’re gossips.

Yesterday during post-debate analysis on Hardball, Roger Simon of The Politico said he was impressed with Fred Thompson because he knew the name of Canada’s prime minister (Celine Dion).  Simon’s words: “It’s more than I knew.”  A proud moment for journamalism.

Daily Kos: Cheers and Jeers

You can save Cheers & Jeers

Vanity Fair has an article by Evgenia Peretz, Going After Gore. Here’s the summary:

Al Gore couldn’t believe his eyes: as the 2000 election heated up, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other top news outlets kept going after him, with misquotes (“I invented the Internet”), distortions (that he lied about being the inspiration for Love Story), and strangely off-the-mark needling, while pundits such as Maureen Dowd appeared to be charmed by his rival, George W. Bush. For the first time, Gore and his family talk about the effect of the press attacks on his campaign—and about his future plans—to the author, who finds that many in the media are re-assessing their 2000 coverage.

Early in the article, which Bob Somerby has recommended, is this:

How does he feel about it all? “I feel fine,” [Gore] says, “but, when I say that, I’m reminded of a story that Cousin Minnie Pearl used to tell about a farmer who was involved in an accident and sued for damages.” To paraphrase, at the trial the lawyer for the driver of the other car cross-examined the farmer, saying, “Isn’t it true that right after the accident, you said, ‘I feel fine’?” The farmer said, “Well, it’s not [that] simple,” before going on to explain that the other car rammed into him, throwing both him and his cow from his car. When a highway patrolman came by and saw the cow struggling, he shot him between the eyes. The farmer continued, “The patrolman then came to my side and said, ‘How do you feel?’… so I said, ‘I feel fine.'”

Hullabaloo has some good commentary on all this.

Just go read the top half of the Daily Howler today on how the media speculates that people have illegally given campaign donations, then speculates that the candidate knew, then speculates that this will bring her down.

Holy we-just-make-this-crap-up Batman!

Among others, former governors Huckabee and and Romney are advocating the “Fair Tax,” which is pretty much Steve Forbes’s “Flat Tax” renamed. It would, according to them, and according to commentators such as George Stephanopoulos, “eliminate all those [federal taxes], and replace it with a 23 percent sales tax.”

That is, it would be a national sales tax that replaces the federal income tax and some other taxes, like that pesky “death tax.”

23%.

Want to know how they get that figure?

According to Bruce Bartlett, a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy under Reagan and Bush I, writing in The Wall Street Journal, the actual rate in the proposal is 30%.

Say something costs a dollar. You will pay (not counting state sales tax) $1.30.

But, you see, 30 cents is only 23% of $1.30. So they call it a 23% “Fair Tax.”

That is intellectual dishonesty at a level that just leaves me aghast.

(Not to even get into the fact that the proposal would tack the 30% on everything — new houses, tanks and airplanes the government buys, school buses and school books, new cars, clothes, food, medical care!

I gleaned all this from the Daily Howler.

According to the Daily Howler, yesterday Tim Russert had this exchange:

RUSSERT: All right. But it is—and we did show, in one poll, her actually beating Rudy Giuliani—

BRODY: Right.

RUSSERT: So people may hold their nose, so to speak, at this stage. Or she may be successful at transforming her image.

Two things.

One, she’s beating Giuliani in every poll including a more recent survey by one pollster Russert cited elsewhere to show a tie.

Two. “People may hold their nose.” Excuse me?! Hillary Clinton is not NewMexiKen’s choice, but clearly Russert’s remark is inapporpriate for a supposedly neutral commentator.

And so goes the national news media, framing the discussion.