Category: Media & Journalism

E-i-e-i-o

An article on Saturday about fund-raising efforts in New York by Senator Barack Obama misspelled the surname of one of President John F. Kennedy’s closest advisers, who introduced Mr. Obama at a fund-raiser. He is Theodore C. Sorensen, not Sorenson. The error also appeared in an article in The Arts on Feb. 22 about books written by candidates, including “Profiles in Courage,” which then-Senator Kennedy wrote with guidance from Mr. Sorensen. (The Times has misspelled Mr. Sorensen’s surname more than 135 times in headlines and articles during the 50-plus years he has been a Democratic adviser and well-known author.)

Corrections — The New York Times

No one noticed for 50 years? Not even Sorensen himself?

Dowd is a cleaned-up version of Coulter

In [Maureen] Dowd’s work, John Edwards is routinely “the Breck Girl” (five times so far—and counting), and Gore is “so feminized that he’s practically lactating.” Indeed, two days before we voted in November 2000, Dowd devoted her entire column, for the sixth time, to an imaginary conversation between Gore and his bald spot. “I feel pretty,” her headline said (pretending to quote Gore’s inner thoughts). That was the image this idiot wanted you carrying off to the voting booth with you! Such is the state of Maureen Dowd’s broken soul. And such is the state of her cohort.

And now, in the spirit of fair play and brotherhood, she is extending this type of “analysis” to Barack Obama. In the past few weeks, she has described Obama as “legally blonde” (in her headline); as “Scarlett O’Hara” (in her next column); as a “Dreamboy,” as “Obambi,” and now, in her latest absurd piece, as a “schoolboy” (text below). Do you get the feeling that Dowd may have a few race-and-gender issues floating around in her inane, tortured mind?

Daily Howler

Best Pierce quote of the day, so far

Charles Pierce is also finding fault with our insipid press:

Two weeks of idiocy about a caesura in a remark made by Hillary Clinton in Iowa a flat year before anyone votes there. . . . Sorry, you pack of smug, insufferable bastards — a war’s gone bad and the country’s a mess, and you never were funny, anyway, not like Molly was. So go and take your little slambooks and wreck some other profession for a while. The grown-ups have work to do.

Barbershop II — Not the movie!

Once again, from the Daily Howler, just in case you aren’t reading it yourself everyday as you should:

On page one, above the fold, Rachel Swarns reports on black voters’ reactions to Barack Obama. In paragraph 5–above the fold–she prints this remarkable paragraph:

SWARNS (2/2/07): ”When you think of a president, you think of an American,” said Mr. Lanier, a 58-year-old barber who is still considering whether to support Mr. Obama. ”We’ve been taught that a president should come from right here, born, raised, bred, fed in America. To go outside and bring somebody in from another nationality, now that doesn’t feel right to some people.”

That paragraph appears above the fold on page one of today’s New York Times’ front page. Again, it raises the anthropological question: Are we Americans smart enough to conduct the most basic journalism?

What’s so remarkable about that paragraph? In it, Swarns quotes a 58-year-old barber as he makes a string of counterfactual claims about a White House candidate. What does this barber seem to say? He seems to say that he is concerned because Obama is not “an American.” He seems to say that Obama is “from another nationality.” And he seems to say that he is concerned because Obama wasn’t “born, raised, bred, fed in America.” These statements appear without challenge or comment. And all of these claims are just false.

Duh! Barack Obama was born in America; otherwise, he couldn’t serve as president. And Obama was “raised, bred and fed in America,” except for a four-year period (ages 6-10) when he lived with his mother in Indonesia. Meanwhile, is Obama “an American?” Is he “from another nationality?” The latter phrase has various meanings, but Obama plainly is an American; he has been an American citizen since the day of his birth. But uh-oh! Given the rest of the quoted material, a reader of Rachel Swarns’ fifth paragraph may well come away thinking different.

The Daily Howler

At The Daily Howler, Bob Somerby continues to disconstruct the Irish-Catholic boys club that makes up much of the media:

MATTHEWS: But, hey, I measure people by their heart. I don’t think Biden was saying anything more than somebody of his generation would say.

But we know someone who’s roughly “of Biden’s generation” who hasn’t been uttering dumb racial gaffes. Her name, of course, is Hillary Clinton—and no, she hasn’t issued cringe-making remarks about Obama’s cleanliness. She hasn’t done so for an obvious reason—she’s smarter than Biden about such matters. She has cared more about matters of race; she has paid much better attention.

Somerby, brought up an Irish Catholic himself, was excellent yesterday as well on the Irish Catholic male (and even female) problem with women yesterday.

The national news media sucks

The media, so-called liberal and otherwise, have started their deconstruct of Barack Obama. He’s a smoker. He wears casual clothes. His middle name is Hussein. Let’s turn him into a cartoon character before the American people can make an honest assessment.

[Insert strong profanity of your choice here.]

FDR smoked. Oh, and he couldn’t walk. Harry Truman’s middle name was “S”. Eisenhower is said to have smoked four packs of Camels a day during the War.

Does Obama have a position on health care, social security, the environment, taxes, the war in Iraq. Who knows?

But he smokes and his middle name is Hussein (which he had very little to do with, by the way, and is the name of his father and grandfather just as my middle name is from my father and grandfather).

Idiots. Unpatriotic, self-serving idiots.

Regret the Error

Gather ’round for our annual collection of the funny, shocking, sad and disturbing media errors and corrections from the past year. From typos that celebrate Queen Elizabeth and her remarkable egg-laying abilities, to media hoaxes, unreliable sources, the Sago disaster and apologies for mistakes nearly 120 years ago, it was a good year for Regret. Though not a banner one for our media brethren.

The Year in Media Errors and Corrections

Link via kottke who has a quick list of highlights.

Homecoming

NewMexiKen favorite Charles Pierce is back where he belongs with Eric Alterman.

I rise again to present, by way of a relevant comparison, my argument that my colleagues in the sportswriting business do their jobs better than most members of the elite political media. Last year, Bud Selig appointed former senator George Mitchell to run the in-house investigation of what is perceived to be the problem with performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Almost immediately, the choice came under criticism that centered on the fact that Mitchell’s probe would not have any real power to compel testimony or documents, and that Mitchell himself had been tied into several major-league baseball franchises — most notably, the Boston Red Sox — and, finally, on the very simple grounds that any in-house investigation started out in Credibility Gap given major-league baseball’s inability to police itself.

I don’t agree with a lot of these criticisms, but they have some merit, and the fact that they were mustered so widely and so quickly stands in stark contrast to the reverential coverage of the Iraq Study Group and its hunt for the pony in the pile. For example where was the instant and withering contempt from our courtier political press over the presence on the ISG of a useless old vampire like Edwin Meese, who started his career calling for detention camps to be set up to house student demonstrators at Berkeley, and ended it, two steps ahead of the law, by giving the Iran-Contra crowd just enough time to shred what they needed to shred? And, anyway, what in the name of Christ’s sweet strawberry preserves does Edwin Meese know about Iraq? Why not just hire him to re-wire the space shuttle and design the new levees in Louisiana while he’s at it? County commissioners go to jail for putting their idiot nephews on county road crews, but, on the bloodiest question of the past 30 years, supposedly educated people wait with their tongues hanging out for a viable solution to emerge from what appears to be the Petrified Forest, and nobody points out the absurdity that’s sitting right there, listening to its arteries harden.

All News Has Become ‘People’ Magazine

Daily Howler discusses the Bush-Webb story. An excerpt:

What did Bush say to Webb? The truth is, we don’t really know. And what was his tone of voice—did he—”snap?” Sorry, we don’t know that either.

No, we don’t really know what Bush said to Webb. And we don’t know his tone of voice when he said it. But so what! As we first noted years ago, “novelization of news” has long been the specialty of the cohort we still call a “press corps.” It’s the way they prefer to transform the real news. Here’s how the practice works:

First, they form a Standard Group Judgment about some politician’s character. Then, they come up with a pleasing Group Story—a story which helps persuade the world that their judgment is wonderfully accurate. In 1999 and 2000, this was endlessly done to Candidate Gore—and it sent Candidate Bush to the White House. But the “press corps” has finally come to see that Bush has been a cosmic failure. So they’ve started peddling pleasing novels which display hisfailed character too.
…

Let’s offer a slightly larger perspective. The “press corps” is now writing novels which cut against Bush because they’ve finally agreed to disown him. For years, though, their silly tales have cut against Dems—and because they’re largely an upper-class institution, that’s the way their tales will tend to cut in the future. In our view, liberals and progressives would do better to reject this silly version of “news” altogether. The press corps does this sort of thing to Republicans when they manage to ruin the world. But in the long run, they will do this to Dems for no earthly reason. In our view, liberals and progressives would be much wiser to reject this whole practice. Flat, cold.

NewMexiKen didn’t mention the Webb story for this very reason. Who knows what was really said and its tone?

Oh, and regarding my title for this post, there is absolutely nothing wrong with People. It’s when all public discourse becomes celebrity-driven that we have a problem.

Bob Somerby Explains All

NewMexiKen thinks you should be reading the Daily Howler every day because a lot of what Bob Somerby writes about is important and revealing. (Alas, he has no RSS feed.)

Normally I would just provide a teaser and a link. Today I’m including the whole first part of his posting because I think it is that important and that revealing.

YOU OUGHTTA KNOW: After yesterday’s post (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/27/06), we briefly revisited the 1994 public discourse about “midnight basketball.” We really thought you ought to consider a bit of what we observed.

In Saturday’s New York Times, Thomas Edsall warned Dems to stop making such proposals, even though they may represent the “pursuit of laudable goals.” After all, Edsall noted, “conservative talk radio” will trash such ideas; the trashing will “spread to the establishment media, and soon became a liability.” As we noted, this is a perfect history of our recent politics—and it’s a perfect history of the way the establishment media has learned to bow low to pseudo-con power. Edsall seems to take it as a given: His colleagues won’t defend the pursuit of laudable goals. Instead, they’ll simply repeat What Rush Says, even when he trashes such efforts.

In precisely that manner, the crackpot forces in American politics seized control of the public discourse during the early Clinton-Gore years. Yesterday, our brief research showed that “midnight basketball”—Edsall’s chosen topic—was an especially good example of the way this process has worked.

What did we think you ought to consider? We were struck by a short, unsigned report in the 8/17/94 New York Times. The Times report noted an interesting fact—the previous Republican president had also approved of midnight basketball:

NEW YORK TIMES (8/17/94): The Republicans who maintain that President Clinton’s stalled crime bill is loaded with excessive social spending often point to a provision for midnight basketball as a prime example of waste.

What they may not know is that the idea of midnight basketball was promoted by George Bush when he was President. In fact, Mr. Bush, a Republican, was so impressed with a midnight basketball program in Maryland that he named it as one of his Thousand Points of Light.

“The last thing midnight basketball is about is basketball,” Mr. Bush said when he visited the program in 1991 in Glenarden, Md., home of the first midnight basketball program in the nation.

Representative Steny H. Hoyer, a Democrat who represents that district, quoted the former President’s remarks on the House floor today.

“Mr. Bush named the program his 124th point of light,” the Times noted. And the paper quoted more of Bush’s 1991 statement: “Here, everybody wins. Everybody gets a better shot at life.”

Fascinating, isn’t it? Before Bill Clinton showed up at the White House, the sitting Republican president applauded this program. But when Clinton proposed modest funding in its support, “conservative talk radio” began to trash it, in ways that were often racially coded; according to Edsall, these attacks “spread to the establishment media,” making the proposal a liability for Clinton. But Edsall doesn’t criticize his establishment colleagues for adopting these pseudo-conservative values; instead, he implores the Democrats to never-again pursue such laudable goals. As such, Edsall’s column becomes a perfect portrait of the way our discourse was lost in this era—of the way a new wave of pseudo-conservatives seized control of the public discourse, with the willing acquiescence of Edsall’s weak-willed cohort. By 1999, Edsall’s establishment colleagues were happily conducting their War Against Gore, taking their talking-points from Jim Nicholson, the endlessly dissembling RNC chairman. After twenty months of such crackpot behavior, they’d sent another Bush to the White House—and he sent us to a new Vietnam.

In short, before the “conservative revolution” of the early Clinton years, everyone thought well of midnight basketball. But soon, a group of loudmouth kooks weighed in—and the Edsels of the establishment media began to suffer the endless breakdowns which have shaped our politics right to this day. Even today, Edsall can’t see the peculiar shape of the history he relates. Even today, he begs the Democrats: Please don’t incite those talk-radio hosts! In the name of all that’s convenient, don’t pursue “laudable goals!”

Worst lines of the day, so far

The Today Show (as reported by Digby):

LAUER: And you brought up Michael J. Fox. Let me just ask you: You know, Rush Limbaugh started a lot of controversy when he said perhaps Michael J. Fox was exaggerating or faking these effects of Parkinson’s disease in that ad promoting stem cell research. Didn’t Rush Limbaugh just say what a lot of people were privately thinking?

[…]

LAUER: But also, Susan, last word. If Michael Fox goes out there politically and puts himself in the fray, he has to expect to be, you know, taken to account, correct?

ESTRICH: Correct. And he is being taken to account.

CBS News (as reported by Digby):

The portion of the interview they broadcast was quite decent. But you can see the whole interview here — and listen to Katie Couric push him over and over again on the burning question of whether he manipulated his medication and ask him whether he should have re-scheduled the shoot when his symptoms were manifested as they were. And she does it while she’s sitting directly across from him watching him shake like crazy. Her questions imply that it was in poor taste or manipulative as if he can magically conjure a film crew to catch him in on of the fleeting moments where he doesn’t appear too symptomatic. The press seems to truly believe that it is reasonable to be suspicious of him showing symptoms of a disease that has him so severely in its clutches that if he doesn’t take his medication his face becomes a frozen mask and he cannot even talk.

So they succeeded, Michael J. Fox is the issue.

Just Time for a Few Best Lines Today

Brad DeLong isn’t too impressed with the report on September new jobs in The Washington Post. He concludes:

One possible explanation is that both Henderson nor Baker are sufficiently lazy and stupid that they have managed to proceed through life writing about economics and politics while remaining completely ignorant of the difference between increases in nominal wages and real wages, and they have done so in a newsroom in which getting the story right is simply not a priority.

Other alternative explanations are more discreditable.

NewMexiKen wonders if it is possible that much of the news media was always this bad, and we just didn’t have the resources to know. Or has the news media just gone downhill that fast — especially The Washington Post?

On the other hand, TPM Muckraker finds some journalists to admire, those at the San Diego Union-Tribune. It seems former Rep. Duke Cunningham has written the paper a self-serving, you’re the cause of all my travail letter from prison. (Follow link to read some of the letter.)

I imagine the letter was difficult for the reporters to read — blinded, as they were, by the light glancing off the Pulitzer prizes they won by helping land Duke in jail.

Meanwhile Digby has this revelation:

I know this will come as a great shock to everyone, but it appears that Hastert may have lied about what he knew and when he knew it.

Like pigs in mud, the pundit corps rediscovers the Joy of Sex

Daily Howler is a must read today for an insightful look at the current situation and modern American political theater.

Really.

Now, here comes the part which is apparently too complex for large numbers of us liberals to grasp. When we ourselves insist on repeating these themes, we continue to spread the unhelpful idea that Al Gore is a big fucking joke. This helps degrade Gore’s public image—and it helps degrade the public image of Major Dem Leaders as a whole. Beyond that, it helps explain why Gore, not being completely crazy, almost surely won’t run for the White House again. After all, if this is the way his supporters portray him, how could he expect to be portrayed by the RNC and the mainstream press corps? The sheer absurdity of this matter simply boggles the mind.

A couple of other things:

The Democrats may be better this time at getting out the votes, but the Republicans will still be better at counting them.

And, for the record, Monica Lewinsky was 22 when she met Clinton.