Silly or asinine coverage is nothing new, but I was struck last night by a few mind-numbing passages in Obama-VP pieces. Those concerns have been eclipsed by Ron Fournier’s AP hit piece today, though. Still, there’s a continuity in that the press continues to insert themselves into the story, and for the ill.
In dragging out the announcement of his vice presidential nominee to almost the eve of the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama has at once demonstrated his willingness to defy conventional political expectations — and to hold the news media in his thrall while doing it. (more…)
David Gregory speculates that the Edwards’ affair may be bad news for Obama. I have a very hard time seeing how Edwards’ affair reflects on Obama. What I do know is that this is another of those cases where there is a tacit but uniform agreement among pretty much all reporters and close campaign watchers not to publicly state the obvious: that this is a perilous development for John McCain. Just as Bill Clinton’s public undressing in the Lewinsky scandal led indirectly to the exposure of several high-profile Republican affairs, Edwards’ revelation will inevitably put pressure on the press in general to scrutinize John McCain under something more searching than the JFK rules they’ve applied to date. I assure you that this dimension of the story occurred to every reporter even tangentially involved in reporting this race soon after the Edwards story hit yesterday afternoon.
We have some great political reporters in America. We also have a large number of vapid, shallow, gossipy twits, with the percentage going way up among TV journalists (and even higher among cable TV journalists). No offense to the good reporters, but there are times that I despise our political press corps as a whole with the heat of, well, maybe not a thousand suns, but a solid nine hundred. Now is such a time.
“Tonight, more on Edwards and the fallout from his admission today about a sexual affair: Is this another skeleton in the Democratic closet that Barack Obama must struggle to overcome?” Gregory also said that, “now, questions about his [Edwards'] future abound in the party and whether this creates another shadow over Barack Obama as he gets ready for the conventions.”
Of course the Edwards affair is going to be covered. But this treatment is weak, insipid stuff worthy of the sex-obsessed David Broder or Maureen Dowd, and sure seems to be an attempt to try to justify covering a tabloid story as legitimate campaign news, when of course it isn’t. Meanwhile, it just happens to smear the entire Democratic Party and their nominee. Gregory’s approach is symptomatic of a wider problem. (more…)
Keith Olbermann revues McCain’s actual voting record compared to his campaign’s rhetoric. Rachel Maddow weighs in on how the media is giving McCain a complete pass on this.
Well deserved. Too bad it took them so long for the rest of the so called journalists to figure it out.
McClatchy’s Washington bureau chief has won the Nieman Foundation’s first I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence for pre-Iraq war coverage.
The foundation said John Walcott’s reporting team stood out for its skeptical coverage of the Bush administration’s rationale for the Iraq invasion. Nieman Curator Bob Giles called Walcott a “dogged” editor who challenged justifications for the war that later proved false.
Walcott was working as Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau chief during the run-up to the war. Knight Ridder has since been bought by McClatchy.
The medal is given by the Harvard-based foundation to a journalist whose work it says shows independence and integrity. It will be presented at the Newseum in Washington D.C. in October.
Discussion on the Today show as to whether the media was aggressive enough in the lead up to the Iraq war in their questioning. Katie Couric, to her credit, is the only one who doesn’t think so. The rest of them will NEVER admit what tools they are. Charles Gibson says it’s their job to ask questions, not to debate.
The silence is deafening……as they say. From Alex Koppelman at Slate:
ABC News reported a few days ago that a group of so-called Principals — including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice — met dozens of times in the White House to “discuss and approve” specific interrogation techniques to be used against suspected terrorists.
Initial reports indicated that Bush was “insulated” from the “series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.” Bush eventually dispelled the notion that he was out of the loop, though, and said — arguably, bragged — that he endorsed the Principals’ work from the outset. The president told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz, “I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”
Via Howard Kurtz, actually, here’s one of the best pieces I’ve read recently on McCain. It’s from Kevin Drum on 3/24, and I’ll quote it in its entirety: (more…)
Cenk Uygur on why the New York Times sat on the Mcain/Iseman story:
The John McCain-Vicki Iseman story is not the first article the New York Times has held back for political reasons. They have now done this on at least three occasions:
1. The original FISA story on how the Bush administration was not getting warrants for wiretaps inside the United States.
2. The original story in 2004 that showed Osama bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.
3. The McCain-Iseman story.
We had James Risen, the writer of the first two stories on our show back in 2005 and he admitted that they held the Bin Laden story until after the 2004 election because the New York Times didn’t want to “get caught up in the politics of it.”
Another way of stating that is that they were afraid of being called the liberal media by Republicans. After decades of being chastised for being liberal, they have become gun’shy. In this McCain story, they also held off until they were about to outed by other news agencies as sitting on the story.
With the recent arrival of MLK Day, it’s time once again for doctrinaire conservatives to pretend that liberals are racists and if Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, he’d be a conservative. Think I’m kidding? Check out this year’s assessment of such rhetoric by Mister Leonard Pierce of Sadly, No! Meanwhile, Rick Perlstein provides some welcome historical perspective on past opposition and this attempted appropriation. (Roy has a slightly different take.)
Of course, if conservative pundits had any integrity, they’d also have called out Jonah Goldberg for his noxious piece of disingenuous, revisionist crap, Liberal Fascism, weeks ago, and Goldberg himself would have actually responded to the “serious” criticism he claims he welcomes. Not content to level the ludicrous accusation that progressives are the real descendents of fascists, Goldberg recently accused them of being the real racists, as well. It’s all the more striking given that Goldberg works for the National Review, which had a long history of supporting segregation (and check out the vintage Goldberg Roy linked in the post linked above). (more…)
