B12 Solipsism

Drudge sucks. I never visit the site because there is never any real news to be found there, only slime and innuendo, but apparently the Washington pundit class loves ‘em some Drudge. Figures. Eric Boehlert notes that The Drudge Report has lost a lot of influence recently, and is pleased.

Matt Drudge is still doing his loyal best to boost the chances of the GOP down the homestretch in the form of a blizzard of anti-Obama and pro-McCain links on his site. (Last week, it was the half-baked McCain “comeback” that Drudge hyped relentlessly.)

…

Well, I’m here to call bullshit.

And no, this isn’t just a wishful, I-don’t-like-Drudge-so-I’m-going-to-claim-he’s-irrelevant column.

This is fact.

Because it’s obvious that since Wall Street’s meltdown commenced five weeks ago, and since America’s economic crisis became a tsunami of a news story that’s not only dominated the media landscape, but also irrevocably altered the course of the campaign, the Drudge Report has become largely irrelevant in terms of the setting the news agenda for the White House run.

That’s because a story like the unfolding credit crisis — sober and complicated — knocks Drudge completely out of his element of frivolous, partisan gotcha links.

…

The race is unrecognizable in terms of where the players are situated now and where they were five weeks ago. (Between September 15 and October 19, there was a 12-point swing in the Gallup daily tracking poll.) Now ask yourself: What role has the Drudge Report played in that burst of campaign movement? The answer, of course, is zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. His trademark flashing red lights have gone missing.

The dynamics of the campaign have irrevocably changed, and the mighty Drudge Report, the news site Beltway journalists trip over themselves to genuflect in front of, has been a complete bystander in the closing weeks of the 2008 campaign. (Not that this is the first time Drudge has choked down the stretch of a nationwide election.)

The reason is simple. Because of the unprecedented economic turmoil, we’re now in serious times. (Fifty thousand home foreclosures this year, in the state of New Jersey alone, is serious business.) And the Drudge Report doesn’t do serious. The American public’s attention has shifted from the campaign to the economy, and that’s why the Drudge Report remains largely irrelevant to that unfolding story.

[From Media Matters - Drudge unplugged: How his campaign influence has collapsed]

Whenever anyone publicly admits to reading The Drudge Report in a non-ironic manner, I lose a lot of respect for them. Corporate Media’s love affair with Matt Drudge says more about Corporate Media than anything else.

Cokie Roberts has a real problem sticking to facts, especially when the facts support Democrats. During the VP debate, I heard a word I didn’t know, and so I looked it up. Took me about 5 seconds to discover that Bosniaks is a valid word. Apparently, Ms. Roberts doesn’t know how to use any of the internets or their traditions.

During coverage of the October 2 vice-presidential debate on PBS’ Charlie Rose, Rose asked, “Did either of them make any mistakes that you noticed?” National Public Radio senior news analyst Cokie Roberts responded that Sen. Joe Biden “talked about the Bosniaks.” Roberts later said: “[I]f [Gov. Sarah Palin] had said ‘Bosniak,’ everybody would be making a big deal of it, you know.” In fact, Biden correctly referred to certain residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina as Bosniaks. According to the U.S. State Department, as of 2002, the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina consisted of the following ethnic groups: “Bosniak 48.3%, Serb 34.0%, Croat 15.4%, others 2.3%.”

The CIA World Factbook states: “Bosniak has replaced Muslim as an ethnic term in part to avoid confusion with the religious term Muslim — an adherent of Islam.”

[From Media Matters - On PBS, Cokie Roberts falsely suggested Biden's reference to "Bosniaks" was a gaffe]

Cokie Roberts has never heard a Republican talking point she won’t repeat.

Now I’m really curious to see the ad, I wonder if it is available.

Google-owned YouTube has pulled a Barack Obama ad from its site at the insistence of NBC, which charged that the spot infringed on its copyrighted content and that it did not give Obama’s campaign permission to use the material.

The ad, titled “Bad News,” is designed to get out the vote by appealing to voters and potential voters who do not want John McCain to win the election. At one point, NBC’s Tom Brokaw and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann are shown — with Olbermann announcing that McCain has “won.”

NBC has demanded that Obama stop using the clip altogether. But his campaign balked and instead attached a disclaimer to it that said, “NBC and MSNBC did not cooperate in the making of this video.”

[From YouTube Pulls Obama Spot]

I checked YouTube, and found the ad, removed, with this disclaimer: This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NBC

If I find a copy, I’ll post it. Must have really irked NBC to be hoisted with their own petard.

As we noted earlier, Palin lied about Obama’s record in her speech last night, and the corporate media didn’t bother fact checking before repeating the lie. In fact, this line was touted as one of her best zingers.

In reporting on Gov. Sarah Palin’s September 4 speech at the Republican National Convention, numerous print media, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine, the Dallas Morning News, Reuters, and an article and a column by Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle, uncritically reported Palin’s claim that Sen. Barack Obama “is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state senate,” without noting that Obama has played key roles in the passage of reform legislation at both the federal and state levels. For example, Sen. John McCain, a co-sponsor of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, thanked Obama for his work on the bill.

Obama was a lead co-sponsor of that bill (S.2590), which sought to “require full disclosure of all entities and organizations receiving Federal funds” — an amount that approximately totals $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, earmarks and loans. While signing the bill into law on September 26, 2006, Bush recognized Obama as a sponsor of the legislation, saying, “I want to thank the bill sponsors, Tom Coburn from Oklahoma, Tom Carper from Delaware, and Barack Obama from Illinois.” Moreover, in a press release upon Senate passage of the bill, the bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), referred to the legislation as the “Coburn-Obama Bill.” In media reports, the bill has also been referred to as the “Coburn-Obama” legislation or bill.

[There's plenty more details at Media Matters - Media report Palin's claim that Obama has not "authored ... a single major law or reform" without noting laws he has passed]

No wonder newspaper circulation is falling - if one has to go to the web to get actual facts, why bother subscribing to a newspaper? What are the newspapers delivering? Press releases interspersed with advertising?

I meant to note a similar complaint regarding this front page¹ of the Wall Street Journal from August 26, 2008:

Because -seriously- this is the worst photo ever:

Her tongue is sticking out for Christ’s sake. And poor Sasha just looks bored. Cute, but bored.

[Click to see a photo of the front page: The Conventional Thinker: Does the WSJ Hate Michelle Obama?]

I wondered more about the headline itself. A shaky (Bush-created) economy challenges Obama Agenda. Umm, seems like it would be just the opposite, no? A shaky Bush-McCain-McSame economy would seem to be ripe for some ‘change’.

Corrections & Amplifications:

Sen. Barack Obama says he would raise the tax rate for married couples with taxable income of more than $200,300 to 36% from 33%. This page-one article incorrectly said the trigger level would be $165,000. In addition, Douglas Brinkley is Rice University’s presidential historian. The article incorrectly gave his name as Alan Brinkley, who is a Columbia University historian.

1. strangely enough, the archived version at the WSJ.com website has a entirely different photo of Ms. Obama, perhaps there were complaints? [↩]

More on the Decline of Newspapers and media in general, from Digby, who was on a panel about the media and the blogosphere with Arianna Huffington, Chris Cilizza, Jonathan Alter and Gregory Maffei:

Alter insists that nobody listens to the gasbags and pundits so we shouldn’t worry about them. I asked him how he thought people got their information about politics and he said from their talkative coworker or politically engaged relative and things like chain emails. It’s apparent that many in the mainstream media have not see the documentation and analysis that’s been done online about how the stories and themes of elections, as conceived by political operatives and political pundits, dominate the campaigns and color the voters impressions of the candidates. Maybe the inside of the bubble is too heady a place to be able to connect those dots.

(In the meantime, perhaps I should just direct everyone to Bob Somerby…)

I find it difficult to keep my patience with the inevitable discussion about how the news media is losing money and can’t afford to do the all important news gathering on which we internet parasites depend. It’s as if this problem has happened in some vacuum in which journalism itself has no culpability. They brought a lot of it on themselves, particularly when they gleefully allowed Drudge to rule their world and Rush to be feted and groomed by mainstream conservative politicians without raising an eyebrow. (Live by the wingnuts, die by the wingnuts.)

[From Hullabaloo]

Builds upon the late-great Molly Ivins’ point: the best way to get more subscribers is to put out a better paper, not just whine.

I don’t want newspapers as an institution to fade away like the 78 Victrola, I depend upon the news-gathering services of several national papers, including the Chicago Tribune. I have print subscriptions to three papers, but even more so, I rely upon their online presence. I may disagree frequently with the slant of newspaper coverage, and lament the obvious pro-corporate sympathies, but if suddenly the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal started cutting their reporting staff to ridiculous levels, I’m not sure what would happen.

This is why Dr. Alterman’s article troubles me:

Spend some time on the “future of news” conference circuit, as I have recently, and believe me, you’ll need a drink and perhaps a Prozac. The flight of readers and advertisers to the web has led to an unprecedented assault on stockholder value, making newspapers the investment equivalent of slow-motion seppuku. For instance, on July 11 Alan Mutter’s invaluable Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reported that in “perhaps the worst single trading day ever” for the newspaper business, “the shares of seven publicly held newspaper companies today plunged to the[ir] lowest point in modern history.” When these losses continued to accelerate, Mutter calculated that newspaper stocks had shed an amazing $3.9 billion in value in just the first ten trading days of July, leading to the disappearance of more than 35 percent of these companies’ combined stock price in 2008 alone

It’s been nearly two and a half years since the much-missed Molly Ivins observed of media moguls that, “for some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful.” And yet the strategy continues unabated. The Los Angeles Times just announced that it will cut loose another 250 people, including 150 in the newsroom–this on top of a series of job cuts by the previous owners, which led to a revolving door of resigning editors and publishers who could not in good conscience carry out the cuts demanded of them.

As a result of this avalanche of industrywide layoffs, buy-outs and firings, Mutter notes, the industry’s age-old ratio of one journalist per thousand papers in circulation is about to disappear. But as a contributor to Romenesko pointed out, this is “a self-correcting mechanism. As subscribers find less and less to read because newspaper staffs are thinned too much to produce quality copy, subscriptions will lapse and the ratio will be restored–until, of course, additional layoffs refresh the cycle.”

[From I Read the News Today... Oh Boy]

Very troubling indeed. Television news is a joke, the news-weeklies (The Nation, et al) don’t have the depth, or space, to cover each days events. The blogosphere, while valuable, would be hard-pressed to step into the breach. Blogs function more as a correcting mechanism, teasing nuance out of already published material. Hardly any blog actually does any hard reporting (Josh Marshall’s empire, of course, and a few others, a very small percentage).

Answers? I have none, or I’d become fabulously wealthy selling advice to publishers. I do wish more corporate media moguls would take Ms. Ivins advice and find other ways to cut costs other than firing staff.

Of course, executives don’t have to worry about their salary: they’ll continue draining the blood from the goose¹

Virtually the only expense still intact is executive pay. On the Recovering Journalist blog, Mark Potts notes that the average compensation among the thirteen public-company newspaper CEOs was just under $6 million a year in 2007, according to corporate proxy filings with the SEC. These figures, one can only conclude, are entirely unrelated to performance.

1. or however that cliche goes [↩]

Corporate Media, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

The television talking heads should be permanently muted, what is the point of breathless and endless speculation about the damn Vice Presidential candidate? We as voters don’t even have a say…

Who *is* going to be the Vice President?

Jamison Foser dissects some recent anti-Obama press, including a reporter named Amy Chozick’s ridiculous Wall Street Journal article about Obama being too skinny for anyone to vote for.

Chozick apparently had some trouble finding people to support the crackpot premise that Obama’s physical fitness might cause voters to question his fitness for office, so she turned to trolling Internet message boards in desperate search of someone — anyone — she could quote. As the blog Sadly, No! revealed, Chozick posted a Yahoo! Message Board thread on July 15, asking, “Does anyone out there think Barack Obama is too thin to be president? Anyone having a hard time relating to him and his ‘no excess body fat’? Please let me know. Thanks!”

About three-and-a-half hours later, Chozick got her first response — a post ridiculing her for her focus on “totally meaningless drivel.” Nearly an hour after that, Chozick finally got the response she was looking for. A user posting under the name “onlinebeerbellygirl” wrote, “Yes I think He [sic] is to [sic] skinny to be President. … I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.” Chozick quoted the post in her article — one of only two quotes agreeing with the premise of the article. She did not, however, disclose that the quote had come only after she started a thread encouraging people to make such comments. After she got caught, the Journal acknowledged: “The article should have disclosed that the reporter used the bulletin board to elicit the comment.”

There may be more to it than that. A post in a subsequent Yahoo! Message Board discussion thread devoted to Chozick’s article noted that “[n]either Chozick nor ‘onlinebeerbellygirl’ has made any other posts on Yahoo before or since, and both profiles appear to have been created on 7/15, the day Chozick started the topics. It certainly looks like Amy Chozick constructed the whole thing.”

Another post wondered: “Do WSJ reporters make up fake IDs and make up fake quotes?”

Chozick’s original thread has been deleted (a cached copy is available here). Even more curiously, a search of the Yahoo! message boards for “onlinebeerbellygirl” comes up empty. Whether “onlinebeerbellygirl” ever really existed at all or was a Chozick invention, running a 1,300-word article suggesting Obama is too skinny to be president, based upon a random Internet message board post, is insane. As Slate.com’s Tim Noah noted, “In the vastness of cyberspace, you can always find somebody who will say whatever you want.”

[From Media Matters - "Obama coverage finds dark lining around silver clouds"; by Jamison Foser]

No wonder newspaper circulation keeps dropping. Mr. Foser continues on to more serious, but equally insane fake memes, like that Obama is “too Presidential” to be President, or too well-educated. Ummm, yeah.

Glenn Greenwald recaps the anthrax scare, and lays the blame quite convincingly right at the breathless reporting of ABC News. Would we be mired in a never-ending war in Iraq without a government employee sending anthrax to public figures? Maybe, maybe not.

The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters — with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 — that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax — sent directly into the heart of the country’s elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets — that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks

[From Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com]

[snip]

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax — tests conducted at Ft. Detrick — revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since — as ABC variously claimed — bentonite “is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program” and “only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.”

ABC News’ claim — which they said came at first from “three well-placed but separate sources,” followed by “four well-placed and separate sources” — was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It’s critical to note that it isn’t the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.

That means that ABC News’ “four well-placed and separate sources” fed them information that was completely false — false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein. And look where — according to Brian Ross’ report on October 28, 2001 — these tests were conducted:

And despite continued White House denials, four well-placed and separate sources have told ABC News that initial tests on the anthrax by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have detected trace amounts of the chemical additives bentonite and silica.

Lots more here. Corrupt bastards. For all we know, Bruce Ivins might just be a convenient fall guy, a sacrificial goat so that inconvenient questions can never be answered.

Of course, we already knew the claim of liberal bias in the media was bogus, but noted nonetheless

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

[From In study, evidence of liberal-bias bias - Los Angeles Times]

Odds are, though, that the claim of liberal bias will continue to be parroted by the McCain supporters in corporate media up until November.

Now, if we are discussing the new media (blogs, web-zines and related), there certainly is a bias. There are very few non-partisan blogs of note. Also, one could even plausibly argue that blogs rebalance the slant of corporate media¹ - blogs pick out the small stories that conform to the interest and bias of the site and its readers. For instance, glancing through B12’s archives, there are lots of negative McCain stories. What percentage of the day’s news are these stories? A small percentage, I’m sure, but they are nonetheless a large percentage of B12’s topics.

1. at least, to the few brave souls who actually read blogs [↩]

I doubted the allegation that Ryan Lizza was barred from the Obama plane as soon as I heard it breathlessly reported as fact. Steve Chapman did one better, and asked the Obama campaign directly.

As a longtime member of the press, I’m always sensitive to any sign a politician is punishing journalists for doing their jobs. So my ears pricked up at the story that Barack Obama’s campaign had retaliated against The New Yorker magazine for its Obama-as-terrorist cover by excluding reporter Ryan Lizza from the press plane on the senator’s Middle East trip.

So I emailed Obama’s media people to ask for a list of journalists who are accompanying him. It turns out almost all the reporters are from TV networks or newspapers–those who cover him week in and week out. Only three magazines were represented: Time, Newsweek and Ebony.

Of the 200 journalists who applied, the campaign says it could take only 40. Among those denied were The Economist, the Boston Globe and the Financial Times. Some of the publications that were included, the campaign says, didn’t get as many seats as they requested.

I would be surprised if Lizza were barred as payback. In my numerous dealings with the Obama press people, they have always been cordial and helpful–even after their previous efforts were rewarded with a piece criticizing their boss on some issue or another. My Sunday column slammed him for his opposition to school vouchers. Yet on Monday morning, they responded quickly and helpfully to my inquiry.

[From Is Obama punishing The New Yorker?]

As Mr. Chapman points out, the Obama team let Maureen Dowd fly, and she has been one of the worst Obama snipers.

Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake and the infamous Nipple That Destroyed America

[click to embiggen, iffen ya dare]

Thank the pasta lords, now I can sleep at night without worrying that a giant nipple is going to destroy America. I have no sympathy for the dingleberries who own/run CBS, but the FCC is even less sympathetic a beast,

In a decision that clears CBS of any wrongdoing for airing the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show that featured Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction,” a federal appeals court overturned the $550,000 fine that the Federal Communications Commission levied against the station, calling the fine arbitrary and capricious.  

Text of the Opinion (pdf)

The decision was handed down early Monday by a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that the fine was unfair because the commission, in imposing it, deliberately strayed from its practice of exempting fleeting indecency in broadcast programming from punishment. The commission also erred, the judges ruled, by holding CBS responsible for the actions of Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, who were characterized by the judges as “independent contractors hired for the limited purposed of the Halftime Show.”

[Click to read more detail regarding Court Throws Out Super Bowl Indecency Fine - NYTimes.com]

and because the FCC acted in poor faith, deciding which incidents were worth going after. 

The court, in its ruling, said the FCC would have had a stronger case against CBS had the performance been pre-recorded. But because it was aired live, and there was no solid evidence that CBS had advance knowledge that Timberlake was going to tear at Jackson’s bustier, the station did not appear to have acted recklessly by broadcasting the show.

In fact, the court said, CBS had implemented an audio delay and other measures to help censor any unexpected profanity, and numerous “script reviews” and “wardrobe checks” before the show did not reveal any problems.

“CBS rejected other potentially-controversial performers who had previously engaged in offensive on-air conduct in favor of Jackson and Timberlake, with the NFL ultimately approving the selections,” the court wrote. “Timberlake in particular, CBS asserts, had on several prior occasions performed ‘Rock Your Body’ live on national television without incident.”

As Steve Earle sang: Fuck the FCC

Katha Pollitt wonders¹ why John McCain’s strong anti-contraceptive views are not fodder for the 24 hour news to chew endlessly on.

But can’t the commentariat take a break from itself and let the world know how much John McCain opposes birth control? Vastly more people rely on contraception than read The New Yorker or know who Bernie Mac is from mac ‘n’ cheese.

In fact, vastly more people use birth control than believe Obama is a secret Muslim. They might like to know that when it comes to contraception, McCain is no maverick.

Here’s the story. Last week, Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard who has been helping McCain look bright-eyed and estrogen-friendly, told reporters that women wanted more choice in their health-care plans. For example, it bothered women when plans covered Viagra but not contraception.

Big mistake! McCain had voted against a bill that would have required plans to cover birth control if they covered prescription meds at all, like, um, Viagra. McCain’s non-response when queried about this by a reporter was astonishing. As you can still see on YouTube, he squirms and grins and smirks (Viagra! embarrassing!) and fumfers about evasively.

“I don’t know enough about it to give you an informed answer,” he manages to splutter, “because I don’t recall the vote. I’ve cast thousands of votes. . . . It’s something I’ve not thought much about.”

So, John McCain is so opposed to contraception he voted against requiring insurance plans to cover it like other drugs, and either so indifferent to women’s health and rights or just so out of it he doesn’t even remember how he voted. That’s the way to show American women you really care.

[From McCain's take on birth control -- chicagotribune.com]

The YouTubery of the question:

Pollitt searched Nexis for discussion of this McCain position and found only 61 mentions in print and on TV, and most of those were indirect references, at best. I guess the fact that John McCain has a 20 year record of voting against contraception yet voting for insurance coverage of Viagra isn’t as important as fist bumping or magazine-cover satire.

1. rhetorically, for sure, since McCain’s gaffes are off the record by media dictate [↩]

Lewis Lapham proves again why I’ve always wanted to have a drink or two with him, preferably in the dining car of a cross-country train.

Lewis Lapham isn’t happy with political journalism today. “There was a time in America when the press and the government were on opposite sides of the field,” he said at a premiere party for Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson on June 25. “The press was supposed to speak on behalf of the people. The new tradition is that the press speaks on behalf of the government.” An example? “Tim Russert was a spokesman for power, wealth, and privilege,” Lapham said. “That’s why 1,000 people came to his memorial service. Because essentially he was a shill for the government. It didn’t matter whether it was Democratic or Republican. It was for the status quo.” What about Russert’s rep for catching pols in lies? “That was bullshit,” he said. “Thompson and Russert were two opposite poles.”

[From Lewis Lapham Unhappy With Political Journalism, Including Tim Russert -- New York Magazine ]

Now that Russert is safely in the ground, I can say without guilt I always thought Russert was the worst kind of putz.