I get the feeling they don’t like each other. And that Scarborough is a tool. Gets going at about 1:45 in:
Archive for the 'Media' Category
Thats what CNN.com looks like right now, at 9:15pm Eastern. I’ve helpfully circled the stupid headline they’ve put up. Are they kidding? What, exactly, has even happened so far? Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? Remember when CNN was supposed to be a trusted news source? Liberal media my ass.
About freaking time. Here’s Keith Olbermann, breaking the news in a Daily Kos dairy:
Happy Now?
The network will be formally announcing this tomorrow, but I am pleased to inform you in this fully authorized leak, that as of Monday, September 8, our mutual friend Ms. Maddow will become host of her own show, on MSNBC, at 9 PM Eastern Time.
And, yes, we will be making another unofficial announcement of this on tonight’s edition of Countdown. My guest to analyze the Rachel Maddow news will be Rachel Maddow.
Maddow, smart and cool, is now poised to make the most of an Obama presidency. She presents a perfect liberal alternative to a Bill O’Reilley or Sean Hannity: not because, like them, she’s a bullying cheerleader for Obama and his party (that’s a little more Olbermann), but because she’s principled enough to fight for the Democrats when they’re right and criticize them when they’re wrong, without engaging in the partisan horseshit of official party mouthpieces like Carville and Begala. (This, by the way, is the important difference between the liberals of MSNBC and the liberals of CNN: Olbermann and Maddow are angry constituents, not party operatives.)
I like this line, from Kurtz:
Remarkably, this season’s discovery isn’t a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a PhD Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist.”
Now I know what I’ll be watching at 9pm every night. Here’s Keith and Rachel discussing the good news (via Ezra):
I’ve never really liked Dana Milbank’s shtick. His Post columns were occasionally decent, his appearances on Countdown generally unwatchable. At times he gives you a glimmer of actual wit but as Kevin Drum notes, he’s basically just trying to be Maureen Dowd now, and the result is not enjoyable. Its Milbank’s TV appearances though that really make you dislike the guy. His unbearable smugness was just too much. I have no doubt that Milbank thinks he’s in the same league as Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart. He seems to think that just because he may be the funniest guy at his Washington cocktail parties (though even that I doubt), that doesn’t make him, you know, actually funny. Or smart.
I say all this because it turns out you (I) won’t have to suffer through Milbank on Countdown anymore:
Keith is referring to this incident, in which Milbank twisted and omitted a quote of Senator Obama’s to make him look bad. Now of course, because this is the Beltway media, Milbank has already landed on CNN, which is fine because who even watches CNN anymore for political analysis? Good riddance Dana, you won’t be missed.
I’ve ripped Andrea Mitchell in the past, deservedly so, but credit where credit’s due, she’s good here:
Now was that so hard? Keep it up Andrea.
I have less then no desire to talk about National Enquirers’ “story” on John Edwards and his supposed mistress (no I’m not going to link to it but some quick Googling will get you to it). I, like many, think its probably a bunch of crap and certainly hope thats the case. Having said that, I couldn’t let Jack Shafer’s article on the situation go with out comment. Shafer is one of my favorite media critics but he’s way, way off base with his thoughts on the situation.
Shafer accuses the media of hypocrisy for the way they’ve cover this “story” compared to how they covered Sen. Larry Craig’s arrest for that stuff in the airport bathroom. This is, in a word, a dumb comparison. There is no doubt about what happened with Sen. Craig (despite, I suppose, Craig’s later protestations), he was arrested and pled guilty. Compare that to Mr. Edwards, who, as Shafer notes, has denied any affair and also this tidbit Shafer incredibly glosses over:
And I should mention that an Edwards political operative, Andrew Young, claims that he is the father of Hunter’s child. (Young is married with children of his own.)
To briefly recap, on the one hand you have a current U.S. Senator who is arrested in an airport bathroom for indecent behavior and who admits his guilt (ignoring his latter pathetic arguments to the contrary). On the other hand you have a former U.S. Senator who is accused of having an affair and a “love child” with another woman yet has denied both such accusations and another man has said the child is in fact his.
Now Shafer wiggles a little bit, saying the two “aren’t directly analogous, they have a bit in common” but then later he says this:
But if Edwards had an affair and lied about it, shouldn’t he suffer scrutiny akin to that of Craig? At least three-dozen daily newspapers in the United States published the Craig news the day after the Roll Call scoop, according to Nexis, but this morning not a single U.S. daily mentioned the Enquirer piece.
Uh, what? Newspapers are supposed to report on the Enquirer’s story because what? It relies on unnamed sources (and no it is impossible to escape the irony of Shafer, of all people, pushing stories relying on anonymous sources)? There’s been a denial?
This might be the most dense sentence in the whole piece:
But if Edwards had an affair and lied about it, shouldn’t he suffer scrutiny akin to that of Craig?
The key word there Jack is “IF”. Yeah, maybe IF he had an affair he should get the same scrutiny BUT WE DON”T KNOW THAT HE HAS! THATS THE WHOLE POINT! Shafer really expects newspapers to report on this crap? I think Shafer needs to get as far away from Mickey Kaus as possible because Shafer’s usually solid judgment is totally absent in this case. Kinda sad.
PS: I told myself I wouldn’t actually talk about the substance of the Enquirer’s story (still not going to link to it) but this little bit keeps bugging me: where are the pictures? Correct me if I’m wrong but I haven’t seen any pictures of Edwards at the hotel, as alleged by the Enquirer. I have no idea if he was there or not but isn’t it a little weird that no pictures have surfaced? Especially since the Enquirer story mentions Edwards running into a photographer? Is he the worst photographer in the world and not able to snap a shot? Maybe there’s a reasonable explanation for why there’s no photos but I can’t think of one. Suspicious, no?
David Carr writes an interesting article on Fox News’ PR tactics, inspired by Fox & Friends co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade attack on New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg and editor Steven Reddicliffe that featured doctored photos. Carr:
At Fox News, media relations is a kind of rolling opposition research operation intended to keep reporters in line by feeding and sometimes maiming them. Shooting the occasional messenger is baked right into the process.
As crude as that sounds, it works. By blacklisting reporters it does not like, planting stories with friendlies at every turn, Fox News has been living a life beyond consequence for years.
Its interesting but one wonders, why don’t the people Fox is going after fight back? Why not stand up for yourselves?
In my top 5 reasons why I hate watching cable news (also in my top 5 reasons why I don’t watch cable news) is when I see some fool who doesn’t know what they are talking about but is helpfully labeled “Democratic strategist”. I don’t mean to generalize but 86% of the time, the people who show up on cable news with “Democratic strategist” appearing below them, are morons (note, this is 99% of the time on Fox News).
Daniel Libit helpful has written an article about the “strategist” phenomenon which explains that, as I thought, most of these people have no idea what they are talking about.
Among the things that the proliferation of TV cable news has wrought is slackened standards for what constitutes a political strategist. Now used as a catchall tag for a whole host of people with varied — and often peripheral — backgrounds in electoral politics, the term has all but lost its meaning.
“I think it’s absurd,” says Ed Rollins, a bona fide strategist who has held high-ranking positions in numerous Republican presidential campaigns. “Everyone calls themselves a strategist. I have been doing this for 40 years, I know most of the players, and I go on these shows and think, ‘Who are these people?’”
Preaching to the choir my man. Give me more.
“Many of these sort of more junior folks who have sort of made it into the ranks of analyst/commentator/strategist,” says one high-ranking cable news executive, “are only too happy to talk about things they don’t know about. Part of the problem is that because, again, they’re very glib, they’re good on TV. And if you ask someone the question and they give you a good-sounding answer, you might not know by asking them that it’s not their area of expertise.”
Others concur that the fractured nature of cable news time, particularly midday, allows almost anyone who’s articulate and politically inclined to act like a campaign insider. Rollins, who often appears on CNN himself, blames the cable news networks for “dumbing down” good analysis in the name of multitudinous voices. “I think the networks are idiotic in that they have capable people who have been around, but they want 12 panels,” he says. Independent TV analyst Andrew Tyndall thinks the “mislabeling” is also the product of the media’s unyielding “bid to seem as though they are inside the horse race.”
Here’s a great quote from a Republican strategist (a real one I assume):
“What’s frustrating for people who worked on campaigns is seeing these folks second-guessing decisions every day,” says one Republican strategist who has been a veteran of several presidential campaigns. “It has to be like an astronaut who spent their whole career and life trying to get to space, and you’ve got somebody who has never been there giving you an opinion of what it’s like on the moon.”
Again, I hate to generalize…but if you’ve appeared on TV with the label “Democratic strategist” (I could care less about the Republican ones) then you should have to apply to get back on to TV and you should probably never be allowed to work for a Democratic cause again.
Unless of course someone wants to put me on TV as a “Democratic Strategist”. I was an intern in 2004 afterall.
I know its a couple weeks old but still….Lara Logan everyone.
Ah, journalism. So refreshing to see:
Why, ask some Republicans, should the United States be thwarted from drilling in its own territory when just 50 miles off the Florida coastline the Chinese government is drilling for oil under Cuban leases?
Yet no one can prove that the Chinese are drilling anywhere off Cuba’s shoreline. The China-Cuba connection is “akin to urban legend,” said Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida who opposes drilling off the coast of his state but who backs exploration in ANWR.
“China is not drilling in Cuba’s Gulf of Mexico waters, period,” said Jorge Pinon, an energy fellow with the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami and an expert in oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. Martinez cited Pinon’s research when he took to the Senate floor Wednesday to set the record straight.
Even so, the Chinese-drilling-in-Cuba legend has gained momentum and has been swept up in Republican arguments to open up more U.S. territory to domestic production.
Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech Wednesday to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, picked up the refrain. Cheney quoted a column by George Will, who wrote last week that “drilling is under way 60 miles off Florida. The drilling is being done by China, in cooperation with Cuba, which is drilling closer to South Florida than U.S. companies are.”