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Comments from an AP history
and government teacher in Raleigh, NC.
e-mail betsynewmark AT gmail.com
Commissions earned from selling items through Amazon will go towards buying materials for my classes. Thank you.
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Friday, September 12, 2008
The media gets angry
Howard Kurtz says that the media is starting to get angry about being manipulated by the McCain campaign.The media are getting mad.As Jim Geraghty points out, McCain's ad is correct about the Obama education bill. And John Hinderaker has demonstrated that both the Anchorage Daily News and the Alaska Democratic Party have credited her with blocking the Bridge to Nowhere.
Whether it's the latest back-and-forth over attack ads, the silly lipstick flap or the continuing debate over Sarah and sexism, you can just feel the tension level rising several notches.
Maybe it's a sense that this is crunch time, that the election is on the line, that the press is being manipulated (not that there's anything new about that).
News outlets are increasingly challenging false or questionable claims by the McCain campaign, whether it's the ad accusing Obama of supporting sex-ed for kindergartners (the Illinois legislation clearly describes "age-appropriate" programs) or Palin's repeated boast that she stopped the Bridge to Nowhere (after she had supported it, and after Congress had effectively killed the specific earmark).
The McCain camp has already accused the MSM of trying to "destroy" the governor of Alaska. So any challenge to her record or her veracity can now be cast as the product of an oh-so-unfair press. Which, needless to say, doesn't exactly please reporters, and makes the whole hanging-with-McCain-on-the-Straight-Talk era seem 100 years ago.Until John McCain selected her as his running mate, it never occurred to anyone to deny that Palin stopped the bridge. That's certainly what the Anchorage Daily News reported on February 8, 2008:And Obama and Biden themselves voted for the Bridge to Nowhere and voted against an amendment that Tom Coburn had proposed to defund that bridge and send the money to aid victims of Katrina. So they have a lot of effrontery criticizing her from switching from her position in the election to what she actually did when they never switched and supported the earmark all along.Let's count how many things Gov. Sarah Palin's predecessor did that she's undone.And again on March 12, 2008:
It's quite a list.
The state-owned jet: Sold.
The proposed Gravina Island "bridge to nowhere" and a pioneer road to Juneau: Won't be funded.Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is aggravated about what he sees as Gov. Sarah Palin's antagonism toward the earmarks he uses to steer federal money to the state. ... A common target for earmark snipers is the so-called "bridge to nowhere" plugged by Alaska Rep. Don Young into the five-year transportation bill in 2005. Congress stripped the earmarks directing the spending but let the state keep the money to use on the bridge if it wanted. Palin ruffled feathers when she announced - without giving the delegation advance notice - that the state was killing the Ketchikan bridge to Gravina Island, site of the airport and a few dozen residents.I don't know how it could be any clearer: as the McCain ad says, Palin killed the bridge. Indeed, the Alaska Democrats themselves say, on a web site attacking Senator Ted Stevens:Gov. Palin recently cancelled the Gravina Island Bridge near Ketchikan that would have connected the Alaska mainland with Gravina Island (population: 50).It is frankly ridiculous to deny that Palin killed the bridge, as the ad says. If the Democrats want to attack some other aspect of her record, fine. If they want to say that she (like all state officials) was generally happy to accept federal money when it was offered, fine. But to say that the simple statement that she killed the bridge is a "lie" is false and disingenuous.
So Kurtz is right. The media is angry. Their chosen guy whom they anointed after his 2004 convention speech and have been supporting ever since is now running into a rough patch which exactly coincides with Palin's emergence and the GOP convention. Sure the McCain campaign played them with that silly lipstick on a pig controversy. But no one forced them to cover the story or talk about it on their morning shows. And no one has forced them to have spent the past two weeks pulling their chins and discussing whether a mom could handle being vice president.
They certainly haven't felt tormented over their coverage of Obama and how they helped him defeat Hillary Clinton.
What must really be getting them angry is their perception that maybe they can't win this thing for Obama as Matt Pressman in Vanity Fair argues. He looks at what the media has done in response to the Palin nomination.Let’s review what they’ve tried so far:So, thanks guys. They can get angry all they want at the McCain team. And they'll lose even more of the population who is sick of the way that they've been puffing up Obama and not examining his record with anything like the intensity with which they've gone after Sarah Palin. If they haven't won the election for him now, they'll have even more trouble winning it for him in the next seven weeks. Of course, that doesn't mean that conservatives won't jump to point out each bit of unfairness in how the media is covering the campaign. It is exactly that pushback which is now possible because of alternative media like talk radio, cable news, and the internet which has weakened the ability of the mass media to throw the election the way they'd want it to go.
1. Fawning coverage of Obama (the candidate with a halo-like glow around him on the covers of Newsweek, Time, and Rolling Stone; Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews gushing so embarrassingly that they had to be removed from MSNBC’s anchor desk)
2. Digging dirt on Obama’s opponents (The Times’s innuendo-laced piece about McCain’s ties to lobbyist Vicki Iseman; the poorly fact-checked stories about Palin’s supposed book-banning and secessionist proclivities)
3. Tough but fair investigations into McCain and Palin’s various lies, bad decisions, and questionable policies
Those are pretty much the only weapons in the media’s arsenal, and so far none of them have really worked.
No. 1 may have helped Obama defeat Hillary Clinton in the primaries, but the independents and wavering Republicans he needs to win over in order to beat McCain are not impressed, and the country as a whole may have grown weary of uplifting stories about His Hopiness. No. 2 failed because none of the mud stuck to McCain and Palin—in fact, they managed to fling it back at the media by painting themselves as victims and exploiting that emotion so key to their electoral hopes, resentment of “the elites” in the media and in Washington. No. 3 is the most journalistically responsible route, and one that has been trod a little too lightly, most Democrats would argue. But as with No. 1, the problem is that the voters Obama needs now largely tune out those kinds of stories; the fragmentation of the media and the proliferation of blogs means that they mostly hear news and (more often) opinion that reinforces their existing views. As GOP strategist John Feehery told The Washington Post yesterday, referring to articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post, challenging the veracity of statements by McCain and Palin, “these little facts don’t really matter.”
Kirsten Powers, whose column this week in the New York Post examined how the media has hurt Obama, argues that the media essentially played into McCain and Palin’s hands by dismissing Palin as a lightweight when her candidacy was announced. “Say the media had given Palin the honeymoon that people usually get,” posits Powers, who as a Fox News personality and New York Post columnist is a Democrat the same way Bruce Bartlett is a Republican. “Say they told her story and then waited to turn on her, and then she went out and gave that speech. She would have seemed like a bitch. But instead, here comes this woman who has been called a nobody, a hick, a bimbo, her family’s been dragged through the mud—of course she’s going to come out fighting, and when she did it was appropriate.”Labels: Media
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Howard Kurtz says that the media is starting to get angry about being manipulated by the McCain campaign.
So Kurtz is right. The media is angry. Their chosen guy whom they anointed after his 2004 convention speech and have been supporting ever since is now running into a rough patch which exactly coincides with Palin's emergence and the GOP convention. Sure the McCain campaign played them with that silly lipstick on a pig controversy. But no one forced them to cover the story or talk about it on their morning shows. And no one has forced them to have spent the past two weeks pulling their chins and discussing whether a mom could handle being vice president.
They certainly haven't felt tormented over their coverage of Obama and how they helped him defeat Hillary Clinton.
What must really be getting them angry is their perception that maybe they can't win this thing for Obama as Matt Pressman in Vanity Fair argues. He looks at what the media has done in response to the Palin nomination.
0 comments
Howard Kurtz says that the media is starting to get angry about being manipulated by the McCain campaign.
The media are getting mad.As Jim Geraghty points out, McCain's ad is correct about the Obama education bill. And John Hinderaker has demonstrated that both the Anchorage Daily News and the Alaska Democratic Party have credited her with blocking the Bridge to Nowhere.
Whether it's the latest back-and-forth over attack ads, the silly lipstick flap or the continuing debate over Sarah and sexism, you can just feel the tension level rising several notches.
Maybe it's a sense that this is crunch time, that the election is on the line, that the press is being manipulated (not that there's anything new about that).
News outlets are increasingly challenging false or questionable claims by the McCain campaign, whether it's the ad accusing Obama of supporting sex-ed for kindergartners (the Illinois legislation clearly describes "age-appropriate" programs) or Palin's repeated boast that she stopped the Bridge to Nowhere (after she had supported it, and after Congress had effectively killed the specific earmark).
The McCain camp has already accused the MSM of trying to "destroy" the governor of Alaska. So any challenge to her record or her veracity can now be cast as the product of an oh-so-unfair press. Which, needless to say, doesn't exactly please reporters, and makes the whole hanging-with-McCain-on-the-Straight-Talk era seem 100 years ago.
Until John McCain selected her as his running mate, it never occurred to anyone to deny that Palin stopped the bridge. That's certainly what the Anchorage Daily News reported on February 8, 2008:And Obama and Biden themselves voted for the Bridge to Nowhere and voted against an amendment that Tom Coburn had proposed to defund that bridge and send the money to aid victims of Katrina. So they have a lot of effrontery criticizing her from switching from her position in the election to what she actually did when they never switched and supported the earmark all along.Let's count how many things Gov. Sarah Palin's predecessor did that she's undone.And again on March 12, 2008:
It's quite a list.
The state-owned jet: Sold.
The proposed Gravina Island "bridge to nowhere" and a pioneer road to Juneau: Won't be funded.Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is aggravated about what he sees as Gov. Sarah Palin's antagonism toward the earmarks he uses to steer federal money to the state. ... A common target for earmark snipers is the so-called "bridge to nowhere" plugged by Alaska Rep. Don Young into the five-year transportation bill in 2005. Congress stripped the earmarks directing the spending but let the state keep the money to use on the bridge if it wanted. Palin ruffled feathers when she announced - without giving the delegation advance notice - that the state was killing the Ketchikan bridge to Gravina Island, site of the airport and a few dozen residents.I don't know how it could be any clearer: as the McCain ad says, Palin killed the bridge. Indeed, the Alaska Democrats themselves say, on a web site attacking Senator Ted Stevens:Gov. Palin recently cancelled the Gravina Island Bridge near Ketchikan that would have connected the Alaska mainland with Gravina Island (population: 50).It is frankly ridiculous to deny that Palin killed the bridge, as the ad says. If the Democrats want to attack some other aspect of her record, fine. If they want to say that she (like all state officials) was generally happy to accept federal money when it was offered, fine. But to say that the simple statement that she killed the bridge is a "lie" is false and disingenuous.
So Kurtz is right. The media is angry. Their chosen guy whom they anointed after his 2004 convention speech and have been supporting ever since is now running into a rough patch which exactly coincides with Palin's emergence and the GOP convention. Sure the McCain campaign played them with that silly lipstick on a pig controversy. But no one forced them to cover the story or talk about it on their morning shows. And no one has forced them to have spent the past two weeks pulling their chins and discussing whether a mom could handle being vice president.
They certainly haven't felt tormented over their coverage of Obama and how they helped him defeat Hillary Clinton.
What must really be getting them angry is their perception that maybe they can't win this thing for Obama as Matt Pressman in Vanity Fair argues. He looks at what the media has done in response to the Palin nomination.
Let’s review what they’ve tried so far:So, thanks guys. They can get angry all they want at the McCain team. And they'll lose even more of the population who is sick of the way that they've been puffing up Obama and not examining his record with anything like the intensity with which they've gone after Sarah Palin. If they haven't won the election for him now, they'll have even more trouble winning it for him in the next seven weeks. Of course, that doesn't mean that conservatives won't jump to point out each bit of unfairness in how the media is covering the campaign. It is exactly that pushback which is now possible because of alternative media like talk radio, cable news, and the internet which has weakened the ability of the mass media to throw the election the way they'd want it to go.
1. Fawning coverage of Obama (the candidate with a halo-like glow around him on the covers of Newsweek, Time, and Rolling Stone; Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews gushing so embarrassingly that they had to be removed from MSNBC’s anchor desk)
2. Digging dirt on Obama’s opponents (The Times’s innuendo-laced piece about McCain’s ties to lobbyist Vicki Iseman; the poorly fact-checked stories about Palin’s supposed book-banning and secessionist proclivities)
3. Tough but fair investigations into McCain and Palin’s various lies, bad decisions, and questionable policies
Those are pretty much the only weapons in the media’s arsenal, and so far none of them have really worked.
No. 1 may have helped Obama defeat Hillary Clinton in the primaries, but the independents and wavering Republicans he needs to win over in order to beat McCain are not impressed, and the country as a whole may have grown weary of uplifting stories about His Hopiness. No. 2 failed because none of the mud stuck to McCain and Palin—in fact, they managed to fling it back at the media by painting themselves as victims and exploiting that emotion so key to their electoral hopes, resentment of “the elites” in the media and in Washington. No. 3 is the most journalistically responsible route, and one that has been trod a little too lightly, most Democrats would argue. But as with No. 1, the problem is that the voters Obama needs now largely tune out those kinds of stories; the fragmentation of the media and the proliferation of blogs means that they mostly hear news and (more often) opinion that reinforces their existing views. As GOP strategist John Feehery told The Washington Post yesterday, referring to articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post, challenging the veracity of statements by McCain and Palin, “these little facts don’t really matter.”
Kirsten Powers, whose column this week in the New York Post examined how the media has hurt Obama, argues that the media essentially played into McCain and Palin’s hands by dismissing Palin as a lightweight when her candidacy was announced. “Say the media had given Palin the honeymoon that people usually get,” posits Powers, who as a Fox News personality and New York Post columnist is a Democrat the same way Bruce Bartlett is a Republican. “Say they told her story and then waited to turn on her, and then she went out and gave that speech. She would have seemed like a bitch. But instead, here comes this woman who has been called a nobody, a hick, a bimbo, her family’s been dragged through the mud—of course she’s going to come out fighting, and when she did it was appropriate.”
Labels: Media
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