I would strongly concur with J.E. Dyer’s observation concerning the leaked cables:
Its true value lies in confirming what hawks and conservatives have been saying about global security issues. China’s role in missile transfers from North Korea to Iran; Syria’s determined arming of Hezbollah; Iran’s use of Red Crescent vehicles to deliver weapons to terrorists; Obama’s strong-arming of foreign governments to accept prisoners from Guantanamo — these are things many news organizations are reporting prominently only because they have been made known through a WikiLeaks dump. In the end, WikiLeaks’s most enduring consequences may be the unintended ones.
You can add to the list of the hawks’ confirmed truths: the enthusiastic support of the Arab states for a more vigorous U.S. response to Iran, the mullahs’ possession of more advanced technology than previously acknowledged, and the recognition by Secretary of Defense Bob Gates that “reset” has been a disaster for democracy in Russia.
You don’t have to cheer the leaks of confidential information (as the left did with every revelation helpful to their cause, from the Pentagon Papers to the drips from the infamously porous CIA during the Bush administration) to understand that, aside from the salacious parts, they do inform the debate by providing details that reveal that the Obama policies in many respects are a failure — and recognized as such by some high-ranking officials within the administration.
Should we prosecute the WikiLeaks gang? Of course. But let’s not deny reality: this is a huge embarrassment for the Obama administration.
It’s the money–all media will go for whichever candidate is perceived to have the largest advertising budget, period. It’s the money!
Jennifer has hit upon something. The Fairness Doctrine should henceforth be referred to as the Censorship Proposal.
Forget about the MSM, now you guys are all squishy, in love with, and biased for Obama. It’s like an icky, filthy disease, and frankly it’s making me sick to my tummy. Yuck.
No, it’s not the money. By the media’s favoring one side over the other in a country roughly split between the two sides, they are effectively halving their audience. Quite a number of subscribers on the center-right-con side have canceled their subscriptions in disgust. Note too how Hollywood is doing poorly because its movies are similarly oriented, often outrageously so.
Jennifer, I agree with you, we need neutral fact-finding organizations. But I think you’re asking too much of the current custodians of the MSM to reform themselves, for reasons mainly having to do with their world view.
On virtually every issue — from abortion to social programs to national defense to the legitimate role of government — they are too vested in their own worldview to play these issues down the middle, because they believe their view is so obviously correct *and essential to living humanely as “citizens of the world.”* When you add to that the reality of herd behavior, I just can’t believe what you’re hoping for is going to happen. They don’t realize or don’t care that they are undermining their own particular institutions and the larger institution of “the press.” What comes after? Maybe nothing good, if by good we mean an institution that serves as an honest information broker, reporting factually and fairly the issues of the day. If all that is left is a partisan press, each faction pushing its own view of the world, then what do the people who don’t want to embrace a partisan view do for information. How can they act rationally without information they feel they can trust?
This is revolutionary stuff. The only question is, does the revolution extend beyond the press’s immediate sphere, to the larger society it is supposed to be serving in its role of watchdog.
Soul searching? They are manipulating people still !!
The MSM did this with their eyes wide open and now they just want to rescue their readership…
Well I am not amused, and I want the Keith O. Chris M. , the editors of Newsweek, etc etc fired.
There is no soul searching here; that BS. How convenient they do this NOW once their Idol got elected. Puh-leaze…
Besides, if they really were doing any soul searching they would be investigating on the MANY loose ends of this election like: all the illegal donations? Obama & Biden medical records? The disappearance of Obama’s 8 years of IL Senate records? How did he filed his taxes without them?
And I could go on and on….
Where are the follow ups now that they “see the light”? I do not detect any willingness to pursue these matters in the future.
Nope, they do not have the minimal intention of pursuing anything about Obama: zero.
Instead they are all now hanging in the newly invented “Office of the President-Elect” ; worrying about the new WH puppy, and when will be the “Obama National Holiday” they are trying to make….
The theatre of the absurd….
The media has always been slanted in the past BUT this election was over the top. The media bashed McCain at every turn while praising Obama, a man with no accomplishments under his belt. They skirted character issues with the “golden boy Obama” while conducting a character assignation of Gov. Palin and her family.
This is inexcusable. Even Pres Clinton faced more scrutiny that Obama. Now, the nation is divided more so than under Bush and there is a real fear of being labeled a racist if you don’t like Obama. Immediately labeled bias and racist by Obama supporters is enough to make even the toughest critic think twice before voicing opposition in public.
I have to tell my daughter to NOT repeat mine and her father’s views at school in fear she will get in trouble and WE will be labeled racist just because we are conservative. There is real fear of this man. His sudden rise to the Presidency, his media lapdogs, the bizarre cult like following, his followers who have no idea what type of change is coming. It’s not normal for a massive amount of people to vote for “change” and not know what that change it.
We are not united under one flag. We are scared too scared to speak out.
After seeing the recent earnings report of Washington Post Co., I decided not to worry that the newspaper is biased: it’s in a death spiral. The majority of the corporation’s revenue and earnings come NOT from WaPo and Newsweek, but rather from Kaplan, the educational firm, and a cable TV outfit. WaPo and Newsweek have negative revenue growth and negative earnings.
If I were on the board of directors, I’d recommend the immediate sale of WaPo and Newsweek, to “maximize shareholder value.”
Think about it: the business model of running printing plants and distributing hard copy is just too cost intensive. Especially when you write off half of your possible readership (i.e., conservatives). And who advertises through “the classifieds” anymore?
The NY Times is even in worse financial shape.
I predict only the WSJ and USA Today will survive as national hard copy papers (who doesn’t LOVE the sports section in the latter?).
Politico’s got the right business model for an opinion outlet: talented journalists (even if lefty), and low overhead.
I tend to agree with the people who believe that the problem isn’t so much the bias in the MSM but the fact that they try to hide it. Let them root for whomever they want, but do it openly for goodness sakes and let the chips fall where they will. Let the NYT, WaPo, ABC, NBC, CNN, etc. assist the left, but don’t permit them to do so while claiming to be “balanced” and simply trying to report “fair news.” I don’t know for certain, but I believe such a situation (openly liberal and conservative media sources) works fine in other countries. Why ours have to “make believe” is foolishness. Oh well, the newspapers are on life support anyway and fewer people trust them for news every year. Those 18-30 year-olds who overwhelmingly favored Obama? I doubt they did so because of anything they read in the NYT or the Washington Post.
I haven’t heard any realistic ideas to overcome or balance the vast left-wing basis of the press. Even the editor of the small, irrelevant, local throw-away newspaper (you know, the type that lands on your lawn in hopes that you look at the ads on your way to the trash) is a liberal.
I mean, come on! I’ve heard of zeitgeist, but this is ridiculous.
Serious, we are dealing with a more or less uniform organ of Liberalism. This will go quite nicely with the Euro-style governing paradigm that we will be following now.
The Soviets always used to talk about the lap dogs of capitalism. I’ve known lap dogs, and, yes, Mr. Matthews, you are a lap dog.
It’s easy to purge your soul and vomit up a confession after the damage cannot be undone and you have had your way. I don’t see any evidence of a plan to change the behavior or even to tell the truths they spiked during the campaign. That would take integrity and they have already admitted that integrity is in short supply
WaPo was bad but many were worse and ran with fake stories, omitted real ones (ok WaPo was guilty of that too) and engaged in journalistic “malpractice” of the highest degree. Chris Matthews will continue to prop up Obama as long as he can, but pretended as if GWB caused Katrina while letting LA dems off the hook. His idea of supporting the nation by supporting the president only works when the president is a democrat.
We could have used some fair reporting this past eight years. I see nothing on the horizon to suggest that we will get more than villainising policy differences and more tingly legs
The Obama presidency, unfortunately, will have to be a complete failure – a stunning disaster – before the MSM undergoes any self re-examination. If it’s a success, they’ll congratulate themselves for assisting in this good story (and repeat their performance); if he muddles through performing adequately, they’ll ignore whatever role they had in getting him into power.
No, there has to be some type of shocking revelation or total failure that critics can directly trace back to the press’s inadequate vetting of candidate Obama.
In such an occurrence, we’ll probably have more to worry about than just a corrupt, if not embarassed, press.
What a bunch of whining neocon racists.
What a bunch of whining neocon racists
Yes, Karl Rove taught us well, didn’t he?
Anyway, I joined up with the neocon racist movement ’cause I look great in brownshirt with the black jackboots. The brownshirt has a slimming effect and the black boots match my adorable brown eyes.
Dreamy, I’m just dreamy.
Thanks for the contribution, too.
Lucky 13: Takes one, donnit?
>While some are rooting for the extinction of old media, I would settle for some soul-searching and reform. It is not that hard.
It is “not that hard” ?
Show me the evidence for that. In fact, show me one single time liberals have given up their power in the interest of fairness, or an exalted idea of objjective journalism.
Or even in the best interests of the country, (this one must be in the past few decades).
Face it– the reason they’re talking about the “fairness” doctrine is not because they want to be fair, it’s because they can’t stand the mere existence of consevatives, period.
Something that might be “hard” but not impossible would be soul-searching among our own Charlie Brown & The Football Conservatives, the ones who think that liberals will someday be decent to us if we just keep bending over backwards and making excuses for them.
Sure much of the media favored Obama and has a liberal bent that is obvious. They used to like McCain more than others. But he is 72, insisted for months that the fundamentals of the economy were strong (oops) and did not do well in the debates. Would fair treatment mean ignoring his age, ignoring his lack of interest in economic matters and ignoring the fact that he was not impressive in 3 debates with Obama? What would fair treatment by the MSM of Gov. Palin have involved? Not running her embarassing interviews? Not aggresively asking questions about her experience when she was named to the ticket 9 weeks or so before the election. (Obama was subjected to Clinton’s attacks for several months.) Not laughing at her Sarkosy “interview”? And BTW, she was not a college basketball player at least according to anything I have seen.
#13 “What a bunch of whining neocon racists”
You omitted “homophobic”!
What’s the matter with you – can’t remember eight words,
after all your training?
What’s the matter with you – can’t remember eight words,
after all your training
C’mon, he was just trying to be friendly so he left that out.
See, Obama has already restored comity in our political discourse?
Though the editors and reporters at the Washington Post and, for that matter, virtually all major media outlets were surely pro-Obama, conservatives who content themselves with that notion would be missing the useful lessons in the article you link to.
What were those lessons?
1) McCain, although he succeeded in “exciting the base” with his pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, never managed to win the full confidence of many important and influential conservatives. The Washington Post has op-ed columnists such as George F. Will and Charles Krauthammer for the specific purpose of representing the conservative view.
Yet, Krauthammer lamented how the pick of Palin demolished the argument for John McCain:
“There are two questions we will never have to ask ourselves, ‘Who is this man?’ and ‘Can we trust this man with the presidency?’ ”
– Fred Thompson on John McCain, Sept. 2
This was the most effective line of the entire Republican convention: a ringing affirmation of John McCain’s authenticity and a not-so-subtle indictment of Barack Obama’s insubstantiality. What’s left of this line of argument, however, after John McCain picks Sarah Palin for vice president?
George F. Will was even less enchanted with McCain. In his column of November 30, 2008, right before the election, what did George F. Will, the most widely syndicated conservative in America write about? The column was entitled: Call Him John the Careless. In the midst of the financial crisis George F. Will expressed his opinion of John McCain’s behavior this way: “Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.”
As the saying goes: “With friends like this who needs enemies?” — but it is worth noting that the Washington Post was not censoring its columnists. The problem is that these examples indicate what opinion important sectors of the conservative movement really had about the McCain/Palin ticket.
Note that in both cases the critique of McCain was not over policy issues where, at least theoretically, McCain could gain votes from non-conservatives by switching positions and hope that conservatives would still come through – both critiques spoke to temperament, analytical abilities, competence, core values, etc.
In the obvious and direct sense if the McCain/Palin ticket had so impressed Will and Krauthammer that they had been consistently writing positive things, that by itself would have tilted the Post coverage a bit in a the direction of McCain.
Indirectly, those Post writers and editors – as well as others in the mainstream media — all read these columnists and if they are persuasive, many reporters and editors will feel a responsibility to address their arguments and points in the course of their coverage. In other words these columnists had the capacity to change the intellectual current a bit. Thus the McCain/Palin problem with the Washington Post partly was that many well-thought of conservatives had a lot of bad things to say about McCain/Palin.
2) The preponderance of horse-race stories vs. issues stories was also surely, at least partially, McCain’s fault. In the financial crisis, McCain would have gotten plenty of coverage had he unveiled his plan for solving the financial crisis. For that matter he would have gained plenty of coverage had he adeptly moderated a series of public roundtable discussion with leading experts to try and put together such a plan. Instead, he did gimmicky things – suspending the campaign – that could only really be analyzed for how it contributed to the horse-race.
In fact what came across was that McCain’s vision of the Presidency was almost that of a super-legislator, bringing about compromise and making a deal. There was no sense that McCain had a plan, had the foggiest idea of how to solve the financial crisis, or even had the capacity to develop a plan, or that, if developed, that such a plan would be based on any particular set of principles.
Indeed the whole emphasis on being a maverick sort of implies unpredictability and a lack of policy principles.
What policies McCain articulated seemed incoherent. We can drill offshore but not in Alaska? Is this coherent? You can’t really expect newspapers to treat one’s policy proposals seriously if one doesn’t do so oneself.
3) Here is a shocker: A boring longtime senator who has been mentioned a million times in The Washington Post and has run for President previously is selected a vice presidential candidate and gets very little coverage. An unheard of female governor from a State as far away and exotic as they come enters the scene, she is beautiful, hunts Moose, is married to a man with Eskimo heritage, has a large family, a special-needs child, etc. and she gets intense scrutiny.
If this is not predictable what is? Surely the McCain campaign selected Governor Palin in part to generate this coverage and energy for the campaign. It is also perfectly obvious that the press is going to delve into whatever it can find on such a person. It is the fear of this coverage that makes one hesitate to nominate a figure not well known nationally. You give the media a chance to define the person. McCain took the chance in part because the options were pretty poor.
Having made the decision to go with an unknown commodity, the question is what else did the McCain campaign give the press to look at? Did Governor Palin hold frequent press conferences and interviews in which she could discuss her philosophy of government and the McCain/Palin position on issues? Not at all. The campaign sequestered her. She did rallies to rouse the troops but provided little content, thus leaving the press to look around for scoops without any alternative coverage.
4) That there was a lack of probing coverage of Senator Obama is surely true. But what do you expect? If the opposition party thinks talking about Reverend Jeremiah Wright is beyond the pale, you can’t expect the media to carry the torch. If Senator McCain believed that a crucial issue in the campaign was, say, Senator Obama’s drug use and made an argument to that effect, brought it up in the debates, etc., then there would have been at least some coverage of the issue. Even the Ayers mention was really downplayed by McCain, the campaign’s web commercial on Ayers specifically says “But Obama’s friendship with terrorist Ayers isn’t the issue…” – If McCain doesn’t think it is an issue you can scarcely blame the media for adopting the same position.
Sure the MSM is biased, but it also is stunningly predictable. Rather than lamenting this problem, conservatives should take a hard look at the candidate and the campaign and think about what should be done differently next time.
“But nothing prevents the MSM from imposing their own fairness doctrines.”
If somebody bought the New York Times and
made it fair and balanced – like Fox – maybe its decline could
be reversed… and that could start a healing process in the
whole MSM.
Barack “Barry” Obama’s supporters have tried to soothe their guilt over slavery by voting for Obama. Obama’s rhetoric is deliberately hollow and designed to create a warm fuzzy feeling in latte drinking, anti-intellectual liberals. He has no substance, as none of the elites at Harvard or Yale do.
When it comes to the teaching of the softer disciplines, there’s simply no substance to be found at those institutions. The anti-Semitism of the Democratic Party’s left-wing is entirely bolstered and informed by the filth coming out of these New England rape factories.
David Thomson, why are you SUCH a neocon, racist? I mean, HELLO, could you BE any more neocon and racist?
David Thomson, why are you SUCH a neocon, racist? I mean, HELLO, could you BE any more neocon and racist?
Is this some kind of internet recording? An endless looping of the same words? If I press “2″ on my keyboard will it come through in Spanish?
There’s really nothing unusual in this — the big media went through the same sort of after-the-fact self analysis following Bill Clinton’s win in 1992. But at the same time, we already know they will do the same thing, and their editorial boards will offer up the same sort of endorsements, for Obama in 2012, barring his morphing into Joe Lieberman between now and then.
How they handle things in between now and 2012 will be interesting, though, if Obama proves to be as maladroit in his first two years as Clinton was in his. Most everyone still remembers the media gushing in the early days over Bill’s morning jogging, and how gosh-darn man-of-the-people-like he was for continuing to eat at McDonald’s. But by early in his second year you had people like Helen Thomas standing out on the front lawn of the White House yelling at Bill, “Everything is falling apart! What are you going to do?” and she wasn’t asking that
question from the conservative side, but from the left, because so many of Clinton’s social policy efforts, including Hillarycare® were on the rocks.
But the liberals in the media felt free to go after Clinton because they saw him at that time as just another southern Democrat failing to meet their expectations from the left, a la Jimmy Carter. Obama’s going to be a little dicier to handle if he goes left in the same way Clinton did once in office, especially since the Blue Dog Democrats remember 1994, and already don’t seem to be in any hurry to cut their own political throats. Hyper-sensative to any thought of being called racist, the big media is going to be far more wary of putting the screws to Obama, even if their criticism comes from the left, than they were against Bill Clinton, unless they see some signs from people like the Congressional Black Caucus, that it’s OK. On the other hand, if the Blue Dogs do start balking at any far left proposals by Barack like the card check initiative or another run at National Health Care, look for the bulk of the media to treat them in the same way they treated John McCain and Sarah Palin during the campaign, remorse over biased coverage be damned.
It’s obvious the MSM was in the tank for Obama. I mean, come on! Like, that time he threw his grandma under that bus? That was MESSED UP!!!!
It was only after he won that people started saying he was only half-black. If I’d have known that, I might have voted for him.
By the way, how awesome is it being a neocon? AM I RIGHT, EVERYONE!? Can I get an amen?
#23, #24, re “Cheese”.
Apparently the infestation did not go away after the elections.
Rather than wasting a moderator’s time (and then adjudicating
complaints) a technical solution would be preferable: a killfile
technology that would make postings with certain keywords
(chosen by each reader) invisible (to that reader).
E.g., filtering with just the single word “neocon” could save much
screen room…
Helpful, it would be a bad idea to stop listening to the other side. Silencing dissent is a Dem idea – not worthy of our side. Besides, it comforts me to know that the best argument the Dems can muster is still the use of stick figure characterizations (“neocon”) and name calling (“racist”). I want people to hear more of this Dem-speak, not less. I cling to the hope (along with my guns and bible) that if people hear enough of this garbage they will eventually wake up.
All of the McCain-specific explanations for the MSM’s bias might be worthy of consideration, if it was only this one election where the bias was obvious. But the pattern is the same in every election. Even Hillary got “the treatment” when she found herself running against a more liberal candidate.
The problem is much, much worse than the “confessions” of the MSM reveal. The approach used in the stories Jennifer links is the typical one – count up the number of positive and negative stories on each candidate. But that approach does not begin to capture the real problem. The worst of it is in the stories the MSM does not report, and which the voters never learn about. For example, right now the MSM is ignoring the fact that the Franken camp is stealing the Minnesota election with a rigged recount. Hundreds of ballots suddenly appear out of nowhere, every single one of them recording a Franken vote, and the polling place records which would confirm or invalidate these ballots are mysteriously missing. And the MSM says not a word. How is this not a story? Can anyone believe that if the mysterious new ballots favored the Republican there would be a media blackout on the story? I think not.
RAS is quite correct in his assesment of the current state of media affairs. The Talkers, led by Rush & Co. exist because of the MSM’s center-left biases. Although the Left has taken the apparent lead on the web, the Right will eventually find their netroots and become more effective as younger conservatives enter the arena.
Where will this lead if unchecked? A quick read of the book “While Europe Slept” tells us that ultimately, the press weds the politcal class in a symbiotic and protectionist relationship where each supports and protects the integrity of the other. Not exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind when the gave the Press freedom from government intervention allowing them to to be the guardians of goverment excess.
The MSM is slowling evolving toward a Pravda style existence where the political class becomes their Masters. Far fetched? Actually, no. MRC reported the comments of an unnamed senior Obama aid when asked if they were creating advertising to deflect the Palin threat. The aid is to have responded that “our friends in the media will take care of her”. Within two days of that comment, the MSM exploded with all things anit-Palin. CMI did a thoughtful assessment of ABC/CBS/NBC stories about Palin and the numbers proved their bias.
And lest we forget Bernard Goldberg’s two books, Bias and Arrogance which chronicaled the MSM’s biases in a very thoughtful manner.
If unchecked, one could argue we will slowly enter a state of media facism. Isn’t that a delightful thought. Hail Caesar! Hail the Czar!
Haha ^^ nice, is there a section to follow the RSS feed