Feb
5
Obama’s Mistakes
Filed Under American Politics | 5 Comments
I think he’s made a number of them in his first year and I might turn this into a series of posts, but for now, I want to focus on one mistake from his first year in office that lends itself easily to hindsight.
Do you remember from this blog last year the discussions about Obama’s declared war on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Within his first week in office, Obama was warning Republicans that they can’t “listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done”. Rahm Emanuel called Limbaugh “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party”. And then there was Fox News. The White House Communications Director, Anita Dunn had this to say about Fox in October last year:
“Fox News often operates either as the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party,” she said. “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is … We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent.”
The war between Fox and the White House became the narrative for a week or so.
The Obama administration made a clear attempt to define conservatism as an extremist force, as exemplified by Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. This of course is a view not unique to the Obama administration. From them to Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats, to liberal pundits and gobshites like Olbermann and Matthews and on to the liberal commentators at blogs like this one (we remember the rather one track commentary of Israel, Morgan and Simon around this time), the need to define conservatives as “wingnuts” is an endemic one.
And as events have transpired, it has been shown to be a wasted effort. Clearly, Obama wanted to separate the conservative base from the middling American voter. Define conservatives as extreme, and watch the non-conservative voter distance them-self from conservatism and push them into the welcoming Democratic Party. Well wasn’t that a damp squib? Instead what we’ve seen is Fox become the most trusted news network, the tea-partiers in poll after poll being shown to be more likely to be well thought of than not, moderate Republicans like Scott Brown and Mark Kirk embracing more conservative positions than they would normally and still gaining votes and a base as energised as they’ve been in the last decade.
As a political tactic, it failed miserably, and may well have back-fired. From the first week of his Presidency, the American voter, who had been promised a new era of post-partisanship, was suddenly witnessing a pre-emptive partisan strike. I get the feeling Obama has learnt from this mistake, there is less of the “I won” rhetoric. But there is one thing I am certain of; his party certainly haven’t learnt that lesson and nor has the base.
Jan
11
Fair And Balanced: You Betcha!
Filed Under Uncategorized | 15 Comments
Palin signs on with Fox. A recipe to make liberal heads explode. Good for her, make money while you can.
Oct
27
I would like to thank Barack Obama, the left wing blogosphere and others on the left for their incessant and puerile whining about Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. You have made them and conservatism a rejuvenated force.
Fox News is sweeping the top 11 cable news slots in the 25-54-year old demographic (chart below), and the top 13 slots in all demos. It’s kind of ridiculous. Word is that Shep Smith’s program had its best month for the entire year.
That was from an article entitled “Fox News Soars After Snub From Obama”
Rep. Joe Wilson has raised over a million more in fundraising dollars than his Democratic rival Robert Miller.
Sarah Palin’s book has broken the all-time record for pre-release sales of a non-fiction book.
GOP fundraising is outstripping that of the Democrats
Liberal whining – good for conservative business. Thanks guys!
Oct
21
The Fox panel discuss the Obama administration’s new political foe, the Chamber of Commerce and their propensity for trying to demonise those they see as political opponents:
For someone who claimed to want to unite America, he sure likes picking fights with those that don’t agree with him. What’s the tally now:
Fox News
Wall Street
Chamber of Commerce
Town Hall Protesters
Health Insurance Companies
This administration comes across as being bitter and vengeful. That type of populism (interestingly the very thing the current conservatives are accused of) might have short-term positives, but it doesn’t look Presidential. Sometimes, attack is not necessarily the best form of defence.
Oct
18
Fox News Is Un-American
Filed Under American Politics | 10 Comments
So says Jacob Weisberg of Newsweek:
What’s most distinctive about the American press is not its freedom but its century-old tradition of independence—that it serves the public interest rather than those of parties, persuasions, or pressure groups. Media independence is a 20th-century innovation that has never fully taken root in many other countries that do have a free press. The Australian-British-continental model of politicized media that Murdoch has applied at Fox is un-American
Yet more evidence of the Dumber and Dumberer talking points of the left. By accusing Fox of being biased, a genuine effort of burying one’s head in the sand is needed. For example, one needs to ignore the fact that CNN felt it necessary to factcheck a comedy skit that had the audacity of taking the mickey out of Obama.
The Washington Post’s ombudsman Deborah Howell (I’m not going to do the silly politically correct thing and call her an ombudswoman) admitted that the electoral coverage in the paper was biased towards Obama:
The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.
The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32
The New York Times admitted covering for Bertha Lewis and ACORN:
The Times quoted a statement by Bertha Lewis, Acorn’s chief executive, saying that the two activists, James O’Keefe, 25, and Hannah Giles, 20, spent months visiting Acorn offices in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia before getting the responses they wanted. But the article left out one city Lewis cited: New York. Between the time of her statement and the publication of the article, a new video surfaced, featuring an Acorn worker in Brooklyn advising Giles to bury money from prostitution in a tin.
Some readers saw a deliberate effort by the paper to help Lewis out of a tight spot. Scott Shane, the reporter, said he had been unable to reach Lewis and felt that including New York among the cities she mentioned would have implied unfairly that she was lying,
And then of course there is MSNBC, the elephant in the room for any accusation by liberals of Fox’s bias. MSNBC is a television channel that conducts incessant ad hominem attacks on conservatives and throws the racist card around with gusto.
So as someone who see politicised journalism as “un-American”, Jacob Weisberg is no doubt a purveyor of good un-biased reportage. In that case, perhaps he could explain the title of his book “The Bush Tragedy“. From the blurb:
Weisberg keenly illustrates how Bush’s insecurities have played out on a global scale. Weisberg also juxtaposes Bush within his family legacy
The left’s political rhetoric has degenerated to made up quotes, ad hominem attacks and the dismissal of large sections of the American public. Obama ran on an agenda of bringing America together. Perhaps he needed to look to his own supporters first who are doing everything they can to tear America apart.
so what if Fox is biased. Reporting the news from a conservative perspective is not un-American, it is just good business sense, there is a reason that Rupert Murdoch is a mega-millionaire. But in light of Obama’s bailout for failing motor company General Motors, and the support shown for that by his supporters, perhaps the left really do see good business sense as being un-American.
Sep
19
By Israel
A lot of people on this site may not of heard of Jane Hamsher and her website but l view it pretty regularly. She had a video of something which happened last Saturday at the teabagging protests run by faux news and its hosts.
Just over a week ago l was asked why l didn’t watch a full hour of Glenn Beck on faux news to see if all the commentary l had made about him, namely that he was a hate-mongering bigot, was actually fair.
As l said at the time, l may not have been to the North Pole but l know that no-one here would argue with me when l say that it’s pretty cold up there.
Another thing l said was that l had actually watched faux solidly for three years and knew enough from that to see which direction this so called “fair and balanced” channel heads every damn day.
The last straw was the disgusting stoking up of the Terri Schiavo case where faux hyped up the rhetoric, demonized her husband and became an open microphone to the religious right with the likes of Former House Majority Leader Bill Frist James Dobson and Jerry Falwell seeing this as a way to stir up the base, aided by faux who sent Hannity down to stalk the hospice she was staying in, completely and callously ignoring the other families who’s loved ones were in there as they brought on coached nurses and family members to make her husband seem like the second coming of Charles Manson.
The worst part was finding out that Hannity had coached the nurses on the replies they were to give to Alan Colmes, an outrageous act that had the infinite void of the right wing echo chamber silent on this piece of journalistic malpractice. But then I.O.K.I.Y.A.R.
Well faux have done it again this time at the 60-70,000 strong 9/12 teabagging event where we see footage of a faux news “producer” stoking up the crowd to get the required response.
Jon Stewart may have been right in his assessment of the event when he said “In faux’s defence you can’t really s**t on a party you’ve thrown” but even that doesn’t cover it.
Why do they waste time pretending to be a legitimate news channel when every action has them exposed as a partisan political media outlet?
The misinformation they provide to their devoted viewers is bad enough (remember which channel’s viewers believed more than most Saddam was directly involved with 9/11?) but this latest staging of outrage takes them further down the Jayson Blair route of journalistic malpractice and it leaves me wondering where it will end.
At the now celebrated (on the left) or infamous (on the right) White House Correspondents dinner Stephen Colbert said that faux give both sides, the president’s side and the vice-president’s side.
“Fair and Balanced?”
Nope. Partisan and Biased.
Faux news: We make s**t up, we decide how much you get to see or hear.
Aug
28
Doh!
Filed Under American Politics | 8 Comments
You’ve got to love the left. If their shoes weren’t labelled “L” and “R”, they’d have trouble putting their shoes on properly.
Their much vaunted boycott of Glenn Beck has backfired in a big way.
Now I’m no fan of Glenn Beck, he is an alarmist, opinionated and to be frank, deceitful commentator. But in the face of a liberal conspiracy against him (with tentative links to the White House), I find myself pulling for him.
And so I was gratified to see that Glenn Beck has added approximately 1,000,000 viewers following the supposed advertising boycott. There have been stories that the advertising boycott has been working. A dubious conclusion, and one that in fact is more likely to affect liberal Cable channels like MSNBC than it is Fox:
As State Farm’s response suggests, the net effect of the anti-Beck crusade probably will be fewer advertisers willing to advertise on the talk shows of any cable network.
Consider, for example, the corporate response from Clorox. On Thursday, company executives wrote Hill stating: “After a comprehensive review of political talk shows across the spectrum, at this time we have made a decision not to advertise on political talk shows.”
All this while Fox is losing no revenue at all:
And for ratings giant Fox, Beck’s remarkable connection with viewers has made the free market a profitable one indeed. “The advertisers referenced have all moved their spots from Beck to other programs on the network,” a Fox spokesman recently told Ad Age, “so there is no revenue lost.”
So Fox News loses no revenue, Glenn Beck gets a significant ratings boost and lots of publicity, and the only likely net losers are the liberal new networks whose ratings are so poor anyway, they really can’t afford to lose any advertisers.
Doh! indeed.
Jul
15
By Israel
As I’m sitting watching the Sotomayor hearings it’s interesting to note that most of the questions asked and answered will be missed by the main news channels.
Here in the UK we get Foxnews as part of the Murdoch Newscorp empire. I personally watch MSNBC online which is the only way we can get that channel over here without having an eight foot tall motorized satellite dish.
The one thing that l have noticed is the increase in soundbites given, not just reported on but given, by politicians grandstanding on issues and by “commentators” pushing agendas. Apart from a few individuals there is now rarely an investigation done now to find out the full story. In the past we had answers to the big five questions “Who?”, “What?”, “Why?”, “When?”, and “Where?”.
I have noticed with alarm that only three of the big five “Who?”, “What?” and “When?” are asked regularly. Where comes along infrequently to pop it’s head around the door to ask if anyone wants to come out for a few shots at happy hour. Why seems to have gone away to find inner piece on a South Sea island somewhere.
The email traffic between media sources and Governor Sanford’s office speak volumes about people far more concerned with currying favour or doing their best to downplay the story than actually doing some reporting. The question of “Why?” came from the reports of The State newspaper, with smaller resources than the likes of “water carriers” like Jake Tapper.
The death of US print media seems to be cheered on by some, mainly those who view the investigative reporting they do as some sort of political biased commentary rather than the reporting that it is. It’s pretty scary to imagine what Watergate would have been without the hard work of the two reporters and it’s very scary to think how different it would have been reported on today. It’s not like Republicans have forgotten. In fact, any chance to bring it up they will take it, and here is where the problem lies.
In a society of media excess, reality television and news shows cut up into 8 minute segments before moving on people no longer have the patience to assimilate all the required information and are relying more and more on the soundbite. there are some in all generations who do want to find out but on both sides of the aisle there is a scary increase in the amount of people who are misinformed and do not care.
The internet is a great source for those willing to find out more about stories but it can be a double edge sword. Ask a conservative who watches O’Reilly their views on Media Matters or a liberal who watches Olbermann for their views on the Media Research Center’s Newsbusters (the unfunny Jody Miller segment with the canned laugh track has to be discounted to level the playing field). Both sides will regale you with stories on the perfidy of the other but it’s the lack of follow up which is concerning.
Sean Hannity’s falsifying of President Obama in the video shown on his programme even after his own network debunked the story days before as well his fearless weilding of the editing scissors relies on the fact that his viewers will not check on what has already been reported not just on other channels but on the same network!!
Is this an exception?
Unfortunately no. Is seems to be becoming the norm and that is a disservice to the electorate who should be given more of the facts to make the best decisions on their futures. The debate over healthcare is coming up and with the Republicans armed by Frank Luntz flooding the airwaves it will be interesting to see who will do their jobs when it comes to the news.