I suppose some might quibble with some details. David Broder and Thomas Friedman are both listed as centrists, for example. In Freidman's case I think a number of folks on the left (Kos for example) would call him a conservative while I bet there are people on the right who call him a liberal. But maybe that is the very definition of a centrist. While to my mind Krugman is correctly labeled a liberal (he is also the best columnist of the last 6 years) I remember when he wrote about trade issues and economics in Slate and often pissed off economic populists. That said, this seems like a pretty valid study and to those not in the thrall of right-wing propaganda not all that surprising.

One issue that is not addressed but would make the picture even more one-sided is the presence in the list of a number of writers who I would call completely disinterested in a fair and honest presentation of issues. Of the 100 listed that I am familiar with those folks are all on the right with Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reily, and Jonah Goldberg being the ones who jump out at me. These people are not journalists, they are dishonest smear artists pushing spin rather than facts. As far as I know there are no left wing counter parts on the list. I may rarely agree with guys like George Will, David Brooks, or even Pat Buchanan, but I will at least grant that they are for the most part intellectually honest and do not purposely ignore or distort facts for political purposes.

[And Hammer would be disappointed if I did not point out, as I always do in these circumstances, that the so called liberal "Red Star" and Tribune has a weekly religion section and a daily business section but neither a science section nor a labor section.]

Labels: liberal media, media, press

Friday, June 08, 2007

Campaign coverage as theater criticism

Posted by: Jambo / 12:26 AM

I would like Paul Krugman's column today for no other reason than he uses a term I have been using to describe political coverage for a decade, "theater criticism." I've applied that to political reporting of all types, not just campaigns, most often in yelling at my TV after Bush state of the union addresses. "God damn it! Don't tell me how well he did or didn't deliver his speech, tell me if it was true or not!" I'll reprint a bunch of it here since many people don't have access to the NYT's "premium content." And because, as usual, he is absolutely, positively right on the money.

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.

You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.

Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies — for example, when he declared of his tax cut that “the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.” That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes — failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.

Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t.

There wasn’t anything comparable to Mr. Romney’s rewritten history in the Democratic debate two days earlier, which was altogether on a higher plane. Still, someone should have called Hillary Clinton on her declaration that on health care, “we’re all talking pretty much about the same things.” While the other two leading candidates have come out with plans for universal (John Edwards) or near-universal (Barack Obama) health coverage, Mrs. Clinton has so far evaded the issue. But again, this went unmentioned in most reports.

By the way, one reason I want health care specifics from Mrs. Clinton is that she’s received large contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Will that deter her from taking those industries on?

Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”

Labels: media, politics

Saturday, June 02, 2007

A president named Fred?

Posted by: Jambo / 11:22 PM

Lance Manion (is that a 70s TV tough guy name or what?) has a great piece on why Fred Thompson should not be taken seriously as a presidential candidate:

The Mo Dowd Approved knock on Hillary is she is ambitious. She shouldn't be President because she wants to be President. Don't they all?

Well, sure. But Hillary wants it too much. How can we tell she wants it too much? Why, she's actually worked hard all her adult life to be qualified and competent to do the job.

By that standard, if working for the job is a sign you don't deserve it, then not working at all for it must be proof that you should have it and therefore Fred Thompson is the candidate, of either party, who has most earned the job by doing nothing to earn it.

Since he left the Senate, after a single term, Thompson has half-assedly pursued a second-rate acting career and diligently piled up big bucks as a lobbyist.

Ah, but while all the other candidates were busy working at being United States Senators or mayor of the most important city in the nation, or at serving as governors of out of the way backwaters like Massachusetts and New Mexico, Arkansas and Wisconsin, or at founding and running their own organizations for political and economic change, Fred Thompson was doing the more important work of building an image as a movie tough guy.

And image is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know when you walk into the voting booth, at least as far as the beautiful minds of our elite Press Corps are concerned.

Fred Thompson is a tough guy, declares Newsweek's Howard Fineman, as if being a tough guy was the qualification for President of the United States as opposed to the leader of a street gang. How do we know he's tough? Why, says Time's Mark Helperin, we know Thompson's tough because he's played so many tough guys well on TV and in the movies.

This is what it takes to be President, according to one of the most influential journalists in America: The ability to be passively accepted in a part someone else has written for you, someone else has directed your performance in, someone else has dressed you for, someone else has photographed to make you look like what you're playing, and someone else has edited to make sure only the very best of what you said and did makes it onto the screen, proves you are what you appeared to be and that then qualifies you to be President of the United States.

The rest of the post that continues along the lines of "why the political media sucks" is well worth reading, too.

Labels: Fred Thompson, media, politics

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Beware all headlines!

Posted by: Hammer / 9:50 AM

CJR Daily has a very interesting post about political language:

Look at the "war on terror." The press, for the most part, absorbed this descriptive term and used it uncritically for the last five years. But, as Jacob Levenson wondered in the pages of CJR two years ago, "It's reasonable to ask, for instance, that if the war on terror had been called the war on Islamic extremism, would the American public have supported the invasion of a country, like Iraq, with a secular government? Similarly, had it been called the war for global democracy, would the Patriot Act have become law? What if it hadn't been called a war at all? Journalists, in other words, must resist employing political jargon -- it tends to shortcut analysis in favor of mobilization."

The question comes up in the context of the coming "surge". A surge connotes progress. One surges forward. A surge connotes brevity. One surges for a modest length of time. Google reports roughly 40,000 news stories using the word "surge". Leading Dems, primarily John Edwards, have been pushing a different noun: escalation (8,000 stories per Google News). Edwards, in fact, has taken this a step further to dub the surge-calation the McCain Doctrine.

"Escalation" carries with it the connotation of Vietnam. Escalation further implies a permanent increase. In that sense, at least, "surge" is the more accurate word, in as much as I don't see any evidence that we can maintain 140,000 troops in Iraq much longer, let alone 160,000.

On to a mundane point of some import. Surge is 5 letters. Escalation is 10 letters. It's a lot easier to put a 5 letter word into a headline than a 10 letter word. If you've got a one-column story on page 1, "escalation" won't always fit. Lesson? When branding an idea, shorter words make life easier for copy editors: "War on Terror" fits just about anywhere and means just about nothing. It's perfect.

Labels: Escalation, language, media