Democracy for Utah - Media Analysis

Inside the right-wing radio machine

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:39:32 -0700

Dan Shelley, a former program director with WTMJ in Milwaukee, dishes about what really goes on inside the world of right-wing talk radio (Milwaukee Magazine). You might want to forward this to any dittoheads you know:

To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners. [...]

Conservative talk show hosts would receive daily talking points e-mails from the Bush White House, the Republican National Committee and, during election years, GOP campaign operations. They're not called talking points, but that's what they are. I know, because I received them, too. During my time at WTMJ, Charlie [Sykes] would generally mine the e-mails, then couch the daily message in his own words. Midday talker Jeff Wagner would be more likely to rely on them verbatim. But neither used them in their entirety, or every single day. [...]

A smart talk show host will, from time to time, disagree publicly with a Republican president, the Republican Party, or some conservative doctrine. (President Bush's disastrous choice of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was one such example.) But these disagreements are strategically chosen to prove the host is an independent thinker, without appreciably harming the president or party. This is not to suggest that hosts don't genuinely disagree with the conservative line at times. They do, more often than you might think. But they usually keep it to themselves.

How to win a presidential debate

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:20:23 -0600

Paul Waldman explains why the 2004 presidential debates didn't make much of an impression on voters:

Pop quiz: Is there anything in particular you remember from the 2004 debates? Probably not. Now what do you remember of the 1988 debate between Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen? Of course, the answer is, "I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." You remember this not because it made such an impression on you when you watched the debate (if you did) but because you saw it a hundred times in the days afterward. [...]

This is the common thread running through all the decisive moments of past debates, whether it was Michael Dukakis failing to cry out in anguish when Bernard Shaw asked him, "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for her killer?" or Gerald Ford supposedly not knowing that Poland was under Soviet domination, or George H.W. Bush glancing furtively at his watch in 1992, or Al Gore sighing condescendingly in 2000. None of these moments revealed something new; instead, they allowed reporters to say, "See, what we've been telling you all along about this guy is true." Quayle was a lightweight, Ford was a bumbler, Bush had no patience for voters and had all but given up, Gore was a supercilious dork — voters may or may not have believed these things, but journalists certainly did.

TV News Rougher on Obama than on McCain

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:43:45 -0600

A favorite source of conservatives finds that the Mainstream Media is biased against the Democratic candidate:

Study Finds Obama Faring Worse On TV News Than McCain

Barack Obama is getting more negative coverage than John McCain on TV network evening news shows, reversing Obama’s lead in good press during the primaries, according to a new study by Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA)....Since the primaries ended, on-air evaluations of Barack Obama have been 72% negative (vs. 28% positive)....

Obama ran even farther behind McCain on Fox News Channel’s Special Report with 79% negative comments (v. 21% positive), compared to 61% negative comments (v. 39% positive) for McCain

McCain no longer getting 'a pass' from reporters on the bus

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:13:46 -0600

Howard Kurtz in the WaPo:

When [reporter Steve] Kraske said that McCain presumably wasn't ruling out a [Social Security] payroll tax hike, McCain interrupted: "That's presuming wrong." When the reporter rephrased the question, McCain said: "If you want to keep asking me over and over again, you're welcome to."

It was a brief moment of friction that highlighted how the captain of the Straight Talk Express is having a bumpier ride with journalists than when he ran for president eight years ago. The popular image of the campaign — McCain bantering with national journalists in the back of his bus — has, in practice, all but vanished. [...]

McCain adviser Steve Duprey, a former chairman of New Hampshire's Republican Party, says "he'd love to be back on the bus, driving around with eight or 10 of you, and just riffing. In New Hampshire, if he'd say something that wasn't artfully phrased, there was more of a flow — he could revise something, or say let's talk about baseball. He'd get a pass. But in the age of blogs, there's always someone who makes a big deal out of it."

So apparently McCain's been making dumb statements for years, but his media fan club let him "revise" his mistakes instead of reporting on them.

TIME: McCain is a 'long shot'

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:42:43 -0600

A rare glimpse of political reality from the corporate media (TIME):

Oh, let's just admit it: John McCain is a long shot. He's got a heroic personal story, and being white has never hurt a presidential candidate, but on paper 2008 just doesn't look like his year. And considering what's happening off paper, it might be time to ask the question the horse-race-loving media are never supposed to ask: Is McCain a no-shot?

Last week, the McCain campaign's case against Barack Obama went something like this: He's irresponsible when it comes to Iraq, naive when it comes to Iran, and a big-government liberal when it comes to the economy. But now Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has more or less endorsed Obama's plan to withdraw from Iraq, forcing McCain to argue that Maliki didn't really mean it, and even the Bush administration has accepted a "time horizon" for withdrawal, if not a precise "timetable." The Bush administration has also engaged in some diplomatic outreach with Iran, just as Obama has recommended, a severe blow to McCain's efforts to portray Obama's willingness to talk as appeasement. And on the economy, a TIME/Rockefeller Foundation poll found that 82% of the country supports

Responses to the New Yorker's "satirical" anti-Obama cover

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:37:56 -0600

BagNewsNotes:

Tom Toles of the Washington Post:

David Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Media report false Obama rumors as such

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:24:40 -0600

I guess it's an improvement from 2000, when the media couldn't say "Al Gore invented the Internet!" fast enough. However, you have to wonder if reporting on false, politically motivated rumors just helps them spread more (WaPo):

On the television in his living room, [Jim] Peterman has watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth: Sen. Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is a Christian family man with a track record of public service. But on the Internet, in his grocery store, at his neighbor's house, at his son's auto shop, Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate's background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. [...]

"I think Obama would be a disaster, and there's a lot of reasons," said [Leroy] Pollard, explaining the rumors he had heard about the candidate from friends he goes camping with. "I understand he's from Africa, and that the first thing he's going to do if he gets into office is

Obama's 'arugula problem,' courtesy of Newsweek

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:30:42 -0600

Digby says it's started, right on cue:

[In February] I wrote this:

It was only a matter of time before the media began to trivialize Obama and his campaign as a bunch of latte-sipping left-wing hippie elites. That's the 30-year conservative rap on liberals and it's been fully internalized by the MSM and a whole lot of Americans, including some Democrats. When you start to hear the pundits talking about "beer track/wine track" this isn't far behind...

[...] This is a Village meme that has been used over the course of thirty years.(Fifty, if you want to go back to Stevenson.) It has been so internalized among the media elites that the Republicans don't even have to say it out loud anymore. It was inevitable that it would happen. [...]

Nobody should be surprised or unprepared for this by now. I think Obama's campaign people underestimated how this label could be applied to their guy and they allowed it to play out in Pennsylvania in ways that should have been anticipated. But then I have always wondered why Democrats are always off guard every time this hits them.

Media criticism, from Elizabeth Edwards to Brian Williams to Glenn Greenwald

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:55:29 -0600

Here's an interesting exchange: Elizabeth Edwards writes an op-ed in the New York Times blasting the media's refusal (yet again) to cover any issue of substance duringa presidential campaign (snarkily titled "Bowling 1, Health Care 0"). Brian Williams, "liberal news" anchor with NBC, sneers at Edwards and says folks should go read Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal instead (choice quote: "Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama's problem. America is Mr. Obama's problem."). And then Glenn Greenwald smacks them both down.

Elizabeth Edwards' Op-Ed critiquing our media's vapidity prompts multiple paragraphs of trite NYT bashing. Peggy Noonan's insistence that Barack Obama's love of America is in question among the Gate 14 crowd (in contrast to the Ultimate Patriot John McCain) — a column that is dumb and disgusting in exactly equal measure — prompts a Pulitzer nomination from our leading News Anchor and deep praise. That's because we have a Liberal Media.

Pentagon Propaganda Program that Propelled Us Into Iraq

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:01:11 -0600

Today the NYTimes published convincing details of the Defense Department's program to shape public opinion on the Iraq war, before and after the invasion of Iraq, by using retired military officers who are authoritative "military analysts" for FOX and other media organizations.

Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what [Torie Clarke, Assistant Secretary of Defense for public affairs] had in mind....a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary....
The Pentagon's regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees....The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments....

Here we go again: The media are going to deify John McCain

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:01:16 -0600

An excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's new book Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Myths of Republican Politics (Huffington Post):

If one examines America's presidential elections beginning in 1980 to the present, what one finds is a consistent and unchanging pattern. The Republican Party dresses up its leaders in all sorts of virtuous personality costumes. The establishment press, driven by the vapid dynamics of high school personality complexes, digests and then promotes that iconography. National elections are dominated by personality imagery and smears and are almost completely bereft of consideration of substantive issues. Worst of all, the personality images that dictate our election outcomes are not just petty, but entirely false, grounded in pure myth.

In every one of these critical aspects, John McCain is perfectly illustrative of the same twisted process that has infected our political discourse and converted our national elections into, using the words of John Harris and Mark Halperin,

The role of the American press: be friends with the powerful

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:37:32 -0600

Things become very clear when Glenn Greenwald explains them:

The number one rule of the standard establishment journalist is to avoid offending the powerful because the more offense they give, the fewer favors the powerful will do for the journalists. Conversely, and by logical necessity, the more journalists please the powerful, the more favors the powerful will do for them. As [Tucker] Carlson put it: "People don't talk to you when you go out of your way to hurt them as you did." I can't think of any single dynamic that better explains what has happened the last eight years than that one. [...]

Even after the lead-up to Iraq War, eight years of the Bush administration, the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch fiascoes and an endless string of similar incidents, American "journalists" like Carlson are actually proud of the role the American media plays. Newsweek's Richard Wolffe, sitting and chatting with Tony Snow: "the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards and covering politics in general."

That's why it won't change and the only real hope is to develop alternatives to it. Serving the politically powerful, functioning as the PR arm of the political establishment, is what they want to do, what they believe they should be doing. The more they do that, the more respectful they are of the politically powerful, the more "standards" they think they have. The success of the American establishment journalist is measured by how many good friends they count among the politically powerful.

And here we all thought they considered their jobs to be reporting the truth.

Salt Lake Tribune: Toxin! Poison! Terrorists!

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 10:13:02 -0700

The front page of the Trib today:

When you read the accompanying story, you learn that investigators have yet to link the case to terrorism in any way.

But hey, if it sells newspapers...

Media ignore anti-establishment presidential candidates

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:04:53 -0700

Glenn Greenwald:

[John] Edwards, [Ron] Paul and [Mike] Huckabee are obviously disparate in significant ways — ideologically, temperamentally, and otherwise. But there is a vital attribute common to those three campaigns that explains the media's scorn: they are all, in their own ways, anti-establishment candidates, meaning they are outside and critical of the system of which national journalists are a critical part, the system which employs and rewards our journalists and forms the base of their identity and outlook. Any candidate who criticizes and opposes that system — not in piecemeal ways but fundamentally — will be, first, ignored and, then, treated as losers by the press. [...]

As Digby notes, Ron Paul is going to raise more money than any Republican candidate this quarter; he just topped the record for most money raised in a single day; and has now exceeded Howard Dean's 2004 quarter total when Dean was at the peak of his online fundraising prowess. Huckabee is now tied for the lead in national polls and is leading in several of the key early states. Yet our establishment media stars continue to sneer at these anti-establishment candidates as though they are aberrational jokes, and there is virtually no serious effort to understand the meaning of their success.

In 2004, the media were basically forced to write about Howard Dean because he was the only candidate who was doing anything interesting. Nonetheless, they made sure everyone knew that the anti-establishment candidate from Vermont was "angry, gaffe-prone and unelectable." Plus ça change.

Happy Iraq Study Group Day

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:56:12 -0700

Atrios reminds us that the Iraq Study Group released their report one year ago today.

Nice one, TIME.