Does Bernie Really Think She's Unqualified? More Important, Do You?

I'm not saying I was ever any good at it but when I returned to America after nearly 7 years of living abroad, working as a journalist seemed like a good way to make a living-- at least until I could find a "real job." (I actually started as a photo-journalist but I saw that my editors valued the "captions" more than the photos.) You need some kind of a "license" to be a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher but you don't need anything to be a journalist... other than a pen. Pretty soon I was surrounded with journalists. I had moved to San Francisco and immersed myself in journalism world.

Overall, my colleagues seemed pretty insecure-- people who left their futures were shaky and their credentials were always open to challenge. Even the rebels-- obviously I gravitated to "the rebels"-- often seemed to crave recognition and approval from an Establishment they knew they would never be part of and they knew would always oppress them on some level. I found it an unattractive occupation and was grateful I was eventually able to avail myself of other opportunities.

Wednesday night, I was watching Maddow when I first heard Bernie had declared Hillary unqualified. She pimped it, nearly breathlessly, as "breaking news." Then, after a commercial break, she showed the video of Bernie not really saying anything very different from what he's been saying all along. That's it just below. Would Maddow walk back her sensationalistic intro after the video? Nope; she doubled down on it. And the rest of the corporate media was doing the same thing. This after a full day of Clinton Machine fulminations about "disqualifying" Bernie and a ruthless frontal attack of him ever since it became clear he would swamp her in Wisconsin by all her carefully scripted, unsavory surrogates.



As Sam Stein, a guy who doesn't give in to the insecurities so inherent in American journalism-- I never discovered the traits in British or Dutch journalists-- pointed out Thursday morning, Hillary's own 2008 statement about Obama was far more of what the journalists are trying to attribute to Bernie than anything in Bernie's statement. "I think that I have a lifetime of experience," she said, "that I will bring to the White House." (That's precisely what many Americans, aware of just what that lifetime of experience actually is, fear.) I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002." That's Hillary. That's her sly, scripted dishonesty and her default position on qualifications. She was dismissing Obama's experiences as a community activist, as a state legislator, as a failed congressional candidate up against the political bosses she's so comfortable with, and as a U.S. Senator. At the time, her own experience had been primarily being a Republican, a Walmart board member, a corporate lawyer and then a first lady... and a very mediocre-- to be extremely kind-- U.S. Senator. Democratic voters eventually judged Obama's experience to be far more worthwhile than hers-- or, later, her buddy, McCain's.

When Hillary talks about "being a Democrat" (following her years of being a Republican-- of which she still claims she is so proud of and insists shaped where she stands on policy today), she's actually talking about using the Democratic Party apparatus and organization as a vehicle for her career aspirations. When Bernie talks about being a Democrat, he's talking about helping to perfect a set of values and principles that have served to make America great and to make the lives of working families more bearable. She defines what it means to be a DINO. He's the embodiment of what Democrats still were when she was still a Republican running around screaming that Nixon beat JFK and that the Democrats stole the election and then running for and winning the presidency of the Wellesley College Young Republicans.

A conversation Wednesday between Amy Goodman and Van Jones shed some more light on the two wings of the Democratic Party, the one based on careerism and the one based on values.

VAN: New York City is the war to settle the score inside the Democratic Party. The Clinton forces understand there is a rebellion in this party. Under ordinary circumstances, it would already be over, because the big donors would have taken the checks back. There are no big checks. This is a people’s movement. They are going to have to bury this movement in New York City, and they know it. You’re going to see a vetting of Bernie Sanders like you’ve never seen. You’re going to see the mainstream media go after him. Now there’s blood in the water on specifics. They’re going to go after him on specifics, you know, way beyond anything any candidate has had to address. And people are going to have to-- I mean, he’s going to have to step up his game, because you can’t, you know, write excuses for people. He’s got to be able to answer those tough questions.

But also, if you want for this Democratic Party to take progressive causes seriously, now is the time to speak out and get engaged. And for African Americans in particular, I want to say something. We are the only part of the so-called Obama coalition that has to give not 50 percent of our vote, not 60, not 70, not 80, not 90, but 92 percent of our vote in every presidential election, in order for Democrats to win. So, we are beyond a base vote. We are the decisive vote. If we give 85 percent of our vote to the Democrats, Republicans win. And so, we deserve to have a full hearing on all the issues that affect us, and hear from both candidates. And all of the history needs to be on the table to be vetted, for both candidates.

Even a robot knows what the real news was yesterday, which somehow didn't quite seem as sensational nor as worthy to Maddow as her-- and all her lemming-like, insecure colleagues'-- "breaking" non-story:

Ben Bradlee (1921-2014)

Jason Robards Jr. as Ben Bradlee in All the President's Men (1976)

"He took The Post, then affluent and filled with underutilized potential, and made it a formidable national newspaper worthy of a head-to-head competition with the [New York] Times. He did it in a way that made the paper itself a joyous place to work. The paper reflected his personality. He was exuberant, competitive and combative if challenged. He made The Post a magnet for young reporters looking for a chance to play in a very high-stakes game."

-- David Halberstam, about Ben Bradlee, from "an
interview" quoted in Robert G. Kaiser's WaPo obit

by Ken

I don't know that I would have thought to write about Ben Bradlee, the longtime top editor of the Washington Post, who died yesterday at his home ("of natural causes") at age 93, if Howie hadn't sent me a link in case I planned to. Once I started thinking about it, it occurred to me that there must be something to say about an editor who presided over a major newspaper for a long period of time (26 years, for the record) and is remembered for, you know, his practice of journalism.

Okay, there's also the fact that he got played by Jason Robards Jr., in one of his classiest performances, in the film version of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's All the President's Men. (Of course nobody made out better in the movie than Woodward, who turned into Robert Redford. Bernstein had to settle for Dustin Hoffman -- a great actor, but you know . . . .)

THE TIMES THEY HAVE A-CHANGED

That Bradlee's tenure at the Post is remembered almost entirely for his journalistic record is partly a tribute to Ben B, but much more a reminder of what's happened to both journalism generally and newspapers in particular in the decades since he handed over the reins of the paper's editorial operation in 1991 to Leonard Downie Jr., his managing editor since 1984. By then, his longtime boss, Katharine Graham, had turned the publisher's chair over to her son Donald. Here's what Robert G. Kaiser has to say in his WaPo obit about Bradlee's relationship with Katharine Graham, which he describes as having been "critical."

She allowed him to spend money, ultimately many millions of dollars, to build a great newspaper. At key moments — particularly the 1971 decision to publish excerpts from the Pentagon Papers and later during Watergate — she stood squarely behind him, defying the advice of her attorneys and business advisers and her powerful Washington friends.

Mr. Bradlee “was just what Kay needed — somebody who built her confidence and worked hard at it,” said the late Philip L. Geyelin, who was editor of The Post’s editorial page from 1968 to 1979. “He made her comfortable. He called her up and told her dirty jokes and told her the latest skinny. It was a wonderful relationship. I can’t remember any time they had any quarrel. She was nuts about him.”

Mrs. Graham had said as much herself. In one of the end-of-year letters she and Mr. Bradlee came to exchange annually — warm, intimate notes of mutual appreciation — she wrote: “Over the years, I have been spoiled by you and I hope most of the time, it’s been reciprocated, in sharing the best, most productive, rewarding working combo that I’ve had or even know of. And best of all, it’s been fun.”

She also teased him sometimes and criticized his erratic management of the newsroom, including impetuous hiring decisions that sometimes turned out badly. One year, she sent him a list of 15 names, his hiring “mistakes,” as she called them, and asked how he could avoid such errors in the future. But mostly she sang his praises, as in her end-of-1974 letter to Mr. Bradlee: “The things [about you] that people don’t know — that I know — are style, generosity, class and decency, as well as understanding of other people’s weaknesses.”

When Mrs. Graham died in July 2001, Mr. Bradlee spoke at her funeral. “She was a spectacular dame, and I loved her very much,” he said, looking down on the vast crowd from the lectern at the east end of Washington National Cathedral. Walking back to his pew, Mr. Bradlee took a slight detour to pass her coffin and give it an affectionate pat.

Leonard Downie remained executive editor till 2008, and a lot of his tenure too is remembered for journalism, but by the end the economic realities of running a paper like the Post were already taking a heavy toll on the operations of the newsroom. Though a lot of questions can be asked about his successors, it's almost unfair to compare their performance, which has been so much concerned with survival -- both their own and the paper's.

The Post has had to contend not just with the catastrophic decline of readership and advertising common to latter-day newspapers generally, but with its relationship to the federal government in a hometown that is so heavily a company town, which also means -- for the hometown paper of the Village -- its positioning in the rightward-lurching political cosmos. Uncharitable observers might utter the word "pandering." (The aforementioned link that Howie passed along was to a Pew Research survey, "Distrust of News Sources," which found the Post registering distrust levels of 26 precent among respondents of "mostly conservative" views and 39 percent among those of "consistently conservative" views -- as against, for example, significantly higher New York Times distrust figures of 33 and 50 percent.)

Now, granted that Ben Bradlee's stewardship of the paper's news operations was a major factor in its prosperity during most of his tenure, it's also true that he didn't have to figure out how to run his operation when that prosperity became past-tense.

"HIS STRENGTHS SOMETIMES BECAME WEAKNESSES"

Ben Bradlee as Ben Bradlee, in 1995

Obviously within the Post the assignment of the Bradlee obit was a a big deal, even given the revolution that has been taking place since its sale to Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos. Of course one also presumes that the choice of Robert Kaiser wasn't spur-of-the-moment; given the subject's age, one assumes that a basic obit text has been in place for, well, quite a while. Certainly Kaiser qualifies as a company guy -- there's hardly anyone around with truer-blue WaPo credentials. Prior to his retirement early this year, he worked at the Post for more than 50 years, the last 16 as associate editor and senior correspondent, following his tenure (1991-98) as Leonard Downie Jr.'s managing editor following his accession to the top job.

Kaiser is also a respected writer in his own right, and There are observations I'm still mulling writing about in his somewhat crotchety but often interesting review, in the current (November 5) issue of the New York Review of Books, of Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan and John Dean's The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It, titled "Our Conservative, Criminal Politicians" (available free to subscribers only).

As Kaiser's comments on Bradlee's relationship with Kay Graham show, he's hardly uncritical. Noting that Bradlee's "strengths sometimes became weaknesses," he recalls the Janet Cooke debacle:

The editor who could inspire his troops to do some of the best journalism ever published in America also fell for an artful hoax by a young reporter, Janet Cooke. Cooke invented an 8-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy and wrote a moving story about him. After the story won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, Cooke was exposed as an impostor who invented not only Jimmy but also her own life story.

When they realized that Cooke had concocted an imaginary résumé, Mr. Bradlee and his editors interrogated her and extracted a confession. Mr. Bradlee quickly returned the Pulitzer, then encouraged The Post’s ombudsman, Bill Green, to investigate and report how the incident could have happened. This was the biggest assignment ever given to the in-house reader’s representative. Mr. Bradlee had created the position in 1970, making The Post the first major paper to employ an independent, in-house critic.

Green produced a detailed, embarrassing report about a newsroom where the urge for journalistic impact overrode several experienced reporters’ doubts about Jimmy’s existence. “Bradlee was really hurt” by the Cooke affair, recalled Peter Silberman, who served under Mr. Bradlee as a senior editor.

Kaiser notes too that "Mr. Bradlee had a notoriously short attention span."

He rarely dug into the details of an issue himself, leaving that to the people he had hired. He managed The Post newsroom with a combination of viscera and intellect, often judging people by his personal reaction to them. He or she “makes me laugh” was perhaps Mr. Bradlee’s greatest compliment. He never enjoyed the minutiae of management and spent as little time on administrative work as he could get away with.

"AGGRESSIVE REPORTING" + "ENGAGING FEATURE PIECES"

But Kaiser goes on to credit Bradlee with "cop[ing] successfully with many crises." And the obit begins with him crediting him with having "guided The Post's transformation into one of the world's leading newspapers."

From the moment he took over The Post newsroom in 1965, Mr. Bradlee sought to create an important newspaper that would go far beyond the traditional model of a metropolitan daily. He achieved that goal by combining compelling news stories based on aggressive reporting with engaging feature pieces of a kind previously associated with the best magazines. His charm and gift for leadership helped him hire and inspire a talented staff and eventually made him the most celebrated newspaper editor of his era.

The most compelling story of Bradlee’s tenure, almost certainly the one of greatest consequence, was Watergate, a political scandal touched off by The Post’s reporting that ended in the only resignation of a president in U.S. history.

But Mr. Bradlee’s most important decision, made with Katharine Graham, The Post’s publisher, may have been to print stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration went to court to try to quash those stories, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of the New York Times and The Post to publish them.

The Post’s circulation nearly doubled while Mr. Bradlee was in charge of the newsroom — first as managing editor and then as executive editor — as did the size of its newsroom staff. And he gave the paper ambition.

Mr. Bradlee stationed correspondents around the globe, opened bureaus across the Washington region and from coast to coast in the United States, and he created sections and features — most notably Style, one of his proudest inventions — that were widely copied by others.

During his tenure, a paper that had previously won just four Pulitzer Prizes, only one of which was for reporting, won 17 more, including the Public Service award for the Watergate coverage. . . .

Kaiser concludes with the quote I've put at the top of this post from David Halberstam, whose journalistic career of course is mostly associated with the New York Times but who "devoted much of his book The Powers That Be to Mr. Bradlee's Washington Post. (The quote, which Kaiser describes as a "valedictory" is credited to "an interview" -- presumably one conducted by the author, presumably for this obit. Bear in mind that Halberstam died in 2007.)

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That Whole GOP Rebranding Thing A Few Weeks Ago Was Just For Silly Gooses In The Beltway Press

Reince and Jefferson Beauregard-- not a lick of difference where it matters (except Jefferson Beauregard left his makeup kit at home when he came for the photo-shoot)

That nasty KKK senator from Alabama, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, apparently never got-- or maybe never bothered to read-- the memo about how the Republican Party is making a concerted effort to woo immigrants from Latin America and Asia into the new post-bigoted GOP. Just after midnight, on March 23, as the vote on the budget approached, Sessions offered a rather hateful amendment which lost on a mostly party-line vote, 43-56. Sessions' purpose, as stated, was "To establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund to achieve savings by prohibiting illegal immigrants or illegal immigrants granted legal status from qualifying for federally subsidized health care."

"Or illegal immigrants granted legal status?" So even after immigrants wind up as citizens, the Republican war against them will continue unabated. "Hey, guys, join our party. We want to make sure you never get any Medicare even if you've been paying for it your whole life!" McCain voted for it and so did other right-wing bigots from states with large Hispanic populations, like Flake (AZ), Cruz (TX), Cornyn (TX), Marco Rubio (FL)-- how would be have voted if this pertained to Cuban refugees?-- Mark Kirk (IL), and Dean Heller (NV). The only Republicans who weren't feeling like bloodthirsty bigots that night were Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AZ). Not even one of the pathetic excuses for Democrats went along with this blatantly unfair and racist amendment.

Apparently that rebranding thing was nothing more than a $10,000,000 publicity stunt to make the GOP look less out of touch with America for a week. It worked... for a week-- and only Inside the Beltway, their whole world anyway. We used this brief Rachel Maddow clip last week to help illustrate a point about North Carolina Republicans going off the rail-- which they surely have. But Rachel's point was broader and it's why I'm bring it up again. Take a look:



It's clear to anyone without blinkers on-- and regardless of how you happen to feel about Obama and his betrayal of working families and Social Security: the Republican Party rebranding circus was all buns and no meat whatsoever. And not just in North Carolina. She goes through a litany of insanity from Republicans in Arkansas, Texas, Ohio, Virginia, North Dakota... everywhere where they've managed to use Democratic Party incompetence to seize control. "The Beltway press," she explained, sounding a familiar tune, "does not cover Republican politics that way but that is what they're doing. It's not what they're talking about; it's what they're doing... The Beltway version of the Republican Party is getting all sorts of unearned credit right now for supposedly trying to move the party past this stuff, right. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus gets all sorts of Beltway credit for saying that Republicans should at least try to sound less Old Testaminty when they talk about social issues... The Beltway line on the Republican Party right now is that social conservatism is over for Republicans, that the party is modernizing and kicking all those old school social conservative issues to the curb. That Beltway line is total bullpucky. Look at what they're doing, not what they're saying... The Beltway common wisdom on this is wrong. The social conservatives have triumphed in the Republican Party. And you can tell it not from what they say to the Beltway press; you can it from how they are using the power that they have in govern all over the country, You cannot distill this stuff out of the Republican Party. This is the Republican Party. If you kick them out of your bedroom they would have no idea where else to go."

When Bob Woodward tells you to read something, you stand up and READ -- plus other Woodward enhanced interrogation techniques

Watch out, Diane! If Bob doesn't like your question, he can have you get up on the table and cluck like a chicken.

by Ken

I think I've established that I'm not a great fan of make-believe journalist Bob Woodward -- having posed such questions as "Is Bob Woodward the very best person to review George Tenet's book? Or maybe the WORST? (Can you guess which way the Washington Post voted?)" (May 2007) and "Is it possible that Bob Woodward really believes he's giving us first drafts of actual history?" (October 2010). All the same, I wasn't expecting to find myself laughing out loud -- along with some eye-rolling, admitedly -- at the Bobster's grandiose self-fluffing.

However, since I do have some curiosity about the prospect of former Sen. Chuck Hagel's installation at the Pentagon, I was curious enough to take a look at what our Bob has to say in a WaPo column called "Why Obama picked Hagel." And he does have some interesting things to say.

There is, notably, a quote from Hagel presented in the now-familiar Woodwardian journalistic spinoff of insider trading, where the practice of journalism consists of gathering insider information with a view to its highly selective release at the most opportune moment -- "most opportune" for the opportunist in question, that is. Thus we are told that in the early months of President Obama's first term his former Senate colleague came "to the White House to vist with the friend he had made during the four years they overlapped in the Senate" and was asked what he thought about foreign policy and defense issues.

According to an account that Hagel later gave, and is reported here for the first time, he told Obama: "We are at a time where there is a new world order. We don't control it. You must question everything, every assumption, everything they" -- the military and diplomats -- "tell you. Any assumption 10 years old is out of date. You need to question our role. You need to question the military. You need to question what are we using the military for.

"Afghanistan will be defining for your presidency in the first term," Hagel also said, according to his own account, "perhaps even for a second term." The key was not to get "bogged down."

Obama did not say much but listened. At the time, Hagel considered Obama a "loner," inclined to keep a distance and his own counsel. But Hagel's comments help explain why Obama nominated his former Senate colleague to be his next secretary of defense. The two share similar views and philosophies as the Obama administration attempts to define the role of the United States in the transition to a post-superpower world.

I've boldfaced that first part because, hey, are you gonna tell me you couldn't use a good laugh? This business of the later-given account and its being reported here for the first time -- such a gaffishly executed exercise in either fake modesty or circumspection, avoiding the central word in all of Woodwardia, ME-ME-ME-ME-ME.

But this isn't the belly laugh I promised at the outset. Indeed, I have to acknowledge that it will be old news to anyone who read Bob's book, oh, whichever-book-it-was. I can't be expected to keep them straight. Oh, I see it was Obama's Wars.

When I interviewed President Obama in the summer of 2010 for my book "Obama's Wars," his deeply rooted aversion to war was evident. As I reported in the book, I handed Obama a copy of a quotation from Rick Atkinson's World War II history, "The Day of Battle," and asked him to read it. Obama stood and read:

"And then there was the saddest lesson, to be learned again and again . . . that war is corrupting, that it corrodes the soul and tarnishes the spirit, that even the excellent and the superior can be defiled, and that no heart would remain unstained."

"I sympathize with this view," Obama told me. "See my Nobel Prize acceptance speech."

No, no, it's not the president saying, "See my Nobel Prize acceptance speech." I admit that's pretty funny, even if by chance the president actually said those words. Maybe it's even funnier if he did. And after all, our Bob has been slammed so hard and so often over his "journalistic" career for suspicious quotes that almost certainly couldn't be actual quotes that you'd think by now when he manufactures quotes to dramatize something that somebody told him somebody else said, he'd do it better than "See my Nobel Prize acceptance speech."

Again, no, though. The hilarious part is our Bob handing the president of these United States a book quotation with the order to read it and the president by golly standing up and reading it out loud.

At first this may not sound odd to anyone who's watched enough TV courtroom dramas, where lawyers are always handing witnesses stuff and ordering them to read "the highlighted portion," and uncomfortable as they appear, they do, even when they have no direct connection to what they're reading, and you'd figure somebody ought to be objecting.

But the president is an under-oath witness subject to "gotcha"-ing by a crafty cross-examining attorney about to blow the whole case wide open. He's, you know, the president. And Bob is just, you know, whatever it is you want to call it, what he is. And our Bob hands him the quotation and tells him to read and he by God stands up and reads. And in just a year or two the world gets to read all about it.


REPORTED HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME: MORE
RECENT WOODWARD ENHANCED INTERROGATIONS

House Minority Leader NANCY PELOSI, on her objection to the House majority leadership's expenditure of millions of dollars to prop up DOMA

Required to read highlighted passages from the 1953 Nancy Drew mystery (No. 31) The Ringmaster's Secret

Senate Minority Leader MITCH McCONNELL, on his search for a Plan B to put in place of his old Plan A ("to make Obama a one-term president")

Instructed to put on a Boy Scout uniform and order five dozen boxes of his favorite variety of Girl Scout cookies (anything but those ridiculous Thank U Berry Much-es)

Supreme Court Justice ANTONIN SCALIA, explaining why his practice of prejudging cases and his habit of hanging out with rich right-wing parties to cases never call for him to recuse himself

Made to sign up for Weight Watchers Online -- though with sign-up fee waived (special "friends of Bob" deal)

Vice President JOE BIDEN, offering exclusive not-to-be-published-till-2016 details about his plans to run for president

Had to stand up and read -- and pick his favorite from among -- a David Letterman-style Top 10 List of "Favorite Joe Biden Gaffes" found online

Treasury Secretary-designate JACK LEW, detailing all his fiscal and monetary plans for these next four years

Asked to recite from memory the Gordon Gekko "Greed is good" speech from the original Wall Street film

Senate Majority Leader HARRY REID, explaining his strategy in the recent filibuster "reform" to-do

Required to stand on the desk and sing his college fight song

New Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair DAVID "THE DIAPER MAN" VITTER, discussing techniques for hiring hookers without leaving a paper trail as well as his recent precedent-defying decision to dump virtually all the committee staff left behind by GOP-term-limited chair James Inhofe*

Called on to strip naked to enable Bob to body-paint the image of Carl Bernstein's genitalia all over him


*SPEAKING OF CHAIRMAN VITTER'S PURGE, HIS
STAFF DENIES ANY ANIMOSITY TOWARD INHOFE

We won't know till the relevant Woodward book is published what Senator Vitter may have told Bob about reports of personal discord with Senator Inhofe and "The Diaper Man" 's purge of Environment and Public Works Committee staff. Like this from National Journal:

One rumor, according to an aide who used to work for Inhofe on the panel, is that the two senators didn't get along.

"From what I've been told, it was due to the fact that Vitter was pissed at Inhofe because Inhofe refused to help him fund-raise because of the prostitution scandal that Vitter faced," the aide said, who was not among the dozen or so most recently let go. "Vitter wanted to purge and get rid of everyone."

However, a source close to Senator Vitter says he told Bob W:

I respect the heck out of my colleague from Oklahoma, and if I found myself in need of a hooker on short notice in the Sooner State, he'd be my first phone call. Besides, nobody has done more to give substance to the belief that God gave us the environment to rape, pillage, and plunder. But every raper/pillager/plunderer has his own style.

Meanwhile at least two energy-industry lobbyists so far confirm receiving e-mails in which the senator wrote:

The only difference between my good friend Jim Inhofe and me on raping, pillaging, and plundering the environment is that he always thinks of it like a one-man mission whereas I'm a strong believer in being a team player, being on the team -- as long as my friends in the environmental-raping industries remember, when it comes time to spread the cash and goodies and cut the checks, that I'm now the guy in charge.

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Of course Infotainment News "journalists" have an ideological bias: Long live the status quo -- with a cushy place in it for me!

by Ken

Tomorrow morning Howie is going to have more to say about the sordid doings of the so-called deficit commission -- about which I was fulminating last night -- and then I'll probably have more to say tomorrow night. But one issue that comes up in connection with it reminds me that we have a piece of unfinished business, regarding the ideological bias of what pass in our sorry media for "journalists."

Here's where this question of journalists' ideology intersects with our ponderings of the commission. In a post today of Jane Hamsher's to which I expect to be returning tomorrow, she tracks the fallout, hopeful and otherwise, from the recent confrontation I mentioned last night between Social Security specialist Alex Lawson and committee co-chair Alan Simpson, notable for Simpson's pompous bullying and, more important, his astounding ignorance or dishonesty on the subject of Social Security. Jane links to a post by Holly Yeager on the Columbia Journalism Review blog:

I’m not usually a big fan of ambush journalism. But I’m making an exception for Alex Lawson of Social Security Works—who’s been standing outside the weekly closed-door meetings of the president’s debt commission, asking members questions when he can—and Firedoglake, which has been running a live stream of his video.

Lawson is polite, he knows his stuff, and, most importantly, he’s been virtually alone in trying to cover the commission’s proceedings.

Now I disagree that this is "ambush journalism," for the very reasons Yeager sets out: that Alex "has been standing outside the weekly closed-door meetings of the president’s debt commission, asking members questions when he can." When commission members emerge from their secret sessions (a) they know that Alex will be there waiting, (b) they know who he is, and (c) they know that he will be trying to get information from them about what's being done behind those closed doors. Settiing that aside, though, the line I want to call attention to is:

"he’s been virtually alone in trying to cover the commission’s proceedings."

Here we have a commission that is presumably designing a new era of American economic austerity, answerable at present to no one, in all likelihood planning the first step in the dismantling of Social Security as a first step toward getting rid of that whole damned social "safety net" that that Bolshie FDR imported from Mother Russia, and our so-called journalists couldn't care less.

Given the makeup of the commission, stuffed full of grinding status-quo-devoted hacks, including an alarming number who are signed on to Pete Peterson's anti-Social Security jihad, it's looking increasingly as if the best we can hope when it serves up its collected wisdom is that Congress has the intestinal fortitude to pay it no mind. On the hopeful side, doing nothing is surely what Congress does best. Meanwhile our working press pays no attention. Oh, the hacks will show up at the press conference where a smiling Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson proudly launch their commission report. But that's about it.

As I mentioned in the post in which the subject of journalists' ideology came up, Glenn Greenwald had linked, while making clear that he didn't agree with all of it, to an interesting post by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen: "Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: On the Actual Ideology of the American Press." I wrote then:

Professor Rosen thinks he's mostly alone in finding the ideology of journalists "complicated," while most everyone else thinks it's simple, despite the fact that we in the "simple" camp disagree comically on what that simple ideology is. I would argue that it's, er, complicatedly simple, by which I mean that it's all about What's In It for Me, but that's an argument for another day.

I encourage you to read the professor's musings, which aren't easily summarized, and which contain all sorts of interesting observations on the habits and lifestyles of the journalistic community. But that's what it seems to me he's mostly concerned with, as when he notes how preponderantly our media folk are "cosmopolitans."

On one point I think we can surely all agree. Professor Rosen cites this 1988 formulation by the late David Shaw, media beat reporter for the Los Angeles Times:

The one thing a journalist prizes above all else in his professional life is a good, juicy story, and most good stories offer bad news -scandal, war, disaster, murder. Most journalists I know would rather write an expose than a flattering profile, regardless of whether their subject is liberal or conservative. That may reveal something unhealthy about journalists’ psyches, but it doesn’t say anything about their partisanship.

Not partisanship in the usual sense, but partisanship in the truest sense: a ferocious devotion to the party of me. Same deal with this seemingly inexplicable-by-ideology point:

Take for instance the way professional journalists try to generate authority and respect among peers, or, to state it negatively, the way they flee opprobrium. Here it is important for them to demonstrate that they are not on anyone’s “team,” or cheerleading for a known position. This puts a premium on stories that embarrass, disrupt, annoy or counter the preferred narrative—the talking points, the party line—of one or both of the sides engaged in political battle.

The professor thinks this proves that the issue of journalists' ideology is "complicated." But again, is it, really? All this tells me is how faithfully our "journalists" hew to the ideology of me.

And although Professor Rosen pooh-poohs what he considers the too-simple indictment of the media from the left ("The political press ultimately serves the interests of the people who own it -- the corporate capitalists, the ones with money and power and “access” to politicians, the people who run things and always have"), is there really any question about this? However "independent" these folks may occasionally feel the need to show themselves, independent is the last thing they are. As the professor himself concludes his summary of the leftist critique: "Those who are unwilling to make peace with this fact don’t make it very far in political journalism."

And no, they don't. What I see, as I said earlier, is a passionate commitment to the status quo, with the single proviso that the status quo will include a nice cushy niche for theirs truly. Yes, once in a blue moon there's an Izzy Stone or a Sy Hersh, but even apart from the obvious fact of how badly the two of them fit into the order of things (thank goodness!), they're singular above all for their singularity. When Judy Miller was doing whatever the hell it was she thought she was doing while making a hash of the New York Times's coverage of national security, she probably thought of herself as a one-woman journalistic crusade. What she really was was a broken-down whore of the Village psychopath, Dick Cheney.

In the famous Bill Moyers inquiry into the journalistic breakdown over the Bush regime's railroading of the country into its planned invasion of Iraq, where fairly consistently the journalists who tried to do their job were ignored and the ones who toed the party line, disastrously for the country, wound up being rewarded, the Washington Post's great reporter Walter Pincus recalled that the Washington press corps attempted to perform some minimal fact-checking of the early press conferences of that legendary presidential fabulist Ronald Reagan, but they discovered that the country didn't seem to like it.

Sure, Reagan was lying through his teeth pretty much every time he opened his mouth, but the media moguls' perception, probably correct, was that lots of Americans didn't want to see their cuddly president hassled, and just didn't give a gosh darn about (yuck!) facts. And, Pincus noted, the media got the message and stopped trying to flag the discrepancies between presidential utterances and reality. (As an ironic footnote, Pincus's stubborn belief in actual journalism caused his star to fall out of the careerist heavens. But while he's no longer a "star" at the Post, he has kept right on doing good old-fashioned reporting, albeit on officially second-tier stories. When you see his byline in the paper, though, it has a credibility hardly anyone else's there does.)

Now that didn't extend to Bill Clinton, of course, because Americans only like to see right-wing sociopaths coddled by the press. Ironically, Bill and Hillary, having survived their White House years as outsiders to the famous Village, seem to have earned their stripes and become full-fledged Villagers.

Of course our avowed right-wing media, from Fox Noise on, are obviously and unapologetically ideological, and partisan, and everyone knows it, but nobody likes to say it. I exempt them from this discussion on the ground that no sentient person could possibly imagine them as "journalists," even with quotation marks.

#

A thought: Maybe 2010 is an election year in which incumbents get to justify their existence -- if they can

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This Daily Show clip was offered by washingtonpost.com's Chris Cillizza the other day in a discussion of the conventional wisdom regarding incumbents this year.

"From Plaquemines Parish to Wall Street, we are seeing what happens when government takes too hands-off an approach to private economic actors. Yet the GOP is managing to sell the idea that the big issue in this election should be . . . government spending.

"Professor Obama and his allies ought to be ashamed of this. The cure for malaise is to have a self-confident sense of purpose, and to act boldly in its pursuit."

--E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column today,

"Democrats should show a little pride and purpose"

by Ken

"A weird malaise is haunting the Democratic Party," E. J. Dionne Jr. begins his column today, continuing, "That's a risky word to use, I know." In case you're wondering, no, he doesn't mean "Democratic Party," which in any case would be a risky pair of words. He means "malaise."

It's freighted with bad history and carries unfortunate implications. So let's be clear: President Obama is not Jimmy Carter, not even close. And Obama's speech on Tuesday was nothing like Carter's 1979 "malaise speech," in which Carter never actually used that word. Obama gave a good and sensible speech that was not a home run.

What's odd is that Obama was seen as needing a home run. This is where the Democratic malaise comes in.

Democrats should feel a lot better than they do. They enacted a health-care bill that had been their dream for more than 60 years. They pulled the country out of a terrifying economic spiral. They are on the verge of passing the biggest reform of Wall Street since the New Deal. The public has identified enemies that are typically seen as Republican allies: oil companies and big bankers. And given the Republicans' past policies, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is at least as much their problem as Obama's.

On top of this, the GOP seems to be doing all it can to make itself unelectable, veering far to the right and embracing a Tea Party movement that, at its extremes, preaches the need for revolution. That sounds more like the old New Left than a reinvigorated conservatism. Oh, yes, and can you think of one thing Republicans stand for right now other than cutting spending? Never mind that they are conspicuously vague about what they'd cut.

Yet it is Democrats who are petrified, uncertain and hesitant -- and this was true before the oil spill made matters worse.

I've been thinking about the Incumbent Question since the other day when I got snookered into reading a piece, from Chris Cillizza's "The Fix" blog, which was billed in a washingtonpost.com newsletter as "Incumbents doing better than thought." Since Chris the Fixer has been one of the people peddling the line that 2010 is a year in which incumbents running for reelection might as well simply start packing their stuff now for the long trip back to Palookaville, I mean home, this got my attention. The actual head on the item, however, was "Incumbents Beware! (Or Not)," and it found Chris in his "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand" mode, which, come to think of it, is better than his declaring-the-agenda mode.

"Conventional wisdom has cemented that 2010 will be an anti-incumbent year," Chris began, and already we have to call for a timeout. Just a sec, Chris. You're talking as if "conventional wisdom" is somebody else. But aren't you, or don't you aspire to be, "the conventional wisdom"? Isn't that the whole point of "The Fix"? To codify and, where possible, improve, what passes for wisdom Inside the Beltway?

AN ASIDE ON THE "IDEOLOGY" OF JOURNALISTS

I don't suppose you think of it that way, Chris -- you know, that your job is Keeper of the Flame of Orthodoxy. You like to think yourself as some sort of gadly blowing the whistle on the CW.

I'm here to say that, when artfully practiced (and anyone with mainstream-journalism aspirations has to learn to practice this artfully), it's the same damned thing. Fortuitously, in the post of Glenn Greenwald's I quoted from yesterday, "The media's understanding of its role," Glenn Greenwald recommended -- even while noting that he doesn't agree with all of it -- a post by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, "Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: On the Actual Ideology of the American Press." Professor Rosen thinks he's mostly alone in finding the ideology of journalists "complicated," while most everyone else thinks it's simple, despite the fact that we in the "simple" camp disagree comically on what that simple ideology is. I would argue that it's, er, complicatedly simple, by which I mean that it's all about What's In It for Me, but that's an argument for another day.

Back now to CW gadfly (giggle) Chris C, who appeared on the verge of striking a dagger to the heart of the conventional -- i.e., that they're toast -- regarding incumbents in this election cycle.

Apparently no one told Jon Stewart. The "Comedy Central" host and -- don't fool yourself -- widely influential commentator about all things political took on that CW on his show last week.

Stewart noted that of the 84 incumbents running on Super Duper Tuesday, all but two were re-nominated. One lost -- scandal-tarred Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons -- while a second, Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), was forced into a June 22 runoff.

[At this point, Chris introduced the Daily Show clip we saw at the top of this post.]

So, is Stewart right? Do the facts bear out that 2010 is indeed an anti-incumbent year? Or is this storyline much ado about nothing?

Not surprisingly it's not long before Chris has us looking at, well, not so much facts -- even though he actually announces, "Let's look at the facts" -- as comparisons "with historic norms." This is a favorite CW way of creating new CW, making comparisons with historic norms. In fairness, if there wasn't some basis of comparison, how would it be possible to discuss meaningfully whether or not these are more or less perilous times than usual for incumbents? Of course, by the time we're hearing --

In 2008, four House Members (three Republicans, one Democrat) fell in their fights for renomination. Two incumbents each lost in the 2006 and 2004 elections; in 2002 election eight House Members lost in primaries, but five of those defeats came in redistricting races in which two incumbents were forced to face off against one another --

we realize that what's being passed off as "historic norms" is what we've more traditionally called "the incumbent protection racket." Seriously, with 437 seats in the House, and maybe 400 (or whatever the actual number is) of them running for reelection in any given cycle, don't numbers like those tell us that we should be rooting for some meaningful incumbent peril?

But just when you think you've got our Chris, he throws a curve. In this case, he starts looking at factors in particular races that might have affected their outcome! Oh, the perfidy!

So far in 2010, four Senate and House incumbents -- Utah Sen. Bob Bennett (R), Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter (D), Reps. Alan Mollohan (W. Va.) and Parker Griffith (Ala.) -- have lost their bids for re-nomination. Inglis looks to be in serious trouble heading into next week's runoff, and both Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) have real primaries in August.

How do those losses by incumbent compare with historic norms?

On the Senate side, no more than one incumbent has lost a renomination bid since 1980, when four senators lost primaries. That said, it's hard to quantify how much bigger a deal it is for two incumbents to lose rather than one -- assuming both McCain and Bennet pull it out later this year.

In House terms, the defeats of two -- or even three -- incumbents are not historically anomalous. In 2008, four House Members (three Republicans, one Democrat) fell in their fights for renomination. Two incumbents each lost in the 2006 and 2004 elections; in 2002 election eight House Members lost in primaries, but five of those defeats came in redistricting races in which two incumbents were forced to face off against one another.

And, looked at individually, the four incumbent losses so far this cycle could easily be explained as exceptions, not rules. Both Specter and Griffith had switched parties -- a political no-no in almost any election cycle -- and were facing voters for the first time. Bennett was victimized by the unique Utah nominating process in which roughly 3,500 of the most conservative of the most conservative voters decide the nominee. Mollohan had been beset by ethical problems (or the rumor of them) for years and didn't help himself by running a 1980s-style campaign 30 years too late.

Eventually Chris arrives, as deep down you always knew he would, at a proposed new piece of CW:

Given all of that, is the reasonable conclusion that the anti-incumbent narrative is simply wrong or, at best, exaggerated?

Before you nod your head "yes," it's important to look at national polling for context. And, national polling suggests that voters are in a genuine "throw the bums out" sort of mood.

In the June Washington Post/ABC poll, just 29 percent of those tested said they planned to reelect their member of Congress, while 60 percent said they wanted to look around. By comparison, in Post/ABC polling the summer of 1994, nearly four in 10 (38 percent) said they wanted to reelect their own member of Congress.

A May New York Times/CBS News poll paints a similar picture with just nine (NINE!) percent saying members of Congress deserve reelection and 82 percent saying they don't.

Those numbers are startling and, from a political reporter's perspective, hard to ignore. They represent historic -- or near-historic -- levels of voter dissatisfaction. And, they are far from the only data points in surveys that suggest deep distrust with Washington; just 15 percent approved of the job Congress was doing in the Post/ABC survey, while seven in 10 said they were either "dissatisfied" or "angry" at Washington in the CBS/New York Times poll.

So, while the anti-incumbent storyline looks to be overblown (at least slightly) in terms of the actual number of incumbents who have been defeated to date, the national atmospherics suggest real unrest directed at Washington.

The best way to view the 2010 election may then be as anti-Washington rather than anti-incumbent. Candidates with the perceived support of the party in the nation's capital have fallen in considerable numbers -- Trey Grayson in Kentucky, Sue Lowden in Nevada, Artur Davis in Alabama, to name a few -- as they, wrongly, assumed the establishment could save them.

It can't. And that is the lesson of the primary season so far.

Now to whom, one wonders, is any of this supposed to be news? Was it really necessary to launch an investivative probe to ascertain the "context" that the country is in a surly and anxious state of mind? (If David Broder hasn't yet launched one of his famous Outside the Beltway expeditions -- to a tavern or coffee shop somewhere in America's Heartland -- to discover this, surely it's just a matter of time. And it will be news to him too.) Those numbers on popular hostility to incumbents are indeed eye-opening, but where is the "context" that such numbers have been running pretty darned high for at least a couple of decades, and by and large those poll respondents kept voting for those same damned incumbents, who until 2006 were deemed all but invulnerable to electoral challenge, for all sorts of reasons that were engraved in the stone of Conventional Wisdom.

Political scientists usually explained this by opining that by and large folks hated everybody else's incumbent, but not their own. For better or worse, or some of both, that distinction is less operative than it has been, and surely this is a good thing.

Take the case of Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln. Under the rules of the old incumbent protection racket, she should have had clear sailing to renomination. That she could have been vulnerable to mounted so late and in such an improvised way must have come as a pretty rude shock to her, not to mention certain blabbermouth senior White House officials. But really, is it such a surprise that Lincoln became vulnerable near the end of a congressional session in which she dropped any pretense of being anything other than a 100-percent-hired whore of corporate interests?

Of course in the end she learned to make the right sort of noises about being the mighty protector of Arkansas voters' interests, and since the Infotainment News Media had no interest in providing those voters with information about, for example, all that cash the greedy sleazebag has been shoveling in from the masters whose interests she proceeded, coincidentally, to champion so loyally on the Senate floor -- and she got plenty of cover from the administration she had often sorely tried and from the Clintons, who may not have been Village favorites when they were in the White House but have since learned admirably how to play that game. The Village closed ranks for one of their own, and it doesn't seem to have mattered to those people that it has almost cost the Democratic Party, whose interests the Village Democrats claim to put above all others, that Senate seat.

(As I'm sure you've heard, the latest numbers, admittedly from the highly suspect pollster-player Scott Rasmussen, have Madame Blanche trailing her November opponent, GOP Rep. John Boozman, 61 percent to 32. That's a margin that seems to me to exceed even the most outrageous whorish-pollster bias. The opponent she so narrowly defeated, Bill Halter, might at least have made a race of it.)

Maybe in the end we've got a situation that a few years ago most of us would have considered something of a goal: an electorate to which incumbents have to justify their existence if they want to be reelected.

As it happens, E. J. Dionne Jr. doesn't think all those Democrats running around like panicky chickens without heads need to be so panicky. The centerpiece of his argument is the recently released poll done for National Public Radio by the Democratic firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republicans at Public Opinion Strategies." The poll found that "in the 70 most competitive House districts, 60 of them held by Democrats . . . the Democrats 'face a daunting environment in 2010.'"

"The results are a wake-up call for Democrats whose losses in the House could well exceed 30 seats," they declared. Two findings convey the whole: "Sixty-two percent of Republicans in Democratic districts describe themselves as very enthusiastic about the upcoming election," compared with only 37 percent of Democrats. And: "By 57 to 37 percent, voters in these 60 Democratic seats believe that President Obama's economic policies have produced record deficits while failing to slow job losses."

Paranoia is striking deep among Democrats, and this poll will only aggravate the disorder. In those competitive districts, Democratic incumbents will be tempted to hunker down, distance themselves from the president, urge their leaders to be cautious and run for the hills to seek refuge from a looming Republican wave.

But the numbers in the NPR survey are so bad that Democrats might pause before becoming lemmings. There is something preposterous about how the administration and congressional Democrats have lost every major public argument that they should be winning.

They lost it on a stimulus bill that clearly lifted the economy, as Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, argued persuasively in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal. They are losing it on the health-care bill, a big improvement on the current system enacted through a process that made it look like a tar ball on an Alabama beach. They are losing it on the deficit even though it was Republicans who cut taxes twice while the Bush administration was starting two wars.

Obama is often criticized for being too professorial. The irony is that Republicans who have little to say about how to solve the nation's major problems are dominating the country's underlying philosophical narrative.

From Plaquemines Parish to Wall Street, we are seeing what happens when government takes too hands-off an approach to private economic actors. Yet the GOP is managing to sell the idea that the big issue in this election should be . . . government spending.

Professor Obama and his allies ought to be ashamed of this. The cure for malaise is to have a self-confident sense of purpose, and to act boldly in its pursuit.

Now it could be argued that these "accomplishments" of Democrats are overstated, but by whom can that be hoenstly argued? Surely not by Republicans, whose only contribution was to do everything in their power to make each of those policy areas worse, the better to produce what Sen. Jim DeMint so called, in a refreshing burst of honesty, "Obama's waterloo."

A more serious question is how many Democrats can honestly take advantage of the arguments Dionne lays out. To put it another way, how many of those endangered Democrats actually "have a self-confident sense of purpose" and have "act[ed] boldly in its pursuit"? From an electoral standpoint it might not matter, since all that necessarily matters in an election is what you can get enough voters to believe.

Still, and this is yet another reason why I love E. J. Dionne, who seems always to want to be able to believe the best about people, his prescription could be a winner if pols -- emphatically including the administration -- could be induced to adopt it as their own:

"to have a self-confident sense of purpose, and to act boldly in its pursuit."

(Confidential to Master Rahm E.: Making yourself as filthy-rich and powerful as possible is truly not what Mr. Dionne has in mind as "a self-confident sense of purpose," and so I'm afraid that no, you don't get even partial credit for "act[ing] boldly in its pursuit.")

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Tom Tomorrow's Invisible-Hand-of-the-Free-Market-Man says: "We'll suggest that media coverage of the spill is the REAL catastrophe"

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

"The TAXPAYERS can take care of the mess. . . That's how the free market WORKS, you know."

-- Invisible-Hand-of-the-Free-Market-Man

by Ken

Of course a case could be made that media coverage of the Gulf disaster has been catastrophic, but not in the way I.H.O.R.F.M. Man means.

Speaking of which, Glenn Greenwald yesterday spotlighted a pair of moments of blinding self-revelation by media titans ("The media's understanding of its role") which would be comical if if they weren't so appalling. The first concerns CNN's Ed Henry, who seems startled to have taken some -- though not nearly enough -- flak for his giggly celebration of the jolly time he and other so-called journalists had at Vice President Biden's recent beach party (which Glenn wrote about in a post called "Our hard-core, adversarial press corps"), dismissing out of hand any suggestion that this sort of fraternizing might compromise the objectivity of said "journalists" in covering the administration. (NPR's Brooke Gladstone asked our Ed why he thinks the WHite House puts on such shindigs, if not to influence coverage. "Maybe they just want to get to know us as people sometimes," suggests Ed. If we had a laugh track, our canned audience would be convulsed in laughter. "To get to know us as people"! Ha ha! Good one, Ed!)

The other example, though, has to do with our immediate subject, media coverage of the Gulf disaster. Sunday on Meet the Press David Gregory interviewed presidential adviser David Axelrod and became obsessed, in connection with the administration's about-to-be-announced insistence that BP establish an escrow fund to finance its acknowledged obligations to disaster victims in the Gulf area, which would have to be administered independently, with the question of whether the president "trusts" BP CEO Tony Hayward. Axelrod tried in vain to explain that the issue has nothing to do with trust, but only with accountability, making sure that the company lives up to its obligations. Gregory insists, "It doesn't sound like there's a lot of faith there at the moment," and Axelrod replies, "Well, our job is to hold them accountable, David, and that's what we're going to do."

Glenn comments:

Axelrod is explaining exactly what the media is supposed to do concerning political officials if they are going to fulfill the function they like to pretend they have, and Gregory is simply incapable even of understanding what's being explained. It's as though it's a completely foreign concept that he's never encountered or thought about before.

Does anyone have any reason to doubt that the concept is utterly foreign to Gregory? After all, the march of history, the stuff that makes up the "news," isn't about complicated stuff like issues and confiicting interests and power, it's about, you know, people. Like Ed Henry thinks the White House wants to get to know the working stiffs who cover them as. Jest folks.

"It's not that these media figures fail to perform their assigned function or consciously decide that they won't," Glenn concludes.

They don't even conceive of their purpose in this way, because holding government officials accountable is not actually their purpose. With some accidental exceptions, the corporations which own these media outlets don't choose people for these positions who want to or who will perform these accountability functions. They choose the ones who have no interest in doing so, no ability to do so, and who simply won't -- and thus don't. Gregory and Henry don't succeed in their corporations despite their failure to do their jobs of holding government officials accountable; they succeed because they do their job, which doesn't include that function.

David Axelrod, of all people, tries to introduce David Gregory to the concept of accountability. Good luck with that, DA!

#

Sure, Young Johnny McCranky has made himself an object of ridicule, but don't kid yourself, he's still "The Real McCain"

Oh no, do we really have to talk about

Young Johnny again? Alas, 'fraid so!

"It is depressing to watch Sen. John McCain transform himself from the refreshingly independent voice he once was to the snarling partisan he has become."

-- start of a Newark Star-Ledger editorial yesterday

by Ken

Let me be the last to comment on the latest antics of Young Johnny McCranky. Young Johnny, you'll recall, announced after the passage of the health care bill that we wouldn't have congressional Republicans to kick around anymore on account of they're gonna cease providing all the cooperation those indomitable bipartisans have contributed to the legislative process in this session.

Now you just stop laughing out there! I'm sure when we check the videotapes we're going to find you've already bust a gut laughing over this. No more Republican cooperation, eh? Okay, that is pretty hilarious, I admit, no matter how often you hear it. If Republicans had extended any less cooperation in this session of Congress . . . um . . . any less cooperation . . . sorry, I just don't have a punch line for that one. "Republicans" and "cooperation" in the same sentence just seems so bizarre.

It's going to be hard to persuade you that this is, nevertheless, serious business. Not so much Young Johnny himself. Oh no, there's nothing serious about the Crankyman -- unless you count the fact that he occupies a seat in the U.S. Senate, and is pressing his Arizonan constituents to send him back for another six years. Still, when you look at the growing collection of jugheads and clowns who share the distinction of occupying space in the U.S. Senate, it hardly seems that special -- unless you count the deadly serious role this carnival of freaks is supposed to play in our governmental process.

Howie has been keeping an eye on Young Johnny's latest self-reinvention, as a Teabagger-friendly obstructionist, as he fights for his life against a Senate primary challenge from the right. (Late word is that tomorrow none other than Princess Sarah will be in Arizona campaigning for him.) The point to remember is that the Crankyman's periodic metamorphoses are as phony, and go about as deep, as the lovely Cindy's makeup. As our friend Cliff Schecter documented all too well in his zealously researched book The Real McCain, Young Johnny's political career, which seems so puzzlingly all-over-the-place ideologically, becomes as predictable as clockwork once you focus on the one overriding consideration: What's good for me personally?

Once upon a time, it suited Young Johnny's purposes to present himself as a Man of Principle, the war hero who stood up to all that torture and maintained his fearless integrity against ideologues of Left and Right. I don't entirely rule out the possibility that on some level he believed it himself. But as Cliff demonstrated so thoroughly, the image had nothing to do with reality.

Even the "war hero" record is a lot more equivocal than our Johnny represents. And he was always the cynically opportunistic wheeler-dealer who traded in his first wife, when she no longer served either his personal pleasures or his political ambitions, for the lovely Cindy and her family's beer-distribution fortune, which he parlayed into a political career -- one that was then perennially riddled with corruption as he struggled to make himself a Man of Means independent of his wife's family's.

One of the scandals of the 2008 presidential campaign was the general failure of the Infotainment News Media to acknowledge what "everyone knew" (everyone on the inside, that is) about Young Johnny's unprincipled past, especially when he was campaigning with a minimum of two positions on every issue of public interest. Now that he's once again let the protective sheet slip off his sleazy, grubby self, Cliff is remembering ruefully how dismissive the Infotainment Newsers were of The Real McCain, without regard to the care that went into its research. Until Young Johnny's campaign had virtually self-destructed, when some of those mainstreamers finally began peeling off their erstwhile hero, it wasn't considered proper in Village precincts to question his character.

I raise these matters now for two reasons that go beyond the immediate case of Young Johnny to fundamental questions of how we govern ourselves in our increasingly imperfect democracy:

(1) This is the man who ran the nation's first all-lies all-the-time presidential campaign. The Bush campaigns had at least been somewhat discreet about its lies. Presumably under the tutelage of Karl Rove, the campaigners mastered the art of telling different groups what they wanted to hear. Remember "compassionate conservatism," to which not even lip service was paid once they seized control of the White Hosue? Rove understood that all that mattered was the electorate's emotion of the moment, that as long as they were careful with their campaign promises, nothing they said in the campaign would in any way limit what they could do once in power. (Remember the scornful dismissal of "nation-building," never heard from again?)

But after eight years of Bush regime lies, and the discovery that there was never a price to pay for them, whereas opponents could almost always be eviscerated for attempting to speak the truth, and the regime's total rejection of any obligation to reality, the various sets of McCranky campaign strategists seemed to agree that truth and reality were only for suckers, and as they got away with it, the lies became ever more encompassing and egregious -- and it became ever so much easier once Barack Obama was the sole opponent, with his campaign's steadfast refusal to make an issue of the fraudulence of right-wing rhetoric and governance.

What scared the dickens out of me was that, after a campaign in which Young Johnny made no rational case whatsoever for his candidacy, he still got 47 percent of the vote. As I've said frequently, I didn't see how that could possibly be good news for the country's future governability. I'm not saying I anticipated the rise of the Teabaggers, but I knew that nothing good was likely to come of so many voters having severed their ties to truth and reality.

(2) Sorry, Newark Star-Ledger editorial board, but if you were to read The Real McCain (which unlike all those right-wing propaganda tracts put out by the publishing presses of the Right-Wing Noise Machine, like Regnery, was actually based on verifiably factual research), you would know that "refreshingly independent voice he once was" existed only in your imagination. It was just a persona he used when it was convenient, and one he played masterfully with an awful lot of journalists who should have known better, should have known they were being played. The bogus "maverick" persona didn't (a) temper the extreme conservatism of McCranky's actual voting record or (b) change all the financial shenanigans he was engaging in all those years both inside and outside the Senate.

But the Infotainment Newsers have been so thoroughly coopted that even now they don't acknowledge what was available for them to know about Young Johnny in 2008. Now that "The Real McCain" has reemerged, the sad truth for our friend Cliff is that the only thing that offends the Village media more than challenging their orthodoxies is challenging their orthodoxies and being proved right.

Which is a lesson we have learned before, no doubt many times over. But once again I call attention to that remarkable Bill Moyers Journal broadcast, "Buying the War," which looked back at the performance of news-gatherers and pundits during the Bush regime's run-up to the invasion of Iraq, which -- contrary to the bogus version Karl Rove is apparently peddling in his new tell-all-lies book -- was clearly certain once the regimistas realized they could use 9/11 as cover for the military adventure their various factions were already salivating over. Here is a sample:

What Bill and his reporting team found was that with depressing consistency the journalistic whores who had uncritically toed the official regime line, and been wrong every step of the way, were rewarded, while the truly intrepid reporters who somehow managed to see what "nobody could have foreseen" were punished, and may never be forgiven in polite circles for having been right. As I pointed out when I last wrote about this, in November, "a DVD of "Buying the War" is still available, and two and a half years later seems every bit as pertinent." (At the moment the PBS website lists it as back-ordered, "but leaves warehouse in 2-4 weeks.")

A thought for the day: Wouldn't it be nice if those rewards and punishments were reversed?

#

When Bill Moyers goes, will anyone on broadcast TV uphold proper journalistic standards -- or even have any idea what they are?

Bill Moyers' Journal, which Bill will draw to a close on April 30 of next year, began with a momentous report called "Buying the War," on April 25, 2007. It was a simple but searing look at the stunning, near-complete breakdown of the infotainment-news media while the Bush regime was lying gullible Americans into war against Iraq. The shameful truth explored in that report was that there were non-Beltway journalists doing an actual job of reporting. In this all-too-brief clip, he notes of people like Knight Ridder's Warren Strobel (working with the solid backing of his bureau chief, James Wolcott), "They went about their reporting the old-fashioned way, with shoe leather, tracking down and meeting with sources deep inside the intelligence community." But no one paid attention to Knight Ridder; they weren't Beltway players. And for the journalists who tried to get the story right, there was no reward, and often punishment, while most of the people who got it wrong -- all wrong, dead wrong -- saw their careers flourish. (By the way, a DVD of "Buying the War" is still available, and two and a half years later seems every bit as pertinent. Maybe PBS could just keep recycling old BMJ reports?)

by Ken

Say it ain't so, Bill.

From Elizabeth Jensen's Friday night NYT "Media Decoder" blogpost:

Mr. Moyers said he had been planning for some time to retire the program on Dec. 25, but was asked by PBS to raise the funds to continue through April, which he did.

“I am 75 years old,” he said of the decision to end the series, which began in April 2007. The program has recently been having a “good run of it,” he added in a telephone interview on Friday, “so I feel it’s time.” He said he was not quitting television work, although he has no new projects planned.

No, it's not fair to badger Bill simply because of the gap his departure will leave. If anybody has earned relief from the grind of producing a weekly hour of solid investigative reporting, it's Bill Moyers at age 75. It's not his fault that there's nobody to replace him. Actually, my guess is that over the years he's worked with, inspired, and trained enough TV journalists that there are people who could carry on his work, but they don't have his name or his ability to squeeze money out of public-television donors.

The fact that there's nobody to replace him works out fine, since it turns out that PBS really has no interest in replacing him. Note that the PBS wizards are taking this opportunity to dump Now on PBS as well. From Ms. Jensen's report: "John Siceloff, the executive producer, said the program, hosted now by David Brancaccio, had been “a unique voice at a time when outlets for insightful journalism are diminishing. We’re all looking for places to continue that work.” Of course there isn't anyplace -- at least not in broadcast TV -- to continue that work.

I'm sure a lot of higher-ups at PBS, many of whom proclaim the highest admiration for Bill Moyers, and some of whom may actually mean it, are breathing easier now that they don't have Bill M to defend anymore. We all know how crazy he drives the loony, lying Right, people who would be incapable of championing fair reporting if their toxic lives depended on it. Bill Moyers as a journalist has always been obsessed with real fairness, the kind that's pinned to truth, as opposed to the kind drooled about by the lying liars of the Right. (When they talk about "fairness," what they mean is "lies the way we like 'em, to suit our delusional, psychotic prejudices.")

Maybe equally important, because the bias of right-wing news outlets like Fox is so blatant and egregious -- to everyone, it appears, except the American journalistic establishment -- Bill Moyers has stood brazenly apart from the muddled mob mentality of Inside the Beltway journalism, whose overriding mission is to coddle the preconceptions and prerogatives of the ossified Village establishment. Even Beltway journalists who privately sneer at the Fox Noisemakers wax indignant when it's suggested that they have abandoned pretty much any pretense to doing actual journalism in exchange for the privilege of being thought of as "insiders" in the corridors of power.

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That said, I have to admit that I haven't watched Bill Moyers' Journal all that often. I should be ashamed to admit it -- heck, I am ashamed to admit it -- but his TV hours are simply too filled with reality, of which my system these years can absorb only so much, even from someone as kindly and gentle as Bill. I'm still hopping mad from "Buying the War," and thinking about coughing about the $29.95 to buy the DVD. But realistically, in terms of the decisions that even well-meaning TV executives have to make, if somebody like me isn't watching the Journal, how big an audience can they hope for? Especially when measured against the nonstop raucous roaring produced by the Right-Wing Noise Machine in response to any attempt at honest reporting.

Still, it was always reassuring, when Bill was doing a regular program, that he was there, meaning that somebody on broadcast TV was practicing journalism.

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