The Enlightened Despot

Well, not me personally, but anyone who reports on things outside of the context of his 9-5. Schumer is one of the sponsors of the senate version of a federal shield law, which would allow journalists to refuse to testify about their anonymous sources. He recently decided to make his bill a little worse:

Previously, the Senate was working with a version of the shield law (S. 448) that defined a journalist in broad terms, focusing on the process and craft of newsgathering. That stood in contrast to the House version (H.R. 985), which passed in March and defines a journalist as someone who gathers news and information “for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain.”

On Thursday, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) offered an amendment to the Senate version that hews toward the professional definition in the House. Under the amendment, which was adopted by the Senate Judiciary Committee, a journalist is defined as someone who:

(iii) obtains the information sought while working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, an entity—
(I) that disseminates information by print, broadcast, cable, satellite, mechanical, photographic, electronic, or other means; and
(II) that—
(aa) publishes a newspaper, book, magazine, or other periodical;
(bb) operates a radio or television broadcast station, network, cable system, or satellite carrier, or a channel or programming service for any such station, network, system, or carrier;
(cc) operates a programming service; or
(dd) operates a news agency or wire service;

I’m not in the business of weighing in on debates about just where media is headed. Really, the only thing I’d put money on is that old and new media outlets will keep going under for a while now before a new set of workable business models emerge. This juxtaposition in my Reader feed amused me, though:

This is excellent news:

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use against “high value” Qaeda detainees. The memos, written by Justice Department lawyers in May 2005, provide the legal rationale for waterboarding, head slapping and other rough tactics used by the CIA. One senior Obama official, who like others interviewed for this story requested anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, said the memos were “ugly” and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a “truth commission” on torture.

Obama has taken a fair amount of criticism for not pushing harder toward punishing the torture-enablers in the Bush administration, but the course he appears to be on strikes me as exactly right. Had Obama come out guns blazing, starting an investigation of his own, say, the backlash would have been huge, and we’d be hearing no end of complaints about partisan witch-hunting. Isn’t that politics getting in the way of what’s right? Absolutely, but when politics are in the way, shutting your eyes and pretending they aren’t won’t get you past them. The idea that Obama should have the courage of his convictions to do the right thing, however unpoular, simply doesn’t make sense here. If you believe that investigating, prosecuting, and ultimately punishing the people responsible for American torture is of great importance, then you should want Obama to work toward that goal in a way that can actually work, even if it’s not the most direct approach.

The key to that, it seems to me, is to increase public awareness of what has gone on. As much as all of this has been discussed in the blogosphere, I don’t get the sense that the man on the street has a good sense at all of the degree to which the photos they’ve seen from Abu Grahib are the result of a policy initiated at the top, rather than the work of “a few bad apples”. The MSM has for the most part played a fairly cowardly role in this. The more smoking guns the administration releases, the harder it will be for this to continue.

Color me naive, but I honestly believe that if Americans become more fully aware of what has gone on, they will be very angry, and launching an investigation will become politically necessary. At that point, expect the effort to start in Congress, ideally as a bipartisan effort. The obvious candidate to be the face of such a push: John McCain.

This is a sad day for the Despot. We made it through the election with out once mentioning Joe the Plumber. (Well, either that, or our site search is broken, which is certainly possible.) In any case, I can’t think of three words that make me wince quite like ‘Joe the Plumber’. It’s not so much that I dislike him - though I do. I felt painful pangs of embarassment whenever he came up. I was embarassed for the jerk who thought he was worth discussing, embarassed for everyone who thought ‘Joe the Plumber’ was an acceptable way to refer to a grown-up with no secret identity, and embarassed for a democracy that could be held captive by this jackass. But as much as the media discussed him as if he mattered, nothing to do with him ever did end up mattering, so I didn’t have to confront this agony and talk about him.

It appears, however, that he is here to stay, at least for a little while. And, painful though it is, this really needs watching:

I’ll have more to say about this in a few days when I’m done weeping, but for now I’ll say that JtP’s career as a journalist is more evidence that the McCain campaign has done some lasting damage to the GOP. Letting the Palinites out of the bottle is all well and good as a hail mary effort to salvage a dying campaign, but they simply will not be able to compete nationally with these clowns front and center.

No one, according to an incredibly unscientific study released by me now. I believe I’ve written about Google Trends before, but if you aren’t familiar with it, you should get familiar. It allows you to see the frequency with which particular words or phrases have appeared in searches and news stories over time. This is a deeply flawed way of measuring interest in a topic, for any number of obvious reasons, but it’s fun, and you learn a lot more than nothing.

So a few hours ago I found myself looking at how the word ‘recession’ was doing. I can only imagine that I was subconciously influenced by the Economist’s R-word Index, which has been around for years, though I’m not aware of having thought about it until afterwards. In any case, here’s the very unsurprising graph for ‘recession’ by itself:

So both journalists and average web-surfers are suddenly much more interested in recessions than they have been in recent years. Nothing surprising in that. But looking at one search term by itself is never that informative, because the raw number of searches is pretty meaningless unless you know a lot about web traffic. So I compared ‘recession’ to a term that represented the weightiest news item of our time: ‘Palin’. Also, to focus on this particular recession, I limited results to the last year. Take a look:

(more…)

K-Lo reports Michael Totten’s reaction to the shoe-throwing incident:

The Bush shoe incident made me laugh slightly. Only because of the U.S. was an Iraqi journalist allowed to throw that shoe. On some level, he knows that. Tellingly, Prime Minister Maliki stepped in the way to protect the president, and many Iraqis in the room apologized for the offense.

I have briefly met many Iraqi journalists in Baghdad. They seem like decent people, for the most part, and are not as shifty as many other civilians I encounter.

Shifty? Shifty? In all fairness, Totten goes on to praise the Iraqi press:

In the Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad, where journalists are credentialed by the U.S. Army, is a poster showing the faces of all the journalists killed in Iraq last year. There are dozens of faces on that poster, and almost every single one of them is Iraqi. Iraqi journalists are very brave, much braver than I am, and I’d hate to see Americans get the wrong idea about these people from one lousy incident.

That’s lovely, but it makes what comes before even more bizarre. He’d hate “one lousy incident” to force Americans to lose sight of the fact that these reporters aren’t all that shifty, on an Iraqi-adjusted scale? Totten is a field reporter. He’s won awards for his coverage of Iraq on the ground. He’s been embedded with both the Army and the Marine Corps. The whole point of him is that he’s supposed to have some privilged insight into the situation in Iraq, based on the connections he has formed with people over there. Even if he hated every last Iraqi man, woman, and child, you’d think he’d have a somewhat politic way of expressing that fact, given that interacting with them is his job. So he praises their press corps for being reasonably unshifty. Shifty!

Via Kevin Drum, a neat chart tracking mentions of global warming in the media:

Drum is upset that media discussion of global warming has gone down dramatically over the past two years in Europe and America, just as predictions are getting gloomier. I agree that this is too bad; people are presumably more likely to respond to a problem if it’s being discussed in the media. But media coverage is always going to depend on dramatic new developments. This is true even when the importance of an issue is huge. “The end of the world is coming” is a great headline, but “the end of the world is still coming” isn’t. Beyond merely affecting which stories are covered, this leads to distortion of how stories are covered. Take the Democratic primary this year; after Super Tuesday, sensible people crunched the numbers and saw that it was more or less all over, barring a DGLB. But Hillary obviously wasn’t going anywhere, so that story simply wouldn’t do.

In the case of global warming, I don’t think this is as big a problem as it seems. Yes, it would be nice if the media were reminding people of this problem more often, but we have already reached the point where there is a lot of political momentum, so coverage is likely to track actual political activity, rather than driving it. Not much has been going on there recently, but when cap-and-trade schemes start being debated in Congress, one should expect the volume of articles on climate change to spike.

… This, from Josh Marshall at the height of the furor over Palin’s press blackout, was the best one-liner of the election:

Isn’t Palin supposed to move to Cheney’s undisclosed location after she gets elected, not before?

There has been more and more talk, both laudatory and disapproving, of McCain ‘running against the media’. As I mentioned earlier, the media will not, in fact, be on the ballot in November. It is the Obama-Biden ticket that they have to defeat. And while the appearence of a feud with the media might be helpful, insofar as it makes McCain look good or Obama look bad, there is absolutely zero intrinsic value to scoring victories over the press corps. What the public thinks of the people feeding them news is irrelevant; it is only how the news affects their thoughts on the actual candidates that is of interest.

This should be painfully obvious - indeed, I feel silly for having written the preceding paragraph. But it apparently needs saying because it renders much of what the media-hating members of the media on the right are saying these days. Consider K-Lo (never fun, I realize, but take your medicine):

On Gwen Ifill, Palin said, “I’m not going to let it be a concern.” She said it will “make us work that much harder. She talked about her ticket being the “underdog,” presumably because of the media.

Don’t tell me folks won’t be motivated by this. They will. And the more the media criticizes, it feeds the campaign’s anti-media campaign. It may just be a winning strategy.

If you’ll forgive me for saying so, Kathryn, you are talking drivel again. The “anti-media campaign” very obviously does not become ever more effective as the volume and severity of media criticism increase. Rather, it works best when there are a small but noticeable numbre of clumsy attacks coming from fairly visible but not overly-respected journalists, along with a higher volume of defensive stories about how unfair the media is being by members of that same media who don’t want to be viewed as partisans. There is no shortage of voters who are capable of forming the opinion that the press is being unfair to candidate x based on the press telling them that the press is being unfair to candidate x.

If, on the other hand, everyone in the media were to repeatedly and viciously attack a candidate, there would be no upside there at all. Most voters can’t possibly know when charges against a politician are unfair unless someone in the MSM is reporting on that fact.

What I’ve laid out above are the two extreme states the media could be in in the context of a “campaign against the media”; obviously things will never look quite like either. The problem for McCain is that the current reality is much closer to the latter case than the former. Having the press this unhappy with you isn’t a strategy, it’s a liability.

Since we’ve been talking so much about it, here’s the clip:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRkWebP2Q0Y&hl=en&fs=1]

Now, to be fair, there actually is something to this ‘gotcha journalism’ charge. Couric is clearly filled with contempt for Palin, and she pressed the governor not because she thought it was important for her viewers to know what Palin reads, but because she knew Palin couldn’t answer the question.

But think about that. If Couric had asked McCain, Obama, or Biden that question, it most certainly wouldn’t have been a ‘gotcha’ question, it would have been a stupid question, because, frankly, who cares? ‘What newspapers and magazines do you read’ would be an incredibly easy question for any serious politician to answer, but it wouldn’t really tell us much about what they thought or intended to do about anything. So one side-effect of the Palin candidacy is now massive inflation in what counts as a gotcha question. It would be absurd at this point to ask Palin who the foreign minister of XYZistan is, so Couric was reduced to asking: “How many newspapers can you name?” The answer, dear reader, will shock you.

Campbell Brown goes after the Palin press blackout:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSNkloIFTQ0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1]

As I have pointed out before, I have a soft spot for Campbell, but I’m afraid I have to disagree with her here. I am as outraged about her being hidden from the press as the next 16th-century-ruler-turned-U.S.-political-blogge, but I think attributing it to sexism is absurd - though she is far from the first to make this claim. It might be the case that the McCain camp thinks they can get away with sequestering her because people in general are sexist, but there is no reason to think they are themselves suffering from sexist delusions.

McCain’s people want to shield Sarah Palin from reporters not because they think women can’t handle tough questions, but because they think Sarah Palin can’t handle tough questions. And they’re presumably right. She certainly has no experience dealing with the national media. She apparently had almost no information about the world beyond North America until a few weeks ago. She didn’t look very adept in the Gibson interview. And there is a mountain of scandals and patent lies about which no sensible campaign would want her questioned.

Sexism is at worst a pretext here. The McCain camp will keep Palin hidden until the media makes them suffer for it. This has nothing to do with their views on women, and everything to do with their knowing what’s good for them.

As has already been discussed at the despot, there has been a lot of grumbling in the liberal blogosphere about the media failing to do a good enough job in calling McCain and Palin out for lying, and, for the most part, it’s been justified. Everyone loves an equivalence, so journalists are always tempted to say: sure, Palin was a bridge supporter, but Obama changed his mind about public financing, so who can judge? The media’s desire to seem even-handed means that as long as neither campaign is utterly without sin - and there is never much risk of that - one side can get away with being much more dishonest than the other without being called on it by the press.

There are signs, though, that the media may have had it with McCain. ABC ran a fact check on some of Palin’s claims in her interview with Gibson, and the results weren’t flattering. Gibson himself was much harder on Palin than he was expected to be.  McCain was worked over pretty thoroughly on the View. The WaPo recaps the Cindy McCain drug story, including accusations that the McCains weren’t entirely honest when they came clean about her problem, and may have been fairly ruthless in trying to cover it up.

It could just be a few bad news days in a row for McCain, but it definitely seems possible that the GOP has taken things far enough that the media feels comfortable calling them on it. Yglesias, however, is still unimpressed:

As I’ve said before, though, the big question isn’t about whether the press writes some good individual stories. The big question is about whether the press creates a narrative. John McCain keeps saying things that aren’t true. So does his running mate. So do his campaign ads. So do his surrogates on television. When does that become a narrative? When do we get stories about how the McCain campaign has been “dogged by questions about its honesty?”

I’m not sure I’m with him here. One major advantage that individual articles have over narratives is that individual articles exist. To say that there has been “a narrative about x” in the media is clearly a flakey way of saying something, but it’s not clear exactly what that something is. I would have thought that a whole lot of stories about x would do the trick, but clearly that’s not what he’s going for. But if the last two sentences in that quote are supposed to be synonymous, that is, if a narrative about x means a few stories about how x keeps happening, then I think we may be in the early stages of a narrative. In the first of those clips from the View, they tell McCain to his face that more than one of his ads has centered around a lie. Or how about this from the AP:

The “Straight Talk Express” has detoured into doublespeak.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment. He said Friday that Palin never asked for money for lawmakers’ pet projects as Alaska governor, even though she has sought nearly $200 million in earmarks this year. He says Obama would raise nearly everyone’s taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts instead.

Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain’s skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama’s campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.

I don’t know what a narrative is, but if articles like that one keep coming out, the McCain camp is in trouble.