Tag: what agenda?

Bill Whittle is as Good in Multimedia . . .

. . . as he is in print! Go watch!

Ladies and gentlemen, we not only have an aristocratic imperial congress-for-life that no longer represents the will of the American people, we also have in place in the unbiased, dispassionate watchdogs that they claim to be, a wildly partisan and utterly unethical press corps who decides over cocktails who should win elections and who should lose them, and then prepares the appropriate narrative which they sell to you as unbiased news. But the current product of CNN, Newsweek and all the rest are as far from actual news reporting as our current Congress and federal government are from the ideals that our Founders had in mind at the very birth of this great nation.

Edited to add today’s Day by Day:

How Can You Tell You’re at a “Grassroots” Protest?

1). Almost all the protest signs are hand-lettered.

2). There isn’t a tour bus to be found

3). Nobody is wearing a Ché shirt.

I took an early lunch today and went down to the TEA Party protest at El Presidio Park in downtown Tucson. I took a digital camera to record the scene. I don’t think there were a thousand people in attendance at any one time, but given the amount of traffic in and out, I’d say there were well over a thousand who showed up – many if not most like me, who could only spare about an hour away from work. Here’s three crowd shots from the same position. (I’d do a panorama if I knew how and thought I could post something you could actually see:

And that’s just a portion of the crowd. I’d like to see what it looked like from the upper floors of the nearby buildings.

There were a LOT of people with hand-lettered protest signs. Here are some of the better ones:

No Ché, but a Bob Marley T-shirt did make an appearance:

Of course, some people did make use of printers and graphics programs:

But no Debt Star.

While there was a lot of Obama-bashing, there really wasn’t a lot of anti-democrat signage, it was mostly anti-political-party stuff. Neither major political party got much love at this rally. But there’s always some:

She also had this to say:

And, of course, there was some free-enterprise capitalism going on. The Kettle Korn guy:

And the hot-dog vendor with a LONG line:

But by far, my favorite was this kid whose mother loves him very much!

I’ll be really interested to see how the legacy media covers these events as opposed to the blogosphere.

UPDATE: Well, that question has been answered.

In relation to yesterday’s post, here’s something in a similar vein from the UK’s Guardian:

Mad about The One
The US media have been captivated by Obama, at the expense of their curiosity and scepticism

Harold Evans, Saturday, Nov. 1, 2008

It’s fitting that the cynicism “vote early and vote often” is commonly attributed to Chicago’s Democratic boss, mayor Richard Daley, who famously voted the graveyards in 1960 to help put John Kennedy in the White House. In this 2008 race, it’s the American media that have voted very early and often. They long ago elected the star graduate of Chicago’s Democratic machine, Barack Obama.

I am not talking of editorials in newspapers, though Obama has the preponderance of the endorsements over John McCain. Obama certainly deserves the credit for recruiting impressive advisers and running a more efficient campaign machine than any one in the US’s political history.

What’s troubling to anyone old-fashioned enough to care about standards in journalism is the news coverage in mainstream media. Forget the old notions of objectivity, fairness, thoroughness, and so on. The nastiest rumours on both sides haven’t been published, but the coverage has been slavishly on the side of “the one”.

It has not just been anti-Republican. It goes without saying that after eight years of George Bush’s macho blunders, the disenchantment of even the conservative outlets was bound to show. Researchers at the Project for Excellence in Journalism report that in the six weeks since the Republican convention, McCain, once the darling of the media, got four times as many negative stories as positive ones. Meanwhile, Obama got twice as many positive stories as McCain. The website Politico has also acknowledged that it had loaded the dice against McCain: 100 stories were more favourable to Obama than McCain; 69 were the opposite.

But the press bias towards Obama doesn’t represent a simple revulsion for the Republican party. It was on display in the Democratic primaries with the persecution of Hillary Clinton. Worst of all, in the primaries, the press let the Obama campaign get away with continuous insinuations below the radar that the Clintons were race-baiters. Instead of exposing that absurd defamation for what it was – a nasty smear – the media sedulously propagated it.

Clinton made the historically correct and uncontroversial remark that civil rights legislation came about from a fusion of the dreams of Dr Martin Luther King and the legislative follow-through by President Lyndon Johnson. The New York Times misrepresented that as a disparagement of King, twisting her remarks to imply that “a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change”. This was one of a number of manipulations on race by the Obama campaign, amply documented by the leading Democratic historian, Princeton’s Sean Wilentz. Clinton came close to tears in a coffee shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which many thought helped her to win an upset victory there. MSNBC television gave a platform to the Chicago congressmen, Jesse Jackson Jr, where he questioned her tears and claimed that she’d not shed any tears for the black victims of Katrina, and that she’d pay for that in the South Carolina primary, where 45% of the electorate would be African-Americans.

In fact, MSNBC ran a non-stop campaign for Obama propelled by the misogyny of its anchors, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and David Shuster. Chelsea Clinton joining Clinton’s campaign prompted Shuster to report she was “pimping” for her mother.

Obamania has not been deflated one bit by the non-stop talkers on rightwing radio. They offer vituperation in place of enlightenment; paranoia in place of policies, and as such have little influence with the crucial independents.

On the web, the rightwing Drudge Report highlights anything that favours McCain, the Huffington Post does the same for Obama, and the more independent Slate has said only one of its staff intends to vote for McCain, the other 55 for Obama. Fox News has the vehement Sean Hannity paired with the mildly liberal Alan Colmes, (mildly liberal?) not a fair match, but it has been more willing to investigate than CNN. In the Democratic primaries, there was a pattern on CNN where the short news videos of Clinton rarely let you hear what she was saying, but the short news videos of Obama let his words come through. I mentioned this to a CNN editor who said, “Oh, that’s our young video editors, they just find Obama more exciting.”

The young and affluent liberals have been captivated by Obama’s charisma, the unstated notion that electing a black man will be absolution for the years of discrimination and prejudice, and the expectation that Obama’s undoubted appeal to the outside world will repair America’s image. All understandable, but these emotions have been allowed to swamp the commonplace imperatives of journalism: curiosity and scepticism.

All the mainstream national outlets were extraordinarily slow to check Obama’s background. And until it became inescapable because of a video rant, they wouldn’t investigate the Reverend Jeremiah Wright connection for fear of being accused of racism. They wouldn’t explore Obama’s dealing with the corrupt, now convicted, Chicago businessman Tony Rezko. They haven’t investigated Obama’s pledge to get rid of the secret ballot in trade union affairs. After years of inveighing against “money in politics”, they’ve tolerated his breach of the pledge to restrict himself to public financing as McCain has done (to his cost). Now the LA Times refuses to release a possibly compromising video, which shows Obama praising Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi at a 2003 banquet, saying its promises to its source prevent it from doing so.

The British press is notorious for political distortions, which more or less balance out. But the American press likes to think of itself as more superior and detached than it actually is. In 2000, the mainstream media did a great deal to elect George Bush by portraying Al Gore as a boastful liar.

Let’s hope the consequences of electing “the one” will be as wondrous as the press has led the voters to believe.

Let’s rather hope that “the one’s” loss will be seen (among other things) as repudiation of the press’s manipulation.

I received the link to this piece from journalism professor Edward Wasserman, with whom I had a short exchange back in 2004, after I sent him an email about the Malone ABC piece. Hopefully in the not-too-distant future, I’ll have a post up concerning a new exchange.