Cross-posted from Blue News Tribune. I try to avoid writing diaries that say “The media sucks,” because it’s such a cliche and so easy. But sometimes …
During their September 10 editions, the three evening network news programs cumulatively devoted more coverage to Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s September 9 joint address to Congress on health reform — in which Wilson claimed President Obama lied when he said “our reform efforts” would not “insure illegal immigrants” — than they allotted to the speech itself. Moreover, while ABC’s Jake Tapper explicitly stated that “the president’s reforms” would not “apply to illegal immigrants” and NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell said that “the bill, as it’s written now, is explicit saying that illegal immigrants will not get any health care benefits in reform,” the CBS Evening News did not attempt to fact-check Wilson’s interjection.
More at http://mediamatters.org/resear…
This is the sort of meta-item you can really make yourself crazy about. (Was this a deliberate strategy? Why did the media enable it? Etc., etc.)
I guess I’ll just focus on the most basic questions:
1. Why would any news producer allow coverage of Wilson to be anything more than a footnote?
2. Would the coverage be the same if Bush was president and Wilson was a Democrat? (Dems say “It wouldn’t have happened,” and history favors us on that.)
But, I have to be honest: If Wilson were a Democrat, I’d be annoyed by the coverage and would say let’s move on.
As is, I’m annoyed by the coverage. Let’s move on.
It was too easy to send a check to what’s his name’s opponent, and feel like we’ve done something important and meaningful, without knowing a thing about the opponent rather than he was a Dem in a Republican state that seems to have a great tolerance, even affection for public servants who indulge in offensive,rude and racist behavior. Think he’ll win? Think it won’t be able to use this to leverage double the amount of contributions? Psahw!
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p>Better uses for my limited political energy and resources.
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p>Q. So why are you spending 15 minutes writing this?
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p>A. Great tolerance and affection for anyone who sent a check and had even a moment of feeling like they did something important and meaningful. Now I ask you to push/support our Congressional delegation and make sure they know we are watching and evaluating their public behavior during this most important couple of weeks.
Why has everyone gotten so worked up about this? Like i said the other day, first the Crowley/Gates/stupidity remark derailed healthcare discussions and now Wilson’s outburst. You can’t blame the right since we would love to have seen this story die but the Democrats smelled a victory in painting “all Republicans” with the Wilson brush so I’m sure Howard Dean and company picked up the red phone with direct dial to the MSM and said “play the story as a headline, we can’t let this opportunity get away”. Result, Joe WIlson will get reelected and Obama’s message got lost… again. Blame this one on the home team.
Of course there was no literal blood this time, but the point is the media, especially television, like drama. This is why nominating conventions get such short shrift by the networks; they’re too scripted. There’s always going to be some news value to what the President has to say, but he didn’t say all that much he wasn’t expected to. The Wilson outburst, on the other hand was made for TV. It was unexpected, exciting in a way, and it fit nicely with the heckling narrative of the summer, so the media just ate it up.
You cannot have watched August in which a lot of frothing teagbaggers garnered all the media coverage and still wondered if Joe Wilson’s outburst was spontaneous.
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p>If you frame the debate you win the debate.
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p>For all the millions of people who heard Obama’s health care proposal, millions more heard Joe Wilson frame the debate, the president is lying about illegal immigrants getting taxpayer-funded health care. The illegal immigrant wedge card is on the table. The president is untrustworthy meme is on the table. Health care reform is on the table …kind of.
Column here:
As HTML Mencken insightfully noted in what is one of the best blog posts ever written, our political mores demand vehement repudiation of petty acts of incivility (not all, but most) while tolerating and even approving of extremely consequential acts of indecency as long as they’re advocated with superficial civility.
He is examining an article in Politico which argues that the Republicans have been taken over by crazies. They are crazy not because they assert crazy things but because (horrors!) they are rude. Following the usual rules of “journalism”, Politico then feels compelled to find some way to blame the Left for craziness. This passage is at once amusing and appalling:
Nor are Democrats strangers to having their crazy uncles take center stage. During the run-up to the Iraq war, for example, Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) and David Bonior (D-Mich.) famously flew to Baghdad, where McDermott asserted that he believed the president would “mislead the American public” to justify the war. The trip made it a cakewalk for critics to describe the Democratic Party as chock-a-block with traitorous radicals.
Now, if you think about it, McDermott, Bonior, and Thompson were right!
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p>The mainstream media has a dysfunctional view of what constitutes craziness.
“I want to comment on posts. Why can’t I register?”
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p>Over the years, I’ve found that many people who wanted to leave comments weren’t interested in sharing useful insights with others. Rather, the point was to keep me to busy with cleaning up bullshit.
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p>This is basic PSYOP and it happens to every site that deals with controversial issues. If the site’s editor is busy, busy, busy dealing with nonsense, less time is spent on core activities. Mission accomplished.
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p>Obviously, there are people who are genuinely interested in writing informative, on topic comments, and I appreciate and welcome that input. The problem is that I have no way of knowing if someone is working full time for a .gov/.mil bullshit factory, mentally ill, working extremist religious agendas, mainly interested in trying to spam their own blog, etc. I don’t want to read that stuff and the people who support this site definitely don’t want their time wasted with that nonsense. Sometimes, comments start out ok, and then the true nonsense motives come out.
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p>If you are committed to writing civil, on topic, informative comments, send me an email requesting an account. Include a desired username. I’ll manually create an account for you.
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p>To the trolls, crooks, spammers, idiots, psychopaths, stalkers and the rest of the noise generators out there, if you think that you’re going to pull a fast one, understand that I’ll punch your tickets without warning.