Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Narrative trumps news in today’s Globe

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The questionable narrative that guides the front page of today’s Globe apparently can’t accommodate the reality of hundreds of thousands of people rejecting the divisive lies and distortions of today’s “resurgent” GOP and Tea Party.

The piece about President Obama by Mark Arsenault is an exercise in GOP boosterism. Check out the lead (emphasis mine):

President Obama embarked on a last-ditch campaign marathon yesterday in a bid to blunt the political rebuke expected to be delivered by voters in Tuesday’s midterm elections, urging dispirited Americans to give Democrats more time to deliver on the promise of change the president made two years ago.

“Last-ditch”? “Political rebuke expected”?

And THIS in the piece that’s apparently supposed to “balance” the companion “Up and down the ballot, GOP is dreaming big” GOP puff-piece.

Apparently, an energetic gathering of hundreds of thousands of folks who reject the lies, bigotry, and hatred being promulgated by the GOP and Tea Party doesn’t fit the Globe’s narrative.

I guess that restoring sanity by rejecting bigotry doesn’t sell advertising in the Globe.

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  1. How dumb do you have to be to take 200,000 motivated people, and REMOVE THEM FROM CAMPAIGNING THE WEEKEND BEFORE AN ELECTION?

    • If those 200,000 people were in fact motivated to campaign for anyone. Besides, at this point, each side has gotten there message out. It will come down to who shows up to vote on Tuesday, not who held a sign at the big intersection in town on Saturday. If there is any effect from this event, it will be motivating people to vote who may have stayed home. And that’s a big if.  

      • IF they can’t blame Colbert, they’d have to consider that people don’t agree with their ideas.  This way, we can listen to two years of why Jon Stewart wrecked Amerika.

        • just not the national party’s execution. How else to explain why this country still prefers Democrats to Republicans by a sizable margin, even as they’re about to punish Democrats at the polls?

          <

          p>Had we led with conviction, instead of timidity, and had the filibuster not existed, we’d be increasing our Congressional leads right now and people would be thinking of Nancy Pelosi — who’s driven hundreds and hundreds of bills through the House that McConnell and his ilk have killed through undemocratic means that is obscure to most of the public — as one of the most effective Speakers in the history of Speakers.

          • Outside of Massachusetts?  Party registration?  If that’s the case, how were GOP governors elected even here?

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            p>Party registration isn’t necessarily agreement with ideas.  Ask Tom Reilly, Finneran, Rush, Goguen….

            • … more recent NYT poll:

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              p>

              In general, is your opinion of the Republican party favorable or not favorable?
              Favorable: 41
              Not Favorable: 52
              DK/NA: 7

              In general, is your opinion of the Democratic party favorable or not favorable?
              Favorable: 46
              Not Favorable: 48
              DK/NA: 6

              <

              p>Moreover, this seems to have held up throughout their past polling data as well.

              <

              p>Drilling into the detail, people generally blame the Bush administration for the mess as well as Banks/Wall street.  They overwhelmingly prefer Democrats for fixing health care.  They give a slight edge to Republicans for creating jobs and a bit more of an edge for reducing the deficit.  To me this just highlights how misinformed people are about both party’s records on both issues, but that’s another matter.  

            • There’s plenty of citations available. We could sit here chatting about why Tuesday’s defeats will happen, even if people like the Democratic Party better, but I think it’s all academic. Bottom line: Democrats haven’t done their job on messaging, and haven’t done their job in getting popular bills through Congress (and even when they have — like is the case with the Wall Street reform bill — they’ve failed to talk about them). Bottom line: Cognitive dissonance is not exactly uncommon.  

      • It was totally dumb timing.

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        p>That said, I know a LOT of people who would have gone to DC or a satellite event but didn’t, because they were involved in GOTV. (Like, me.)

      • is all about GOTV — in other words, getting “who shows up to vote on Tuesday,” to increase.

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        p>I have to agree with El Kabong: the rally, being this weekend, was poor planning if Stewart and Colbert really care about making sure the Teahadists go down in flames. GoodGreat idea, lousy execution. Honestly, had it been last weekend, even, I wouldn’t say the same thing.

  2. I think many people believe that Obama really is on a last ditch effort to make some headway against the massive Republican tide washing over the country. Why are they wrong in reporting this? It’s true!

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    p>BTW, the Glenn Beck rally on Aug 28th wasn’t on the front page of the Globe either, sounds like fair reporting to me.

    <

    p>PS I thought the Stewart rally was advertised as “non-political”? A little dishonesty on their part?

    • I think that’s fair.  Of course he also advertised his rally as “non-political”.  I think both clearly had political implications.  Is “non-political” an attribute that has to be claimed in order to get a permit on the National Mall?  Otherwise, I don’t understand why both didn’t just come out and say they were political.

    • You wrote:

      I think many people believe that Obama really is on a last ditch effort to make some headway against the massive Republican tide washing over the country. Why are they wrong in reporting this? It’s true!

      <

      p>Are you even aware of bias you reflect in your choice of words? “last ditch effort”? “some headway”? “massive Republican tide”?

      <

      p>Those are propaganda words. I grant you that the rabid Republican base desperately and fervently loves language like this — I think, however, that this is different from “truth”.

      <

      p>Do we know, for example, that a similar “tide” in support of Barrack Obama and the Democrats is not washing through the urban neighborhoods of the US? When hundreds of thousands of folks turn out to demonstrate against this “massive Republican tide” that you speak of, is it wrong to not report it?

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      p>During the run-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, millions of people demonstrated against that invasion around the world. The mainstream US media, including the Globe, largely ignored it. Yet our right-wing claimed a “liberal bias” in the mainstream US media.

      <

      p>Where was the Stewart rally advertised as “non-political”? The only such claims I recall were made in advance of the “non-political” Glenn Beck rally.

      <

      p>I think today’s front-page of the Globe exemplifies the disturbing trend of modern newspapers to shift from reporting facts to “telling a story.” In my view, the two are VERY different.

      • Tom,

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        p>Agree wholeheartedly with you on your position that the news media continues to confuse news and opinion.  I am all for people, editors, whomever, expressing their opinion on news and matters of the day.  Heck newspapers even have a section for the – Opinion Pages.  However, the ongoing commingling of news and opinion in the guise of news diminishes the role of journalists.

        <

        p>

        • It’s very unusual for any story to be reported that doesn’t have bias in it. Maybe in days gone by there was an editor who would read a reporter’s story and remove lines which showed a leaning towards any side of a story but that is gone.

          <

          p>Beck’s rally and Stewart’s rally should be handled in similar manners, reporting the facts and then leave the editorial section for people’s opinions.

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          p>If you didn’t like the “tide” remark then you’ll disdain MSNBC’s current headline story titled…

          <

          p>

          New poll suggests Democrats will ‘feel the force of hurricane winds’

        • I watched the clip.

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          p>Do you also suggest that Stephen Colbert is a conservative :-)?

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          p>I think Jon Stewart has a schtick, just like Stephen Colbert. In all seriousness, I think both are mining the vein that Andy Kaufman opened up back in the seventies. From the Wikipedia summary of Andy Kaufman: “The audience would be left unsure whether they had been tricked, which became a trademark of Kaufman’s comedy.”

          <

          p>I think the Stewart rally was political from conception to fruition.

  3. Polling certainly predicts that Republicans are about to make large gains. The state of the economy is also a strong predictor that the majority party will lose seats. I’ve certainly spoken with enough voters this weekend who (irrationally) think that getting someone “new” will (magically) improve things. And those were registered Democrats.

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    p>It is hardly mere narrative to say that GOP is going to win some seats. There’s certainly no evidence anywhere that Democrats are going to strengthen their majorities in House or Senate.

    • I’m fine with reporting polling results, with observing the relationship between the economy and voter’s ballot-box decisions, and with reporting the magical thinking of too many voters (though I would prefer such thinking to be identified as such).

      <

      p>In my view, there is no place for phrases like “last ditch” or “blunt the political rebuke expected” in an above-the-fold news item on the front page of a major metropolitan news daily.

      <

      p>Report the news, yes. The “interpretation” belongs on the editorial page.

  4. I agree that the D.C. event should have gotten much more prominent coverage.  But let’s not, in making that point, construct false dichotomies.  It is pretty much impossible to present news without narrative.  Nor is it possible to report without some level of interpretation.   Facts do not simply “speak for themselves,” and it takes a lot of hard intellectual labor to decide what is a relevant fact, what that relevance is, where to find it, etc.  So you can’t get election coverage without getting some judgments about what’s salient and why.  Furthermore, the basic claim being presented in the stories you target, namely, that the Republicans are going to win many seats nationally, is–alas!– probably true.  We won’t know for sure until tomorrow night, but we do know that it’s what nearly all polls (and, I’d wager, most of us on BMG, too) say is going to happen.  We lefties and liberals can quibble about the particular metaphors used in the headlines, such as “epidemic,” “rebuke” and the like, but are those word choices really a major part of our political ailments (note the metaphor) today?   Hardly.

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    p>None of the above entails that the following points are false:

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    p>1. The ever-dwindling allocation of resources to serious investigative journalism erode the foundations necessary to democratic public discourse.

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    p>2.  Coverage in even the putatively liberal parts of the MSM is among the impediments to left and even liberal politics.  This is true both because of the constraints of corporate ownership and because of what media scholars sometimes call “the politics of narrative form,” i.e. both because of how, in this case, political issues are defined and portrayed in the press.

    <

    p>3. Coverage in most newspapers is much shoddier and more pernicious than in the Globe.

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    p>4. Coverage on TV tends to be worse still.  The selection of talking heads, to take only one example, skews way right.

    <

    p>5. The only difficult question about the relationship between Fox news and Republican party is whether it is better to call the former a subsidiary of the latter or vice versa.  

    <

    p>Like you, I imagine, I’d say, yeah, these are big problems.  But they’re often complex problems, and we should not simplify them.  Nor–and I think this is really important–should stressing this importance  keep us from recognizing and thinking hard about the many forms of Democratic bungling and cowardice that have helped create tomorrow’s likely electoral fiasco.  To reckon adequately with the current political moment, we need to look honestly at failings from poor framing, to poor timing, to bad choices about what issues get acted on and which ones get pushed off the agenda, to the all too manifest role of big financial interests in shaping Democratic policies.    

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    p>And, no, I am not thereby suggesting anything good about the–generally heinous–Republicans who are about to take office.  There’s nothing good to say about them or the causes they represent.

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    p>After all that gloom it may be worth adding that MA, happily, looks very likely to be an outlier tomorrow:  my guess is that Democrats win every Congressional race and all of the statewide campaigns except the one for auditor.  And certainly in our Governor’s case, that victory will be very much deserved.

    • Coverage on TV tends to be worse still.  The selection of talking heads, to take only one example, skews way right.

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      p>Have you watched the ED show, Hardball, Keith Olberman, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O”Donnel… lately. Could you please show me how the “talking heads” on these back to back shows on MSNBC are skewing to the right?

      <

      p>

      The only difficult question about the relationship between Fox news MSNBC and Republican Democratic party is whether it is better to call the former a subsidiary of the latter or vice versa.  

      <

      p>Huh?

      <

      p>

      And certainly in our Governor’s case, that victory will be very much deserved.

      <

      p>Democratic incumbents’ victories are well deserved but Republican victories are not?

    • I was going to take up the “narrative is inescapable” line too but you did it better than I could.

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