Bad, inaccurate and silly articles and headlines are no doubt going to be the norm for this election. The next in line for todays top spot is the following:
Listen, there are two New Yorkers running, that is hardly a crowded field. Meanwhile there is a third guy who has said he won’t run BUT whom the press is building up as a candidate. Even if he did run, that would be three. There are currently twenty-plus people running. Less than 10% of that field is from NY. That is by no means crowded.
If you are going to count Bloomberg then you have to count EVERYONE ELSE who is rumored to run. Gringrich & Gore etc. At which point you could also make the following headline:
“The Letter G Dominates presidential names”
Once Fred Thompson gets into the race you can also say “Thompsons Crowd Presidential Field”.
There is a story on ABC.com right now about how the Pentagon spends a good deal of money on research, some of it very wacky research at that. Gay bomb & psychic teleportation wacky.
Now granted the idea of creating a ‘gay bomb’ sounds pretty crazy. Well it is pretty crazy too. With that said, this is science. Not long ago funding billion dollar research to split a microscopic atom in order to blow up cities probably sounded pretty darn wacky too. I am not going to lie, a good chunk of this research will end up never leading to anything substantive. Because of that plenty of politicians and political watchers will use it in a stump speech to talk about the waste of government. The reality is you never know where good science will come from. Did anyone think mold could be used to cure disease? Probably not.
With that said THE LAST group of people who should be talking about funding stupid things is the media. At the same time this story is running another story is out purporting that NBC is paying Paris Hilton $1 million for her first post-jail interview. I guarantee the country and the media would get more out of that $1 million searching for psychic teleportation then they will spending it on Paris Hilton. Which is to say, what can you get for less then nothing?
“Probably there should be a rule against it,” said New Yorker writer Mark Singer, who wrote the magazine’s profile of Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign, then gave $250 to America Coming Together and its get-out-the-vote campaign to defeat President Bush. “But there’s a rule against murder. If someone had murdered Hitler  a journalist interviewing him had murdered him  the world would be a better place. I only feel good, as a citizen, about getting rid of George Bush, who has been the most destructive president in my lifetime. I certainly don’t regret it.”
An interesting article on MSNBC which stated “MSNBC.com identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.”
The article is chock full of good quotes that will make your head roll:
“I don’t make campaign contributions,” said Jean A. Briggs, who gave a total of $2,000 to the Republican Party and Republican candidates, most recently this March. “I’m the assistant managing editor of Forbes magazine.”
When asked about the Republican National Committee donations, she replied, “You call that a campaign contribution? It’s not putting money into anyone’s campaign.”
(For the record: The RNC gave $25 million to the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004.)
If you want to join the political Internet revolution, make sure you’ve got reliable Exchange outsourcing to handle all your incoming love/hate mail! Small business email hosts will ensure that your email is accessible whenever you need it, and a business email account will give you and your coworkers a unified email server.
I actually think Klein is hitting on something bigger and I am actually currently writing about it and will have posted either here or somewhere else soon. The Internet has given a huge voice to those who have surrounded themselves around a cause. At the same time it has turned those around these causes very nasty and very radicalized and not prone to allowing others into their domain. (I use the McLuhan idea of retribalism, ok enough, more on that in the future).
Cindy Sheehan became a very big example of this to me and right now it seems to be hitting its height in the “liberal” side of the Internet in the same way it took in the conservative talk radio/attack book side of the media in the 90’s. Basically these organizations have formed a “you are with us or against us” attitude.
Both sides right now are playing to their bases, it’s primary season, but the left base seems really intent on attacking their own. I understand they felt snubbed after 2000 & 2004 but its definitely overcompensation time now.
Anyone who even hints at having an agenda slightly different then these groups is attacked and ripped to shreds. There are examples, such as immigration on the other side, but its a loose confederation as opposed to the highly Internet organized left.
The reality is governing demands moderation & compromise. These groups increasingly take any compromise as a sign of weakness and turning on the base. Those two things run counter to one another and should make for a messy future. Which to be honest as an outside observer, I kind of like.
In a way, political fundraisers are a lot like school fundraisers. All parties try very hard to be the fundraising leader, annoying whoever they can to get support. But, unlike a school fundraiser, politicians are often successful at raising funds and don’t have to hawk new school supplies to their friends and families!
Right now if you visit the Huffington Post you will see the following:
Clinton is maxed out on big donations, cannot keep up with small donations, a supposed insider reports.
… doesn’t mean you have to use it. Sorry but I felt like tossing out my opinion for a moment.
As you know MSNBC hosted the Don Imus program up until the I-Man went a little nutty and got himself thrown off. The channel quickly replaced the program with an innovative and completely different morning idea. They ran the news. Yeap, sounds crazy but a news network ran news.
The problem is, they spent all this money on a studio. You just can’t pack a couple of neon desks and microphones up, that would be crazy. Thus Gregory Live starring David Gregory was born.
It was the biggest topic in the campaign news for at least twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours this week, U.S. General Pace remarked that homosexuality was “immoral” and suddenly every news reporter was flocking to find out what all the candidates thought. Did Senator John McCain, the only major candidate to have served, agree with the general? Did Mitt Romney, the candidate now being championed AND questioned heavily by the Religious right, have the answer that would make them happy? The General was speaking about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell a popular issue in other elections. What did each candidate really think?
If you wanted to find out and get your news straight from the horses mouth then heading to any of the candidates Web pages certainly wasn’t the way to do it.
I am one step above the casual Web viewer when it comes to using the candidates sites. I subscribe to RSS when possible, get campaign e-mail and check out various other sites which monitor the candidates blogs. Nowhere, not in those immediate hours and rarely afterward did I see anything at all addressing the issue of the day. The sites had plenty of virtual networking available, I could watch old video footage, see Hillary have a conversation from three weeks ago. I could do a lot, I just couldn’t find out what the candidates were thinking, in real time, about an issue immediately relevant to the news.
Edwards campaign cited the participation of FOX News along with scheduling conflicts for the non-participation of the candidate in debates to be held in Nevada on August 14th. The decision is quickly being hailed in the liberal blogosphere which is organizing a movement to delete FOX’s participation altogether.
My personal take? I understand why Edward’s is making this move. He is trying to play to the liberal base of the party. Regardless of its ‘Fair & Balanced’ mantra I have rarely been able to find anything but a conservative slant on FOX. When there are Democrats and liberals I usually shutter for them as they tend not to be seasoned party veterans who understand the nuance of their arguments. It reads quite simple, Republicans are in Control and Democrats have no idea what they are talking about.
That is a gross generalization of course but it is, in my opinion the truth.
So what should Democrats be doing to combat a 24/7 news network that they perceive is against them?
The big media event this weekend happened in Selma Alabama where (gasp!) Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama spoke at the same event, in the same city, and on the same day! Pull out the fire hoses friends, the media suspected things would get hot!
Now you may have missed the endless barrage of articles with the word “faggot” in the headline this weekend, thank you Ann Coulter, but I bet you saw the endless barrage of headlines referring to the latest Clinton/Obama smackdown.
If you followed the actual event you were seriously let in for some massive and jaw dropping, disappointment. Yes friends, two politicians speaking at an event honoring civil rights might sound like a rock em’ sock em’ display of fiery force to some editors but it sure is a boring sight to witness in reality. So why did they write with such gusto that big things were going to happen? Well, what else would they write about?
If you notice I fill the blog up with media criticism along with election information. I think its important to help people realize when information is misinformation, advertising or just bad journalism.
Anyway Fark.com creator Drew Curtis has a very well written and informative article on the subject of media criticism in the Christian Science Monitor that I wanted to point to.
