David G. Savage / Los Angeles Times September 10, 2009

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court’s conservative bloc sounded poised Wednesday to strike down on free speech grounds a 100-year-old ban against corporations spending large amounts of money to elect or defeat congressional and presidential candidates.

If the justices were to issue such a ruling in the next few months, it could reshape American politics, beginning with the congressional campaign in 2010. Big companies and industries – and possibly unions as well – could fund campaign ads to support or defeat members of Congress.

Since 1907, federal law has prohibited corporations from giving money to candidates. And since 1947, corporations and unions have been barred from spending money on their own to urge voters to elect or defeat federal candidates. Corporate executives, as individuals, can contribute money to a corporate political action committee or PAC, but these amounts are relatively modest compared to the funds available to the corporate treasury.
At least 24 states have similar bans on corporate spending in state races.
All those spending limits have come under growing legal attack from conservatives and libertarians who say the government should not be allowed to set limits on campaign spending and electioneering, even when corporate or union money is in play.

Three justices – Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas – have already said they would overrule past decisions that had upheld federal and state restrictions on corporate election spending. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito also have said they favor free speech over the campaign funding limits. But they have not yet said whether they would go along and give corporations a free speech right to spend on campaign ads.

That was the issue before the court Wednesday. It was a rare re-argument in a seemingly narrow case of a small nonprofit group called Citizens United. It had produced a video called “Hillary: The Movie,” which was designed to undercut Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 campaign for the presidency. However, it got tied up in a legal battle with the Federal Election Commission.

Because Citizens United is incorporated and received a small amount of corporate money, the group and its movie came under FEC regulation. Any amount of corporate money can trigger regulatory action under the election laws.
In March, the justices debated whether the law should apply to a nonprofit group that produced a campaign-related video. But rather than decide that narrow question, the justices said in June they would focus instead on whether to say that all corporations, like individuals, have a right to spend freely to elect or defeat candidates.

Washington lawyer Ted Olson, the former solicitor general under President George W. Bush, pressed the justices to rule broadly. “Corporations are persons entitled to protection under the First Amendment,” said Olson, who represented Citizens United.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Russell Feingold, D-Wis., co-sponsors of the 2002 campaign funding law, were in the courtroom and listened intently to the 90-minute argument. The ruling could strike down part of the McCain-Feingold Act that restricted corporate and union-funded election ads in the months before the election.

The court will meet behind closed doors later this week to vote on the case. A decision could come within a few months.

By MICHAEL BARBARO and DAVID W. CHEN

Michael R. Bloomberg, the Wall Street mogul whose fortune catapulted him into New York’s City Hall, has set another staggering financial record: He has now spent more of his own money than any other individual in United States history in the pursuit of public office.

Newly released campaign records show the mayor, as of Friday, had spent $85 million on his latest re-election campaign, and is on pace to spend between $110 million and $140 million before the election on Nov. 3.

That means Mr. Bloomberg, in his three bids for mayor, will have easily burned through more than $250 million — the equivalent of what Warner Brothers spent on the latest Harry Potter movie.

The sum easily surpasses what other titans of business have spent to seek state or federal office. New Jersey’s Jon S. Corzine has plunked down a total of $130 million in two races for governor and one for United States Senate. Steve Forbes poured $114 million into his two bids for president. And Ross Perot spent $65 million in his quest for the White House in 1992 and $10 million four years later.

“I have never seen anything like this — it’s off the charts,” said Jennifer A. Steen, a lecturer in political science at Yale who has studied self-financed candidates for the last decade. “He’s in a league of his own.”

Mr. Bloomberg has used his wealth, estimated at $16 billion, to establish what appears to be insurmountable financial dominance in the race.

He has spent at least 14 times what his Democratic rival in the race, William C. Thompson Jr., has: $6 million. A Thompson campaign spokeswoman on Friday called the mayor’s spending “obscene.”

Since late September, the pace of Mr. Bloomberg’s spending has drastically accelerated: He is now sending nearly $1 million a day into the city’s economy. The bulk of the money is devoted to advertising on television, radio and the Web, but much of it bankrol ls a first-class approach to parties, snacks and travel.

The campaign has spent $322,521 on food, $293,953 on transportation, $176,066 on furniture and $39,858 on parking.

His lavish spending has confounded political consultants and campaign finance experts, who said that his popularity with New Yorkers, and his built-in advantages as a two-term incumbent, should be sufficient to win him re-election. (Compare/Contrast this with The Doctrine of Sufficiency – Kautzman)

“The main thing money does is allow you to get name recognition,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group in Washington. “But in this case, with Bloomberg, because he’s so well known, it’s more like, he can do it, so why not?”

With more than 100 employees, his campaign now has a staff larger than 97 percent of all businesses in New York City. And his political operation has become a one-man economic stimulus program, buying $8,892 worth of pizza from Goodfellas Brick Oven Pizza on Staten Island and in the Bronx. The company had suffered a big drop in business since the start of the recession.

“It’s a huge help,” said Marc Cosentino, one of the owners of Goodfellas. “They don’t have to economize like everyone else.”

Squier Knapp Dunn, the media company responsible for the mayor’s television ads, has taken in $48,313,776. While most of that money pays for TV time, media companies typically receive fees of about 15 percent.

“A number of firms are practically living off of this,” said Steve Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The spending has drawn howls of protest from good-government groups and advocates of campaign finance reform. In interviews, several said, angrily, that the mayor’s decisions to rewrite New York City’s term limits law and then spend wildly to secure re-election, have undermined democratic principles.

“Whether Bloomberg wins or loses, the toxic combination of mega-spending and crass use of his office to bypass the voters on term limits will always be a stain on his mayoralty,” said Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the New York Public Interest Research Group.

“These twin assaults on municipal democracy will undermine his political clout in a third term and sadly fuel public skepticism about elections and elected officials,” Mr. Russianoff said.

A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign, Howard Wolfson, defended the spending, saying, “Voters in this race have a choice between one candidate who is independent and doesn’t take a dime from special interests and another who practices politics as usual.”

Mr. Thompson, a Democrat, has had the unenviable task of trying to raise money in the middle of a deep recession, when many voters already assume that Mr. Bloomberg will prevail. Their lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Thompson’s candidacy was reflected in his latest campaign finance disclosure, which showed he had raised $270,000 over the last three weeks.

While donations came in at a much brisker pace than in the previous three-week reporting period, when he raised $114,000, that is unlikely to make a dent in Mr. Bloomberg’s advantage. Factoring in public matching funds, Mr. Thompson will have $3 million in the final week and a half of the race.

“This is a clear indication that the momentum of the mayoral race continues to shift towards Bill Thompson,” said Mike Murphy, a spokesman for the Thompson campaign.

But Mr. Thompson’s fund-raising still badly trails that of the two last Democrats who lost to Mr. Bloomberg: the former public advocate, Mark Green, and Fernando Ferrer, the former Bronx borough president.

The newly released records show that Mr. Bloomberg is handsomely rewarding top aides who take leaves from their City Hall posts to join the campaign. His first deputy mayor, Patricia E. Harris, is earning about $28,000 a month. It is a healthy raise: At City Hall, she made about $21,000 a month.

The mayor also typically showers the aides with additional bonuses after Election Day.

All that money shows how far Mr. Bloomberg has come, wealth-wise. His campaign spending this year will nearly equal what his boyhood hometown of Medford, Mass., population 55,000, devotes to its annual budget.

by Charles Krauthammer
The Spokesman-Review

Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster.

Now he’s put a horse’s head in Roger Ailes’ bed.

Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn’t scare easily.

The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox “not really a news station.” And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to “be led (by) and following Fox.”

Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration – from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony Sept. 11 “truther” to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health care legislation – the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.

The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry – finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.

At first, there was little reaction from other media. Then on Thursday, the administration tried to make them complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House “pool” news organizations – except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down.

This was an important defeat because there’s a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they’re engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

There’s nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.

Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand “the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties.” They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other – and an otherwise imperious government.

Factions (political parties, interest groups etc. . . ) should compete, but also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.

But didn’t Teddy Roosevelt try to destroy the trusts? Of course, but what he took down was monopoly power that was extinguishing smaller independent competing interests. Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical – and that doesn’t even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.

Fox and its viewers (numbering more than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN – which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a “Saturday Night Live” skit mildly critical of President Barack Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?

Defend Fox from whom? Fox’s flagship 6 o’clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I’m not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She’s been attacked for extolling Mao’s political philosophy in a speech at a high school graduation.

But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?

The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

By Michael Scherer

There was never a single moment when White House staff decided the major media outlets were falling down on the job. There were instead several such moments.

For press secretary Robert Gibbs, the realization came in early September, when the New York Times ran a front-page story about the bubbling parental outrage over President Obama’s plan to address schoolchildren — even though the benign contents of the speech were not yet public. “You had to be like, ‘Wait a minute,’” says Gibbs. “This thing has become a three-ring circus.” (See who’s who in Barack Obama’s White House.)

For deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer, the more hyperbolic attacks on health-care reform this summer, which were often covered as a “controversy,” flipped an internal switch. “When you are having a debate about whether or not you want to kill people’s grandmother,” he explains, “the normal rules of engagement don’t apply.”

And for his boss, Anita Dunn, the aha moment came when the Washington Post ran a second op-ed from a Republican politician decrying the “32″ alleged czars appointed by the Obama Administration. Nine of those so-called czars, it turned out, were subject to Senate confirmation, making them decidedly unlike the Russian monarchs. “The idea — that the Washington Post didn’t even question it,” Dunn says, still marveling at the decision. (Read Mark Halperin’s grades for the Obama Administration.)

All the criticism, both fair and misleading, took a toll, regularly knocking the White House off message. So a new White House strategy has emerged: rather than just giving reporters ammunition to “fact-check” Obama’s many critics, the White House decided it would become a player, issuing biting attacks on those pundits, politicians and outlets that make what the White House believes to be misleading or simply false claims, like the assertion that health-care reform would establish new “sex clinics” in schools. Obama, fresh from his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, cheered on the effort, telling his aides he wanted to “call ‘em out.”

The take-no-prisoners turn has come as a surprise to some in the press, considering the largely favorable coverage that candidate Obama received last fall and given the President’s vows to lower the rhetorical temperature in Washington and not pay attention to cable hyperbole. Instead, the White House blog now issues regular denunciations of the Administration’s critics, including a recent post that announced “Fox lies” and suggested that the cable network was unpatriotic for criticizing Obama’s 2016 Olympics effort.

White House officials offer no apologies. “The best analogy is probably baseball,” says Gibbs. “The only way to get somebody to stop crowding the plate is to throw a fastball at them. They move.”

The general in this war is Dunn, 51, a veteran campaign strategist who arrived at the White House in May. She has been a force in Democratic campaigns since the late 1980s and helmed Obama’s rapid-response operation during his run. At the White House, she has become a devoted consumer of conservative-media reports and a fierce critic of Fox News, leading the Administration’s effort to block officials, including Obama, from appearing on the network. “It’s opinion journalism masquerading as news,” Dunn says. “They are boosting their audience. But that doesn’t mean we are going to sit back.” Fox News’s head of news, Michael Clemente, counters that the White House criticism unfairly conflates the network’s reporters and its pundits, like Glenn Beck, whom he likens to “the op-ed page of a newspaper.”

As a mother — who plans to transition to a new job later this year in order to spend more time with her 13-year-old son — Dunn is a rarity in the almost all-boys club that is Obama’s inner circle. But her impact on the White House has been unmistakable. Since her arrival, the communications operation has been tightly refocused, with greater emphasis on planning ahead to shape the news cycle and controlling staff contacts with the press. In daily internal meetings, she points out where to strike back or admit error.

It is not hard to awaken her fiercer instincts. “Here in the White House, you are reluctant to feel like you have to go to that place,” she says. “But we have to be more aggressive rather than just sit back and defend ourselves, because they will say anything. They will take any small thing and distort it.” In other words, after eight months at the White House, the days of nonpartisan harmony are long gone — it’s Us against Them. And the Obama Administration is playing to win.

Read a brief history of presidents and the press – see below:

Brief History: Presidents and the Press
By Randy James

Barack Obama: The inescapable president. From Good Morning America to televised town-hall meetings, ESPN to Men’s Health, the leader of the free world misses few chances for free publicity. In his first six months in office, Obama gave three times as many interviews as either of his two immediate predecessors, according to the White House Transition Project. He’s already held more prime-time news conferences than George W. Bush did in eight years.

Presidents weren’t always so eager to meet the press. Thomas Jefferson had little use for the ink-stained wretches, believing newspapers offered “the caricatures of disaffected minds.” During Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, reporters were forced to remain outside the White House gates, until Teddy took pity on them during a rainstorm (the voluble T.R. would later enjoy bantering with scribes while getting a shave). Many Presidents required the press to submit questions in writing and barred them from printing direct quotations; access was so limited the New York Times’s Arthur Krock won a Pulitzer for scoring a sit-down with FDR. Advances in technology have compelled recent leaders to engage with the media more often, albeit reluctantly. Dwight Eisenhower was the first to allow TV cameras into his press conferences; live telecasts, with all their pomp, began with JFK.

The press has only expanded since then, but savvy White House media teams now seize on tactics to reach voters directly. George W. Bush spoke before backdrops bearing the day’s message (like STRENGTHENING OUR SCHOOLS or the notorious MISSION ACCOMPLISHED). And on Sept. 21, Obama becomes the first sitting President to grace David Letterman’s couch–a day after he hits the Sunday-morning news shows. On five networks.

by Leonard Pitts Jr.

Perhaps you are familiar with an old saying: even a broken clock is right twice a day. I’ve found that maxim valuable as I wade through the recent hand-wringing and recrimination among journalists and their critics over the fact that most mainstream media were slow to pick up on the story of corruption at ACORN.

New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt (a former colleague) and Andrew Alexander, his counterpart at the Washington Post, are among those who have asked whether that laggard performance reflects an unfortunate deafness to conservative media. As one of my readers put it, “There is a lot wrong with ACORN, and Fox was the only channel talking about it.”

I might join this pity party if I thought Fox a credible news source. I do not. Consider just a few of the network’s and its hosts’ recent lowlights:

June 3 – In a column Bill O’Reilly says he never called murdered abortion doctor George Tiller “a baby killer.”

This is wrong. PolitiFact.com has documented 24 instances, just since 2005, of O’Reilly referring to the doctor as “Tiller the baby killer.”

June 10 – Glenn Beck asks, “Why do we have automatic citizenship upon birth? We’re the only country in the world that has it.”

This is incorrect. Canada has it, as do 32 other nations.

June 18 – Sean Hannity says that under the cash for clunkers program, “all we’ve got to do is … go to a local junkyard, all you’ve got to do is tow it to your house. And you’re going to get $4,500.”

This is false. The program requires the car to be drivable and to have been registered for at least a year.

July 22 – Beck says the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy “has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.”

This is untrue. The claim is based on a textbook John Holdren co-authored in 1977 that analyzed and “rejected” such coercive means of birth control.

July 31 – Kimberly Guilfoyle claims the government will get total access in perpetuity to the computer of any participant in the cash for clunkers program who signs up at the government Web site, cars.gov.

This is inaccurate. FactCheck.org reports this claim is based on a security notice required of “car dealers” who access a secure area of the Web site.

Let me make this next point crystalline: Every news organization from CNN to CBS to Miami’s Herald to L.A.’s Times gets it wrong on occasion, and every single report risks reflecting the biases – political, racial, religious, class, educational, geographical, generational – of the reporter. This will be true until the day the news business is no longer run by human beings.

But Fox is in a class by itself. In its epidemic inaccuracy, its ongoing disregard for basic journalistic standards of fairness, its demagogic appeals and its blatantly ideological promotions it is, indeed, unique – a news source in name only. That’s not just an opinion: A 2003 study found Fox viewers more likely to be misinformed than those who get their news elsewhere.

Yet because this network that cries wolf, this network of birthers, terrorist fist bumps and tea party promotions, got it right for a change, mainstream media should wear sackcloth and ashes for their failure to take it seriously? No.

What missing the ACORN story suggests is a need for mainstream reporters to develop more sources among conservative activists and bloggers. But Fox forfeited any expectation of being taken seriously by serious people when it made itself an echo chamber less concerned with reporting news than with affirming the ideological biases of its viewers.

When faced with a broken clock, after all, the person who wants to know the time has two options: Try to guess when the reading is right …

Or get another clock.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Donna St. George / Washington Post

By the numbers
5.6 million: Number of full-time, stay-at-home mothers in the United States
165,000: Number of full-time, stay-at-home fathers

WASHINGTON – The first national snapshot of married women who stay home to raise their children shows that the popular obsession with high-achieving professional mothers sidelining careers for family life is largely beside the point.

Instead, census statistics released today show that stay-at-home mothers tend to be younger and less educated, with lower family incomes. They are more likely than other mothers to be Hispanic or foreign-born.

Census researchers said the new report is the first of its kind and was spurred by interest in the so-called “opt-out revolution” among well-educated women said to be leaving the workforce to care for children at home.

“I do think there is small population, a very small population, that is opting out, but with the nationally representative data, we’re just not seeing that,” said Diana Elliott, a family demographer who is co-author of the U.S. Census Bureau report.

The report showed that mothering full time at home is a widespread phenomenon, including 5.6 million women, or nearly one in four married mothers with children under age 15. By comparison, the country’s stay-at-home dads number 165,000.

Researchers noted that the somewhat younger ages of stay-at-home mothers could partly explain their lower education levels, and that less family income would be expected with just one parent in the workforce.

Even so, the profile of mothers at home that emerged is at clearly at odds with the popular discussion that has flourished in recent years, they said.

The notion of an opt-out revolution took shape in 2003, when New York Times writer Lisa Belkin coined the term to describe the choices made by a group of high-achieving Princeton women who left the fast track after they had children.

It has since been the subject of public debate, academic study and media obsession. It has been derided as a myth, but has never quite gone away in an era when women still struggle to balance work and family, and motherhood’s conflicts have been parodied and probed in everything from Judith Warner’s book “Perfect Madness” to television’s “Desperate Housewives” and “The Secret Life of a Soccer Mom.”

The census statistics show, for example, that the educational level of nearly one in five mothers at home was less than a high school degree, as compared with one in 12 other mothers. Thirty-two percent of moms at home have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 38 percent of other mothers.

Twelve percent of stay-at-home moms live below the poverty line, compared with 5 percent of other mothers. On the other end of the economic scale, about one-third of moms at home had family incomes of $75,000 a year or more, whereas roughly half of other mothers did.

Given this portrait, mothers at home appear to be “the more vulnerable women, for whom I would argue the issue is lack of opportunity,” said sociologist Pamela Stone of Hunter College. “They have a hard time finding a job and finding a job that makes work worth it.”

This may well be illuminating for many observers of family life, she said, because “the attention is always focused on this erroneous perception about the women at the top.”

Stone, who studied successful women who left their careers for a 2007 book called “Opting Out?,” said some shift course and focus on their children but “not at the numbers people think. Even among this advantaged group, there is no upward trend of staying at home.”

The Census report was based on nationally representative data from 2007, predating the current economic crisis.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kathleenparker@ washpost.com.

Justices could overturn finance restrictions

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

Objectors call Tuesday’s broadcast political move

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kathleenparker@ washpost.com.

by Chris Jordan – Former AP GO PO Student
I’m watching Fox News right now and it’s really tough to do.

Sean Hannity is on covering the “Universal Nightmare” and every time
he talks about Obama’s healthcare plan, computerized blood flashes
across the screen. Classy…

He just had some “expert” on his show explaining why the Public Option
that we’ve heard so much about is a horrible idea. This is exactly
what he said…

“When President Obama says ‘If you like your current plan, you can
keep it,’ he’s not telling the truth. Millions of Americans will be
forced from their current insurance because the government run plan
will be able to come in at a lower cost.” And then he went on with all
the usual stuff about how horrible government-run healthcare is.

First of all, it is absolutely impossible for anyone to be FORCED from
their current plan into something called a Public OPTION that you can
only enter into by choice. The government run OPTION is intended to
provide competition to private insurance. If millions of people CHOOSE
to abandon their private insurance for a public option, it’s because
they’ve made the decision that they could get better care for a lower
cost with that plan. It won’t be because the evil government FORCED
them into a government plan. People will choose what is best for their
families, and if that so happens to be a government plan, so be it!

If conservatives and whoever else really believe that private
insurance is superior, and that government run healthcare is really so
horrible and low quality, then the only way to find out is to have
them compete. If we can set it up in a way so that the competition is
fair, shouldn’t everyone want private insurance if it’s really so
awesome?

We should set up a healthcare system that is uniquely American – one
that combines the best aspects of our own system (high quality care,
innovation) with the best aspects of other systems (universal
coverage, lower cost). That’s why Obama is not proposing a government
takeover (much to my dismay)– he’s proposing introducing a public
OPTION that people can choose to go into if they don’t like their
current insurance. People will choose whatever plan is best for them,
public or private.

I agree that choice and competition will lower prices. And that’s why
I support the public option – because it’s one more choice Americans
will have as THEY decide the insurance that is best for them.

May the best plan win!

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.

December 23, 2008

By Steven Malanga

An international group holds an event every holiday season called Buy Nothing Day, in which members protest our consumer culture by urging shoppers to restrain for at least one day from shopping. This year, not surprisingly, the event was reportedly a smashing success. Although I imagine many shoppers took part unwillingly, having lost their jobs or witnessed the value of their assets plummet, others said they were buying nothing, or at least buying considerably less this year, in sympathy with those who were struggling.

“Even though we can afford to spend more, we’re not going to,” someone identified as Mary from Brenham, Texas told CNN. “It just doesn’t seem right to spend lots of money when so many are hurting.” Bart, the head of a nonprofit in Springfield, Missouri, told a local newspaper that with so many people struggling, “It just doesn’t feel right to go out and spend a bunch of money on Christmas gifts.” The sentiment seemed pretty much the same across the pond, where a columnist for the London Times observed that rich friends “have all cancelled their customary Christmas holidays. Sure, they could afford Tobago as usual, but this year it just doesn’t feel right.”

Not once during the dozens of stories I saw about Buy Nothing Day or about consumers’ general holiday abnegation did anyone, including the reporter or TV producer constructing these accounts, seem to consider that it might actually be counterproductive for those who can afford to spend as much or more this year on gifts to instead spend less. Indeed, many of these stories ran virtually side-by-side with gloomy reports of layoffs, retail bankruptcies, companies cutting wages and eliminating bonuses, and factories going on furloughs because of the difficult holiday shopping environment. Yet it is as if the two stories were virtually unconnected.

Why is it that in tough times it seems rational and even noble to deny oneself, even when doing so only spreads the pain? Much of the reason for this may be that we humans have been living in the modern, consumer-driven economy for just a few hundred years�”since the great leap forward of the Industrial Revolution, when technological advances greatly expanded humans’ productive capabilities, vastly increasing standards of living in the process. By contrast, we spent a hundred thousand years or so living in tribes and roving bands where existence was day-to-day and tribal members shared resources to survive. We’re still not always comfortable reconciling the consumerism that’s at the center of our economy since the Industrial Revolution with the egalitarianism of what anthropologists call our deep history.

That’s why during times of economic stress some of us still preach sacrifice and restraint because it appears unseemly to have and consume too much when others are going wanting. Doing otherwise is politically unacceptable. When President Bush, for instance, urged Americans after 9-11 to shop enthusiastically during the 2001 holiday season, critics derided him for emphasizing something as frivolous as consumerism at a time of deep national pain and introspection.

Maybe it’s best that our leaders simply lead by example rather than words. Our President-elect, for instance, is now vacationing with his family in Hawaii after spending nearly two years running a grueling campaign for office. With a hefty bank account thanks to two-best selling books, President-elect Obama isn’t about to deny his family or himself the way those British rich folks are denying themselves their Tobago vacations this year, and our citizens of Hawaii are no doubt grateful to him for his business.

Still, our press and cultural commentators have it in for anyone who spends lavishly during times like this, even if it is a business investing generously in its future. At Major League Baseball’s winter meetings in early December, a number of teams made whopping contract offers to star players who were free agents. The press subsequently roasted these free-spending teams for heaping riches on guys whose only contribution to our society is to hit a fastball at 95 miles per hour, or throw one that fast. What a strange reaction to businesses that are investing to improve their product during a downturn?”a perfectly sensible strategy if you have money to spend, talent is available and your competitors are being cautious.

The winter baseball meetings were Christmas come early for a few players, and one hopes they celebrated appropriately by spending some of their new-found wealth and in the process boosting the economy. As one of the 20th Century’s most notable non-believers, Ayn Rand, observed about Christmas, “The gift buying…stimulates an outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure.”

And to give them jobs. There’s still time, though just a little, to renounce your vow of moderation and buy liberally. It’s the least you can do for your fellow man.

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December 22, 2008

By Ed Gillespie

As the year draws to an end and President Bush enters his final month in office, there is much commentary about the Administration’s record over the past eight years. Unsurprisingly, many of these stories assail and distort the President’s record and recycle myths and unfounded allegations that have been leveled for the better part of his two terms. Historical accuracy requires a response to the litany of attacks leveled against President Bush, and while there’s not enough space to respond to all of them, here are five of the most egregious:

Myth 1: The last eight years were awful for most Americans economically and President Bush’s deregulatory policies caused the current financial crisis.

Reality:

President Bush’s time in office is ending as it began, with our economy under stress. The recession President Bush inherited as he entered office ran through the attacks of September 11, 2001, but during the recovery that followed, and due in no small part to the tax relief President Bush worked with Congress to provide, this country experienced its longest run of uninterrupted job growth – 52 straight months, with 8.3 million jobs created.

This reflected six consecutive years of economic growth from the Fourth Quarter of 2001 until the Fourth Quarter of 2007. From 2000 to 2007, real GDP grew by more than 17 percent, a remarkable gain of nearly 2.1 trillion dollars. This growth was driven in part by increased labor productivity gains that have averaged 2.5 percent annually since 2001, a rate that exceeds the averages of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. In the same period, real after-tax income per capita increased by more than 11 percent, and there was a 4.7 percent increase in the number of new businesses formed. The current economic challenges, which the President and his Administration have responded to aggressively, threaten to reverse some of these gains – but the gains cannot be denied.

As for the current crisis, the President and his economic team have taken unprecedented actions to stabilize the financial sector and avert a collapse. While there are a number of causes of the housing and credit crises that are at the root of our current economic troubles, deregulation by the Bush Administration is simply not one of them. In fact, one of the circumstances that contributed to the crisis was the failure of the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which President Bush long tried to subject to greater regulation. In April 2001, three months after taking office, the President warned in his first budget that the size of the two GSEs were a “potential problem” that “could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting Federally insured entities and economic activity.” In 2003, the Administration began calling for a new GSE regulator, and over the next five years, the Administration continued to call for GSE reform only to be accused by Democrats in Congress of creating artificial fears and advocating for ill-advised proposals. By the time Congress finally acted in 2008 to provide the oversight the President requested, it was too late to prevent systemic consequences. Had the Administration’s initial reform proposals been adopted, some of today’s turmoil in our financial markets may have been averted.

Myth 2: President Bush’s tax cuts only benefitted the wealthy and were paid for by sacrificing investments in health care and education.

Reality:

There are not 116 million “wealthy Americans,” but that’s how many taxpayers benefited from the President’s tax relief. The across-the-board tax cuts provided tax relief to every American who pays income taxes, created a new bottom 10 percent bracket rate, doubled the child tax credit to $1,000, and actually increased the share of the Federal income tax burden paid by the top 10 percent of individual earners from 67 percent in 2000 to 70 percent in 2005. Furthermore, this Administration removed 13 million low-income earners from the income tax rolls completely.

The economic growth spurred by tax relief also spurred growth in Federal tax receipts. In fact, the Federal Treasury realized the largest three-year increase of revenue in 26 years, and tax receipts grew more than $542 billion between 2000 and 2007. And yes, much of that money went to investments in health care and education.

President Bush provided more than 40 million Americans with better access to prescription drugs by creating the market-based Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. And it is one of the rare government programs that actually costs less than expected. Projected overall program spending between 2004 and 2013 is approximately $240 billion lower, nearly 38 percent, than originally estimated, thanks to the market-oriented principles included at President Bush’s insistence.

Despite the heated rhetoric over children’s health insurance (S-CHIP) legislation last year, estimates from a 2007 Federal survey show that the number of uninsured children under the age of 18 actually declined by 800,000 from 2001 to 2007. From 2007 to 2008, the number of people covered by affordable and portable Health Savings Account-eligible plans increased 35 percent. Additionally, since President Bush took office, more than 1,200 community health centers have opened or expanded nationwide, which has helped provide treatment to nearly 17 million people.

Federal spending on education has increased nearly 40 percent under President Bush. Additionally, Pell Grant funding nearly doubled during the Administration, which is expected to help more than 5.5 million students attend college in the 2008-09 school year, 1.2 million more students than were assisted by Pell Grants in the 2001-02 school year. This financial aid assistance also helps account for the fact that 66 percent of high school graduates from the class of 2006 enrolled in colleges, compared to 63 percent in 2000.

Perhaps more importantly, the President’s No Child Left Behind Act has delivered tangible results to students. Since the law was enacted, fourth-grade students have achieved their highest reading and math scores on record, eighth-grade students have achieved their highest math scores on record, and African-American and Hispanic students have posted all-time high scores in a number of categories, narrowing the gap between minority students and white students.

Myth 3: The President’s “go it alone” foreign policy ruined America’s standing in the world.

Reality:

Rarely can one see revisionist history occurring in the present, but this charge is nothing short of that. The United States acted with a multilateral coalition of partner nations to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq after he failed to comply with the will of the international community, including numerous United Nations Security Council Resolutions. To ignore this fact is not only a distortion of history, but it is also an insult to the service members of our coalition partners who sacrificed their lives to contribute to the success we are now witnessing in Iraq. And in Afghanistan, approximately forty countries are currently deployed with American forces, including every one of our NATO allies.

The President also created a worldwide coalition of more than 90 nations to combat terrorist networks by sharing information, drying up their financing, and bringing their leaders to justice. To date, we have captured or killed hundreds of al-Qaeda leaders and operatives with the help of partner nations. Furthermore, the Administration established the Proliferation Security Initiative, which now includes more than 90 nations, and other multilateral coalitions to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The President successfully pushed for expanding NATO membership, generated international pressure on Iran to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, and organized the Six-Party Talks, which have resulted in North Korea committing to give up its nuclear weapons and abandon its nuclear programs. Verifying North Korea’s commitment will be a challenge, but at the most recent Six-Party Talks meeting, there was strong consensus among the five parties that North Korea must submit to a comprehensive verification regime that accords with international standards.

U.S. ties in Asia have been strengthened over the past eight years, and the Administration has built strong relationships with China, Japan, and South Korea, among others. We have signed an historic civilian nuclear power agreement with India, reflecting a fundamental change in our relationship. Pro-American leaders have been elected in Germany, France, and Italy. Eastern European countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Kosovo treasure their relationships with the United States, and no president has done more to improve health and security in the nations of Africa. We have also strengthened cooperation with Latin America, including initiatives with Brazil on biofuels and with Mexico and Central America on fighting organized crime. Finally, when the President took office, America had trade agreements in force with only three countries, versus 14 today – with three additional agreements approved by Congress but not yet in force and agreements with three countries that are awaiting Congressional approval.

Myth 4: The war in Iraq caused us to “take our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and with al Qaeda.

Reality:

Iraq and Afghanistan are two fronts in the same war, and while the success of the surge in Iraq has been visible, we have also had a quiet surge in Afghanistan. The U.S. has continuously and aggressively fought side-by-side with Afghans and our allies to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The United States has provided nearly $32 billion for security, political, and economic development assistance and the international community has provided more than $55 billion to Afghanistan since 2001.

An additional U.S. Marine battalion deployed to Afghanistan in November and they will be followed by an Army combat brigade of about 3,400 troops in early 2009. U.S. forces now total approximately 31,000, and are joined by nearly as many coalition troops. The United States and our allies are working with Afghanistan to help it nearly double the size of the Afghan National Army over the next five years, from 79,000 now trained to 134,000 in 2014.

We have also deployed Provincial Reconstruction Teams to ensure security gains are followed by real improvements in daily life, and we have helped local communities strengthen their economies and create jobs, deliver basic services, improve governance and fight corruption, and build or repair key infrastructure such as roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools. More than six million children, approximately two million of them girls, are now in Afghan schools, compared to fewer than one million in 2001.

In this Global War on Terror, we do not have the luxury to fight on one battlefront at a time. To defeat the terrorists, we must fight them overseas so we don’t have to fight them here at home. Since 9/11, we have successfully captured or killed dozens of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership and hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives in two dozen countries, removed al-Qaeda’s safe-haven in Afghanistan and crippled al-Qaeda in Iraq, and disrupted numerous al Qaeda terrorist plots against the U.S., including a 2006 plot to blow up passenger planes traveling from London.

Myth 5: This Administration has been bad for the environment and ignored the problem of global warming.

Reality:

Given the liberal media’s failure to acknowledge this Administration’s true record on alternative energy, conservation, and climate change, it’s not surprising this charge has stuck. But here are some irrefutable data points: From 2001 to 2007, air pollution decreased by 12 percent, and fine particulate matter pollution is down 17 percent since 2001. Ethanol production quadrupled from 1.6 billion gallons in 2000 to 6.5 billion gallons in 2007, wind energy production has increased by more than 400 percent, and solar energy capacity has doubled. In 2007, solar installations increased more than 32 percent and the U.S. produced 96 percent more biodiesel (490 million gallons) than in 2006. The Administration also provided nearly $18 billion to research, develop, and promote alternative and more efficient energy technologies such as biofuels, solar, wind, clean coal, nuclear, and hydrogen.

This Administration has improved and protected the health of more than 27 million acres of Federal forest and grasslands, protected, restored, and improved more than three million acres of wetlands, and established the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the world’s largest fully protected marine conservation area (nearly 140,000 square miles).

Much of the misperception about the President’s environmental record is born out of the President’s withdrawing the United States from the Kyoto Protocol, which did not include the effective participation of major developing countries such as India and China. Instead, the President worked to address climate change by launching the Major Economies Process, which convened the leaders of the world’s major economies, both developed and developing, to work on ways to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy security without harming our economies or giving any nation a free ride. Finally, the President set the country on course to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions below projected levels by 2025 and invested more than $44 billion in climate change-related programs.

Some other items that are infrequently mentioned about the real record of the Bush Administration but are worth noting: Teenage drug use has declined 25 percent; in 2007, the violent crime rate was 43 percent lower than the rate in 1998; between 2005 and 2007, the chronically homeless population decreased approximately 30 percent; funding for veterans’ medical care has increased more than 115 percent; and as of 2005, the most recent abortion rate is at its lowest since 1974.

And one last fact: Our homeland has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. That, too, is part of the real Bush record.

More on RCP: Gas Prices Shouldn’t Set Our Energy Policy

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December 21, 2008

BRIAN HAMILTON is chief executive officer of Sageworks Inc. Contact: brian.hamilton@sageworksinc.com

Much has been written about the economy, and, if you accept certain assumptions from what you read, you might think that we are in the midst of a global depression. It’s important to put the current economy in perspective.

Last quarter, U.S. gross domestic product fell at a rate of 0.5 percent, which means that the total value of goods and services produced in the country fell by a half of one percentage point last quarter over the previous quarter. For the first two quarters of this year, GDP grew by 0.9 percent and 2.8 percent, indicating that economic growth is relatively flat this year, but that it is not falling off a cliff.

This isn’t the first time GDP has fallen, and it won’t be the last. The last decrease in GDP was in the fourth quarter of 2007, and before that was in 2001. A decrease in GDP after almost six years of increases is not positive, but almost predictable.

Some would say that we cannot only look at GDP, so let’s look at other factors. Interest rates remain at historically low levels. Loan volume in the country, according to the FDIC and contrary to what you read about the credit crisis, actually increased last quarter compared to the same quarter last year.

How about employment? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment sits at 6.7 percent. At this time last year, unemployment was 4.7 percent. The decrease in employment is not favorable, but historically an unemployment rate of 6.7 percent is not close to devastating.

The 50-year historical rate of unemployment is 5.97 percent. Most economists agree that the natural rate of unemployment, which is the lowest rate due to the fact that people change jobs or are between jobs, is around 4 percent. So, today we sit at 2.7 percent above that rate.

Once again, the very recent trend is not good, but it is certainly not horrifying. Americans have good hearts and empathize with those who are unemployed, yet it would be easy to go too far in our assumptions on how the working population is currently affected in aggregate.

Look at personal income today. Personal income is income received by individuals from all sources, including employers and the government. Personal income rose last quarter compared to a year ago, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Compared to five years ago, personal income has risen by 32.1 percent. Even considering that inflation was 18.13 percent in this period, people are generally making more money than they used to.

Next, there is inflation. The inflation rate measures the strength of the dollar you hold today as compared to a year ago. The inflation rate is currently 3.66 percent. Over the past 50 years, the inflation rate has averaged about 4.2 percent. Inflation remains well within control.

Now, the skeptics reading this will undoudebtly point to other (I believe, far lesser) statistics that validate their gloomy view of the economy and the direction of the country. I ask the reader: If people are employed, are making good wages, can borrow inexpensively, hold a dollar that is worth largely what it was worth a year or five years ago, and live in a country where the value of goods and services is rising, tell me exactly where the crisis is?

There is no doubt that the economy has slowed, but slowness does not equal death. It is true that the financial markets are a mess (and the depreciation of the value of equities is both scary and bad), but analysts typically go too far in ascribing the fall of the financial markets with the fall of a whole economy. The markets are an important component of the economy, but the markets are not the totality of the economy.

No one can say whether conditions will worsen in the future. However, we have learned that the American economy has been tremendously resilient over the past 200 years and will probably remain so, as long as the structural philosophies that it has been built upon are left intact.

Kathleen Parker
The Orlando Sentinel
December 12, 2008

It always seems like fun at the time. Then the photo surfaces.

Two guys, some beer and a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton have created fresh grief for the young and uninitiated to Washington Rules.

In the latest blog scandal-ette, Jon Favreau, a Holy Cross valedictorian and 27-year-old wunderkind speechwriter for Barack Obama, was captured clutching the prospective secretary of state’s, um, pectoral area, while a fellow reveler, wearing an “Obama Staff” T-shirt, nuzzles Clinton’s ear and holds a beer bottle to her smiling lips.

The photo popped up on Facebook for a couple of hours before being removed … too late. The moment was captured and the rest was instant and persistent history. On the Information Highway, alas, roadkill is never really dead.

One day, Favreau was the golden boy of silken tongue. The next, he was just another dimwitted dude acting dumb.

Feminists groups such as NOW and the New Agenda are outraged that Clinton – or at least her image – is being treated disrespectfully by the boys. Conservatives are outraged that there’s not enough outrage, as would be the case were the party boys Republicans.

An attorney wrote on the Feminist Law Professors blog that Favreau should not be excused for “youthful indiscretion” and questioned Obama’s judgment “in continuing to rely professionally on someone so young and irresponsible and offensively sexist.”

FitzWalter, quickly, my smelling salts! Oh, and dust off the guillotine while you’re at it.

Only Hillary Clinton has made light of the “incident,” hereinafter known as Night of BBB (Boys Being Boys). In an e-mail to the Washington Post’s Al Kamen, a Clinton adviser wrote: “Senator Clinton is pleased to learn of Jon’s obvious interest in the State Department, and is currently reviewing his application.”

Hear, hear. Nipping nonsense in the bud is an essential skill for a secretary of state, and Clinton used her shears deftly. If anyone recognizes a little harmless male sport, it would be the bride of President “Is.” One thing is harmful; another thing isn’t.

Nevertheless, Clinton’s response has fallen short of what some deem appropriate. CNN’s Campbell Brown charged Clinton with forfeiting her feminist cred, especially after issuing her own charges of sexism throughout the presidential campaign. Now that Clinton’s a member of the Obama team, she suddenly has a sense of humor?

All of the above would be nonsense except that almost nothing any longer is. Nonsense is the new standard for controversy; and even party shenanigans qualify.

Puritans and prohibitionists would adore our brave new world of shutterbug infamy. The fact is, no one’s having fun anymore, especially in the nation’s capital, where one can’t afford to let the tongue slip or risk being caught in the crosshairs of a cell camera.

Political veterans have learned, sometimes the hard way. This new generation – the Obama cohort – needs to review the Rules. Smart grown-ups in Washington don’t get drunk in public. A glass of wine is a prop that rarely gets drained.

At a small, private dinner recently, where wine flowed freely (and no one took pictures), conversation turned to the day when politicos and others routinely enjoyed three-martini lunches. How did they do that? Not just the drinking, but the escape from scrutiny?

It was all about time. In low-tech America, people had time to sober up. There was no e-mail light blinking to demand your immediate attention, no 24/7 news producers demanding instant responses to urgent claims and counterclaims. Several hours – or even a few days – could pass before anyone had to Do Something.

For all the gratification and convenience of real-time everything, downtime was underappreciated while it lasted. Even 10 years ago, BBB would have been vaguely recalled over Bloody Marys – and quickly forgotten. Now young men goofing around are immortalized as misogynist maulers, portentous reminders to the rest of us that the gender wars won’t end until irreverence and humor are dead.

In the meantime, feminists might channel their free-ranging anger toward, say, Iran, where yet another woman recently was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery.

And Facebookers might heed the saloon owner’s orders: Check your weapons at the door. Cameras are lethal.

December 07, 2008

By George Will

WASHINGTON — Reactionary liberalism, the ideology of many Democrats, holds that inconvenient rights, such as secret ballots in unionization elections, should be repealed; that existing failures, such as GM, should be preserved; and, with special perversity, that repealed mistakes, such as the “fairness doctrine,” should be repeated. That Orwellian name was designed to disguise the doctrine’s use as the government’s instrument for preventing fair competition in the broadcasting of political commentary.

Because liberals have been even less successful in competing with conservatives on talk radio than Detroit has been in competing with its rivals, liberals are seeking intellectual protectionism in the form of regulations that suppress ideological rivals. If liberals advertise their illiberalism by reimposing the fairness doctrine, the Supreme Court might revisit its 1969 ruling that the fairness doctrine is constitutional. The court probably would dismay reactionary liberals by reversing that decision on the ground that the world has changed vastly, pertinently and for the better.

Until the Reagan administration extinguished it, the doctrine required broadcasters to devote reasonable time to fairly presenting all sides of any controversial issue discussed on the air. The government decided the meaning of the italicized words.

When government regulation of the content of broadcasts began in 1927, the supposed justification was the scarcity of radio spectrum. In 1928 and 1929, when Republicans ran Washington, a New York station owned by the Socialist Party was warned to show “due regard” for others’ opinions, and the government blocked the Chicago Federation of Labor’s attempted purchase of a station because all stations should serve “the general public.” In 1939, when Democrats ran Washington, the government conditioned renewal of one station’s license on that station’s promise to desist from anti-FDR editorials.

In 1969, when the Supreme Court declared the fairness doctrine constitutional, it probably did not know the Kennedy administration’s use of it, as one official described it: “Our massive strategy was to use the fairness doctrine to challenge and harass the right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue.” Richard Nixon emulated this practice. In 1973, Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, a liberal, said the doctrine “has no place in our First Amendment regime” because it “enables administration after administration to toy with TV or radio.”

The court’s 1969 ruling relied heavily on the scarcity rationale. But Brian Anderson and Adam Thierer, in their book “A Manifesto for Media Freedom,” note that today there are about 14,000 radio stations, twice as many as in 1969, and 18.9 million subscribers to satellite radio, up 17 percent in 12 months, and 86 percent of households with either cable or satellite television receive an average of 102 of the 500 available channels. Because daily newspapers are much more scarce than are radio and television choices, should there be a fairness doctrine for The New York Times?

The 1969 court dismissed as “speculative” the possibility that the fairness doctrine would cause broadcasters to “eliminate coverage of controversial issues.” But the proper worry was that the doctrine would continue to stifle the flowering of controversy. A court that considers the doctrine today will note that whereas in 1980 there were fewer than 100 talk radio programs, today there are more than 1,500 news or talk radio stations.

Further subverting the “scarcity” rationale for government supervision of broadcast content, some liberals now say: The problem is not maldistribution of opinion and information, but too much of both. Until recently, liberals fretted that the media were homogenizing America into blandness. Now they say speech management by government is needed because of a different scarcity — the public’s attention, which supposedly is overloaded by today’s information cornucopia.

And these worrywarts say the proliferation of radio, cable, satellite broadcasting and Internet choices allows people to choose their own universe of commentary, which takes us far from the good old days when everyone had the communitarian delight of gathering around the cozy campfire of the NBC-ABC-CBS oligopoly. Being a liberal is exhausting when you must simultaneously argue for illiberal policies on the basis of dangerous scarcity and menacing abundance.

If reactionary liberals, unsatisfied with dominating the mainstream media, academia and Hollywood, were competitive on talk radio, they would be uninterested in reviving the fairness doctrine. Having so sullied liberalism’s name that they have taken to calling themselves progressives, liberals are now ruining the reputation of reactionaries, which really is unfair.

Michael Smerconish
November 28, 2008

Every election season seems to introduce us to a slew of new pundits, even if many have resumes that don’t add up to the title on the screen underneath their television images.

Take, for example, Martin Eisenstadt, a self-described neoconservative who found his opinions in demand during the presidential campaign. Eisenstadt, identified on his blog “a senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy,” made waves by outing himself as the source of the rumor that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country, not a continent. That Eisenstadt would know such information would not seem unusual given that the “bio” section of his blog identifies him as “an expert on Near Eastern military and political affairs” who “works alongside Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, offering advice and liaising with the Jewish community in particular.”

And it wasn’t the first time Eisenstadt had achieved mainstream recognition. A Los Angeles Times blog had picked up on his July comments after the McCain campaign’s portrayal of Barack Obama as a celebrity akin to Paris Hilton.

There was just one problem: Eisenstadt is the Borat of the campaign season, a fictitious character created by a pair of aspiring filmmakers, Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish, in their quest to get a TV show. Now, plenty of media outlets have egg on their faces.

“I think we’ve learned that often in the 24-hour news cycle, bloggers and even mainstream media work so quickly that they don’t really have the chance to check,” Gorlin told me last week. “I think also where news has become entertainment … where I think political news is almost following, now, celebrity news … where it doesn’t matter what you say about Britney Spears, as long as something was said. Basically, gossip posing as news.”

This incident is bigger than Gorlin and Mirvish. It speaks to a larger problem of what happens in an age of newsroom downsizing. It reminded me of something I read months ago in the entertainment bible Variety about the “domino” nature of today’s media.

There, columnist Brian Lowry observed: “Shrinking print coverage threatens to trigger a ‘domino effect’ as news operations downsize, feeding the strange Internet age conundrum where there’s more information — courtesy of blogs and the Web — but less real news, especially as it pertains to backyard issues.”

I am one such domino.

My day begins every morning at a local convenience store, where at 3:40 I greet a truck arriving to deliver the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. Two hours, 20 minutes later, I begin a live, current-events-driven radio show that lasts three hours. Although about half of the content for my show is determined the day before, I will use those newspapers and a variety of other news sources available in the studio to plan the remainder of the morning. If something leads the local newspaper, it most certainly makes my broadcast. I always offer attribution, and I attempt to expand on a given story with personal opinion. As a radio or television talking head, I don’t do reporting. I repeat. I analyze. I offer my opinion and I gauge the opinions of others. There are many like me in today’s media world.

But what happens if we remove newspapers from that equation?

It seems like hardly a week goes by without a headline about a major publication trimming newsroom staff. Earlier this year, the New York Times succumbed to “growing financial strain” by cutting 100 newsroom jobs – despite reported earnings of $209 million last year. This month it was Time Inc. beginning the process of cutting 600 jobs.

Unfortunately, those who report the news are a dying breed, even in the Internet world. The dearth of hard news and investigative journalism leaves the always-expanding number of outlets – 24-hour cable networks, satellite radio stations, blogs, podcasts – scrambling for anything they can parrot to a hungry audience.

The result? People eager for the next piece of news are easily taken in by characters such as Martin Eisenstadt. And those bad habits will continue to inch their way into cash-strapped, understaffed traditional news-gathering outlets where legitimate reporting is falling by the wayside.

October 27, 2008

by Martha Rough

Last Sunday, I cried for America. I didn’t cry for the money we’ve lost in our current economic turmoil or because of predictions Obama will win the election or out of concern that America is losing status in the world. No, any one of these events was not the cause of my tears, rather they are symptoms. My tears were tears of grief, tears of guilt, and tears of fear, for the very idea of America as envisioned by our Founders, appears to be very endangered these days.

As I watch the financial crisis unfold and reflect on its causes, and as I watch the news coverage of the campaigns and listen to the polls, I find myself asking, “Have Americans truly grown weary of the responsibility of freedom?”  “Responsibility?” you may ask, “Is freedom not a right?” Rights always include responsibilities; they are two sides to one coin. What I fear is that in today’s culture, too many of us have forgotten that the responsibility associated with freedom should be an important part of the conduct of our daily decisions. Too often we consider this responsibility only in times of war and military threat. Furthermore, I fear that in today’s crisis, the responsibility seems too much.
Closely considered, you can see that freedom is the foundation of all the unalienable rights sought by the Founders. All they wanted from King George III or anyone else was to be left alone, left alone to live freely in the manner of their choosing, freely choosing how to build their own lives and happiness. In return, they recognized the duty to leave others alone as well; plus, they assumed the responsibility for the choices they made with the situations life brought them. They wanted nothing more than freedom to work, to worship, to think, to try, to fail, and to try again, to go from being poor to being wealthy, and no doubt, they accepted, too, that they were free to go from being wealthy to being poor, if their decision-making led them there. For a century and a half, we built on this heritage of freedom and refined and enhanced it by ending slavery and extending the freedom to live as one wished equally to all.

Such freedom demands that we choose everything wisely and carefully, keeping in mind and accepting the risks and uncertainties of the future alongside the hopes and gratifications of today. Freedom demands our attention at all times. It is impacted by how we work, how we eat, how we vote, how we invest, how we spend, how we do anything. Truly, the dollars we spend and the actions we take are mighty powers, if we use them wisely and responsibly. Personal responsibility is key to maintaining freedom.  Has this price of freedom become too much?
Apparently, it has. Polls verify that the people want government to fix the economy, solve their health care problems, save their home loans and incomes, cut their taxes, and more. In America today, the scope of rights to which people feel entitled has expanded radically. Certainly, health care, higher education, home ownership, financial security, and, even, wealth were all goals that the Founders would say any citizen should be free to pursue, but the Founders knew that remaining free would mean the responsibility for achieving those goals lay with the individual. We imperil our most precious right, the right to freedom, with these new demands, and the peril stems from the responsibility side of the rights coin. Once these goals become rights to which everyone is entitled, who is responsible for providing them?
Unlike the unalienable rights which demand no positive contribution from others, the ideas and longings listed above would be positive rights. In other words, someone gets a right fulfilled, but someone else must provide for it. The problem with positive rights is they always infringe on the negative rights of someone in some way. How?  The unalienable rights leave us to work, dream, build, and enjoy the fruits of our efforts. Our newly sought-after rights take some of these fruits of our neighbor’s labor, thus diminishing his or her freedom to work and enjoy. Such policies clearly, then, infringe on liberty, but even the folks who stand to benefit from such policies lose some of the joy of their basic rights. By eliminating the need to pursue happiness and replacing it with an entitlement, the citizenry is robbed of the satisfaction of personal achievement and accomplishment. Not only do we lose this satisfaction that only we can truly bestow on ourselves, but those who achieve lose the rewards and incentives that have been the impetus for the innovation and entrepreneurship that have provided countless benefits to the world.
When we consider the uncertainty we live with these days, we can see where voters might be motivated to make demands for positive rights. The outlook for our individual and collective financial lives is bleak and miserable. The pundits as much as the populace seem at a loss. It appears that no one knows how to fix this. Furthermore, most of us feel we have done our part, working and caring for our families, so the need to assign blame to Bush or corporate fat cats or unqualified borrowers is understandable; but as Mama always said, “For every finger of blame you point, there are three pointing back at you.”  Despite all the good things we do day in and day out, for quite a while now, plenty of us have seen the signs of trouble brewing, yet we have not spoken out or acted. We have known that Americans, individually and as a nation, have become credit junkies. We have given our politicians a pass, sending not even one concerned letter, about questionable, though well-meaning, policies. Why give loans to unqualified consumers?  Why not help them become qualified, instead?  We have invested in fast growing stocks to build portfolios as quickly as possible, ignoring the risk and the notion of real value in ways not dissimilar to the speculators whose greed and denial drive them to addictive levels of trading. We have built a house of cards, a fairy tale economy, but now we just want someone to fix it for us.
What I fear is that Americans have reached a precipice, a tipping point as defined by Malcolm Gladwell in his bestseller. Our times and the prognosis for America are confused and uncertain. The Bush administration has already injected the government into private enterprise, a move that, if permanent, is a definite step toward socialization. The current financial crisis, however, is only the latest piece in a jigsaw puzzle that has been taking shape for decades. The idea that we are all entitled to have whatever we want while we do whatever we want to do grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Since then, American culture has been deemed bad for the environment, bad for our image in the world, unfair and mean to anyone middle class and below. The degree of loathing of the American way has intensified steadily and unhealthily, shifting focus away from the vision of what we have been at our best and what we can be when we fulfill our legacy. This message has permeated popular culture, promoted by college professors, the news media, the movie industry, and liberal politicians. Americans have been sold the idea that we have to change. And, change is likely to be the order of the day on November 4. The idea of change has never stuck or been as enticing as now.  Obama’s Main St. versus Wall Street rhetoric and the idea of electing the first Black American to the Presidency, an act that should serve to heal some very old wounds, have Americans sold on the idea of change.
But I won’t be voting for Barack Obama, though I have seriously entertained the idea throughout much of the last year and a half. You see, when I first started listening to Obama’s message, I was hopeful that he held the same appreciation of the Founders’ vision of freedom and responsibility as I do, but the revelation of his policies tells me that he favors positive rights and the idea of absolute equality much more than he values freedom. Maybe he truly believes that government can create both, but history teaches us otherwise. We can never make or keep everyone’s status equal.  The classless society is never really classless, and, in the end, the citizenry forfeits its freedom for nothing.
I wonder how far left the country would move under an Obama Presidency. Several conditions make a substantial shift not only quite possible, but very probable.  First, he would have no check placed on him by Congress since the Congressional majority favors positive rights and follows two leaders whose modern liberalism matches Obama’s. Additionally, this group of legislators has called to overtly impede freedom of speech and of the press with the Fairness Doctrine and has worked to curtail Second Amendment rights to bear arms.
Next, the press, except for Fox, will not place any checks on Obama. The press is supposedly our “fourth estate,” meant to serve the interest of the people. Rather than serve, the press works to lead the people, especially in matters of politics and social change. If you doubt the media bias in this campaign, just look at the contributions that the Obama campaign has received from media sources. The parent companies of CNN, NBC, and CBS have all made sizable contributions to the Obama campaign and none to McCain. In fact, several recent comments from the Obama camp and the lack of news coverage about them have given me serious pause. The most troublesome came from Joe Biden at the Seattle fundraiser where he said Obama would be tested. The media played the comment about Obama’s mettle to the hilt. What few people know is that Biden went on to talk about how the decisions that he and Obama would have to make would most likely be unpopular and questionable. He was asking the supporters to keep the faith and fervor they have had during the campaign in the future. Obama, according to Biden’s comments, would need their support, with “the use” of their “influence in the community.”  I worry about a ticket that asks for such blind faith without any explanation and that escapes without more media scrutiny.
Furthermore, consider the array of Hollywood stars who support Obama. Frankly, none of them share my hopes for America. They subscribe to the negative view of our country, all while many of them reap the rewards of its liberty, making as much money or more as the corporate CEOs they demonize, and growing just as wealthy as the fat cats of Wall Street. What is particularly perplexing is that none of them seems to worry about Obama spreading their wealth around. Perhaps they will benefit from their close association to the candidate.
The collision of this election and the current economic crisis is what worries me most and makes me very fearful that Americans will opt for being taken care of because they will think their futures are more certain. But, we should always be careful what we ask for; we might just get it. Look at what our demands from government have done for us already. Even when spending for the war is factored out, Americans make more demands from the government than we are paying for. That is why our government has a budget deficit and owes money to others around the world. Indeed, some steps to prevent an outright depression were essential because global economic disaster will most surely set the stage for global conflict. For the government to solve the crisis single-handedly, though, without increasing our debt to other countries or driving up inflation will be nearly impossible. The value of the dollar has suffered drastically which adds to my worries, because a traumatized currency threatens the whole system. Vladmir Lenin recognized this, saying, “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.”  This fiscal instability and demands for more and more positive rights via socialized programs puts us at a precipice. America seems too closely leaning toward the brink to socialism.  Will Barack Obama push us over?  I do not know, but the evidence suggests that the conditions for such a plunge are much more likely with Obama than with John McCain.  In these unsure times, I will err on the side of caution. I will vote for John McCain, not because he has a perfect record, but because I feel much more certain that his appreciation of rights and mine are the same.
Borrowing from Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, I find myself wondering, “Are equality and certainty so dear, or ease so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of freedom?”  Any teenager longing to be on his or her own recognizes that they will never have full freedom as long as their parents support them. When people invest in you, they own part of you. Any 17-year-old can tell you that. Kids know you can have someone take care of or you can have your freedom, but you really can’t have both.
Over the last week, I’ve ventured to share these points with others, dared to vocalize my worries even with folks I knew would disagree with me. I am heartened to find that I am not alone with these concerns. There are others also focused on the health of American freedom. Still, I fear how close we are to the edge, to the fall of American freedom as envisioned by our Founders, fought for by our fathers and grandfathers, nurtured by our mothers and grandmothers. I still carry a guilty fear that I will face them someday and have them say that I, that we, did not do enough to save the best dream humankind has ever birthed.
Maybe my thoughts won’t count for much.  I’m an average middle-American school teacher.  My husband and I did not grow up with money.  In fact, we were both relatively poor, but our homes were rich in care, and we were raised with an ethic of self-responsibility. The possibilities afforded to us by freedom have enriched our lives in every way.
Last week, I cried for America. Today, I am writing for America, pouring my heart out to America, praying for American freedom, asking my fellow Americans to keep Liberty’s torch undampened and burning bright.  Our freedom, the very idea of America, is worth the effort.

PHILADELPHIA — Senator Barack Obama is days away from breaking the advertising spending record set by President Bush in the general election four years ago, having unleashed an advertising campaign of a scale and complexity unrivaled in the television era.

With advertisements running repeatedly day and night, on local stations and on the major broadcast networks, on niche cable networks and even on video games and his own dedicated satellite channels, Mr. Obama is now outadvertising Senator John McCain nationwide by a ratio of at least four to one, according to CMAG, a service that monitors political advertising. That difference is even larger in several closely contested states.

The huge gap has been made possible by Mr. Obama’s decision to opt out of the federal campaign finance system, which gives presidential nominees $84 million in public money and prohibits them from spending any amount above that from their party convention to Election Day. Mr. McCain is participating in the system. Mr. Obama, who at one point promised to participate in it as well, is expected to announce in the next few days that he raised more than $100 million in September, a figure that would shatter fund-raising records.

“This is uncharted territory,” said Kenneth M. Goldstein, the director of the Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin. “We’ve certainly seen heavy advertising battles before. But we’ve never seen in a presidential race one side having such a lopsided advantage.”

While Mr. Obama has held a spending advantage throughout the general election campaign, his television dominance has become most apparent in the last few weeks. He has gone on a buying binge of television time that has allowed him to swamp Mr. McCain’s campaign with concurrent lines of positive and negative messages. Mr. Obama’s advertisements come as Republicans have begun a blitz of automated telephone calls attacking him.

The Obama campaign’s advertising approach — which has included advertisements up to two minutes long in which Mr. Obama lays out his agenda and even advertisements in video games like “Guitar Hero” — has helped mask some of Mr. Obama’s rougher attacks on his rival.

“What Obama is doing is being his own good cop and bad cop,” said Evan Tracey, the chief operating officer of CMAG, who called the advertising war “a blowout” in Mr. Obama’s favor.

Based on his current spending, CMAG predicts Mr. Obama’s general election advertising campaign will surpass the $188 million Mr. Bush spent in his 2004 campaign by early next week. Mr. McCain has spent $91 million on advertising since he clinched his party’s nomination, several months before Mr. Obama clinched his.

The size of the disparity has even surprised aides to Mr. McCain, who traded accusations with Mr. Obama over the advertising battle in this week’s debate, with Mr. Obama telling Mr. McCain that “your ads, 100 percent of them have been negative” and Mr. McCain saying that “Senator Obama has spent more money on negative ads than any political campaign in history.”

The most recent analysis of the presidential advertisements by the University of Wisconsin, based on the period from Sept. 28 through Oct. 4, found that nearly 100 percent of Mr. McCain’s commercials included an attack on Mr. Obama and that 34 percent of Mr. Obama’s advertisements, which were more focused that week on promoting his agenda, included an attack on Mr. McCain.

That finding reflected the McCain campaign’s strategy of trying to make Mr. Obama an unacceptable choice in the eyes of undecided voters and Mr. Obama’s goal of making undecided voters comfortable with him.

But the Wisconsin Advertising Project says that since Mr. Obama wrapped up the Democratic nomination in June, 54 percent of Mr. McCain’s advertisements have been completely focused on attacking him, roughly a quarter have mixed criticism of Mr. Obama with a positive message about Mr. McCain, and 20 percent have been devoted solely to promoting Mr. McCain.

In the same period, the study found that 41 percent of Mr. Obama’s advertisements had been devoted solely to attacking Mr. McCain, one-fifth mixed criticism of Mr. McCain with a positive message about Mr. Obama, and 38 percent were solely devoted to promoting Mr. Obama.

The group reported that Mr. Obama has also had several weeks in which his advertising was nearly 100 percent negative or contrast advertisements, though considerably fewer such weeks than Mr. McCain has had.

The percentages do not reflect the vastly greater number of spots run by Mr. Obama. But Mr. Goldstein said Mr. McCain had shown more purely negative advertisements than Mr. Obama had, in spite of Mr. Obama’s spending advantage.

Here in Philadelphia, the biggest media market in a critical state, both candidates showed a mix of positive and negative advertisements on Friday. The spots seemed to show up across the dial as regularly as the affable Geico gecko or the ambling ne’er-do-wells of FreeCreditReport.com.

During “Dr. Phil” on the CBS affiliate here, Mr. Obama showed a minute-long positive commercial recounting “one of my earliest memories: going with Grandfather to see some of the astronauts, being brought back after a splashdown, sitting on his shoulders and waving a little American flag.”

But minutes earlier during the late afternoon news on the NBC station, Mr. Obama had criticized Mr. McCain over a health care plan that an announcer alleges “could leave you hanging by a thread.”

Toward the end of the 4 p.m. newscast on the CBS station, Mr. McCain ran one of his rare purely positive spots, speaking directly into the camera and telling viewers, “The last eight years haven’t worked very well, have they?” He promises, “I have a plan for a new direction for the economy.”

But on the NBC affiliate an advertisement approved by Mr. McCain was tying Mr. Obama to Antoin Rezko, a Chicago real estate developer convicted of fraud who is listed as among the friends Mr. Obama is said to reward “with your tax dollars.”

That spot was co-sponsored by the Republican National Committee, which is allowed to split the costs with Mr. McCain on an unlimited number of advertisements, helping him to double the number of advertisements he can buy.

Mr. McCain has used such advertisements to keep up with Mr. Obama’s advertising in vital cities like this one, where the campaigns have combined to spend the most in the general election but where Mr. Obama has recently outpaced Mr. McCain by nearly two to one. But such advertisements come with a caveat: they must include a reference to Congressional issues and leaders, making the message generally less direct.

The spot with Mr. Rezko also shows the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, and Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts.

But for every city like Philadelphia, in a state Mr. McCain views as important to his chances for victory, there are those like Miami, Washington and Chicago, where Mr. Obama has often been able to run advertisements nearly unopposed. Washington and Chicago are particularly expensive, and Mr. Obama will easily win both. But their stations reach parts of the contested states of Indiana and Virginia.

Mr. McCain is also getting help from the Republican Party’s independent advertising unit, but it cannot coordinate with the party leadership or Mr. McCain’s campaign, meaning it is not always in line with Mr. McCain’s campaign message. And a smattering of outside groups are running hard-charging advertisements against Mr. Obama, but he has the money to immediately meet those attacks with spots directly addressing their charges.

Now spending almost as much as he can in local television markets, Mr. Obama has increased his advertising on the broadcast television networks, including on National Football League games and soap operas.

“They’re doing the networks” said Mr. Tracey, of CMAG, “because they’ve saturated these markets and they’re looking for more time.”

Last Sunday, Mr. Obama bought so heavily on football games and other nationally televised programs that, according to CMAG, he spent $6.5 million on a day when Mr. McCain spent less than $1 million.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Paul Greenberg

COMMENTARY:

There was a small but revealing moment on the final night of the editorial writers’ convention here in Little Rock not long ago.

Our distinguished guest speaker of the liberal persuasion was waxing nostalgic for the heady time when the old Fairness Doctrine ruled the airwaves and all was right with the world of broadcast opinion. For in those days impartial government bureaucrats enforced the rule that, for every opinion voiced on radio and television, equal time had to be allotted to its opposite, and all was right with the world.

It all sounds fair enough – like so many abstract doctrines – if you didn’t have to live with it. To appreciate, and apprehend, how the “Fairness” Doctrine really operated, just listen to one of my heroes in this business – Nat Hentoff, a true liberal who has seen it all in his couple of lifetimes in Medialand:

“I was in radio under the reign of the Fairness Doctrine, at WMEX in Boston in the 1940s and early ’50s,” he remembers. And being Nat Hentoff, he naturally aired a few of his opinions from time to time. Uh oh. “Suddenly Fairness Doctrine letters started coming in from the FCC and our station’s front office panicked. Lawyers had to be summoned, tapes of accused broadcasters had to be examined with extreme care; voluminous responses had to be prepared and sent. After a few of these FCC letters, our boss announced that there would be no more controversy of any sort on WMEX. We had been muzzled.”

The Unfairness Doctrine had claimed another victim. Which was just the way the mainstream media wanted it. Why debate others’ ideas when it was so much easier to stifle them with lawyer letters?

It was a deliberate strategy. To quote one of the Democratic Party’s apparatchiks back then, Bill Ruder: “Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass the right-wing broadcasters, and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too costly to continue.”

It worked. Broadcast opinion was soon largely reserved for the right people with the right opinions, that is, moderately leftish ones. Or what our guest speaker called “legitimate” news outlets – like the New York Times instead of all those loudmouths agitating over the airwaves.

The gamut of political opinion on the television networks, all three of them in those pre-cable days, ran roughly from center to left-of-center.

This is the period today’s nostalgic gliberals refer to as The Golden Age of television news. Golden for their opinions, anyway. At a time when the tube was still the dominant, shaping medium, ABC, NBC and CBS were the holy trinity. Any other viewpoint was considered less than respectable, even heretical, or just ignored. Which was easy to do if they couldn’t be aired.

There was but one Truth in those days and Walter Cronkite was its prophet. They called him the most trusted man in America, and doubtless he was, for though he had imitators, he had no real competition. How things have changed. Mr. Cronkite tried writing a syndicated column not long ago and it fell flat.

Because in this age of alternatives like 24/7 television news, radio talk shows all over the dial, and the ubiquitous Internet with all its bloggers, one for every taste and many with no taste at all, there is a multiplicity of other viewpoints to choose from. And lots of fact-checkers out there to catch us all. Just ask Dan Rather, formerly of CBS.

Wild and crazy thing, the First Amendment, when it burgeons in all its glory. It produces the widest variety of fruits, or just fruitcakes, for you can’t have liberty without inviting license. But I’ll gladly bear the abuses to enjoy the freedom.

There are always those who’d like to improve on freedom of speech. Shut up, they explain. All they want is what’s fair, meaning their idea of what’s fair. There’s a difference.

They sigh for the good old days when riffraff like Rush Limbaugh and numerous imitators could be shut out of the public discourse. It is those who claim to speak for The People who resent it most when people choose to listen to somebody else.

We knew who our betters were in the good old days, when we tuned in to find out what was politically correct long before it had acquired that label. No wonder our current elite, or those who would like to be, dream of restoring the Fairness Doctrine in all its constricting glory.

On his Web site, Barack Obama says the country should “clarify the public interest obligation of broadcasters who occupy the nation’s spectrum.” I’m not sure what that means, but I have an idea. The senator can put all the lipstick he wants to on the Fairness Doctrine, but it would still be unfair. Those who wax sentimental for it mystify me. I would much prefer to win a fair fight, or even lose one, rather than tie the other guy’s hands. For the best response to an idea one detests is not to suppress it, but to offer a better idea. It’s only fair.

Paul Greenberg is a nationally syndicated columnist.

McCain holds final fundraiser for RNC

Matthew Mosk
Washington Post
October 15, 2008

WASHINGTON – Sen. John McCain stepped into a ballroom at the Grand Hyatt in New York Tuesday night for what was likely to be his last fundraiser of the 2008 presidential campaign.

But while the event, which was expected to net between $8 million and $10 million for the Republican National Committee, will provide a much-needed infusion for the GOP nominee, it will do little to whittle down the massive financial advantage that Sen. Barack Obama is using to dominate the electoral landscape.

Exactly how much money Obama has raised will not be clear until next week, when the two campaigns are required to report their September fundraising totals to the Federal Election Commission, although some strategists are openly speculating that he could approach $100 million for the month. That would shatter a record Obama set in August, when he brought in $67 million.

As the first presidential candidate to run a general-election campaign entirely with private donations, Obama has a significant fundraising advantage and is using that imbalance to swamp McCain on the airwaves and in building turnout operations coast to coast.

Voters in large swaths of Florida will see Obama television commercials dozens of times before catching sight of a McCain ad. A drive across Virginia will wend past 51 Obama field offices, compared with 19 for McCain. “It’s given them resources to compete in multiple battlegrounds in all dimensions – on the ground, through the mail, with media, everything,” Chris Kofinis, a Democratic political strategist, said of Obama’s fundraising success. “I think people will look back and say this was one of the most pivotal decisions in his campaign.”

Since accepting $84 million in public funds, McCain has been barred from raising money for his own campaign. He has sought to keep pace with Obama’s effort by hosting RNC fundraisers like Tuesday night’s event in New York. The party committee raised $66 million in September and has begun to expand its presence on television with ads featuring blistering attacks on Obama.

At the same time, the RNC is leading an effort to challenge the legality of millions of dollars in “un-itemized” donations that Obama has collected. Under FEC rules, his campaign does not have to document the names of donors who give less than $200.

The RNC is keeping a growing list of phony donors and unexplained credit card charges that they believe point to more than a simple inability by the Obama team to keep track of all the money flowing in. Steve and Rachel Larman, a Missouri couple who vote Republican, told local reporters that they found a $2,300 charge for a donation to the Obama campaign on their credit card statement that they could not explain. Patricia Phillips, a Virginia Republican, had a similar experience, she said, when she opened her MasterCard statement last month to discover a $5 charge from the Obama campaign. “I thought, ‘Oh, my! This is not from me,’ ” she said.

Other donations have arrived under such obviously bogus names as Edrty Eddty and Es Esh.

Experts called it a common problem on an uncommon scale – while there have always been donors who, for a host of reasons, tried to circumvent federal election rules and give campaign contributions without providing their real names, they are more frequent with Obama because of the volume of donations his campaign is processing.

“I’m sure they have a system in place to screen out improper donations,” said Scott Thomas, a former FEC chairman. “Their problem is they have such a massive donor base and so many of these coming in that it’s hard to keep up.”

Obama campaign aides said they have followed a policy of sending immediate refunds to people who contact the campaign to say that they have been charged for a contribution they did not make. “While no organization is protected from Internet fraud, we have taken every available step to root out improper contributions, updating our systems when necessary,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman.

So far, the complaints have not prompted FEC action. And Obama’s controversial decision to forgo public funding and instead raise money on his own is paying huge dividends.

The most noticeable evidence of his spending advantage has been on the airwaves, where, in some states, Obama been running seven or eight times as many commercials as McCain. Evan Tracey, an analyst with the Campaign Media Analysis Group, called the disparity stunning.

“McCain’s in a shouting match with a guy holding a bullhorn,” Tracey said.

Video games sport ads for Obama

An ad for presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama is seen in the XBox360 Live version of “NBA Live 08.” Eighteen video games will feature Obama ads in the next few weeks. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Devlin Barrett
Associated Press
October 15, 2008

WASHINGTON – Too busy playing video games to watch presidential ads on television? Barack Obama has found you, too, by becoming the first presidential candidate to buy ad space inside a game.

Eighteen video games, including the extremely popular “Guitar Hero” and “Madden 09,” will feature in-game ads from the Obama campaign in the final weeks before the election. The ads – appearing on billboards and other signage – remind players that early voting has begun and plug a campaign Web site that encourages people to register for early voting.

Obama campaign officials said the video game ads target 10 states that allow early voting, including several battleground states: Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Colorado.

“These ads will help us expand the reach of VoteforChange.com, so that more people can use this easy tool to find their early vote location and make sure their voice is heard,” said Obama spokesman Nick Shapiro. The campaign did not say how much it cost to launch the ad blitz on gamers.

The idea of embedding advertising temporarily inside a video game is relatively new, having only begun about 18 months ago, and Obama is the first presidential candidate to buy space, according to Holly Rockwood, a spokeswoman for Electronic Arts Inc., whose company is featuring the Obama ads in nine of its games.

The Democrat’s ads are aimed primarily at game players who like sports, including NASCAR, the NBA, the NHL and skateboarding.

Rockwood would not say how much the ads cost, but she said they are running on the Xbox Live versions of the game through Nov. 3. They began earlier this month.

“It reaches an audience that is typically hard to reach: young males, roughly 18 to 34,” Rockwood said. “That’s very appealing to our advertisers.”

Rockwood declined to say how much revenue the company generates from selling ad space in its games.

For those who still associate video games with clunky “Pac-Man” or “Space Invaders” consoles, here’s how in-game advertising works: The Xbox 360 console connects to the Internet, so it can be updated with new features, including ads. In the case of “Burnout: Paradise,” the game came out in stores in January, but the Obama ads were only inserted this month.

Michael Barone
October 11, 2008

“I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors,” Barack Obama told a crowd in Elko, Nev. “I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.” Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people’s faces. They seem determined to shut people up.

That’s what Obama supporters, alerted by campaign e-mails, did when conservative Stanley Kurtz appeared on Milt Rosenberg’s WGN radio program in Chicago. Kurtz had been researching Obama’s relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in Chicago Annenberg Challenge papers in the Richard J. Daley Library in Chicago – papers that were closed off to him for some days, apparently at the behest of Obama supporters.

Obama fans jammed WGN’s phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest e-mails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Rosenberg’s example: We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One.

Other Obama supporters have threatened critics with criminal prosecution. In September, St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce warned citizens that they would bring criminal libel prosecutions against anyone who made statements against Obama that were “false.” I had been under the impression that the Alien and Sedition Acts had gone out of existence in 1801-02. Not so, apparently, in metropolitan St. Louis. Similarly, the Obama campaign called for a criminal investigation of the American Issues Project when it ran ads highlighting Obama’s ties to Ayers.

These attempts to shut down political speech have become routine for liberals. Congressional Democrats sought to reimpose the “fairness doctrine” on broadcasters, which until it was repealed in the 1980s required equal time for different points of view. The motive was plain: to shut down the one conservative-leaning communications medium, talk radio. Liberal talk-show hosts have mostly failed to draw audiences, and many liberals can’t abide having citizens hear contrary views.

Corporate liberals have done their share in shutting down anti-liberal speech, too. “Saturday Night Live” ran a spoof of the financial crisis that skewered Democrats like House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank and liberal contributors Herbert and Marion Sandler, who sold toxic-waste-filled Golden West to Wachovia Bank for $24 billion. Surprising, but not for long. The tape of the broadcast disappeared from NBC’s Web site and was replaced with another that omitted the references to Frank and the Sandlers. Evidently NBC and its parent, General Electric, don’t want people to hear speech that attacks liberals.

Once upon a time, liberals prided themselves, with considerable reason, as the staunchest defenders of free speech. Union organizers in the 1930s and 1940s argued that they should have access to employees to speak freely to them, and union leaders like George Meany and Walter Reuther were ardent defenders of the First Amendment.

Today’s liberals seem to be taking their marching orders from other quarters. Specifically, from the college and university campuses where administrators, armed with speech codes, have for years been disciplining and subjecting to sensitivity training any students who dare to utter thoughts that liberals find offensive. The campuses that used to pride themselves as zones of free expression are now the least free part of our society.

Obama supporters who found the campuses congenial and Obama himself, who has chosen to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely natural to suppress speech that they don’t like and seem utterly oblivious to claims that this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. In this campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free speech, and we may see its flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Already advertising at record levels, Barack Obama has scheduled a half-hour commercial for prime time on Oct. 29, six days before Election Day.

Obama campaign officials said the campaign had secured a 30-minute block of time at 8 p.m. on CBS and NBC. CBS already was juggling its lineup to accommodate the Democratic presidential candidate, moving back an episode of “The New Adventures of Old Christine.”

Such a vast purchase of commercial time is a multimillion-dollar expense, but Obama has been spending dramatically on ads, overshadowing rival John McCain and the Republican National Committee.

Short political spots have been the traditional way for politicians to communicate with voters. But a prime-time, sitcom-length commercial would provide Obama an opportunity to make a closing argument to the entire country.

“It’s a luxury to be able to afford that kind of communication,” said Tad Devine, a Democratic media consultant who was a senior adviser to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.

That Obama has the ability to buy such a huge block of prime time is a testament to his prodigious fundraising. He has not been shy about spending it.

On Monday, for instance, he spent $3.3 million in a single day of TV advertising. At that rate he will spend more than $90 million on ads through Election Day _ more than all the money Republican rival John McCain has to spend on his entire fall campaign.

McCain’s ad spending Monday totaled about $900,000 and the Republican National Committee weighed in with about $700,000 worth.

All whopping numbers, but the disparity between Obama and the Republicans is so wide that it has allowed Obama to spend in more states than McCain, to appear more frequently in key markets and to diversify his message by both attacking McCain and promoting his own personal story.

With national and state polls showing him building a broader lead over McCain, Obama has switched to a more positive pitch. Last week, only 34 percent of his ads attacked McCain directly while virtually all of McCain’s ads attacked Obama, according to a study by the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

One of Obama’s most recent ads comes as McCain makes an issue of Obama’s connections to 1960s radical Bill Ayers and as McCain’s running mate, Sarah Plain, argues that Obama “is not a man who sees America like you and I see America.”

The ad bespeaks Americana. In it, Obama recalls being a child, sitting on his grandfather’s shoulders and waving an American flag as they watched astronauts return from a splashdown. “And my grandfather would say, ‘Boy, Americans, we can do anything when we put our minds to it.’”

The ad offers a direct response to Palin. But it also illustrates Obama’s continuing need as an African American to reassure voters about his candidacy.

On Friday, the Republican National Committee will start running a TV ad in Indiana and Wisconsin seeking to sow doubts about Obama’s political upbringing, linking him to Ayers and other Chicago figures. “The Chicago Way. Shady politics. That’s Barack Obama’s training,” the ad says.

Boosted by an economy in crisis and a saturation of advertising, Obama has built up his margins over McCain in Democratic-leaning battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania and Michigan. He has tilted Republican-leaning states such as Colorado and New Mexico toward his side. And he has created contests in such reliably Republican states as Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina.

By now, McCain’s allies had hoped the Arizona senator would have established his dominance in states President Bush won in 2000 and 2004, and would have focused on winning two of the three key Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.

But McCain stopped advertising in Michigan, Obama leads in Pennsylvania and he has the edge in Ohio.

“Money doesn’t always mean victory, but it means that you have more options to cover more of the battlefield,” Republican strategist Terry Holt said. “We’re going to have to win with less.”

Less is right. Obama is outspending McCain in practically every one of the 14 states the two camps are contesting. One exception is Iowa, where McCain spent more than Obama even though Obama has been sitting on a comfortable lead in the polls.

Meanwhile, Obama’s ability to spend is restrained only by his ability to raise money.

He is the first major party candidate to decline public financing in the general election, leaving him free to spend as much as he can raise. McCain, on the other hand, is limited to spending only the $84 million in public funds he accepted to cover all his costs in September and October.

The RNC is helping with its own resources. It raised a record $66 million in September. Obama has not disclosed his September finances; he doesn’t have to until Oct. 20, when financial reports are due to the Federal Election Commission.

Even with their combined resources, McCain and the RNC trailed Obama in ad spending last week by more than $6 million.

“That is a message imbalance that you just can’t overcome,” said Evan Tracey, head of TNS/CMAG.

___

AP Television Writer David Bauder in New York contributed to this report.

OCTOBER 9, 2008

Its activist role has been the single constant in this eternal election.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

September 27, 2008

By Jack Kelly

One wonders how Sen. Joe Biden can talk so much with his foot in his mouth.

“We’re not supporting clean coal,” the Democratic vice presidential candidate said while campaigning in Ohio last week. “No coal plants here in America.”

Coal mining is an important industry in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, all tightly contested states in this election, so Sen. Biden’s remarks were impolitic. Especially so since Sen. Obama supports clean coal technologies.

“Obama’s Department of Energy will enter into public-private partnerships to develop five ‘first of a kind’ commercial scale coal-fired plants with clean carbon capture and sequestration technology,” the Obama-Biden campaign Web site says.

Sen. Obama’s efforts Tuesday to depict Sen. John McCain as too quick to oppose a federal bailout of insurer AIG were undermined when he was reminded by NBC’s Matt Lauer that Sen. Biden had said the same thing on the same day.

“I thought it was terrible,” Sen. Biden told CBS news anchor Katie Couric in an interview broadcast Monday. “If I had anything to do with it, we never would have done it.”

Sen. Biden was referring to an Obama ad that mocked Sen. McCain as an out of touch old fogy because he doesn’t use a computer.

The ad was terrible. (Sen. McCain doesn’t use a computer because his war injuries prevent him from typing on a keyboard). And it testifies to Sen. Biden’s basic decency that he thought so. But there are some opinions you just don’t voice.

In the same interview, Sen. Biden told Ms. Couric: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”

Franklin Roosevelt didn’t become president until three years after the stock market crashed in 1929. Television didn’t go into widespread commercial use until years after FDR died in 1945.

Sen. Biden has said something foolish or indiscreet so often the Republican National Committee has started a “Biden Gaffe Clock” to chronicle them all. Can you imagine the media frenzy if it were Sarah Palin who was saying these things?

Sen. Biden wasn’t chosen to provide comic relief. Sen. Obama thought his 35 years in the Senate, most of it on the Foreign Relations Committee, of which he is now chairman, would give the ticket foreign policy credentials Sen. Obama himself lacks.

The most hypocritical of the legion of double standards employed by the news media in this campaign is that a paucity of experience in foreign policy is considered disqualifying in the Republican candidate for vice president, but inconsequential in the Democratic candidate for president.

Sarah Palin’s only claim to experience in national security policy is that as governor of Alaska, she’s head of the state’s National Guard, and she has a son in the Army. That’s mighty thin gruel. Sen. Obama has served on the Senate Foreign Relations committee since coming to the Senatebut hasn’t shown up for many hearings in the last two years. If you think inexperience in foreign policy is a bad thing to have a heartbeat away from the presidency, why is it acceptable to put inexperience directly into the White House?

Gov. Palin has been in public life longer than Sen. Obama. She served four years on the city council in Wasilla, eight years as that town’s mayor, a year as chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and the last 22 months as governor of Alaska.

Sen. Obama served eight years in the Illinois legislature and a little less than four in the U.S. Senate, of which he’s spent most of the last two running for president.

All but four years of Gov. Palin’s public career has been spent in the executive branch. Sen. Obama has no experience in the executive branch, nor any private sector managerial experience except for his role in the failed Chicago Annenberg Challenge, about which he is reluctant to talk because it brings up his association with unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers.

As mayor, Sarah Palin managed explosive growth in Wasilla while cutting property tax rates 40 percent. As governor, she worked out a deal to build a natural gas pipeline to the lower 48 that her predecessors had been trying, and failing, to do for 35 years.

Sen. Obama’s tenure in the Illinois legislature was noted chiefly for his having voted “present” a remarkable 130 times. His brief time in the U.S. Senate has been devoid of significant accomplishment.

Sen. Obama argues judgment is more important than experience, and Sen. Biden is living proof that experience without judgment is not a pretty thing.

The most important decision Sen. Obama has had to make as a presidential candidate was his selection of a running mate. He chose Sen. Biden. Inexperience and bad judgment is the worst combination of all.

September 24, 2008

By Tony Blankley

The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign.

While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are covering for one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Völkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.)

And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly or even halfway honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs — the press. The image of Obama that the press has presented to the public is not a fair approximation of the real man. They consciously have ignored whole years of his life and have shown a lack of curiosity about such gaps, which bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct.

Thus, the public image of Obama is of a “man who never was.”

I take that phrase from a 1956 movie about a real-life World War II British intelligence operation to trick the Germans into thinking the Allies were going to invade Greece rather than Sicily in 1943. Operation Mincemeat involved the acquisition of a human corpse dressed as “Major William Martin, R.M.,” which was put into the sea near Spain. Attached to the corpse was a briefcase containing fake letters suggesting that the Allied attack would be against Sardinia and Greece.

To make the operation credible, British intelligence concocted a fictional life for the corpse, creating a letter from a lover and tickets to a London theater — all the details of a life, but not the actual life of the dead young man whose corpse was being used. So, too, the man the media have presented to the nation as Obama is not the real man.

The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeat any McCain gaffes while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Web sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventually clear sentence from Obama. You don’t see Obama’s ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the U.N. Nor his whining and puerile “come on” when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels’ disciples, not Cronkite’s.

More appalling, a skit on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” last weekend suggested that Gov. Palin’s husband had sex with his own daughters. That show was written with the assistance of Al Franken, Democratic Party candidate in Minnesota for the U.S. Senate. Talk about incest.

But worse than all the unfair and distorted reporting and image projecting are the shocking gaps in Obama’s life that are not reported at all. The major media simply have not reported on Obama’s two years at New York’s Columbia University, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter-mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers. Later, they both ended up as neighbors and associates in Chicago. Obama denies more than a passing relationship with Ayers. Should the media be curious? In only two weeks, the media have focused on all the colleges Gov. Palin has attended, her husband’s driving habits 20 years ago, and the close criticism of the political opponents Gov. Palin had when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

But in two years, they haven’t bothered to see how close Obama was with the terrorist Ayers.

Nor have the media paid any serious attention to Obama’s rise in Chicago politics. How did honest Obama rise in the famously sordid Chicago political machine with the full support of Boss Daley? Despite the great — and unflattering — details on Obama’s Chicago years presented in David Freddoso’s new book on Obama, the mainstream media continue to ignore both the facts and the book. It took a British publication, The Economist, to give Freddoso’s book a review with fair comment.

The public image of Obama as an idealistic, post-race, post-partisan, well-spoken and honest young man with the wisdom and courage befitting a great national leader is a confection spun by a willing conspiracy of Obama, his publicist (David Axelrod) and most of the senior editors, producers and reporters of the national media.

Perhaps that is why the National Journal’s respected correspondent Stuart Taylor wrote, “The media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis.”

That conspiracy not only has Photoshopped out all of Obama’s imperfections (and dirtied up his opponent McCain’s image) but also has put most of his questionable history down the memory hole.

The public will be voting based on the idealized image of the man who never was. If he wins, however, we will be governed by the sunken, cynical man Obama really is. One can only hope that the senior journalists will be judged as harshly for their professional misconduct as Wall Street’s leaders currently are for their failings.

Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.

David S. Broder
September 14, 2008

WASHINGTON – Every so often, reality has to intrude on politics. The candidates, of course, resent it and do their damnedest to avoid it. And those of us who make a living reporting politics are equally determined not to let the harsh truths of the outside world impinge on the “game” being played out on the campaign trail.

Last week, just as everyone was settling in to weigh the delightful prospect of a new administration and a new Congress – reformers all, to hear them tell it – a cold-water dash of realism smacked us in the face.

This one was administered by the killjoys at the Congressional Budget Office, who announced that the next president, whoever he is, will likely inherit a budget at least $500 billion out of balance – a record sum that will limit his ability to do any of the wonderful things being promised daily in the upbeat rhetoric of the campaign.

Barack Obama and John McCain scarcely blinked at the news, nor did I really expect them to do so. The last thing candidates want to admit is that if they win, they will be unable to deliver the goodies they have promised the voters.

Both of them are telling their audiences that they will outdo the Bush administration in every respect. They will not only bring fundamental change to Washington, but deliver the big goals everyone craves – peace and enhanced national respect abroad, energy independence, more jobs, affordable health care, a cleaner environment, improved schools and, of course, lower taxes.

You will not hear them admit that, before they do any of those things, they will have to pay a gigantic annual interest bill on the rapidly expanding national debt – or else our foreign creditors will stop lending us the money to pay our bills.

No one is going to be elected on the promise that he will satisfy the bankers in Shanghai and the money-managers in Moscow.

But that is the reality. Our country has so thoroughly abandoned any pretense of fiscal prudence, accumulating public and private debt at a breakneck pace, that no president can avoid asking: How do I keep our creditors at bay?

If this were a rational world, that question would be at the top of the agenda for the first presidential debate, for it will be inescapable when the work of governing begins in earnest next January.

It is not being asked now because it is in no one’s interest to raise it – not Obama’s and not McCain’s, for they have no easy answers, and not the media’s, because we too hate to be the jerks who spoil the party by asking who’s paying for the booze.

But trust me, the question will have to be asked in 2009, if not in 2008. The events that have dominated the economic news – soaring unemployment, bankruptcy and foreclosure rates, government bailouts of giant financial firms – are not accidental occurrences. They are symptoms of a systemic breakdown marked by easy credit, lax spending discipline and a toxic aversion to taxing ourselves enough to pay our bills.

The fine print in the CBO report measures the course of our reckless imprudence. The projected deficit is almost triple the size of last year’s flow of red ink. In January, the deficit for this year was estimated at “only” $219 billion, and both Bush and the Democratic Congress claimed that we were on our way to a balanced budget in another three years.

More mythmaking. The reality: A slowing economy sapped federal revenues. An “economic stimulus” bill boosted spending, while Iraq and Afghanistan continued to absorb more billions. In the face of that, Bush continues to call for more extended tax cuts, and Democrats, playing along with the polls, are poised to go along.

It’s unfair in a way that those who will move into new positions on Pennsylvania Avenue next January should bear the consequences of the decisions made or avoided by their predecessors. But that is the reality; economic forces do not obey election timetables.

And reality does intrude, no matter how much the politicians try to deny it.

September 13, 2008

By Charles Krauthammer

“Ms. Palin most visibly stumbled when she was asked by Mr. Gibson if she agreed with the Bush doctrine. Ms. Palin did not seem to know what he was talking about. Mr. Gibson, sounding like an impatient teacher, informed her that it meant the right of `anticipatory self-defense.’” — New York Times, Sept. 12

WASHINGTON — Informed her? Rubbish.

The Times got it wrong. And Charlie Gibson got it wrong.

There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today.

He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?”

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”

Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, he grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”

Wrong.

I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of The Weekly Standard titled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine.

Then came 9/11, and that notion was immediately superseded by the advent of the war on terror. In his address to Congress nine days later, Bush declared: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” This “with us or against us” policy regarding terror — first deployed against Pakistan when Secretary of State Colin Powell gave President Musharraf that seven-point ultimatum to end support for the Taliban and support our attack on Afghanistan — became the essence of the Bush Doctrine.

Until Iraq. A year later, when the Iraq War was looming, Bush offered his major justification by enunciating a doctrine of pre-emptive war. This is the one Charlie Gibson thinks is the Bush doctrine.

It’s not. It’s the third in a series and was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine, the most sweeping formulation of Bush foreign policy and the one that most distinctively defines it: the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world. It was most dramatically enunciated in Bush’s second inaugural address: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

This declaration of a sweeping, universal American freedom agenda was consciously meant to echo John Kennedy’s pledge that the United States “shall pay any price, bear any burden … to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” It draws also from the Truman doctrine of March 1947 and from Wilson’s 14 points.

If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume — unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise — that he was speaking about Bush’s grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda.

Not the Gibson doctrine of pre-emption.

Not the “with us or against us” no-neutrality-is-permitted policy of the immediate post-9/11 days.

Not the unilateralism that characterized the pre-9/11 first year of the Bush administration.

Presidential doctrines are inherently malleable and difficult to define. The only fixed “doctrines” in American history are the Monroe and the Truman doctrines, which came out of single presidential statements during administrations where there were few conflicting foreign policy crosscurrents.

Such is not the case with the Bush doctrine.

Yes, Palin didn’t know what it is. But neither does Gibson. And at least she didn’t pretend to know — while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, “sounding like an impatient teacher,” as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes’ reaction to the phenom who presumes to play on their stage.

September 8, 2008

By BRIAN STELTER

MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.

That experiment appears to be over.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.

The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.

“The most disappointing shift is to see the partisan attitude move from prime time into what’s supposed to be straight news programming,” said Davidson Goldin, formerly the editorial director of MSNBC and a co-founder of the reputation management firm DolceGoldin.

Executives at the channel’s parent company, NBC Universal, had high hopes for MSNBC’s coverage of the political conventions. Instead, the coverage frequently descended into on-air squabbles between the anchors, embarrassing some workers at NBC’s news division, and quite possibly alienating viewers. Although MSNBC nearly doubled its total audience compared with the 2004 conventions, its competitive position did not improve, as it remained in last place among the broadcast and cable news networks. In prime time, the channel averaged 2.2 million viewers during the Democratic convention and 1.7 million viewers during the Republican convention.

The success of the Fox News Channel in the past decade along with the growth of political blogs have convinced many media companies that provocative commentary attracts viewers and lures Web browsers more than straight news delivered dispassionately.

“In a rapidly changing media environment, this is the great philosophical debate,” Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, said in a telephone interview Saturday. Fighting the ratings game, he added, “the bottom line is that we’re experiencing incredible success.”

But as the past two weeks have shown, that success has a downside. When the vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin lamented media bias during her speech, attendees of the Republican convention loudly chanted “NBC.”

In interviews, 10 current and former staff members said that long-simmering tensions between MSNBC and NBC reached a boiling point during the conventions. “MSNBC is behaving like a heroin addict,” one senior staff member observed. “They’re living from fix to fix and swearing they’ll go into rehab the next week.”

The employee, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity because the network does not permit it people to speak to the media without authorization. (The New York Times and NBC News have a content-sharing arrangement exclusively for political coverage.)

Mr. Olbermann, a 49-year-old former sportscaster, has become the face of the more aggressive MSNBC, and the lightning rod for much of the criticism. His program “Countdown,” now a liberal institution, was created by Mr. Olbermann in 2003 but it found its voice in his gnawing dissent regarding the Bush administration, often in the form of “special comment” segments.

As Mr. Olbermann raised his voice, his ratings rose as well, and he now reaches more than one million viewers a night, a higher television rating than any other show in the troubled 12-year history of the network. As a result, his identity largely defines MSNBC. “They have banked the entirety of the network on Keith Olbermann,” one employee said.

In January, Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews, the host of “Hardball,” began co-anchoring primary night coverage, drawing an audience that enjoyed the pair’s “SportsCenter”-style show. While some critics argued that the assignment was akin to having the Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly anchor on election night — something that has never happened — MSNBC insisted that Mr. Olbermann knew the difference between news and commentary.

But in the past two weeks, that line has been blurred. On the final night of the Republican convention, after MSNBC televised the party’s video “tribute to the victims of 9/11,” including graphic footage of the World Trade Center attacks, Mr. Olbermann abruptly took off his journalistic hat.

“I’m sorry, it’s necessary to say this,” he began. After saying that the video had exploited the memories of the dead, he directly apologized to viewers who were offended. Then, sounding like a network executive, he said it was “probably not appropriate to be shown.”

In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Olbermann said that moment — and the perception that he is “not utterly neutral” — restarted months-old conversations about his role on political nights.

“I found it ironic and instructive that I could have easily said exactly what I did say, exactly when I did say it, if I had been wearing a different hat, and nobody would have taken any issue,” he said.

“Countdown” will still be shown before the three fall debates and a second edition will be shown sometime afterwards, following the program anchored by Mr. Gregory.

The change casts new doubt on what some staff members believe is an effective programming strategy: prime-time talk of a liberal sort. A like-minded talk show will now follow “Countdown” at 9 p.m.: “The Rachel Maddow Show,” hosted by the liberal radio host, begins Monday.

Mr. Griffin, MSNBC’s president, denies that it has an ideology. “I think ideology means we think one way, and we don’t,” he said. Rather than label MSNBC’s prime time as left-leaning, he says it has passion and point of view.

But MSNBC is the cable arm of NBC News, the dispassionate news division of NBC Universal. MSNBC, “Today” and “NBC Nightly News” share some staff members, workspace and content. And some critics are claiming they also share a political affiliation.

The McCain campaign has filed letters of complaint to the news division about its coverage and openly tied MSNBC to it. Tension between the network and the campaign hit an apex the day Mr. McCain announced Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. MSNBC had reported Friday morning that Ms. Palin’s plane was enroute to the announcement and she was likely the pick. But McCain campaign officials warned the network off, with one official going so far as to say that all of the candidates on the short list were on their way — which MSNBC then reported.

“The fact that it was reported in real time was very embarrassing,” said a senior MSNBC official. “We were told, ‘No, it’s not Sarah Palin and you don’t know who it is.’ ”

Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams, the past and present anchors of “NBC Nightly News,” have told friends and colleagues that they are finding it tougher and tougher to defend the cable arm of the news division, even while they anchored daytime hours of convention coverage on MSNBC and contributed commentary each evening.

Mr. Williams did not respond to a request for comment and Mr. Brokaw declined to comment. At a panel discussion in Denver, Mr. Brokaw acknowledged that Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews had “gone too far” at times, but emphasized they were “not the only voices” on MSNBC, according to The Washington Post.

Al Hunt, the executive Washington bureau chief of Bloomberg News, said that the entire news division was being singled out by Republicans because of the work of partisans like Mr. Olbermann. “To go and tar the whole news network and Brokaw and Mitchell is grossly unfair,” he said, referring to the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell.

Some tensions have spilled out on-screen. On the first night in Denver, as the fellow MSNBC host Joe Scarborough talked about the resurgence of the McCain campaign, Mr. Olbermann dismissed it by saying: “Jesus, Joe, why don’t you get a shovel?”

The following night, Mr. Olbermann and his co-anchor for convention coverage, Mr. Matthews, had their own squabble after Mr. Olbermann observed that Mr. Matthews had talked too long.

Some staff members said the tension led to the network’s decision to keep Mr. Olbermann in New York for the Republican convention, after he ran the desk in Denver during the Democratic convention. MSNBC said that he stayed in New York to anchor coverage of Hurricane Gustav. But some workers say there were other reasons — namely, that Mr. Olbermann was concerned about his safety in St. Paul, given the loud crowds at MSNBC’s set in Denver.

NBC Universal executives are also known to be concerned about the perception that MSNBC’s partisan tilt in prime time is bleeding into the rest of the programming day. On a recent Friday afternoon, a graphic labeled “Breaking News” asked: “How many houses does Palin add to the Republican ticket?” Mr. Griffin called the graphic “an embarrassment.”

According to three staff members, Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal, and Steve Capus, president of NBC News, considered flying to the Republican convention in Minnesota last week to address the lingering tensions.

Up to now, the company’s public support for MSNBC’s strategy has been enthusiastic. At an anniversary party for Mr. Olbermann in April, Mr. Zucker called “Countdown” “one of the signature brands of the entire company.”

Just last year, Mr. Olbermann signed a four-year, $4-million-a-year contract with MSNBC. NBC is close to supplementing that contract with Mr. Olbermann, extending his deal through 2013 — and ensuring that he will be on MSNBC through the next election.

Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting for this article.

Leonard Pitts Jr.
August 9, 2008

I haven’t read Robert Novak’s (AKA “The Prince of Darkness” by friend and foe alike – Kautzman) column in 10 years.

Back in 1998 he made a comment on CNN – what it was is not material here – that I considered beyond the pale. I decided I could henceforth do without his opinions and insights. He impressed me as a distinctly disagreeable man. And that was well before he outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame.

When the news broke a few days ago that Novak had a brain tumor and would retire, I was not made prostrate by grief. What I felt was that whisper of common mortality, that sense of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God one usually feels when tragedy strikes someone who is known to you, but not too closely. I felt sorry for the man and for his loved ones. It did not occur to me to celebrate their misfortune.

In this I am evidently different from a number of observers who have infested Internet Web sites with exultation over the columnist’s diagnosis. To be sure, the majority of bloggers and posters – even those put off by Novak’s often brusque conservatism and abrupt personality – have wished him well. But there has been no shortage of those who were unable to attain that level of grace. One calls Novak’s fate evidence of God. Another calls him a scumbag. Still another claims this proves “Republicanism” is a mental illness. LOL, it says.

Then there’s the message board of Novak’s home paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, where whoever is in charge of deleting offensive content is surely working overtime to keep up with the invective. I managed to snag two of the messages before the censor got hold of them. One expressed the hope that Novak “suffers like the victims of his lies.” Another said, “May he rest in pain.”

There is nothing new here. Similar responses attended the late Tony Snow’s battle with the cancer. And Michael Savage, a barely housebroken radio personality, played a song by the Dead Kennedys when news broke that Sen. Edward Kennedy had been diagnosed with brain cancer.

The intention, I imagine, is to debase those with whom one has political disagreements. The authors of this sort of abuse evidently don’t realize that they really debase themselves – and political discourse as a whole.

Yes, it is fair, even now, to offer a harsh critique of Novak’s politics. But there is something fundamentally indecent about celebrating his grave illness. Osama bin Laden, I might understand; he’s a mortal enemy. Robert Novak is just a columnist with whom some of us disagree.

But then the distinction I draw no longer exists in the minds of many, raised as they have been on talk radio diatribes, accustomed as they are to spewing vitriol from the anonymity of the Internet. For them, disagreement is the very mark of a mortal enemy. For them there is no such thing as the sort of easy bonhomie among opponents that allowed, say, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill to share a drink at the end of a long day spent fighting one another in the political trenches.

It is a sweet picture that might as well be painted in sepia tones, so long ago does it seem. Today there is no bonhomie. Politics is war. In war, one does not drink with enemies. One neither reasons with them nor seeks common ground. One simply hates them. One simply kills them.

That’s the mentality you’re seeing here – politics as war – and it is not pretty. The thing is, there are truths above politics and one of them is that you do not laugh at the other guy’s tragedy. How estranged are you from your own humanity, how deficient was your home training, when you need to be reminded of that?

Friend or foe, there is only one word any of us should feel compelled to offer Robert Novak right now:

Godspeed.

They know it’s news. They just wish it would go away.

By Byron York

Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.

Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”

There was nothing subtle about that attempt to position Senator Obama as the Other, a candidate who might technically be American but who remained in some sense foreign, not sufficiently patriotic and certainly not one of us — the “us” being the genuine red-white-and-blue Americans who the ad was aimed at.

Since then, Senator McCain has only upped the ante, smearing Mr. Obama every which way from sundown. On Wednesday, The Washington Post ran an extraordinary front-page article that began:

“For four days, Senator John McCain and his allies have accused Senator Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true.”

Evidence? John McCain needs no evidence. His campaign is about trashing the opposition, Karl Rove-style. Not satisfied with calling his opponent’s patriotism into question, Mr. McCain added what amounted to a charge of treason, insisting that Senator Obama would actually prefer that the United States lose a war if that would mean that he — Senator Obama — would not have to lose an election.

Now, from the hapless but increasingly venomous McCain campaign, comes the slimy Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ad. The two highly sexualized women (both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear) are shown briefly and incongruously at the beginning of a commercial critical of Mr. Obama.

The Republican National Committee targeted Harold Ford with a similarly disgusting ad in 2006 when Mr. Ford, then a congressman, was running a strong race for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee. The ad, which the committee described as a parody, showed a scantily clad woman whispering, “Harold, call me.”

Both ads were foul, poisonous and emanated from the upper reaches of the Republican Party. (What a surprise.) Both were designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women.

The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control. It was at work in that New Yorker cover that caused such a stir. (Mr. Obama in Muslim garb with the American flag burning in the fireplace.) It’s driving the idea that Barack Obama is somehow presumptuous, too arrogant, too big for his britches — a man who obviously does not know his place.

Mr. Obama has to endure these grotesque insults with a smile and heroic levels of equanimity. The reason he has to do this — the sole reason — is that he is black.

So there he was this week speaking evenly, and with a touch of humor, to a nearly all-white audience in Missouri. His goal was to reassure his listeners, to let them know he’s not some kind of unpatriotic ogre.

Mr. Obama told them: “What they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky.”

The audience seemed to appreciate his comments. Mr. Obama was well-received.

But John McCain didn’t appreciate them. RACE CARD! RACE CARD! The McCain camp started bellowing, and it hasn’t stopped since. With great glee bursting through their feigned outrage, the campaign’s operatives and the candidate himself accused Senator Obama of introducing race into the campaign — playing the race card, as they put it, from the very bottom of the deck.

Whatever you think about Barack Obama, he does not want the race issue to be front and center in this campaign. Every day that the campaign is about race is a good day for John McCain. So I guess we understand Mr. McCain’s motivation.

Nevertheless, it’s frustrating to watch John McCain calling out Barack Obama on race. Senator Obama has spoken more honestly and thoughtfully about race than any other politician in many years. Senator McCain is the head of a party that has viciously exploited race for political gain for decades.

He’s obviously more than willing to continue that nauseating tradition.

 

Susan Estrich
Creators Syndicate
July 26, 2008

The Sunday opinion section is gone. So is the book review section. So are literally hundreds of the reporters I have come to respect over years of reading my local paper. What is happening in my hometown is happening in every city across the country. Layoffs. Cutbacks. Slow death.

Meanwhile, talk show hosts, who don’t pretend to “report,” who don’t try to be “objective,” who will tell you themselves, if they are being honest, that they are in the business of entertainment, sign record contracts. I don’t begrudge them their riches. They’re making money because their shows do. But for those of us who care about the role of a free press in a democracy, something is askew.

Not long ago, a fine newspaper reporter who covers the Supreme Court came to lecture in one of my classes about some of the cases then pending before the court. Frankly, I didn’t expect that many of my students would be familiar with his work. But I was wrong.

How many of you read the paper every day? he asked them. A surprisingly large number of hands went up. We looked at each other, puzzled. We both knew that circulation was dropping, that young people don’t buy the paper in the same numbers that their parents did. How many of you read it on paper, I asked. Most of the hands went down. They read the paper; they just didn’t buy it.

I’m not going to mourn the decreasing demand for newsprint. Let the trees live. The danger of reading newspapers online, I have discovered, is that you miss all the stories you don’t think you’d be interested in until they catch your eye as you’re turning the page. When I read papers online, I always read the political and legal stories, but I miss an interesting book review, a surprising sidebar, an obituary that doesn’t make it to the front index. The challenge for newspapers as they go online and off paper is to find a way to tell me about all the good stuff inside that I don’t know I’m interested in until I read the first few lines or see the picture.

The bigger problem goes to the question of standards. “All the news that’s fit to print,” the motto of the New York Times, isn’t really about printing, but about standards of fitness. It’s about old-fashioned values like professionalism and fairness, about good and demanding editors who take the time to make sure you’ve checked the facts and given everyone a chance to respond before they put the story in the paper. It’s about the difference between the news pages and the editorial pages, the difference between reporting the news and commenting on it, and the need to respect that line and make sure readers can see where it is being drawn.

I’m not a reporter and I don’t pretend to be. I write commentary. I offer opinions. I do so based on many, many years of working in politics and teaching law, not to mention raising kids and taking care of family. I try to be fair and I value my reputation for being honest, but I don’t pretend to be objective. That’s not my job.

But it should be somebody’s. It has always been the job of newspaper reporters and editors to live by a set of rules that ensure that when you read a “news story,” as opposed to an opinion column, you can assume that a substantial effort has been made to document the facts, to tell a story rather than opine about it, to ask the tough questions and fairly report the answers. Moreover, when it comes to news, the evening news still tends to be guided by the morning paper. If the latter declines in quality, so will the former.

Of course, some television and radio reporters try to live by these standards, as do some bloggers. The problem is that the most-watched programs on television, the reporters who make the most money and the sites that get the most hits are not necessarily the best journalistically.

In all the years I’ve done television, I can count the number of times someone has complimented me for what I said. People watch TV; they don’t listen to it. If you do well, they’ll tell you how good you looked, not how smart or knowledgeable you sounded. What’s worse, when it comes to the substance, you get attention not for being well-informed and reasonable, but for being out there and outrageous, even if you know nothing about what you’re talking about.

I want to be a political pundit, pretty young girls and boys tell me all the time. No, they don’t want to actually do politics, study politics, learn the game. They just want to get paid to look good and give opinions. Lawyers barely out of law school, who have never argued a case in their lives, decide to be legal commentators. And too many good reporters, looking for television slots and the paid speeches that come next and trying to dodge the pink slips that are everywhere, are aiming to play the same game. They may win, but the rest of us are losing.

by Dee Dee Myers

July 21, 2008

Tomorrow, CBS’s Katie Couric will interview Barack Obama from Jordan. On Wednesday, ABC’s Charlie Gibson will chat with him from Israel. And on Thursday, NBC’s Brian Williams will do the honors from Germany. Call it the presidential campaign equivalent of Shooting the Moon.

And to think, a few short months ago the Washington establishment was buzzing about the press’s pending dilemma: With Obama and John McCain looking like the all-but-certain nominees of their respective parties, how would the media choose between its new crush, Obama, and its long-time paramour, McCain? The Illinois senator has been a media darling since he burst onto the scene at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2004, and during the Democratic primary season, he bested Hillary Clinton in both quantity of coverage (he got more) and tenor (his was way more positive). But McCain has gotten so much favorable media attention over the years that he often joked that the press was his political base. In a head-to-head competition, who would win?

So far, the answer is clear: Obama is The One. In the first quarter of the general election, he has simply gotten more and better coverage than McCain. For those who need more evidence than the enormous press entourage that is treating Obama’s current trip not like the campaign swing of a presidential candidate, but like the international debut of the New American President, there are several new studies which help quantify the disparity.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which evaluates more than 300 newspaper, magazine, and television stories each week, found that from June 9 (after Obama had wrapped up the Democratic nomination) until July 13, Obama was more prominently covered every single week. During one particular week, July 7–13, McCain was a significant presence in 48 percent of the stories—but Obama met that mark in 77 percent of the pieces. Similarly, the Tyndall Report, a media monitoring group, found that Obama received substantially more media attention.

I can only imagine what the gap must be like this week, as Obama continues to meet with world leaders and adoring crowds, while the mere presence of media’s biggest and brightest stars stamps each and every event as important!

Given all that, it’s not surprising that voters, particularly those of the Republican persuasion, think the media is more or less in Obama’s pocket. A recent survey by Rasmussen found that 49 percent of the likely voters they talked to believed that reporters would favor Obama in their coverage, while just 14 percent said the same about McCain. Seventy-eight percent of Republicans thought the press would try and help Obama win, while only 21 percent of Democrats thought journalists were in bed with McCain. Complaints about bias are only exacerbated when the New York Times (the bête noire of the right) rejects an opinion piece written by McCain comparing his position on Iraq to Obama’s—just days after the Times ran a similar piece by Obama.

Suspicions of pro-Obama bias began in the primaries. A Pew survey in late May and early June found that 37 percent of Americans believed that Obama received preferential coverage; only eight percent said the same about his principal opponent, Hillary Clinton.

There are lot of “explanations” for the lopsided coverage: Obama is new and what’s new is “news.” As the first African-American to run a serious race, let alone win a major party’s nomination, Obama is running an historic campaign. Obama has created a “movement,” and Americans are simply more interested in him than in his opponents. Obama is running a smarter campaign, and he knows how to court media attention. It’s also true that intense media coverage is a double- edged sword: the attention is great when things are going well, but it can doom a candidate if and when things start to go badly. And so far, Obama has had way more good days than bad days. Each of those rationales is largely true—and somewhat less than satisfying.

At the end of the day, this will be a long campaign, and what’s true in July may not be true in November. But what seems indisputably true—to quote another dazzling young Democrat who received disproportionately favorable media attention, John Kennedy—is this: “Life is unfair.”

 

April 20, 2008

Message Machine

Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

By DAVID BARSTOW

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. “The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

It was, Mr. Whitman added, “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”

Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

“I’m not here representing the administration,” Dr. McCausland said.

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use it.”

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

John C. Garrett is a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.

In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”

At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.

Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.

With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.

“The impressions that you’re getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false,” Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.

The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on “Today.” “There’s been over $100 million of new construction,” he reported. “The place is very professionally run.”

Within days, transcripts of the analysts’ appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

Charting the Campaign

By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit “key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities.

In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own all-star squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed a new opportunity. To Ms. Clarke’s team, the military analysts were the ultimate “key influential” — authoritative, most of them decorated war heroes, all reaching mass audiences.

The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.

Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. “It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. “It is my life.”

Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what Ms. Clarke’s team had in mind. Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. “We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out,” Mr. Meyer said.

The Pentagon’s regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.

Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.

Assembling the Team

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

“Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.

Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a national security team that represents several military contractors. “We offer clients access to key decision makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the firm’s Web site.

Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making this pledge. Another was Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general. Soon after signing on with CBS, General Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a “world affairs” analyst for CNN. “The Cohen Group knows that getting to ‘yes’ in the aerospace and defense market — whether in the United States or abroad — requires that companies have a thorough, up-to-date understanding of the thinking of government decision makers,” the company tells prospective clients on its Web site.

There were also ideological ties.

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

The Selling of the War

From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

“Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. “It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s more subtle.”

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive “war of liberation.”

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. “Let’s think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.

By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.

The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts.

The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.

The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in the nation’s op-ed pages.

The trip invitation promised a look at “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”

The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul Bremer III, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, “My Year in Iraq,” that he had privately warned the White House that the United States had “about half the number of soldiers we needed here.”

“We’re up against a growing and sophisticated threat,” Mr. Bremer recalled telling the president during a private White House dinner.

That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the analysts were touring Iraq.

Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave and even the gardens of Babylon.

Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show, spooled out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were needed. The “growing and sophisticated threat” described by Mr. Bremer was instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.

“We’re winning,” a briefing document proclaimed.

One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly “artificial” that he joked to another group member that they were on “the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq,” a reference to Mr. Romney’s infamous claim that American officials had “brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president’s $87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of “up-armored” Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraq’s security forces.

Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.

Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.

“Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.,” Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. “I tried to push hard with some of Bremer’s people to engage these people of Al Anbar,” he said.

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

“We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.

“I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.

Access and Influence

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that “mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

“We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Its success only intensified the Pentagon’s campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States Central Command.

The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an e-mail message warning that the trips “have the highest levels of visibility” at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s closest aides, “picks up the phone and starts calling the 4-stars.”

Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a “conscious decision” was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract “the increasingly negative view of the war” coming from journalists in Iraq. The analysts, he said, generally had “a more supportive view” of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces. “On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible spokesmen,” he said.

For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers.

Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. “You start to recognize what’s most important to them,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.”

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.”

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.

The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of “key influentials” had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts.

An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her observations during the trip, the analysts “are having a greater impact” on network coverage of the military. “They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she wrote.

Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

“We knew we had extraordinary access,” said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV.

“Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.

Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.

“ ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”

Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

“Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he wrote. “I will do the same this time.”

Pentagon Keeps Tabs

As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

“Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all,” the report concluded.

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable “surrogates” in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, “just upfront information,” while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other. “None of us drink the Kool-Aid,” General Scales said.

Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. “Not related at all,” General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN “in the lowest esteem.”

Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”

“General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.

“Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.

The Generals’ Revolt

The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt” dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to “give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that “the boss” wanted the meeting fast “for impact on the current story.”

That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.

“Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he added a little later, “will be much appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.

“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.

The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept “very formal,” records show. “This is very, very sensitive now,” a Pentagon official warned subordinates.

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’ ”

“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”

“Frankly,” one participant said, “from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.”

An analyst said at another point: “This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a threat to us.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.

But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. “America hates a loser,” one analyst said.

Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the “political tide.” One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to “just crush these people,” and assured him that “most of the gentlemen at the table” would enthusiastically support him if he did.

“You are the leader,” the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. “You are our guy.”

At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: “In one of your speeches you ought to say, ‘Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi.’ And then you just go down the list and say, ‘All right, we’ve got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.’ If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t imagine a world like that.’ ”

Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as the next “milestone” that would, as one analyst put it, “keep the American people focused on the idea that we’re moving forward to a positive end.” They placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran.

“When you said ‘long war,’ you changed the psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational event,” an analyst said. “And again, I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job…”

“Get in line,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.

Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon’s talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted “frequently and sufficiently” with his generals; that he was not “overly concerned” with the criticisms; that the meeting focused “on more important topics at hand,” including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:

“Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war.”

“Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran.”

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

“I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions,” he said.

View From the Networks

Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”

“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”

For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.

Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.

“I don’t think NBC was even aware we were participating,” said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.

Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. “None of that ever happened,” said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.

“The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”

Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.

CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’ business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.

NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: “We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest.”

Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. “We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives “refused to participate” in this article.

CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.

CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.

General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.

“We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have,” CNN said in a written statement.

In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. “I mean, that’s what McNeil does,” he said.

CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil’s military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.

General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. “I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,” he said.

But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job.

“We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him,” CNN said.

 [What was it that Eisenhower said about the "Military Industrial Complex"?  Kautzman]

Thursday, Mar. 13, 2008

By James Poniewozik

On Feb. 5, I woke up, went for a run, showered, had a yogurt smoothie, took the kids to school and voted for Barack Obama. Only one of those facts is worth your knowing, and it is the one that most journalists would never tell you.

In today’s confessional era, reporters disclose private matters ranging from marriage to stock ownership. Everything except voting. Some refuse to vote at all—like Washington Post editor Len Downie, who told NPR, “I didn’t want to take a position, even in my own mind” on elections. (To which I say, Anyone who can perform that kind of self-hypnosis should get into the lucrative smoking-cessation business.) More commonly, reporters vote but keep it to themselves. At the New York Times, even opinion columnists are forbidden to endorse candidates.

It wasn’t always so, but as grubby “reporters” evolved into white-collar, credentialed “journalists,” it has become a tradition—a pointless one. If a tech writer told you he had no preference between Macs and PCs and chose not to use a computer in the interest of impartiality, you would rightly consider him an idiot. But politics is not consumer journalism, right? Right—it’s more important, and transparency in it is more essential.

The reasons not to say whom you’re voting for boil down mainly to the interests of journalists, not those of readers and viewers. It would be a pain in the neck. Campaign sources would mistrust you. Radio hosts and bloggers would have a field day. Readers would become suspicious.

But more suspicious than they are already? The biggest reason to go open kimono is that the present system does what journalism should never do: it perpetuates a lie. Modern political journalism is based on the bogus concept of neutrality (that people can be steeped in campaigns yet not care who wins) and the legitimate ideal of fairness (that people can place intellectual integrity and rigor over their rooting interests). Voting and disclosing would expose the sham of neutrality—which few believe anyway—and compel opinion and news writers alike to prove, story by story, that fairness is possible anyway. Partisans, bloggers and media critics are toxically obsessed with ferreting out reporters’ preferences; treating them as shameful secrets only makes matters worse.

And let’s be honest about the worry that lies behind that reticence: What happens when the public finds out the press is full of Democrats? (An msnbc report last year found that of more than 100 journalists who made political donations, the vast majority gave to the Dems.) If people knew this—or knew, say, that a certain cable-news network tilted pro-Bush—would they trust us less? Hey, maybe they should. And maybe we should view their criticism as a help, not an annoyance.

Mainstream media organizations are all for interactivity when it means getting our audience to work for free—uploading video or volunteering prose on our websites. If we can outsource the news, why not outsource news criticism? Getting stories right takes constant attention. Let the audience help, by critiquing, analyzing and hectoring from as informed a basis as possible. Arguing that offering more information makes us less credible is not just absurd but antijournalistic. When else do reporters argue that their audience must be protected from knowledge?

Opinion is not itself dangerous. Hidden opinion is, as is journalism slanted to reflect it. I’ve critiqued Obama’s campaign videos favorably but also criticized the press for its swooning coverage of him. I don’t know if that makes me fair. But you can judge for yourself, and you should.

Of course, it’s easy for me to be sanctimonious: I’m a pop-culture columnist, not a campaign reporter. The logistics of disclosing votes would be a problem; no one wants to slog through countless articles giving the writers’ electoral history back to college. But the online magazine Slate handled this by doing a poll of its staff before the 2000 and 2004 general elections. It is the sort of thing websites and blogs are made for. The main reason it won’t happen with the mainstream media soon, however, is simple: the other guy isn’t doing it. Ultimately, it’s about money—you’d risk losing half your audience.

But for the larger journalism business to stay relevant (and profitable), doing it could be a very good thing. The partisans who hate the media for our perceived politics are a relatively small, vocal group. More widely damaging, in the age of authenticity, is phoniness—in this case, acting as if we were dispassionate marble gods. It’s time to leave that Potemkin Olympus and admit that, like responsible citizens, we care about elections. And then prove that, like responsible professionals, we care about the truth more.

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 3, 2008; C01

During a campaign stop in Ohio last week, ABC’s Jake Tapper asked Barack Obama about what he called “an attempt by conservatives and Republicans to paint you as unpatriotic.”

Tapper’s litany: “That you didn’t put your hand over your heart during the national anthem, that you no longer wear an American flag on your lapel pin, that you met with some former members of the Weather Underground, and now they are questioning your wife’s comments when she said she hasn’t been proud of the U.S. until just recently.”

Obama dismissed the criticism as “nonsense.” But did the exchange mark the end of a long period in which the media have gone easy on the man who could all but clinch the Democratic nomination in tomorrow’s primaries? Are the media going to change the environment that prompted Kristen Wiig, playing a CNN anchor on “Saturday Night Live,” to declare that she and her colleagues “are in the tank for Obama”?

The Illinois senator still hasn’t faced the sort of negative onslaught that generally envelops presidential front-runners. But after a year of defying the laws of journalistic gravity, he is being brought back to earth.

Some of this involves recycled reporting that didn’t get much traction the first time around. Within the last two weeks, ABC’s “World News” has done a story on Obama voting “present” nearly 130 times as an Illinois legislator, two months after that information was on the New York Times front page. “NBC Nightly News” has followed up a two-week-old Times piece about Obama compromising on Senate legislation affecting a nuclear energy company that contributed to his campaign. A “CBS Evening News” segment reviewed a series of negative points — Obama’s controversial pastor, his ties to indicted fundraiser Tony Rezko, voting present, the nuclear contributions and the lack of a flag pin.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton maintains the media have “consistently examined both his public and personal record.” Burton calls suggestions of soft treatment “a false premise that is advocated by a couple of members of the media and the Clinton campaign. The investigative teams at the networks, major national news organizations and the Chicago papers would take great issue with the notion they haven’t examined Barack Obama’s record.” The Chicago newspapers have been the most aggressive by far.

Some conservative commentators, after years of obsessing over Hillary Clinton, are now training their fire on Obama. Cincinnati radio host Bill Cunningham, appearing at a John McCain event, generated a wave of coverage last week by challenging the media to “peel the bark off Barack Hussein Obama.”

In his Times column, Bill Kristol picked up on Obama’s comment in October that he views wearing a flag pin as a substitute for true patriotism. “Obama’s unnecessary and imprudent statement impugns the sincerity or intelligence of those vulgar sorts who still choose to wear a flag pin,” Kristol declared.

Erick Erickson, editor of the blog RedState, wrote that voters should be wary of “the liberal anti-gun former cokehead whose feminist wife hates America.”

Michelle Obama became talk-show fodder when she said on Feb. 18 that “for the first time in my adult life, I’m really proud of my country.” But for the following week, there was no mention of the flap in a Washington Post or New York Times news story, although the Los Angeles Times jumped on the controversy.

There was also little pickup when the Politico reported that a decade ago Obama visited Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers, the 1960s radicals whose Weather Underground group was involved in two dozen bombings. And the issue of Obama’s dealings with Rezko all but vanished after a brief flurry until the run-up to his trial, which begins today.

Similarly, there was scant media mention of Louis Farrakhan’s support for Obama until Tim Russert challenged the senator to repudiate that support at last week’s MSNBC debate — making Russert the target of some liberal bloggers who say he went overboard on the issue.

Would Clinton have skated as easily if she were found to have visited radicals tied to violence? Or bought land from an indicted businessman, as in the Rezko case? Or if the pastor of her church had talked about “this racist United States of America,” as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who heads Obama’s church, has?

That is hard to imagine. Clinton’s complaints about media imbalance are buttressed by a new study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs. From Dec. 16 through Feb. 19, it says, the three network newscasts aired reports that were 84 percent positive for Obama and 53 percent positive for Clinton. She scored higher on evaluations of policy and public performance, but that amounted to only 10 percent of the coverage.

On Friday, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson told reporters there was a “staggering” gap between the Rezko coverage and the volume of questions he fielded about her indicted fundraiser, Norman Hsu. Yet Clinton’s team angered the press again by not telling traveling reporters in Texas that she was flying to New York to appear on “SNL” — intelligence they had to learn from Obama aides.

Still, after a year in which Obama was hailed as the second coming of JFK, will his Teflon coating now be scratched? Tapper says he asked Obama about his patriotism “because obviously Democratic voters think the nominee should be someone who is able to withstand Republican conservative attacks.” He says he noticed such criticism spreading on talk radio, cable shows and blogs, and “to act as if we can ignore other parts of the media because we’re snobby about it . . . then we’re irrelevant, because we’re missing part of the story.

“It’s very difficult to argue that the level of scrutiny of Barack Obama has been the same as the level of scrutiny of other candidates.”

But, Tapper says, holding Obama accountable is difficult because he speaks to reporters infrequently.

RedState’s Erickson says the media haven’t really focused on Obama’s positions. “I’ve spent the last six months accumulating stuff from his voting record. This is an opportunity to define him,” he says.

Erickson concedes that his “cokehead” crack was a distraction, saying he would not join the ranks of partisan commentators who “write in such a hyperbolic way that it destroys their credibility. It’s going to be the template, as with the Clinton-haters, for the Obama-haters to report on the salacious and the rumors.”

But the media don’t need to descend into Rumorland to give a candidate a hard time. After Russert raised the issue of Obama’s pastor at the debate, CNN did a piece on the senator’s relationship with Wright, an admirer of Farrakhan. (Obama says they disagree on some issues.) The Washington Post, followed by the Times, ran a story on Obama trying to reassure Jewish leaders about his commitment to Israel, a controversy that had been brewing for months.

One overlooked aspect of Obama’s success may be his skill at defusing hostile media inquiries. He preempted critics by calling his dealings with Rezko a “boneheaded mistake.” He has talked about the danger of spending “too much time arguing with the refs,” says a new book by Chicago reporter David Mendell. The question is whether Obama can resist that temptation if journalists start tackling him more often.

So Much for Diplomacy
Sam Zell, the Chicago businessman who now owns the Tribune Co., recently hurled an obscenity at a photographer for one of his papers, the Orlando Sentinel. Zell apologized, and editors at the Los Angeles Times, the largest Tribune paper, issued a memo saying it was all right for the boss to curse but not the employees.

Some staffers in the company’s Washington bureau certainly felt like uttering expletives — and one female staffer was left in tears — after a Zell visit last week. The new boss complained about the size of the Times’ 47-person contingent, saying that far fewer reporters were covering California’s Orange County and perhaps the numbers should be reversed.

Doyle McManus, the Times bureau chief, tried to reassure his demoralized staff afterward. In a memo, McManus said Zell’s comments “shouldn’t be taken literally. . . . Sam Zell likes to say his role is to throw bombs and shake people up.” On that point, he succeeded.

Cruelty to Animals
California’s North County Times has fired an editor with a warped sense of humor. As a joke, the unnamed editor mucked with a wire-service account of a news conference on pet spaying at which a Los Angeles City Council member “held a kitten,” changing the verb to “strangled.” The paper apologized for the “terrible mistake.”

 

Be serious! Give us access! The roots of the Clinton-media tension.

By Evan Thomas

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:57 PM ET Feb 16, 2008

If Hillary Clinton loses the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, it is a good bet that she, or her minions, will cast a measure of blame on the press. Bill Clinton has already started making excuses, complaining that the media has given Obama a free ride. Though Hillary handed out chocolate Valentines to members of her traveling press corps, any embers of romance between the former First Lady and the Fourth Estate have long since died. It is also true, as Clinton spokesman Jay Carson tells NEWSWEEK, that the press is “obsessed” with Obama.

Nonetheless, the bad blood between the Clintonistas and the media has less to do with any personal failings of the Clintons themselves—or the foibles of individual reporters and editors—than it does with a poisonous, and predictable, dynamic between the press and presidents that goes back at least a half century. It’s a good guess that the current media darlings, Obama and John McCain, will experience the fickleness of the press before too long.

The last president who liked and enjoyed reporters (some of them, anyway) was John F. Kennedy. Chief executives ever since have felt surrounded and beleaguered within months, if not days, of taking up residence in the White House. If they have seemed paranoid at times, it may be because they had real tormenters in the basement of the West Wing, ready to pounce on their hypocrisies. How presidents handle the ordeal of press coverage can be revealing of character. Some pretend to shrug it off better than others. The Clintons have been theatrical in their resentments and aggressive about pushing back. But in the realm of press relations, the most important difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama or John McCain is that she has lived for eight years in the White House and they have not.

The estrangement between presidents and the press is particularly painful because the relationship often begins as a love affair. The press swooned over the young Bill Clinton. Many reporters and pundits, tired of 12 years of Reagan-Bush, saw Clinton, only 45 when he began his run in 1991, as a fellow baby boomer who was going to rejuvenate and make more realistic and relevant the liberalism of the 1960s. They learned to put up with “Saturday Night Bill” when, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, some tapes surfaced of Clinton sweet-talking a woman—not his wife—named Gennifer Flowers. But by the summer of 1992, the romance with the press was back in full bloom. The week of the Democratic convention, NEWSWEEK ran a cover showing a vibrant Bill and his running mate, Al Gore, under the line YOUNG GUNS. (At the Republican convention in August, NEWSWEEK put President George H.W. Bush on the cover with his dog Millie. DOG DAYS, read the headline.) Clinton’s presidential honeymoon was over almost before it began. The White House stumbled in ways that now seem minor and forgettable—by, for instance, nominating as attorney general a woman, Zoë Baird, who had hired illegal aliens as nannies and chauffeurs for her kids. The press clucked and thundered. THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING PRESIDENT was Time’s cover line in June 1993. NEWSWEEK’s cover showed a picture of Clinton looking haggard, and asked WHAT’S WRONG?

THE Clintons were not naive about the media. The First Lady suggested moving the press room out of the West Wing and into the Old Executive Office Building down the block. When this idea didn’t fly, Clinton’s then press secretary, George Stephanopoulos, closed the door between the press room and his warren of offices: reporters yowled as if he had just erected the Berlin wall. Reporters can be soothed with food and wine, but only briefly. In June, the Clintons held six small dinners in the White House for various pundits and reporters. I went to one of them and weakly joked to President Clinton, “Well, we’re co-opted now.” He responded, unsmiling, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Whitewater, a tangled financial scandal, broke in the winter of 1994, and the Clintons descended into the bunker for good. Hillary was feeling burned by a New York Times Magazine cover story in which she had opened up about her spiritualism and been mockingly dubbed “Saint Hillary.” When press adviser David Gergen suggested that the White House make available its Whitewater files to The Washington Post—to show there was nothing to hide—the First Lady nixed the idea.

Former presidential adviser Dick Morris (now a ferocious critic of the couple) tells NEWSWEEK the Clintons talked about why they were getting such bad press, and Hillary speculated that certain journalists were jealous of the Clintons’ success. “They are all our age,” said Hillary, according to Morris. President Clinton zeroed in on Howell Raines, an Alabama native and New York Times editorial page editor who was roasting the president daily. “He had to leave the South to make good and I never had to,” Morris says Clinton said. Morris also says that when Gen. Colin Powell began flirting with a presidential run in the summer of 1995, Clinton warned that the press would not ask tough questions of a black man. “Bill would be furious that the media was giving him a free pass,” says Morris. “Consider the source,” says Carson.

Once scorned or reviled former presidents have a way of becoming elder statesmen. Clinton, out of office, morphed into a globe-trotting do-gooder, expansive and relaxed, even with reporters. Hillary Clinton came into her own as a U.S. senator, not as charismatic as her husband, but still solid and respected, even by reporters. But as a presidential candidate, Hillary was back to the old psychodrama, running as a once and future queen in a Restoration drama. Her basic pitch—ready on day one—is the same one used by George H.W. Bush when he ran for president in 1988. Hillary has been unlucky to have a rock star as an opponent, the kind of dazzling orator who is bound to make her seem plodding by comparison. Obama appeals to the young millennial-generation reporters who fill the seats on press planes, just as Bill Clinton struck a chord with baby boomers 16 years ago. Her campaign has arguably alienated reporters by stonewalling them at times, but the relationship between the press and the Clintons is complicated—more in the nature of a bad marriage than a cold war.

Republicans express their disdain for reporters by ignoring them. The Bush 43 White House appointed press secretaries who were intentionally kept uninformed about the inner doings of the Oval Office. The Clintons have more-intimate ties to the media establishment. Stephanopoulos was a true Clinton insider before he took over briefing the press every day. He yelled at reporters, but also gossiped with them and became a newsman himself (now ABC’s chief Washington correspondent). Hillary’s close confidant Sidney Blumenthal is a former journalist, and Clinton’s admaker, Mandy Grunwald, is married to a veteran journalist and former NEWSWEEK correspondent, Matt Cooper. Familiarity seems to have bred contempt in Grunwald: she can be disdainful of the press. (She may be reflecting her boss’s view that the press is fundamentally not serious about reporting the substance of policy.) Clinton campaign officials have not hesitated to go over the heads of reporters and complain to their editors; the reporters regard this, not unreasonably, as an intimidation tactic.

In the long run-up to the Iowa caucuses, the Clinton campaign herded reporters, sometimes rudely, away from the candidate. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, vented against the press for favoring Obama. When he began to not so subtly play the race card by comparing Obama with Jesse Jackson, the press backlash was indignant and gleeful. President Clinton’s baiting backfired in South Carolina, and it seemed to some pundits that the Clinton machine was not so fearsome after all.

By then, Hillary Clinton had begun schmoozing with reporters again, going back into the press section of the plane and showing her jollier side. (The belly laugh is genuine.) But it may be too late. While it is not true that the press has “gone easy” on Obama—his slender record has been and will be scrubbed—the press helped fuel his momentum with mostly positive coverage.

A Clinton aide, speaking anonymously to hide his bitterness, predicted that Obama would get his comeuppance if he wins the nomination. “The one person the press corps likes more than Obama is John McCain,” the aide says. Maybe so, but it doesn’t really matter, because the press is almost certain to turn on both men. Digging through the personal record, searching for human flaws, is what reporters do when they cover presidential campaigns, and the critical skepticism only deepens when the winner occupies the Oval Office.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/112842

©   Newsweek Mag

The Times

February 29, 2008

Sadly the presidential contest between Obama and McCain is being ridiculously caricatured

Gerard Baker

Bill and Hillary Clinton are miffed that the American media have fallen in a collective swoon for the phenomenon that is Barack Obama. You can’t blame them.

The tone and even the content of so much of the verbiage that pours from television and newspapers on the subject of the man seems to channel Rodgers and Hart, via Ella Fitzgerald:

I’m wild again, beguiled again,

A simpering, whimpering child again

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered…am I.

In fairness, though, the beguiling of the American liberal mind by this first-term senator from Illinois looks like sober contemplation compared with the ecstasy he has induced in the synapses of the rest of the world.

The Germans call him, without irony, the Black JFK. The BBC evidently thinks he’s the best thing to come out of America since, well, in their rather limited worldview, since Jimmy Carter. If you listen carefully you can hear grown men wandering the corridors of London, Brussels and Berlin, crooning as they ponder an exciting new future:

I’ll sing to him, each spring to him,

And worship the trousers that cling to him

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered …am I.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that all this excitement is going to be repaid in the devalued currency of disappointment. Mr Obama’s ego is certainly writing cheques his body can’t cash. There’s an expectation that a President Obama will change everything in America’s relations with the world. But my guess is that, for all his campaign rhetoric and for all his genuine intent, the facts on the ground won’t change much.

He will be able to do little or nothing new about Iraq. And in return for all those nice commitments he is going to make about multilateralism, global warming and international law, he will, if anything, step up America’s demand for hard European action in the fight against terrorism – especially boots on the ground in Afghanistan – something Europeans are not going to want any part of. If he is half-serious about some of the things he has said on trade, he is going to pit the US against the rest of the world in ways that might make diplomats yearn for the tranquil days of George Bush.

And yet there’s no doubt he has a view of the world that is closer to European attitudes than anything we have seen in the past seven years and it is this that keeps Obamania in full swing. The effect is heightened, of course, by the identity of the Republican nominee.

The same morally simple narrative that hails Mr Obama as Luke Skywalker, bursting out of America’s Death Star, is beginning to portray John McCain as a kind of Darth Vader. Mr McCain is already, in the media’s account, the grumpy old white man who emerged from a field of grumpy old white Republicans.

He was once regarded, even by opponents, as a man of exceptional character, a war hero with a heartbreaking story of courage, who came to Washington to reform government. But that version is steadily being replaced by a new one. This is McCain the Hypocrite. Last week’s shockingly uncorroborated and salacious hit job on him by The New York Times was a case in point. Here he was, we were told, the man railing at the special interests in Washington by day and getting into bed with them by night.

The rest of the world can fill in the blanks of the rest of this morality tale – rich, white corporate warmonger versus fresh new, African-American embodiment of hope and change.

If it’s a caricature that takes hold, it will be a great shame and a great disservice to American politics. Mr McCain has at least as large a claim to be welcomed by America’s critics as does Mr Obama.

He is deemed a foreign policy hawk. It is true that he has insisted that the war in Iraq be fought to a successful conclusion. But it’s not even clear he would have taken the US to war in the first place. If he had, you can be sure he would not have done so in such a disgracefully ill-prepared way as Mr Bush did.

For those around the world who worry about these things, Mr McCain is very Euro-friendly on a number of important issues. He is deadly serious about climate change, favouring an aggressive cap and trading system. He is sharply critical of US detainee policies and wants to close Guantanamo Bay. When he opposes torture by the US, he does so from a position of authority, having for five years been on the sharp end of torture techniques in a Vietnamese hellhole. Mr McCain has a long and almost unique track record of taking on powerful corporate interests in Washington.

What marks him out from Mr Obama is not his age or his race or his party, but that he has achieved so much of what Mr Obama merely promises to do – tackle the role of money in politics, work across the political lines and promote an image of the US in the world that is in keeping with the finest traditions of American democracy

The problem is that there’s a danger that the presidential contest between Mr Obama and Mr McCain will become not a debate but a silly battle of conflicting icons. You can be sure that, in the eyes of the rest of the world, and much of America, if Mr McCain wins it will be not because of his superior experience or the quality of his ideas, but because America is irredeemably racist.

Instead of being the welcome break with America’s recent past that he truly is, he will be painted as a continuation of it. Worse, that that, he will have won by vanquishing Hope and Peace. He will be for ever The Man Who Shot Bambi.

Jonathan Tilove
Newhouse News Service
December 27, 2007

Come the New Year, America plunges headlong into a whirlwind presidential primary and caucus calendar with wide-open races in both parties.

It may be the most exciting and volatile presidential election season in generations, all the more so given a new media landscape in which scandalous rumor can strike like lightning out of cyberspace, even skewing outcomes before charges are vetted or rebutted.

“It’s ‘Feeding Frenzy’ to the tenth power,” said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, referring to his influential 1991 book, which was subtitled “How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics.”

When it comes to scandal-mongering, Sabato said, the Internet is viral in every sense of the word. “It’s just taken what was a serious problem and turned it into the bubonic plague,” he said.

Salacious e-mails accusing candidates of every manner of misdeed arrive every day, Sabato said. The blogosphere is a perpetual wellspring of innuendo, and the mainstream press, desperate not to be left behind, finds itself ready to rationalize reporting on rumor.

“If it’s ‘out there,’ that’s enough excuse,” he said. ” ‘It’s affecting people’s votes,’ they say, and so it’s OK to go with it.”

Dhavan Shah, a professor of journalism and political science at the University of Wisconsin, sees the makings of a “perfect storm” that could play havoc with the nominating process. “It’s happening at such a pace that some of this information doesn’t have the normal filters of political journalism,” he said.

And Matthew Hindman, professor of information technology and politics at Arizona State University, said he “would bet large sums of money that there is going to be a scandal emerging in this election that would be discovered or disseminated first on a blog.” Hindman has written a book, tentatively titled “The Myth of Digital Democracy,” due out next fall.

In the long run, said Brown University political scientist Darrell West, the truth will out.

But the Iowa caucuses are Jan. 3; the New Hampshire primary is five days later. By Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, more than half the states will have voted.

“The trouble is in the short run, and we now have a very compressed nomination schedule where the short run is everything,” said West, author of “The Rise and Fall of the Media Establishment.”

In 2003, West, playing off Sabato’s coinage, wrote about “responsibility frenzies in news coverage” — occasions when the mainstream press refrained from covering the “salacious and tawdry.” But he thinks that kind of restraint is less likely now.

“Over the last decade we have seen the flourishing of the Internet and the rise of bloggers and nobody’s policing discourse anymore,” West said. “You can basically say anything you want.”

To many, of course, this freedom is not a problem but a great virtue.

“I think this kind of uh-oh-what-bad-could-happen story has been done a thousand times … and the world has not collapsed,” said Jeff Jarvis, who blogs about the media at Buzzmachine.com and is director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.

“We’re not a nation of idiots. There are lot of gatekeepers and filters, among them the minds of the voters (if you don’t trust that, then hang up the Constitution).”

What’s more, Jarvis said, “You could talk about the rumors that get debunked quickly — more quickly than some media outlets print corrections.”

Indeed, Mickey Kaus, whose blog, Kausfiles, is on Slate.com, views the wild ride ahead as the surest path to the truth.

“Good investigative journalism depends on a little bit of mania,” Kaus said. “Sources have to be panicked to come forward.”

Kaus has been criticized for mentioning the specifics of scandal rumors on his site, but, as he said in a December exchange on Bloggingheads.TV with Robert Wright, only by posting one rumor did he learn to his satisfaction that it was unfounded. “You get feedback from your readers. The truth is found faster that way.”

And in a Nov. 1 post, Kaus relished rumors that a “potentially devastating sex scandal involving a leading presidential candidate” was in the offing, rumors he hoped would serve as a kind of “depth charge,” blowing every latent scandal public.

“Let all the scandals that lurk in the mud hatch out,” he continued. “I assume depth-charging will become a permanent feature of electoral politics.

“They tell me the Internet has changed things! Is there a problem? The true rumors will be confirmed and the phony rumors won’t be confirmed. But it will be harder to suppress the former. Isn’t the purpose of the primary campaigns to find out everything about the candidates before they are nominated?”

But political scientist Michael Cornfield believes the campaign schedule is the enemy of truth.

“In the short run, the rapid-response teams and journalistic fact-check operations can push back and be heard by the electorate,” Cornfield, author of “Politics Moves Online: Campaigning and the Internet,” wrote in an e-mail. “But I think the `short-run’ requires a week at least.”

Who knows? Everything is new. The campaign timetable. The fluid field, which includes groundbreaking candidates certain to engender fierce passions and resistance.

“We have a woman, a black, a Mormon and a Christian fundamentalist who are leading candidates,” said West. “There’s something to upset nearly everyone in America.”

Kathleen Parker
The Orlando Sentinel
December 22, 2007

Floating crosses, love babies and hag photos. We’re all tabloid now.

Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, politics has gotten not just ugly but unseemly and cruel. If the human appetite for scandal and schadenfreude is satiable, the media haven’t gotten the word.

Besides, in a dangerous world of war and terrorism, it’s far easier to speculate on sex lives and sensationalize religious belief than it is to evaluate whether jihad is coming to El Paso.

This isn’t to blame American voters, but rather the media. Human beings will always look at a roadside accident, but that doesn’t mean they want the accident to occur. We’re a curious lot and most will look at what’s in front of us (the proof is in the porn stats).

Thus, who puts the thing up for observation is the proper target of our attentions. Calling Katie Couric.

Wednesday night, “CBS Evening News” anchor Couric asked the leading 2008 presidential candidates whether voters should trust an adulterer. Why not just ask for a show of hands: How many of you have messed around on your spouse?

Couric’s inquisition closely shadowed the tabloid gossip item that John Edwards has a “love baby” with a former campaign worker. Edwards has denied the accusation, as has the mother-to-be, who has named the person she says is the real father. But no matter.

Splash! It’s out there. The suggestion, the innuendo, the lingering question. Just as “someone” hoped, no doubt.

Not so long ago, no reputable news organization would touch a tabloid headline. Now, thanks to the Internet, what’s out is out and the source seems not to matter. Mainstream media now feel compelled to report what’s being reported. (Response to pot-kettle monitors: Cultural commentary requires cultural commentary.)

A few days before Edwards made news, Mike Huckabee’s “floating cross” was all the talk.

One of Huckabee’s ads shows him in front of a bookcase. The intersection of two shelves creates four contiguous right angles, suggestive of a cross, as intersecting shelves are wont to do.

Whether the positioning was intentional or just a divine coincidence is anyone’s guess. But the debate, far longer than warranted, was the stuff of alien-seeking tabloids. Is it just me, or was that the Virgin Mary’s face imprinted in the wood grain?

Gratuitously cruel was a photograph of a tired-looking Hillary Clinton posted on the Drudge Report and elaborated on by Rush Limbaugh. The photograph was apropos of nothing – no story was linked – and merely ran with the caption: “The Toll of a Campaign.”

Hillary, who is 60, showed a few wrinkles, which is not unusual among men and women of that age. Apparently, both Drudge and Limbaugh were gleefully surprised to discover that Hillary is showing signs of maturity that would be characterized as character on a man’s face.

Limbaugh framed his remarks as anthropological observation: “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?”

Can a woman ever get it right? Too much cleavage one day, too many wrinkles the next. A male friend forwarded the picture to me and I replied:

“This picture makes me like her more.” My bet is thousands of others felt the same way.

Why? Because we’re all aging women, that’s why. We’re all at war with time. And with calories, one can’t help noticing. The seven deadly sins are alive and well in America’s garden, for both women and men.

At the risk of sounding like a Christian panderer, we are all fallen.

Perhaps that is why the candidates, when asked about adultery, unanimously said that while important, carnal imperfection doesn’t necessarily disqualify someone from being president.

As Barack Obama noted: “Some of our greatest presidents haven’t always been terrific husbands.”

The indignity of the question should embarrass the interviewer, though nothing seems to embarrass anyone anymore. The uglier the stories, the stronger the backlash – and the mudslide has just begun.

If private lives are no longer private – and a woman can’t frown in the winter wind – then we can give up on leadership. Only the perfect need apply and the perfect, having made no mistakes, haven’t learned anything.

Our jihadist observers – who, incidentally, kill adulterers, take religious belief very seriously, and think women shouldn’t vote – have learned much.

Such silly people, Americans. Such simple targets.

Such serious business, this election.

Susan Estrich
Creators Syndicate
December 15, 2007

Bill Shaheen was clearly wrong. The Hillary Clinton supporter and husband of New Hampshire’s former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen ignited a firestorm by suggesting that Barack Obama’s open admission of drug use in his youth could be ammunition for the Republicans in a general election.

In case you missed it, what he said was that Obama’s candor “could open the door” to further questions from those mean old Republicans. “It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’ … It’s hard to overcome.”

The short answer is: No, it’s not. See George W. Bush. When he was young and crazy, he’s said enough times to make it a mantra, he was young and crazy. More than that he would not say, lest he serve as a bad role model for kids, and more than that no one ever demanded.

The problem with Shaheen’s comments, though, is not simply that they were wrong or unauthorized, or that they forced Hillary herself to repudiate him and them. He hurt the candidate he was trying to help. He helped the candidate he was trying to hurt. He made Hillary look desperate. He made Barack into her victim. He commanded attention he didn’t deserve, hadn’t earned and that his comments didn’t merit.

Why?

Why does anyone really care what a volunteer who is best known for being somebody’s husband has to say about what the Republicans would do in a general election?

It’s a reflection of what politics has come to that nothing either candidate said or did in the last two days commanded near the attention that Shaheen’s unauthorized comments did. What politics has come to is a slugfest, and if the candidates themselves aren’t throwing the punches, the press is willing to cover anybody who does, in whatever form they’re thrown. If Billy Shaheen had given a two-hour speech on all the things he likes about Hillary Clinton, no one would have written a word about it. Who cares, we would have said. But throwing a punch at Obama? Now that’s news.

Shame on us.

The press is desperate to turn this into an ugly war, even if they have to use sucker punches by nobodies to do it.

Of course, it’s true that Obama’s people seized on the remarks, seeing in them an opportunity to portray their opponent as desperate, and as acting in a way inconsistent with her own prior statements. Why wouldn’t they? This is how the game gets played. If politics has become a business in which the fact of an attack gets more coverage than its substance or merits, why not look for an opportunity to brand your opponent as an assailant?

Volunteers, including “officials of state campaigns,” are what we in politics call “loose cannons.” Many of them have titles, titles being a dime a dozen in politics. They say lots of things. But they don’t deserve the press’s attention, or the country’s.

When a loose cannon takes a bad shot, it shouldn’t be enough to start a war. It shouldn’t be the story of the day, with the apology becoming the story of the next day. This is why people hate politics. And they’re half right. It isn’t politics they should hate, but what those of us in the media have done to turn it into a combat sport in which only the punches get attention. If a nobody throws a punch and we all ignore it, it’s not a punch. It’s a tree falling in a forest that no one sees.

In a campaign that’s likely to go on as long as this one, we’ll all be stuck in the swamp by the time it’s over if we’re not careful. Billy who? Forget him.

James Klurfeld
December 11, 2007

I noticed with amusement recently that some colleagues who are out on the presidential campaign trail are voicing a complaint that echoed some of my own sentiments when I was on a similar assignment: They are hardly getting any opportunity to ask the candidates questions, let alone spend any quality time with them.

If anything, the reporters are saying, campaign organizations have become more controlling than ever. This complaint is especially true for the front-running candidates such as Sen. Hillary Clinton and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Reporters are lucky to get a press conference once a week, some said.

From a candidate’s point of view, this is how it should be. To the politicians, there is paid media – their television and radio commercials – and free media, the coverage they get from journalists. Paid media, they can totally control. Free media, they do their very best to manipulate. And limiting access to a candidate is part of that effort. This is especially true of the traveling press, as opposed to the local press, at least in part because those who are regularly following a candidate are quicker to see contradictions or changes in position and tend to be more critical.

But there is a new – changing is a more accurate word – element to political coverage these days that offers voters, and reporters, more and maybe better ways to find out who these people who want to run our country are and what they have done in the past. And it might mean that traveling with the candidate is not necessarily the best or only way to cover a campaign.

I’m talking about the explosion of Internet sites that are looking at every aspect of the campaign and the candidates.

At the most basic level, you can watch a debate or interview you missed by going online to a site such as YouTube or a television network’s site. You can also visit a candidate’s Web site and review his or her position papers or, of course, contribute your dollars to the campaign.

But what has really caught my interest this campaign cycle are the nonpartisan journalism sites that are quickly and thoroughly evaluating what the candidates say compared to what the facts or the historical record really are.

For instance, there is a site called PolitiFact.com, sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, that runs a “Truth-O-Meter” that evaluates what candidates say on a true, mostly true, half true, barely true or false scale.

When Sen. Barack Obama says, “I do provide universal health care,” the meter says barely true, and you can click on to a spot that explains the difference between his health care plan and Clinton’s in some detail. Or when Sen. John McCain says that Giuliani never took part in the Iraq Study Group and was either fired or asked to leave, the meter says “True” and goes on to explain that the mayor missed the group’s first two meetings and never participated in its work.

At FactCheck.org, there’s a multimedia piece on “how to spot political ads powered only by hot air.” The story contains one commercial from Republican Mitt Romney and one from Democrat John Edwards and explains how each uses positive words and images that are largely devoid of substance. “Voters should beware,” it says.

There are many other sites illuminating the campaign in different ways, including Politico.com, RealClearPolitics.com and mainstream media Web sites such as those of Newsday, the New York Times or the Washington Post.

My point isn’t that it is not important for reporters to be following a campaign on a regular basis. Of course, it is. They have to keep pressing for more access to candidates. But 20 years ago, we were limited to what we knew about candidates by our local newspaper or the television networks.

The Internet represents a revolution in communications, for better or worse. For the news consumer, with a little bit of effort, it is definitely better.

 

The posture of Rudy’s inner circle (made up of the Yes-Rudys) is ‘to hell with the critics! He’s our guy!’

By Jonathan Alter

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:49 PM ET Nov 17, 2007

It was the mid-1990s, and I was trying to interview Judith Regan on the telephone about a media-industry story. We’d never met, but within a few minutes the publishing dominatrix was telling me graphic details about her sex life with her ex-husband. I’ve heard variations on the same theme from several friends: with Judith, it’s always Too Much Information, abusive and profane, pouring out of her mouth in a confusing eruption of fib and fact.

The same applies to the sensational $100 million lawsuit Regan filed last week against her former employer, HarperCollins, and its parent company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Regan alleges that she was “smeared” as an anti-Semite by her bosses and fired on a “pretext” after being urged by a News Corp. senior executive to lie to federal investigators about her past affair with Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police chief and nominee to be Homeland Security secretary who was indicted earlier this month. The point, Regan claims, was to protect Rudy Giuliani from embarrassment.

But even as News Corp. called the suit “preposterous” and Giuliani dismissed it on the campaign trail as a “gossip item,” you could see a little fear in Hizzoner’s eyes. Turncoats are dangerous, and Regan is a skillful and brazen enough media manipulator to keep this story humming for months.

The lawsuit feels thin. While it’s true that no one in News Corp. management deemed Regan anti-Semitic until it was convenient for their efforts to scapegoat her, she offers little evidence for her allegations, and is unlikely to win without smoking-gun tapes, which have yet to materialize.

But Regan, whose career blew up last year amid the fiasco of News Corp.’s seeking to profit from O. J. Simpson’s “confessions,” is not your basic disgruntled employee. She generated hundreds of millions of dollars in News Corp. revenues (with best sellers from the likes of Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore and porn star Jenna Jameson). She had her own TV show, courtesy of Murdoch and Fox News Channel founder Roger Ailes. And long before trysting with Kerik in an apartment near Ground Zero that by some accounts was supposed to be reserved for exhausted recovery workers, she was an important player in the FoxRudy power axis, now aiming for the presidency.

Before Giuliani gets there, Americans might want to learn more about the New York demimonde he runs with. In recent years, New York’s hothouse of sex and power has sometimes felt like a nuthouse, with the inmates in charge. It’s astonishing how often you hear traumatized former staffers or bemused acquaintances of Rudy and Roger and Bernie and Judith use exactly the same words to describe them: he (or she) is crazy, as if the political, media, law-enforcement and publishing worlds were run by the denizens of the “Star Wars” bar.

Beyond Giuliani’s temperamental fitness, there’s the question of whether this craziness has a way of trickling down. Giuliani’s subordinates (known as the Yes-Rudys) outdo each other in proving their fanatical loyalty. The whole culture of the inner circle is thus infected: To hell with the critics! He’s our guy!

The Kerik-Giuliani relationship was described by Kerik himself in his memoirs (edited by Regan) as something out of “The Godfather.” After each of Giuliani’s cronies kissed him one by one in a darkened room, he realized: “I was being made. I was now part of the Giuliani family, getting the endorsement of the other family members, the other capos.”

How else to explain how Kerik, who was known by Giuliani to have shady connections (he was briefed), was made police commissioner and then pushed forward in 2004 by Giuliani to handle what the candidate calls the president’s most critical function—homeland security? When his nomination was withdrawn, the explanation was a “nanny problem.” In fact, Kerik was embroiled in several scandals, at least a few of which had to be known by his fellow capos. Even now, Rudy praises him. Loyalists are loyal to the idea of loyalty. Be sure of this: President Giuliani would bring more of the same.

The founding bond for this family goes back to the 1980s. Roger ran Rudy’s first (unsuccessful) campaign for mayor in 1989; then, after winning, Rudy used his power as mayor to pressure Time Warner Cable to put the fledgling Fox News Channel on the air in 1996. No Rudy, no Fox. Ailes even asked Giuliani to officiate at his wedding.

Murdoch himself is not a big part of the family. People close to Murdoch, requesting anonymity, claim he’s never been particularly friendly with Giuliani and so far has specifically declined efforts to get behind his campaign. (He apparently prefers Michael Bloomberg.) But Ailes now has enough autonomy to boost Giuliani on Fox News, to the point where conservative supporters of rival candidates are blogging that—stop the presses!—the network is no longer “fair and balanced.”

With any luck, more episodes of this soap opera are forthcoming. It beats driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. For now, Judith Regan, media moll, is out of the family, vowing vengeance. As the Corleone family said on the eve of a mob war, “Let’s go to the mattresses!”

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/70998

By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 — Over the past six years, the Bush administration has spent almost $100 million on a highly classified program to help Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, secure his country’s nuclear weapons, according to current and former senior administration officials.

But with the future of that country’s leadership in doubt, debate is intensifying about whether Washington has done enough to help protect the warheads and laboratories, and whether Pakistan’s reluctance to reveal critical details about its arsenal has undercut the effectiveness of the continuing security effort.

The aid, buried in secret portions of the federal budget, paid for the training of Pakistani personnel in the United States and the construction of a nuclear security training center in Pakistan, a facility that American officials say is nowhere near completion, even though it was supposed to be in operation this year.

A raft of equipment — from helicopters to night-vision goggles to nuclear detection equipment — was given to Pakistan to help secure its nuclear material, its warheads, and the laboratories that were the site of the worst known case of nuclear proliferation in the atomic age.

While American officials say that they believe the arsenal is safe at the moment, and that they take at face value Pakistani assurances that security is vastly improved, in many cases the Pakistani government has been reluctant to show American officials how or where the gear is actually used.

That is because the Pakistanis do not want to reveal the locations of their weapons or the amount or type of new bomb-grade fuel the country is now producing.

The American program was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration debated whether to share with Pakistan one of the crown jewels of American nuclear protection technology, known as “permissive action links,” or PALS, a system used to keep a weapon from detonating without proper codes and authorizations.

In the end, despite past federal aid to France and Russia on delicate points of nuclear security, the administration decided that it could not share the system with the Pakistanis because of legal restrictions.

In addition, the Pakistanis were suspicious that any American-made technology in their warheads could include a secret “kill switch,” enabling the Americans to turn off their weapons.

While many nuclear experts in the federal government favored offering the PALS system because they considered Pakistan’s arsenal among the world’s most vulnerable to terrorist groups, some administration officials feared that sharing the technology would teach Pakistan too much about American weaponry. The same concern kept the Clinton administration from sharing the technology with China in the early 1990s.

The New York Times has known details of the secret program for more than three years, based on interviews with a range of American officials and nuclear experts, some of whom were concerned that Pakistan’s arsenal remained vulnerable. The newspaper agreed to delay publication of the article after considering a request from the Bush administration, which argued that premature disclosure could hurt the effort to secure the weapons.

Since then, some elements of the program have been discussed in the Pakistani news media and in a presentation late last year by the leader of Pakistan’s nuclear safety effort, Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, who acknowledged receiving “international” help as he sought to assure Washington that all of the holes in Pakistan’s nuclear security infrastructure had been sealed.

The Times told the administration last week that it was reopening its examination of the program in light of those disclosures and the current instability in Pakistan. Early this week, the White House withdrew its request that publication be withheld, though it was unwilling to discuss details of the program.

In recent days, American officials have expressed confidence that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is well secured. “I don’t see any indication right now that security of those weapons is in jeopardy, but clearly we are very watchful, as we should be,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon news conference on Thursday.

Admiral Mullen’s carefully chosen words, a senior administration official said, were based on two separate intelligence assessments issued this month that had been summarized in briefings to Mr. Bush. Both concluded that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was safe under current conditions, and one also looked at laboratories and came to the same conclusion.

Still, the Pakistani government’s reluctance to provide access has limited efforts to assess the situation. In particular, some American experts say they have less ability to look into the nuclear laboratories where highly enriched uranium is produced — including the laboratory named for Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man who sold Pakistan’s nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

The secret program was designed by the Energy Department and the State Department, and it drew heavily from the effort over the past decade to secure nuclear weapons, stockpiles and materials in Russia and other former Soviet states. Much of the money for Pakistan was spent on physical security, like fencing and surveillance systems, and equipment for tracking nuclear material if it left secure areas.

But while Pakistan is formally considered a “major non-NATO ally,” the program has been hindered by a deep suspicion among Pakistan’s military that the secret goal of the United States was to gather intelligence about how to locate and, if necessary, disable Pakistan’s arsenal, which is the pride of the country.

“Everything has taken far longer than it should,” a former official involved in the program said in a recent interview, “and you are never sure what you really accomplished.”

So far, the amount the United States has spent on the classified nuclear security program, less than $100 million, amounts to slightly less than one percent of the roughly $10 billion in known American aid to Pakistan since the Sept. 11 attacks. Most of that money has gone for assistance in counterterrorism activities against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The debate over sharing nuclear security technology began just before then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was sent to Islamabad after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the United States was preparing to invade Afghanistan.

“There were a lot of people who feared that once we headed into Afghanistan, the Taliban would be looking for these weapons,” said a senior official who was involved. But a legal analysis found that aiding Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program — even if it was just with protective gear — would violate both international and American law.

General Musharraf, in his memoir, “In the Line of Fire,” published last year, did not discuss any equipment, training or technology offered then, but wrote: “We were put under immense pressure by the United States regarding our nuclear and missile arsenal. The Americans’ concerns were based on two grounds. First, at this time they were not very sure of my job security, and they dreaded the possibility that an extremist successor government might get its hands on our strategic nuclear arsenal. Second, they doubted our ability to safeguard our assets.”

General Musharraf was more specific in an interview two years ago for a Times documentary, “Nuclear Jihad: Can Terrorists Get the Bomb?” Asked about the equipment and training provided by Washington, he said, “Frankly, I really don’t know the details.” But he added: “This is an extremely sensitive matter in Pakistan. We don’t allow any foreign intrusion in our facilities. But, at the same time, we guarantee that the custodial arrangements that we brought about and implemented are already the best in the world.”

Now that concern about General Musharraf’s ability to remain in power has been rekindled, so has the debate inside and outside the Bush administration about how much the program accomplished, and what it left unaccomplished. A second phase of the program, which would provide more equipment, helicopters and safety devices, is already being discussed in the administration, but its dimensions have not been determined.

Harold M. Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, which designed most of the United States’ nuclear arms, argued that recent federal reluctance to share warhead security technology was making the world more dangerous.

“Lawyers say it’s classified,” Dr. Agnew said in an interview. “That’s nonsense. We should share this technology. Anybody who joins the club should be helped to get this.”

“Whether it’s India or Pakistan or China or Iran,” he added, “the most important thing is that you want to make sure there is no unauthorized use. You want to make sure that the guys who have their hands on the weapons can’t use them without proper authorization.”

In the past, officials say, the United States has shared ideas — but not technologies — about how to make the safeguards that lie at the heart of American weapons security. The system hinges on what is essentially a switch in the firing circuit that requires the would-be user to enter a numeric code that starts a timer for the weapon’s arming and detonation.

Most switches disable themselves if the sequence of numbers entered turns out to be incorrect in a fixed number of tries, much like a bank ATM does. In some cases, the disabled link sets off a small explosion in the warhead to render it useless. Delicate design details involve how to bury the link deep inside a weapon to keep terrorists or enemies from disabling the safeguard.

The most famous case of nuclear idea sharing involves France. Starting in the early 1970s, the United States government began a series of highly secretive discussions with French scientists to help them improve the country’s warheads.

A potential impediment to such sharing was the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which bars cooperation between nations on weapons technology.

To get around such legal prohibitions, Washington came up with a system of “negative guidance,” sometimes called “20 questions,” as detailed in a 1989 article in Foreign Policy. The system let United States scientists listen to French descriptions of warhead approaches and give guidance about whether the French were on the right track.

Nuclear experts say sharing also took place after the cold war when the United States worried about the security of Russian nuclear arms and facilities. In that case, both countries declassified warhead information to expedite the transfer of safety and security information, according to federal nuclear scientists.

But in the case of China, which has possessed nuclear weapons since the 1960s and is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Clinton administration decided that sharing PALS would be too risky. Experts inside the administration feared the technology would improve the Chinese warheads, and could give the Chinese insights into how American systems worked.

Officials said Washington debated sharing security techniques with Pakistan on at least two occasions — right after it detonated its first nuclear arms in 1998, and after the terrorist attack on the United States in 2001.

The debates pitted atomic scientists who favored technical sharing against federal officials at such places as the State Department who ruled that the transfers were illegal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and under United States law.

In the 1998 case, the Clinton administration still hoped it could roll back Pakistan’s nuclear program, forcing it to give up the weapons it had developed. That hope, never seen as very realistic, has been entirely given up by the Bush administration.

The nuclear proliferation conducted by Mr. Khan, the Pakistani metallurgist who built a huge network to spread Pakistani technology, convinced the Pakistanis that they needed better protections.

“Among the places in the world that we have to make sure we have done the maximum we can do, Pakistan is at the top of the list,” said John E. McLaughlin, who served as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, and played a crucial role in the intelligence collection that led to Mr. Khan’s downfall.

“I am confident of two things,” he added. “That the Pakistanis are very serious about securing this material, but also that someone in Pakistan is very intent on getting their hands on it.”

Leonard Pitts Jr.
Miami Herald
November 4, 2007

You might want to wash your hands after reading this.

After all, many other folks touched this paper (or screen, as the case may be) before you, and you don’t know where their hands have been.

For all you know, the last person to touch the paper was carrying Entamoeba histolyca, a parasite that causes amebiasis. You could end up with stomach cramps, bloody stools and an abscess on your liver. And that’s assuming the disease doesn’t spread to your lungs and brain.

Or maybe the last person to use the computer recently came into contact with African green monkeys. You could contract Marburg hemorrhagic fever. It brings rash, vomiting, chills, chest pain, sore throat, fever and diarrhea. And jaundice, pancreatic inflammation and severe weight loss. And delirium and shock. And liver failure and multi-organ dysfunction. And then you might die.

You think I’m trying to scare you? You’re right. Why should I be the only journalist in America who isn’t?

Consider what happened about two weeks back when every news organization in the country suddenly, simultaneously, discovered that staph infections kill people.

You could not turn on the television or pick up any publication this side of TV Guide without encountering alarmist stories about Staphylococcus aureus. Like flocks of birds that turn in the same direction at the same time in response to some invisible stimulus, it was as if every news editor in the country got the same memo at the same time: this is staph week.

Most of the stories were about MRSA, i.e., Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a staph strain that does not respond to common antibiotics. This made the so-called “super-bug” a headline magnet.

You know how many times staph was mentioned in U.S. newspapers in the first two weeks of October? According to a computer search: 155. Know how many times it was mentioned between the 15th and the 31st? 1,650.

So did staph somehow become deadlier in the last two weeks than it was before? No.

“Staph is not new,” says Nicole Coffin, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “Even MRSA is not new. In the hospitals it’s been around for 30 years. In the general population, it’s been around for at least 10 years.”

According to Coffin, the media’s staph infection stemmed from a story in the Journal of the American Medical Association nearly a month ago. JAMA reported on a study that found there were 19,000 fatal MRSA infections in 2005.

The number was higher than researchers had expected. But even that comes with a caveat: researchers cautioned that the methodology they used was significantly different than that of earlier studies, so direct comparisons with earlier data are dicey.

Am I making light of staph? Far from it: One of my family had a serious bout with the infection just this year. So I’m not diminishing staph. I am, however, ridiculing media.

As in the people who bring us shark attacks! Poison gases in your home! Bacteria lurking in hotel sheets! The pedophile next door!

We live evermore in the United States of Fear. We are entertained by it. Titillated by it. Distracted by it.

And we have learned to move as media move, together like birds in a flock, attention changing constantly and for no apparent reason. Already, fear of staph is fading. Tomorrow there will be fear of something else.

Meanwhile, in other news, 47 million Americans have no health insurance, the number of hate groups in this country has risen by 40 percent in seven years, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are projected to cost $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to wash your hands.

 

Because of lynching’s violent, racist history, the mere invocation of it can make people insanely angry.

By Ellis Cose

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 3:20 PM ET Oct 27, 2007

In an age when lynching is no longer accepted, what is the meaning of a noose? When a twisted rope, evocative of such a hideous history, hangs so far away from the horrors that defined it, is it still worth getting worked up about? Or when nooses appear on trees, on doors and in well-traveled public places, should we dismiss them as tasteless diversions? Cries for attention from sick, benighted souls? If only the questions were purely hypothetical. In the past few weeks, nooses have appeared in numerous places, spawning an orgy of coverage along with questions about their significance and potential harm.

The catalyst seems to be the brouhaha in Jena, La. Last year six black students there were accused of beating up a white student after three nooses were found hanging from a tree outside a school. The blacks were charged with attempted murder. Though the charges were subsequently reduced, outrage over the students’ being charged with such a serious crime culminated in a demonstration last month that drew an estimated 10,000 protesters to the tiny town of 3,000.

Now, it appears, nooses have become the totem of choice for some troubled people. Earlier this month a black professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College found a noose hanging from her office door. USA Today recently cataloged an array of such incidents: nooses at the University of Maryland, in a Long Island, N.Y., police locker room and in a bus-maintenance garage in Pittsburgh, to name a few. RACIAL CRISIS? OR JUST ROPE IN THE HANDS OF FOOLS? asked the headline atop a New York Times column.

I’d lay odds on the latter. This is an outbreak of copycat idiocy perpetrated by mean-spirited people who get a thrill out of seeing others riled up. And a lot of people have taken the bait. At Columbia, the noose spawned a rally in support of the targeted professor. In her State of the College address, president Susan H. Fuhrman said the perpetrator had “targeted all of us who believe in diversity.”

It’s unclear exactly what effect the noose was supposed to have. But it is clear that it stirred emotions out of proportion to its threat. The reason, of course, has to do with the history of the noose—or, to be more precise, the legacy of lynching.

Between 1882 and 1951, more than 5,000 people were lynched in the United States, according to statistics kept by the Tuskegee Institute. Not all were black. Roughly a fourth were white, Mexican or Asian. But lynchings of blacks were different from lynchings of whites. Many were “spectacle” lynchings, public rituals designed to make the point that “black bodies still belonged to white people,” writes Cynthia Carr in “Our Town,” which explores a 1930 lynching in Marion, Ind. Newspapers and public officials frequently egged on the lynch mobs, plying them with lurid (and often false) details. “Stories of sexual assault, insatiable black rapists, tender white virgins … were the bodice rippers of their day … The cumulative impression was of a world made precarious by Negroes,” reports historian Philip Dray in “At the Hands of Persons Unknown.”

Because of lynching’s violent, racist and sexually charged history, the mere invocation of it can make people insanely angry—or, as Clarence Thomas demonstrated during his Senate confirmation hearings (when he referred to his treatment as a “high-tech lynching”), silence a roomful of normally loquacious politicians. Still, 2007 is different from 1907.

Hate crimes didn’t even have a name then. It was reasonable to believe, especially in the South, that “uppity,” or even just random blacks, could be lynched with impunity. In 1990, Congress mandated the attorney general to collect data on hate crimes, and the FBI pledged to work with local officials to prosecute such transgressions. More important, lynchings and other hate crimes—be they anti-Semitic, anti-gay or anti-black—no longer have broad public support.

People still engage in hateful behavior: the FBI recorded 7,163 bias incidents in 2005, the last year for which statistics are available, down slightly from the 7,947 recorded a decade earlier. The majority were racial incidents, mostly against blacks. Still, no one really believes a Columbia professor is about to be lynched.

A position paper by the American Psychological Association concluded that most hate crimes were the work of “otherwise law-abiding young people.” Their actions were sometimes fueled by alcohol or drugs, “but the main determinant appears to be personal prejudice,” which blinds aggressors “to the immorality of what they are doing.” Extreme crimes “tend to be committed by people with a history of antisocial behavior.”

Maybe it’s time to stop getting so upset about these stupid gestures. Use them as occasions to educate—to revisit and extract lessons from history. And in cases where prosecutable crimes are committed, make the fools feel the full impact of the law. But to treat their acts as a serious expression of anything other than cruelty is to grant them an importance that they do not deserve.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/62297

A local journalist tells the story you haven’t heard.

By Craig Franklin

 

Jena, La.

By now, almost everyone in America has heard of Jena, La., because they’ve all heard the story of the “Jena 6.” White students hanging nooses barely punished, a schoolyard fight, excessive punishment for the six black attackers, racist local officials, public outrage and protests – the outside media made sure everyone knew the basics.

There’s just one problem: The media got most of the basics wrong. In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice.

I should know. I live in Jena. My wife has taught at Jena High School for many years. And most important, I am probably the only reporter who has covered these events from the very beginning.

The reason the Jena cases have been propelled into the world spotlight is two-fold: First, because local officials did not speak publicly early on about the true events of the past year, the media simply formed their stories based on one-side’s statements – the Jena 6. Second, the media were downright lazy in their efforts to find the truth. Often, they simply reported what they’d read on blogs, which expressed only one side of the issue.

The real story of Jena and the Jena 6 is quite different from what the national media presented. It’s time to set the record straight.

Myth 1: The Whites-Only Tree. There has never been a “whites-only” tree at Jena High School. Students of all races sat underneath this tree. When a student asked during an assembly at the start of school last year if anyone could sit under the tree, it evoked laughter from everyone present – blacks and whites. As reported by students in the assembly, the question was asked to make a joke and to drag out the assembly and avoid class.

Myth 2: Nooses a Signal to Black Students. An investigation by school officials, police, and an FBI agent revealed the true motivation behind the placing of two nooses in the tree the day after the assembly. According to the expulsion committee, the crudely constructed nooses were not aimed at black students. Instead, they were understood to be a prank by three white students aimed at their fellow white friends, members of the school rodeo team. (The students apparently got the idea from watching episodes of “Lonesome Dove.”) The committee further concluded that the three young teens had no knowledge that nooses symbolize the terrible legacy of the lynchings of countless blacks in American history. When informed of this history by school officials, they became visibly remorseful because they had many black friends. Another myth concerns their punishment, which was not a three-day suspension, but rather nine days at an alternative facility followed by two weeks of in-school suspension, Saturday detentions, attendance at Discipline Court, and evaluation by licensed mental-health professionals. The students who hung the nooses have not publicly come forward to give their version of events.

Myth 3: Nooses Were a Hate Crime. Although many believe the three white students should have been prosecuted for a hate crime for hanging the nooses, the incident did not meet the legal criteria for a federal hate crime. It also did not meet the standard for Louisiana’s hate-crime statute, and though widely condemned by all officials, there was no crime to charge the youths with.

Myth 4: DA’s Threat to Black Students. When District Attorney Reed Walters spoke to Jena High students at an assembly in September, he did not tell black students that he could make their life miserable with “the stroke of a pen.” Instead, according to Walters, “two or three girls, white girls, were chit-chatting on their cellphones or playing with their cellphones right in the middle of my dissertation. I got a little irritated at them and said, ‘Pay attention to me. I am right now having to deal with an aggravated rape case where I’ve got to decide whether the death penalty applies or not.’ I said, ‘Look, I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. With the stroke of a pen I can make your life miserable so I want you to call me before you do something stupid.’”

Mr. Walters had been called to the assembly by police, who had been at the school earlier that day dealing with some students who were causing disturbances. Teachers and students have confirmed Walters’s version of events.

Myth 5: The Fair Barn Party Incident. On Dec. 1, 2006, a private party – not an all-white party as reported – was held at the local community center called the Fair Barn. Robert Bailey Jr., soon to be one of the Jena 6, came to the party with others seeking admittance.

When they were denied entrance by the renter of the facility, a white male named Justin Sloan (not a Jena High student) at the party attacked Bailey and hit him in the face with his fist. This is reported in witness statements to police, including the victim, Robert Bailey, Jr.

Months later, Bailey contended he was hit in the head with a beer bottle and required stitches. No medical records show this ever occurred. Mr. Sloan was prosecuted for simple battery, which according to Louisiana law, is the proper charge for hitting someone with a fist.

Myth 6: The “Gotta-Go” Grocery Incident. On Dec. 2, 2006, Bailey and two other black Jena High students were involved in an altercation at this local convenience store, stemming from the incident that occurred the night before. The three were accused by police of jumping a white man as he entered the store and stealing a shotgun from him. The two parties gave conflicting statements to police. However, two unrelated eye witnesses of the event gave statements that corresponded with that of the white male.

Myth 7: The Schoolyard Fight. The event on Dec. 4, 2006 was consistently labeled a “schoolyard fight.” But witnesses described something much more horrific. Several black students, including those now known as the Jena 6, barricaded an exit to the school’s gym as they lay in wait for Justin Barker to exit. (It remains unclear why Mr. Barker was specifically targeted.)

When Barker tried to leave through another exit, court testimony indicates, he was hit from behind by Mychal Bell. Multiple witnesses confirmed that Barker was immediately knocked unconscious and lay on the floor defenseless as several other black students joined together to kick and stomp him, with most of the blows striking his head. Police speculate that the motivation for the attack was related to the racially charged fights that had occurred during the previous weekend.

Myth 8: The Attack Is Linked to the Nooses. Nowhere in any of the evidence, including statements by witnesses and defendants, is there any reference to the noose incident that occurred three months prior. This was confirmed by the United States attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, Donald Washington, on numerous occasions.

Myth 9: Mychal Bell’s All-White Jury. While it is true that Mychal Bell was convicted as an adult by an all-white jury in June (a conviction that was later overturned with his case sent to juvenile court), the jury selection process was completely legal and withstood an investigation by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Court officials insist that several black residents were summoned for jury duty, but did not appear.

Myth 10: Jena 6 as Model Youth. While some members were simply caught up in the moment, others had criminal records. Bell had at least four prior violent-crime arrests before the December attack, and was on probation during most of this year.

Myth 11: Jena Is One of the Most Racist Towns in America. Actually, Jena is a wonderful place to live for both whites and blacks. The media’s distortion and outright lies concerning the case have given this rural Louisiana town a label it doesn’t deserve.

Myth 12: Two Levels of Justice. Outside protesters were convinced that the prosecution of the Jena 6 was proof of a racially biased system of justice. But the US Justice Department’s investigation found no evidence to support such a claim. In fact, the percentage of blacks and whites prosecuted matches the parish’s population statistics.

These are just 12 of many myths that are portrayed as fact in the media concerning the Jena cases. (A more thorough review of all events can be found at www.thejenatimes.net – click on Chronological Order of Events.)

As with the Duke Lacrosse case, the truth about Jena will eventually be known. But the town of Jena isn’t expecting any apologies from the media. They will probably never admit their error and have already moved on to the next “big” story. Meanwhile in Jena, residents are getting back to their regular routines, where friends are friends regardless of race. Just as it has been all along.

• Craig Franklin is assistant editor of The Jena Times.

James P. Pinkerton
Newsday
October 19, 2007

The 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal once observed that mankind is suspended between two infinities – the infinitely large and the infinitely small. And so it is with two figures in the news: Al Gore wishes to speak for the planet, while Bill Cosby wishes to speak to the human heart.

And it’s revealing, given the liberal biases of our culture, that one man receives so much attention and the other man, so little.

Gore, former vice president-turned-pundit-movie star, has chosen, as his topic, the infinitely big. And he has been rewarded hugely: He just won the Nobel Peace Prize, on top of many other awards showered down on him by the elite culture, including an Oscar and an Emmy. So Gore will ascend into the jet stream of world renown – the same left-tilting empyrean occupied by such globetrotters as Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates.

In the meantime, closer to the ground, the comedian-turned-reformer Bill Cosby has joined with Alvin F. Poussaint of Harvard Medical School to write a book, “Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors,” which argues that many of the problems within the black community are self-inflicted, the result of a counterproductive culture of violence and victimhood.

Cosby has been making this point for years – and has been attacked by the left for years. Michael Eric Dyson, speaking for the liberal street-activism left over from the ’60s, wrote an entire book attacking Cosby’s “poisonous” view of black culture.

But Cosby and Poussaint have the cold terrible facts on their side: “In 1950, five out of every six black children were born into a two-parent home. Today that number is less than two out of six.” Yes, white racism exists, but it was worse a half-century ago. Something bad is happening within black culture, and Cosby and Poussaint are not shy about naming it: the celebration of violence and ignorance emblemized in the “gangsta” lifestyle.

The unyielding truth is that any group climbs into the middle class only by embracing middle-class values. This is a “conservative” fact of life that was once equally embraced by liberals, before they “progressed” on to “liberation” as a new goal.

But after decades of disaster, black thinkers such as Cosby and Poussaint – and before them, John McWhorter, Juan Williams and, yes, Clarence Thomas – are leading a moral renaissance among African Americans, which surely counts as the most hopeful social trend in our national life today. And yet with the remarkable exception of NBC’s Tim Russert, who bravely devoted the entire hour of Sunday’s “Meet the Press” to Cosby and Poussaint, the mainstream media seem little interested in this black renaissance.

Why is that? Perhaps because the liberal-leaning elites realize that they are losing the debate over poverty and uplift – the winners being those who speak for hard work, abstinence and delayed gratification.

No wonder the chattering classes, fleeing from their horror of such a “bourgeois” existence, have moved on to new, greener pastures.

But there’s a problem looming ahead for Gore and his many fans: how to radically reduce “greenhouse gases.” The environmentalists have their answer: some sort of global authority to restrict factories and cars – which would, not coincidentally, authorize them to rule the world. But maybe China won’t cooperate. Maybe the Chinese will watch as we shut down our factories – and they keep theirs open. And then who will win the next war? Not a war of polar bears and the Prius, but a real war of ships and airplanes.

If Gore wants to be constructive, he will figure out to how to reduce pollution – while still preserving American industry. If he could do that, he would truly earn the respect and admiration of all Americans.

But in the meantime, Cosby and Poussaint have taken on a challenge that we can win, because the struggle will take place within our own hearts.

Robert Scheer
Creator’s Syndicate
October 19, 2007

When will we listen to the troops? I’m not talking about soldiers used as props for a George W. Bush photo-op, telling reporters what Washington wants to hear. The military is disciplined and thus accustomed, from Gen. David Petraeus on down, to toeing the official line. But the Iraq war has also produced brilliant messages of dissent from the ranks that should cause us to stop in our tracks and reconsider what we have wrought. First, a group of sergeants came forward, and on Tuesday it was the captains’ turn to speak out.

In “The War as We Saw It,” an eloquent op-ed article published in the New York Times in August, seven Army sergeants summarized the futility of their 15 months fighting in Iraq: “To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched.” After penning that cri de coeur, two of the soldiers died in Iraq, and a third was severely wounded.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post printed, “The Real Iraq We Knew,” by 12 Army captains, all of whom served in Iraq, which begins: “Today marks five years since the authorization of military force in Iraq, setting Operation Iraqi Freedom in motion. Five years on, the Iraq war is as undermanned and under-resourced as it was from the start. And, five years on, Iraq is in shambles.

“As Army captains who served in Baghdad and beyond, we’ve seen the corruption and the sectarian division. We understand what it’s like to be stretched too thin. And we know when it’s time to get out.”

How come those brave veterans know it’s time to get out, but leading Democrats, who voted for the war to be authorized, are still pussyfooting about quickly removing the troops from this ever-deepening quagmire? They’re jockeying for political advantage, knowing that drawing out the war hurts the Republicans.

It is a deeply cynical ploy that works only because, with our all-volunteer military, most Americans don’t have to face the choice of sacrificing themselves or their loved ones in a futile and losing war.

Yes, it costs the taxpayers, but so do the “Halo 3″ video games Americans are purchasing in record numbers, and for most, Iraq is a make-believe war. Even the cost seems unreal, as Bush is the first president in U.S. history to cut taxes in a time of war, with the result that more than a trillion dollars in long-term obligations will not come due while his administration has to foot the bills.

If there were a military draft, people would be in the streets demanding an end to this carnage, which now threatens to go on for decades. That is precisely why the neoconservative ideologues who got us into this mess built their fantasies on a volunteer force, supplemented by hundreds of thousands of contractors (including 50,000 mercenary troops like those from Blackwater) and the purchase of largely irrelevant but highly profitable high-tech weaponry – although they forgot about simple armor for the troops.

The most fraudulent neocon claim was that pro-Western, even pro-Israel, Iraqis, such as their favorite, the now totally discredited Ahmed Chalabi, would police the country as surrogates for the United States, and that Iraqi oil sales would pay for it all.

The 12 captains, who worked with the local Iraqi residents, are very clear as to the forlorn outcome of that plan. “And, indeed, many of us witnessed the exploitation of U.S. tax dollars by Iraqi officials and military officers. Sabotage and graft have had a particularly deleterious impact on Iraq’s oil industry, which still fails to produce the revenue that Pentagon war planners hoped would pay for Iraq’s reconstruction,” they wrote.

As for that other ongoing illusion – that we are turning over power to Iraqi forces we have trained – the captains write: “Iraqi soldiers quit at will. The police are effectively controlled by militias. And, again, corruption is debilitating. U.S. tax dollars enrich self-serving generals and support the very elements that will battle each other after we’re gone.”

Building an empire on the cheap and by proxy doesn’t work. If you want one, and of course most of us shouldn’t because only a few fat cats benefit from such imperial adventures, you need a vast conscript army. As the captains put it: “There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately.” Enough said.

David Reinhard
The Oregonian
October 15, 2007

Things must be improving in Iraq, because you don’t read or hear about it as much these days. If things were getting worse – or staying the same – you can bet the big networks and newspapers would be out spreading the news. The prestige media would be declaring Gen. David Petraeus’ surge a bust and dissecting its failure in lavish, even loving, detail.

Now the best anyone can come up with is another story about Blackwater, which simply doesn’t pack the wallop of Abu Ghraib and Haditha. Moreover, the recent fixation on a U.S. security firm operating in Iraq is too obvious. (Come on, guys, everybody sees what you’re doing.) Abu Ghraib and Haditha became incantations of a war gone bad. The mounting war dead became an invitation for throat-clearing “quagmire” pronouncements. Abu Ghraib, Haditha, deteriorating security in Iraq – yeah, those were the days.

Now the nation’s naysayers are left with this: The U.S. military reported last week that troop deaths in Iraq went down for the fourth month in a row, and the Iraqi government reported that civilian deaths declined by half in September.

What to do? Well, CBS and NBC gave the new casualty figures a few sentences on their evening news programs, and the major papers played the news far from their front pages. Only ABC led with the story. In fact, the Washington Post’s media critic, Howard Kurtz, wondered about the short shrift the media gave this news after four years of “continuously depressing” news. On CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” he asked the Washington Post’s Robin Wright and CNN’s Barbara Starr whether the news should have received more attention. Perish the thought, they both said – we’re not sure there is a trend yet.

OK, four months is not a trend. But Kurtz then asked the obvious question: If those casualty figures had gone up, wouldn’t that have made front pages? “Oh, I think inevitably it would have,” replied Starr. “I mean, that … by any definition, is news.”

OK, bad Iraq news is news, good Iraq news is not.

Even the bad news out of Iraq isn’t what it used to be. Recall Haditha. In the spring of 2006, Rep. John Murtha said that Pentagon sources had told him Marines there had murdered 24 Iraqis “in cold blood” and that the cover-up of the November 2005 massacre “goes right up the chain of command.” It was, for a season, the “event” that told ever so many all they needed to know about what was wrong in Iraq. Murtha said it happened because our forces are stretched too thin. It was going to be this war’s My Lai – a dark incantation summing up the whole rotten mess, a one-word dirge of our immediate disgrace and inevitable defeat. Haditha, Haditha, Haditha!

All that was missing were … actual facts, completed investigations and court proceedings.

Last week Haditha became not-so-much news. That is, it became good news, which, in the media’s strange calculus of Iraq, is not big news.

A senior military investigator recommended dropping murder charges against Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the last ranking enlisted Marine charged in the case. Lt. Col. Paul J. Ware recommended the charges be downgraded to negligent homicide if the case went to court-martial. Earlier he had recommended that all charges be dropped against the two Marines accused of murder in Haditha. His conclusion in all three cases: insufficient evidence.

The New York Times reported the latest Haditha news back on Page 8. In May 2006, the paper had a Page One story declaring that “Military Expected to Report Marines Killed Iraqi Civilians.” Front-page charges, back-page exonerations. “Last year, when accounts of the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of Marines came to light,” The Times’ Paul von Zielbauer wrote Saturday, “it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity.”

Perhaps Haditha did produce this war’s defining atrocity, just not in the way so many once imagined. Rushing to accuse Marines of murdering two dozen Iraqi innocents “in cold blood” and alleging a cover-up “right up the chain of command” before the facts are known – using the alleged massacre to serve your pet theories on the war’s conduct or your anti-war stand when the conflict is going poorly – this could be the war’s “defining atrocity” if the progress on the ground reported recently is sustained.

I know, let’s get back to Blackwater.

Justin Martin
Baltimore Sun
September 30, 2007

During the reign of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi newspaper Azzaman could only be published in London. Fleeing the government’s muscular arm in the 1990s, the newspaper’s founder, former Saddam aide Saad al-Bazzaz, was forced to run his media operation out of Europe for nearly a decade.

But after Saddam’s expulsion in 2003, al-Bazzaz set up offices in Baghdad, and he has since been busy running what is considered Iraq’s most credible Arabic publication. With a daily circulation of more than 75,000, Azzaman is a modern journalistic success story and a publication that has added greater depth to the political debate in Iraq.

Among the relatively few positives to come out of Iraq in the last four years is the growing size and autonomy of its media. While the U.S. invasion of Iraq has caused chaos in so many of the country’s sectors, the removal of Saddam has brought a semblance of order and purpose to Iraqi journalism.

For nearly three decades during Saddam’s supremacy, Iraqi journalists existed only to applaud and glorify the dictator and his imps. Criticism of the government’s higher reaches and investigative reporting were often deadly undertakings. Supervision was fierce. Saddam’s son, Odai, was director of all Iraqi radio and TV stations, owned 11 of Iraq’s newspapers and was the head of the Iraqi journalists union.

With Saddam and his sons gone, journalists in Iraq are enjoying freedom and publication opportunities unimaginable under their previous rulers. Reporters Without Borders announced in 2003 that “a wind of freedom has gusted through the Iraqi media. Genuine diversity and openness are now possible.”

During Saddam’s rule, fewer than 40 Arabic news publications existed; today, they number in the hundreds. “Iraqi readers have been bombarded with new publications,” Arab journalist and scholar Noha Mellor wrote in her 2005 book, “The Making of Arab News.” And Iraqis are voracious news consumers, Mellor writes, welcoming the burgeoning number of available news outlets.

In 2002, the year before Saddam was removed, human rights advocate Freedom House rated Iraq as one of the worst nations in the world in its annual survey of media freedoms. Placing Iraq near the likes of North Korea and Rwanda in the rankings, Freedom House explained that criticism of Saddam and his powerful government appointees was simply not an option for Iraqi reporters. Since then, Iraq has been steadily improving its journalistic standing in the Middle East and around the world.

Now, the greatest impediment to free expression in Iraq is not government censorship but rampant lawlessness. Iraq is by far the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 23 reporters died in Iraq in 2005, 32 lost their lives in 2006 and, as of this writing, 19 have died this year. Scores of reporters have also been kidnapped, beaten and threatened by militants during this time.

Still, despite the sectarian brutality that often forces foreign and Iraqi reporters to write their dispatches from hotels and offices, media freedoms in Iraq will likely continue to grow. Journalists in Iraq will not abide a return to their country’s practice of crushing political criticism and open debate. Once people taste freedom, they rarely hunger for anything less.

For their part, too, Iraqi news consumers will not likely permit anything but the continued expansion of journalistic discourse in their country. One of the first things many Iraqis did after Saddam’s regime fell in 2003 was rush out and purchase satellite dishes to view news that wasn’t produced by Saddam’s family.

Iraqi journalists and their audiences are doing many of the right things to encourage a watchdog media and open debate. It is tempting to wonder how much more progress will be made if U.S. and Iraqi leaders ever get a handle on things over there. With stability in Iraq so fragile, it is heartening to know that a vocal press – that indispensable democratic pillar – is coming to life.

Thomas Sowell
Hoover Institution
September 27, 2007

It is painful – and dangerous – how little we learn from history, even when it is recent history.

Just a year ago, “rape” charges spread lynch-mob hysteria on the campus of Duke University and in much of the liberal media, while professional race hustlers descended on the town of Durham, N.C., and mindless tribalism was stirred up by extremists in the local black community.

This year, we have all learned what a total fraud that case was, from beginning to end. Yet now we see a similar outburst of mindless tribalism and another attempt at mob rule, promoted by such veterans of last year’s hysteria as Jesse Jackson.

This time the scene is in Jena, La. The issue is the prosecution of a black high school student accused of stomping on an unconscious white student – and the lack of criminal prosecution of white students who hung a noose on a tree, who were disciplined by the school.

Liberals’ skills at moral equivalence have been so finely honed during the long years of the Cold War that they have turned this into a case of “unequal treatment,” based on race – as if putting a noose on a tree is equivalent to stomping somebody who is unconscious.

The black student was found guilty but the verdict was overturned on appeal – not on grounds that he was not guilty, but on grounds that the appellate court did not think he should have been tried as an adult.

The usual legal procedure would be to try the student again, this time not as an adult. However, the usual legal procedures are not good enough for those who have once again seized the opportunity to hype race – and to hell with questions of guilt or innocence or legal procedures.

The immediate demand of the mobs descending on Jena is that the young man found guilty of a serious crime of violence should be free on bail pending a second trial.

The legal question is whether letting someone accused of such a crime go free on bail is likely to mean that he will not be around long enough for a second trial. But no one is seriously debating that.

Racial hype has replaced all rational discussion. Moreover, the Jena episode has shown that two can play the racial hype game. Neo-Nazis have published the names and home addresses of all the young blacks involved in the school incident.

The slogan “No justice, no peace” has been used to justify settling legal issues in the streets, instead of in courts of law.

Neo-Nazis have now helped demonstrate what a dangerous slogan that is, since different people have opposite ideas of what “justice” is in a given situation.

Long after the imported demonstrators have left, and the national media have lost interest, the families of the black youngsters involved in the school altercation will have to live with the knowledge that their privacy and security have both been lost in a racially polarized community, with vengeful elements.

The last thing the South needs is a return to lynch-mob justice, whatever the color of whoever is promoting it.

Back in the 1950s, when the federal courts began striking down Jim Crow laws, one of the rising demands across the country was that the discriminators and segregationists obey “the law of the land.” But, somewhere along the way, the idea also arose and spread that not everybody was supposed to obey “the law of the land.”

Violations of law by people with approved victim status such as minorities, or self-righteous crusaders such as environmentalists, were to be met with minimal resistance – if any – and any punishment of them beyond a wrist-slap was “over-reacting.”

College campuses became bastions of the new and sanctified mob rule, provided that the mobs are from the list of groups approved as politically correct.

The politics of condoned law-breaking is part of the moral dry rot of our times. So is settling issues in the streets on the basis of race, instead of in courts on the basis of law.

James P. Pinkerton

Newsday
September 8, 2007

Should we in the media be virtuous? That is, should we consciously set out to do good – and to be good? The American people, especially the young, say “yes.” And yet most in the media say “no” – for various reasons that are worth exploring.

Needless to say, most journalists, like most people, wish to think of themselves as virtuous. But still, it is not the normal language of journalism to speak of virtue as a goal.

For news reporters, the stated goal instead is to be “objective” – to get the story right. That’s a laudable goal, of course, but as Abraham Lincoln once explained, there’s a difference between objectivity and neutrality.

One can be objectively accurate in one’s report, but still not neutral in one’s stance. As Lincoln put it, if your loved one is being eaten by a bear, you can see the situation clearly – and seek to save your loved one. In such a case, the virtue of impartiality risks becoming the vice of indifference.

Last month, many people thought that CNN went overboard on “neutrality” with its three-part special, “God’s Warriors.” Reporter Christiane Amanpour neatly divided her reporting into thirds, among Jews, Christians and Muslims. Yet, one watchdog group, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, called her reportage “one of the most grossly distorted programs” ever aired on TV. At a minimum, one can say that by rigidly assigning “equal time” to zealotry in all three faiths, she was imposing an artificial and misleading “fairness.”

On the other hand, a growing branch of the media is punditry. And commentators generally make no pretense of being fair; their goal is to show “attitude,” so as to generate “buzz” and glean “eyeballs.”

But one problem with such relentless self-promotion is that it attracts people to whom modesty and decency are strangers. A case in point is MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson, who on Aug. 28 bragged about a gay-bashing incident from his youth. Carlson will no doubt be doing penance before gay groups for years to come, but his chuckling recollections of his own thuggery provide a wide window into his true self. Yet, he’s “good television,” and so he still has a job.

Of course, nobody in the media – including this writer, who also contributes to the Fox News Channel – is without fault.

But maybe, in pursuit of scoops and ratings, we have gone too far. That’s what the American people seem to think, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

The center found that most Americans believe the media don’t care about the people they report on. Indeed, they think that news organizations are too critical of America overall – although it’s important to note that by a 2-1 ratio those same respondents think that George W. Bush is receiving fair coverage, which suggests that people see a distinction between the treatment of an individual politician and the treatment of our country.

Interestingly, the center found that those Americans who get their news from the Internet – who are typically younger and better educated – are more critical of the media than their elders. A full 68 percent of “Net-heads” say that the media disrespect ordinary folk, compared with 53 percent of the general public. The other findings reveal a streak of idealism about the media as they could be – and harsh judgmentalism about them as they are.

People understand how powerful the media are these days, even as they fragment into more and more pieces. People want reporters and pundits – and bloggers and everyone else – to use that power for good. Yes, there are debates about the definition of the good, but perhaps not as much room for disagreement as the “neutral” press has suggested in recent decades.

In the fight between good and evil, Americans are saying, loudly, neutrality is not an answer.