Presidential Race 2008
I've about had it with the FT.
Regular (and truly devoted) Cake Eater readers will know that this is our daily, dead tree taking. I've put up with their partisan coverage of the election, simply because, well, I can skip past it, and move onto the regular news about a. financial crisis or b. world affairs (you all do know that Congo and Rwanda are about to go at it, right? In a big, bad and very 1994 way, right?) that no American media outlet covers. I like the paper, for the most part, but, right now, they're just another paper in the tank for Obama. Curiously enough though, while they're continuing with their fawining coverage (today it was three quarters of a page dedicated to Obama's transition preparations), they've apparently decided to start hedging their bets, and started mentioning today, for the first time, that the race is tightening. I think they're simply beginning to think that, hey, we'd better start managing expectations of our European readers, just in case Obama doesn't get elected.
Also, the columnists are starting to drive me batty. Today, they've got Christopher Buckley writing McCain's imagined concession speech. (Which I didn't even bother reading.) They've also got John Gapper, who is the regular Thursday columnist, telling us that the msm's shift to the left is "temporary."
{...}It still infuriates Republicans, who are convinced that the media have it in for them. Umpteen newspapers (including the Financial Times) have declared their support for Mr Obama and Slate, the online magazine, this week disclosed that 55 of its staff and contributors intend to vote for Mr Obama and one for Mr McCain.
In fact, I think they are correct that the media currently tilt leftward in the US, but not for the obvious reason. It says less about the bias of “liberal elite” journalists and more about a breakdown of the established media order, from The New York Times to Mr Drudge.
Mr Drudge’s dominance has been undermined by competition. His sensibility infuriated so many people that left-leaning sites such as the Daily Kos sprung up to challenge him. Lately, his thunder has been stolen by the Huffington Post, an unlikely blend of leftwing blogging, reporting and aggregation founded by Arianna Huffington, the media gadfly.
The Huffington Post has leapt past the Drudge Report in traffic, attracting 4.5m unique users in September, compared with 2.1m for Drudge and 2.4m for Politico, a political news site. While Mr Drudge picks out stories that could hurt Mr Obama, the Huffington Post does the opposite, highlighting anything that makes Mr McCain look bad.
This shift leftwards online has been matched on cable television, where Fox News, the rightwing news channel, has increasingly faced its mirror image at MSNBC. The latter’s leftish talk-show hosts, Keith Olbermann and now Rachel Maddow, a chirpy gay liberal, dish out scorn about Republicans in opposition to Bill O’Reilly and others at Fox.
The effect is not just to balance out Mr Drudge and Mr O’Reilly but to place old-school media objectivity, as practised by US newspapers, under pressure. Obama-supporting blogs have ridiculed stories in outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post that fail to dismiss distortions by Mr McCain.
All this, and falls in advertising and circulation, is pushing newspapers back to a scrappier, more plain-spoken and partisan “yellow press” past. Instead of soberly trying to filter all information with a careful “on the one hand, on the other hand” balance, they are becoming more colourful in tone and politics.
Some old hacks are shocked. Michael Malone, a columnist and “one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I’m cut”, wrote on ABC News online that the bias to Mr Obama on television and in newspapers was “not just bewildering but appalling”.
Well, maybe, but it looks familiar enough to a British journalist: this is Fleet Street. It is what happens when you get intense competition among different media outlets, all seeking to play on (and pander to) the audience’s sympathies and biases.
The centre is no longer holding. “Having many voices is the natural state of the media. There was just a three-decade long exception in the US when city papers and networks dominated,” says Jeff Jarvis, a blogger and lecturer in journalism at City University of New York.
Just as Fleet Street swings left and right politically, depending on where it sees its commercial advantage, the US media have shifted left for a time, to mimic what they judge to be the country’s mood. When that mood swings back, so will the media.{...}
My first nit to pick on this one is there anyone in the real world who actually puts the Huffington Post and Drudge on the same level? They're entirely two different kinds of sites. It's comparing apples to oranges. Drudge mainly links to other people, and provides very little content of his own. (And, no, kids I don't count the usual six word lede, "Obama did so and so...developing" to be original content.) Huffington Post links to no one, but puts out plenty of their own (atrocious) content (and steals bandwidth every time they get a chance to do so). That HuffPo had more traffic in September than Drudge, is supposedly Gapper's best example of internet leftist media winning out. Which is bullshit. Because neither of these sites purports to be an actual "news" organization, or if they do, that's not what they are in reality. They are citizen op-ed pages. Pure and simple. That's it. And everyone knows that, or at least they should.
The "new media" of the internet has never proclaimed to be truly out there to represent the people, in an All the President's Men-Ben Bradlee-get two solid sources to confirm-we've got to be objective-sort of way. It has happened, particularly when Powerline brought down Dan Rather in 2004, but for the most part, the right side of the blogosphere is a bunch of tech saavy people, surfing the web, linking to stories and commenting on them. They also provide more information than has been reported in the msm. It's developed as a counterbalance to what many people have seen as the leftist tilt of the media, which is nothing new but rather developed during the Clinton Administration---another president that the media loved and wanted elected. That the internet came to the fore during his tenure is interesting, because while the economy it created saved Bubba in varied ways, it, ironically, almost brought about his downfall. Drudge was the first guy to report about Monica Lewinsky, and it's completely possible that if he hadn't done the work, and hadn't published that story, the mainstream media wouldn't have done anything with the information. In my personal opinion, Drudge has yet to trump that scoop. The Huffington Post, to my knowledge, has yet to break any worthwhile news at all, you know, other than that John Cusack (or any number of celebrities) is apparently pissed off about the Bush administration. But the point is still the same: for some unknown reason, Arianna Huffington felt liberal viewpoints were being ignorned by the mainstream media, so she created an outlet for them. Same deal, different decade. This isn't, for the most part, citizen journalism, it's citizen op-ed writing.
While I won't deny that the web and blogs have been handy for grassroots efforts, on either side of the equation, mostly, it's about bitching. I should know. I'm a prime example. And one of the things that people bitch about, left or right, is the perceived imbalance of the media. The left thinks the msm was in the tank for Bush in the lead-up to the Iraq war; the right thinks they're in the tank for the left every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Yet, according to Gapper, all this opinion that started with the web, and is filtering into cable news, is putting pressure on "old school media objectivity" because, as Gapper sees it, opinion makes money and keeps dying newspapers afloat, while strict, objective reporting of the news is a financial loser. Yellow Journalism, apparently, pays, if Fleet Street is any indication, and it is in Gapper's book.
See, this is the sort of thing that drives me bananas. Because there is, obviously, a double standard at play here. What Gapper isn't saying is that Yellow Journalism is all right now that there's a candidate on the left that we actually like and want elected (and, yes, the FT did endorse Obama earlier in the week) and are willing to get behind. But if it was the other way round, if the candidate of the moment was a rightwinger, he'd freak out. He'd be, undoubtedly screaming, about media objectivity, and how they weren't doing the job the people of the world expect them to do. (And that's only if the media could ever get in the tank for a rightist candidate, which is unlikely.) Gapper insinuates that it would work this way, because media outlets that mimic the public's mood make money, so there would, eventually, be a wholesale media shift to the right.
And how likely do you think that outcome is, my devoted Cake Eater readers.
What Gapper doesn't get is that Americans truly believe that the media should be objective. We want the facts, without opinion, if you please, because we want to make up our own damn minds about things. If I want to only read articles that I agree with, I'll stick with the blogs or opinion magazines, thank you ever so bloody much. I want facts. I want numbers and names and who said what and when did they say it and how they said it. This is what I want as a media consumer. I don't want endless "analysis". I don't want pundits putting their two cents out there, fifty times a day. I don't want any of this. What I want is to make up my own damn mind about things, and for that I need facts. Plain, boring facts. I want the who, what, where, why, when, and how. AND THAT'S IT. I don't want the media to have an agenda of their own, that they push on their own pages, and by that I do not mean the editorial pages. Their bias filters down into news stories, where they decide what are the germane facts and what aren't. We place an awful lot of trust in these people to give us accurate accounts of what is going on, and what happens when that trust is shattered? What's going to happen to the FT, and every other newspaper who doubled down on the hope of an Obama presidency, if McCain is elected? How will people be able to trust anything they publish ever again? I'm already starting to doubt the other stories that they publish because their viewpoint is so obviously compromised, what's going to happen after the election? Eh?
Gapper doesn't seem to have any good answers other than to tell us to get used to the pendulum swinging from left to right to left to right in the media. What happens, dear Mr. Gapper, when the pendulum falls to the ground and shatters completely? Because, come Tuesday, there's a very good chance of that happening. What role with the mainstream media play then?
I really love America, because it produces people like Tito Munoz. You don't know who Tito is? Well, let me introduce you to a great man. Tito showed up at a McCain/Palin Rally in Woodbridge, Virginia this weekend, and let the media have it over their treatment of Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher.
{...}In the audience Saturday, there were plenty of people who were mad about it. There was real anger at this rally, but it wasn’t, as some erroneous press reports from other McCain rallies have suggested, aimed at Obama. It was aimed at the press. And that’s where Tito Munoz came in.
After McCain left, as the crowd filed out, Munoz made his way to an area near some loudspeakers. He attracted a few reporters when he started talking loudly, in heavily-accented English, about media mistreatment of Wurzelbacher. (It was clear that Spanish was Munoz’s native language, and he later told me he was born in Colombia.) When I first made my way over to him, Munoz thought I was there to give him the third degree.
“Are you going to check my license, too?” he asked me. “Are you going to check my immigration status? I’m ready, I have everything here. Whatever you want, I have it. I have my green card, I have my passport — “was a little surprised. Did Munoz really bring his papers with him to a McCain rally? I asked.
“Yeah, I have my papers right here,” he said. “I’m an American citizen. Right here, right here.” With that, he produced a U.S. passport, turned it to the page with his picture on it, and thrust it about an inch from my nose. “Right here,” he said. “In your faceMunoz said he owned a small construction business. “I have a license, if you guys want to check,” he said.
Someone asked why Munoz had come to the rally. “I support McCain, but I’ve come to face you guys because I’m disgusted with you guys,” he said. “Why the hell are you going after Joe the Plumber? Joe the Plumber has an idea. He has a future. He wants to be something else. Why is that wrong? Everything is possible in America. I made it. Joe the Plumber could make it even better than me. . . . I was born in Colombia, but I was made in the U.S.A.”The scene turned into a mini-fracas when David Corn, of Mother Jones, defended press coverage. Munoz was having none of it. Why, he asked, would the press whack Joe the Plumber when it didn’t want to report on Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber? “How come that’s not in the news all the time?” Munoz said. “How come Joe the Plumber is every second? I’m talking about NBC, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN.”A black woman with a strong Caribbean accent jumped in the fray. “Tell me,” she said to Corn, “why is it you can go and find out about Joe the Plumber’s tax lien and when he divorced his wife and you can’t tell me when Barack Obama met with William Ayers? Why? Why could you not tell us that? Joe the Plumber is me!”
“I am Joe the Plumber!” Munoz chimed in. “You’re attacking me.”{...}
God bless you, Tito. We need more immigrants like you.
Over the weekend, the husband and I were at a party, and we were chatting with a friend of ours, one more conservative in our party of liberal friends (Which makes a total of three conservatives. Usually politics are verboten at these get togethers.) and, when we were off to the side, away from everyone else and he knew he was safe, he said he couldn't believe how they'd gone after Joe the Plumber, and how vicious they'd been about it. The husband and I agreed with him when he insisted this was really going to come back to haunt the Democrats on election day. It's entirely possible that it will---and it's more than possible, it's probable.
The media may have been doing Obama's dirty work with Joe the Plumber, but it's not the media who will pay. Good on Tito for calling them on it, but it's not the media who will pay...it's Obama. People are sick of this stuff. In an ironic plot twist, the mainstream media, which has been nothing if not for Barack Obama since day friggin' one, might have cost their Messiah the election. Their ill-informed savaging of Joe the Plumber's reputation is not going down well with people. Decent people. People who might have been tempted to vote for Obama, but whose eyes have since been opened about the Obama Nation's behavior. How many voters does this guy think he can alienate and still win the election? The PUMA's {"Party Unity, My Ass"}are voting for McCain, because they're pissed off about how Obama and the DNC treated Hillary Clinton and her supporters. There are any number of people who are voting for McCain because they're sick of how Obama treats people who disagree with him, by labeling them racists. And so on and so forth...and you know what? The alienated voters have a tendency to add up in the positive column for McCain. I keep hearing how they're not going to stay home on election day---they're going to go out and vote for McCain because they will not tolerate an Obama Presidency. That's how much Obama has pissed these people off: He's driven them entirely out of voting Democratic to vote for McCain, someone whom they probably never would have considered voting for in the first place. A vote for McCain is turning into a protest vote against Obama, and you know what...unlike votes cast for Ralph Nader, these might actually help get someone elected.
Let's be frank, the reason Obama thinks he can alienate these people is because he thinks he's got the election in the bag. Which, if my understanding of how polls can change within a twenty-four hour news cycle is correct, is not true, with two weeks left to go. Particularly when the major polls are oversampling Democrats to get Obama his beloived three point lead? It's not in the bag--AT ALL. It's closer than it ever has been.
An Army of Joes can change a lot.
I meant it last week when I wrote that Joe Wurzelbacher could probably cost Obama the election. We've all been waiting for the "October Surprise"? Well, my personal feeling is that a big, bald plumber from Toledo is the October Surprise. He asked a question, it was answered poorly, and he was savaged for it. No one deserves to be treated like that. Joe resonates with people. They consider themselves to be normal, average Joes. They may not be plumbers, but they, too, have dreams, perhaps of owning their own business, working for themselves and making it into an entirely new tax bracket. Tito is one of those guys. This isn't about lower taxes just this instant---although, that would be nice---it's more about knowing that there won't be higher taxes when they get into that new tax bracket. It's about leaving room to dream about the future, and how you want that future world to work. That's no small thing. Only one candidate comes close to providing that sort of freedom, the freedom to dream and hope and to work hard for your own future.
And it ain't Barack Obama.
