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 | July 18, 2008 |
| The Weekly Update from Media Matters for America Yet again, the political media is obsessed with the question of whether the Democratic presidential nominee is "likable" and whether he can "connect" with "regular people." We go through this every four years. It's a remarkably bad way for journalists to spend their -- and our -- time, but old habits die hard, especially when the alternative is doing some actual reporting. Voting for president based on who seems the most likable -- or, in the media's favorite shorthand, based on who you would rather have a beer with -- is a spectacularly bad idea, what with the almost total lack of similarity between talking about the Knicks over a bottle of Bud and running the world's most powerful nation. It requires very little judgment or analytical skills to determine that the Knicks stink. Deciding whether to send Americans off to die in a foreign land is (or should be) a little different. But that isn't the only reason why journalists shouldn't spend their airtime and column inches pontificating about which candidate is more likable. For better or worse, voters will allow their opinions of the candidates' personalities to have an effect on their vote -- and that isn't an entirely bad thing. But voters don't need to be told who they like. They can decide that for themselves. They don't need to be told who "connects" with them or does not -- they will feel a connection, or they won't. The pundit class' insistence on talking endlessly about candidates' purported "likability" and ability to "relate" to "regular Americans" is, at best, a waste of time, and the ultimate in pointless horserace journalism. And at worst, it introduces an observer effect, where the view promoted by the media -- the purported observers and chroniclers -- that a candidate has a likability problem with the public becomes inseparable in the public's mind from the candidate's inherent "likability." Not to mention that, if the media talk enough about "likability," the public absorbs the idea that that is a key criterion in judging a candidate's qualifications. In other words, the public hears enough from the media that a candidate is not considered likable by the public, and the public itself begins to view the candidate as less likable. And then there's the fact that the pundit crowd doesn't have the foggiest idea what they are talking about. They sit around their insular little echo chamber in Washington and New York, prattling on about people in Michigan and Pennsylvania being incapable of liking a candidate who doesn't bowl well or who drinks green tea. And, incredibly, they tell us the candidate is an elitist, even as they make elitist assumptions about the voters. Needless to say, they're wrong. A lot. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to spot the clues that the pundit class obsession with Barack Obama's purported inability to connect with regular people is misplaced. He is, after all, consistently running ahead of John McCain in the polls. And he did just raise $52 million in one month, with an average contribution of $68. That's a hell of a lot of support from regular people for someone who is supposed to have trouble connecting with regular people. If the fact that Barack Obama is winning is insufficient proof for the media that he can relate to "regular people" well enough to win, the media might want to take a few moments to browse the public polling results posted at PollingReport.com. While the pundits sit around insisting that Barack Obama has trouble relating to people, people keep telling pollsters the opposite. Obama does better than McCain on questions about which candidate "understands the problems Americans face in their daily lives" and "understands the concerns of people like myself." In many cases, he does significantly better -- 25 points better in a USA Today/Gallup poll on the question of which candidate understands problems Americans face, 18 points better on a similar question in an ABC/Washington Post poll, and 22 points better on the question of which candidate "cares about the needs of people like you" in a USA Today/Gallup poll. A Time poll asked which candidate is the "most likable" -- Obama bettered McCain 58 percent to 23 percent. USA Today/Gallup found more people say Obama shares their values; ABC/Washington Post found more people say Obama "represents" their "own personal values." Based on those poll results, if either candidate is having trouble connecting with people, it is clearly John McCain. So why does the media keep claiming that Obama, rather than McCain, has trouble connecting with people? Occam's Razor suggests a classic case of projection. They revere John McCain, so they assume everyone else does, too. They find Barack Obama aloof, so they assume everyone else does, too. And to support their assumptions, they desperately search for reasons why the American people, despite their continued insistence on expressing a preference for Obama, secretly dislike him. If the media's insistence that Barack Obama has difficulty connecting with regular people isn't supported by the polling, upon what evidence do they stake their claims? The political media's method for declaring who you like is, like much of what they do, a scene from a middle school cafeteria, played out with deadly consequences. Instead of each voter deciding for himself who he likes and connects with, the punditocracy presumes to decide for all of us who is and isn't cool, and goes about trying to convince the rest of us that we don't like whoever has been deemed uncool. (And they just happen to keep deciding that Republicans are cool, and Democrats are not.) Like a middle school cafeteria, the assessments tend to be based on superficialities. Al Gore was mocked for his clothes (brown pants! Three-button suits! The horror!); John Kerry for his physical appearance (he "looks French," so many pundits delighted in reminding us, dutifully repeating a talking point handed down by Republican operatives). And Barack Obama was the unfortunate kid who brought the "wrong" lunch to school, mocked by Chris Matthews and others for eating arugula and drinking orange juice. Like cliquish teens, the D.C. pundit class is all too happy to make up a reason why you should dislike a candidate if a real reason fails to present itself. They told you again and again that Al Gore was a liar, lying about things he had said in order to do so. They attributed a bogus quote about NASCAR to John Kerry in order to portray him as a stiff. And Barack Obama ... they're desperate to find a reason why people don't like Obama (even though they do). The bowling thing didn't stick as well as they had hoped, and it's probably safe to assume that, Chris Matthews' best efforts notwithstanding, Barack Obama's orange juice consumption is unlikely to spark much of a backlash against his candidacy. So this week they took a new one out for a spin, arguing that Obama's undoing will be that he is uptight and cannot take a joke because his campaign criticized a magazine cover that depicted him as a terrorist. Just two weeks ago, the very same Washington media elite was in an uproar, visibly offended that Wesley Clark had said that John McCain was a war hero, but that heroism didn't qualify him for the presidency. They were offended and outraged that Clark hadn't been quite enthusiastic enough in professing his admiration for McCain's heroism. And now, when a national magazine runs a cover depicting Barack Obama as a flag-burning disciple of Osama bin Laden, they tell him to lighten up. Get a sense of humor, buddy - the cover may have depicted you as a terrorist, but at least it didn't say you are a hero whose heroism nevertheless doesn't necessarily qualify you to be president. That would be an outrage! But the problem isn't that Obama can't take a joke; it's that the Beltway media's idea of what's funny and what isn't would itself be funny if it weren't so damaging to our politics. This is a crowd that lives for recycled humor and endless sequels to marginally amusing original content -- a crowd that still thinks Jib Jab is cutting-edge humor. If there is ever a City Slickers 6, MSNBC will play clips of it three times an hour. And this is a crowd that laughed along as George Bush joked about his WMD lie that sent thousands of brave Americans to die, while sitting stone-faced as Stephen Colbert masterfully skewered them at the 2006 White House Correspondent's dinner. There is a lot of humor in the world -- but very little of it is found on cable news. Besides, there's no reason to think the public is looking for a president who can also serve as Comedian in Chief. Before he started lying about the war records of Purple Heart recipients, Bob Dole was probably the funniest presidential nominee in the past 30 years. He lost in a landslide. Then there's John McCain -- the media regularly tell us how funny he is. And it's true, he tells jokes all the time. Like the one he told last year, when he encountered a mannequin at a campaign event - which he described as a "dummy" and (wrongly) said was named "Hillary." If the humor value in calling Hillary Clinton a "dummy" escapes you, keep in mind that the speaker is a guy who keeps talking about Czechoslovakia in the present tense, despite the fact that that nation ceased to exist 15 years ago. A little funnier now, isn't it? At another event, McCain sang "Bomb Iran," (roughly) to the tune of "Barbara Ann." McCain's most infamous joke was the one in which he called a then-teenage Chelsea Clinton "ugly" and said then-Attorney General Janet Reno was Chelsea's "father." Or the one he reportedly told during his 1986 Senate campaign, the premise of which was that women enjoy being savagely beaten and raped. (When the alleged joke was reported in 1986, a McCain spokeswoman said McCain "does not recall" making the joke.) If only Barack Obama had a sense of humor like that fun John McCain, people might like him! More likely, though, the media would invent some new reason to explain Obama's inability to connect with the voters -- an inability that seems to exist only in the mind of the media.     | Forward This E-mail To A Friend Sign up |
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| July 18, 2008 |
| Altercation, by Eric Alterman We've got a new "Think Again" column called "Nowhere-istan," here, about coverage of the conflict in Afghanistan, and a new Nation column, "I Read the News Today, Oh Boy," about the alarming state of the newspaper business. From today's Wall Street Journal editorial page: "The Washington Post has criticized this as obstinate, and Democratic foreign policy analyst Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution reacted this way: 'To say you're going to get out on a certain schedule -- regardless of what the Iraqis do, regardless of what our enemies do, regardless of what is happening on the ground -- is the height of absurdity.' " Which leads me to wonder if, when people like the editors of The Wall Street Journal, Michael O'Hanlon or the editors of The Washington Post (among many, many, many others, of course) attack Barack Obama's plans for Iraq, it might be a good idea -- for the sake of fairness and intellectual honesty -- to preface their remarks by saying: "Of course, it was the judgment of people like me who caused this catastrophe, and nothing I predicted before the war has actually turned out to be true, while Obama was not only correct about its likely effects, but also prophetic. Still, for reasons I can not even begin to explain, much less justify, I feel qualified to instruct him that ..." Nick Turse ("The Iraqi Oil Ministry's New Fave Five") offered some tips to mainstream reporters who finally -- only five years late -- made it to the Bush administration's role in Iraq's oil story. Now, in part two of his series on what the mainstream media misses when it comes to our oil wars and the energy story, he turns to Washington and that gas guzzler par excellence, the Pentagon. The ties that "the Complex" -- the term Turse gives the old military-industrial complex in his superb book on how our everyday lives have been militarized -- has developed with an allied petro-industrial complex are so taken for granted that mainstream reporters seldom think they add up to a story. It's like being on the science beat and filing stories about how we breathe. As a war-making society, though, our breathing's been a little labored lately and he suggests that perhaps it's time to take another look at everyday energy activities in the Pentagon. Recently, the New York Times revealed that Hunt Oil -- a company with close ties to George W. Bush himself -- made an oil deal with the Kurdistan regional government in Iraq that undermined U.S. policy -- and the State Department actually encouraged it. So far so good. At the same time, however, Hunt Refining, Hunt Oil's corporate twin, got more than $70 million from the Pentagon in a fuel contract and nobody so much as noticed. As Turse writes: "While the hunt for oil in Iraq is now being increasingly well covered in the mainstream, the Pentagon's hunt for oil remains a subject missing in action. Despite the staggering levels at which the Pentagon guzzles fuel, it's a chronic blind spot in media energy coverage." As an example of the Pentagon's life as a massive energy user, he then follows the Hunt Refining story -- and the ever larger rewards the company has reaped from the Department of Defense on our tax dollars since the President's Global War on Terror was launched. He concludes: "This is how the government now works and it should be a story -- and Hunt Refining should be part of it. But don't count on that. It's taken the mainstream media five years to make it to the oil story in Iraq. How many more before it notices that everyday oil operations in Washington are worth a look? ... Until the mainstream media begins to tease out the close-knit relationships among Hunt, other energy corporations, and the Pentagon that enable our military to function on a daily basis, key aspects not just of major scandals but of how our world works will remain hidden, even if in plain sight." Name: Myles Reilly The net is beating the printed page because of its timeliness and convenience. Not content, not news. Somebody has to answer the questions: What were the sirens about last night? Who won the game? What are the facts? Net people comment on the news, but they get it from the poor schmucks getting canned now. Reporting is and will always be a "boots on the ground" job. Imagine Drudge without links, it's just a blank page. The future. Name: Kirby Warnock Your reference to Lee Abrams caused my eyebrows to raise. Back in the late 70s, a consultant by the same name (I'm sure it is him) caused the demise of FM rock radio stations. He sent out his recommended playlist to stations in all of the major markets telling them which rock songs to play and which ones to avoid until we have our current situation where every FM rock station plays the same thing except the local traffic report. Lee Abrams single-handedly ruined FM rock. Now he's out to ruin newspapers. The McDonalds-ization of America continues. Every town will soon look alike. It all started with radio. Name: Martin E. Cobern Wow! And people thought Clinton could parse a term! Douglas Feith: "Removal of clothing is different from naked." Imagine all the arguments in court cases involving "adult entertainment," or discussions with police on nude beaches, where there is a new authority to cite. It boggles the mind. PS: If you give an investigator unrestricted authority to "remove [someone's] clothing," doesn't that mean that he can strip the suspect naked? If not, how not? Name: Derrick Gibson The key takeaway from the great New Yorker Magazine Caper of 2008 came when McCain went on television mouthing the same words as the Obama campaign with respect to the cover: "offensive." What was in this offensive cover? Why, all of the anti-Obama talking points the crazed right wing loves to espouse: Obama is a secret Muslim; he is part of a plot hatched by Osama bin Laden to take over the White House; Obama is not patriotic; Michelle Obama is a Black Nationalist, etc. These messages recirculate from email to radio to television and back, and the New Yorker captured all of them in one cover. But now, McCain is on record from his own mouth as saying that the cover -- and the images it contained were -- were offensive. What will he do when the 527 organizations take up one or two or all of those images and convert them into their ads during the fall? What will he say when confronted with those ads during a debate -- will he shy away from his supporters or will he be forced to "reject and denounce" them? Had Obama ignored the cover or attempted to shrug it off, his campaign would have fallen into the same trap that John Kerry did, who attempted to rise above it all with an air of -- "unpatriotic? I have a Purple Heart, for goodness sakes!"). Instead, by denouncing the cover immediately, he forced reporters to put the question to John McCain and get him on the record too. What could McCain have said but ape the talking points the Obama campaign had made? "I think the cover raises questions that should be answered" or "Where there is smoke, there must be fire -- I just didn't know it was a flag burning!" or "No one will ever confuse my name with the most hated terrorist in the world." None of those work in the presence of a strong denunciation as the joke is made clear and supporting those images -- or supposing some portion of truth in them -- is laid bare as a falsehood. Looks like Obama is playing chess where other campaigns are playing checkers. Name: Pat Vaughan Dr. Alterman: Regarding the post "Things I learned reading 'Iraq Case Sheds Light On Secret Contractors' ($) by Siobhan Gorman and August Cole in today's Wall Street Journal," item #4 stated "The House of Representatives Wednesday passed a broad bill tackling a wide range of intelligence policy issues, including tightening oversight of such contractors. It would force intelligence agencies to keep Congress better informed about their use." I have a better idea. Why not legislate that any government contractor with at least one employee stationed in either Iraq or Afghanistan must report the nature, length, size (number of employees), and value of the contract to the Congress. Failure to comply means imprisonment of the corporate officers and the refund of all payments made to the contractor under the terms of the contract. Name: Ben Miller Mr. Alterman, Am I the only one who does not fully understand the Washington Post's current series on who killed Chandra Levy? It is sad she was killed, and it must make everything more difficult for her family and friends that no one has ever been convicted of the murder. But every single day, especially in Washington, D.C., people are murdered in cases that are never solved. And most of those murders go unsolved and receive nothing more than a blurb buried someplace in the Post. Name: Michael Green It always is a good day when I can criticize both The Washington Post's once-reputable editorial page and Joe Buck in the same breath, so here goes. The Post's editorial is a reminder of that paper's sorry history on wars. Few seem to remember today that under an excellent if essentially closed-minded editor, J. Russell Wiggins, The Post was one of the most ardent supporters of LBJ's policies in Vietnam (while The New York Times under the much-underrated John Oakes's editorship was one of the leading editorial doves). Wiggins was, as David Halberstam beautifully described him in The Powers That Be, the kind of old-fashioned man who could not believe that his government would lie to him. That begs a question: what excuse does Fred Hiatt have? And what excuse does the Graham family have for countenancing this daily outpouring of lies and disgrace? Which brings us to Joe Buck. He recently told a talk show host that he isn't all that interested in baseball. Actually, his entire broadcast style is a forced irreverence and unforced boredom designed to show that he is interested in something other than the event he is covering and that he knows something about popular culture. He is a far cry from his father, the late, great Jack Buck, probably the greatest modern baseball broadcaster next to Vin Scully, who once had a lovely line about George M. Steinbrenner III -- or, as Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist Red Smith used to call the Yankees owner before age and the loss of historical awareness softened him and the media's perceptions of him, George III. Buck claimed to have been to Steinbrenner's yacht and said it was "a beautiful sight, with all 36 oars working in unison." Name: Bob Tallman As a RI-born Red Sox fan I had to laugh at the Yankees' idea of a grand finale to the All Star pre-game festivities, one Geo. Steinbrenner. I had been looking forward to a replay of the 1999 Fenway All Star pregame introductions and wondered who NY would choose to honor in the finale -- Willie Mays or, more likely, the greatest living Yankee Yogi Berra. I was happy to see both enjoy sustained ovations from the NY crowd. Whereas the Sox capped off a memorable event by highlighting the greatest hitter who ever lived, the Yankees rain George down upon the national audience, spoiling what up until then had been an impressive parade of baseball's immortals. Like I said, as a fan of the World Champion Red Sox, I had to laugh. Name: Jesse Zander Corum Without defending the Yankees or Steinbrenner, I disagree with Eric B from NYNY about letting the man into the Hall of Fame. It's not the "Hall of Baseball People Who Were Nice and Decent Human Beings." Even if you see Steinbrenner as a villain, sort of baseball's Darth Vader, he had a clear influence on the game over decades. For the same reason, I think it's silly to ignore Pete Rose's playing career because of the very poor decisions he made later. If Ty Cobb is in there, it's kind of hard to argue anyone else should be disqualified on moral grounds. Name: Ron Curtiss Eric: I just have to compliment you on your use of song lyrics to introduce your column. Being an old proghead and seeing "Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends" from Emerson, Lake and Palmer does my heart good. Amazing how apropos they all are to the madness that exists around us. Eric replies: Thanks. Sometimes it's a lot of work, but yesterday was one of those days where magically, what was on worked. | Forward This E-mail To A Friend Sign up |
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