I watched this last Sunday on Reliable Sources and saved the clip because there was a lot going on during the week. Howard Kurtz' segment was how skeptical the press was over how successful President Obama's climate talks in Copenhagen were. The Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti makes a fool of himself with this statement about President Obama and the press:
CONTINETTI: Well, I think the puncturing began earlier in the summer with the Nobel Prize announcement and the failure to win the Olympics. And, for me, that's the turning point. That's when the press started to actually start criticizing the Obama administration, not giving it always a free pass.
With this agreement, basically it's an agreement to one day reach an agreement. So it should be taken with the appropriate skepticism.
Conservatives are just not very serious people. They attacked a sitting president for winning a worldwide award and openly cheered when the Olympic committee didn't award Chicago the bid. If anything, their behavior started to turn average American families against conservatives. And Continetti's idiotic view that the press turned on Obama because he lost the Olympic bid is ... how should we say ... ridiculous.
He wasn't called on his lunacy either, which is a systemic problem in TV news. Conservatives are always allowed to spew off nonsense and are never corrected.
(h/t CSPANjunkie)
Full transcript via CNN:
KURTZ: Just in time for the evening news on Friday, President Obama salvaged the climate talks in Copenhagen with an 11th-hour agreement he trumpeted as significant and unprecedented. But the international deal was nonbinding, totally voluntary, and the emissions targets fell short of what the conference's goals were.
So, are the media buying the White House spin that this was some kind of breakthrough?
Ryan Lizza, Charlie Gibson said that what Obama brought back from Copenhagen may not be worth the paper it's printed on. Are the media just sort of dismissing this agreement?
LIZZA: No, they're not dismissing it. I think they're treating it with the right degree of skepticism.
It's not what a lot of people expected out of the conference. And the key in politics is often meeting expectations. It's not nothing, and I think a lot will depend on what happens next year when the climate legislation starts making its way through the Senate. We can do a lot here in United States on our own.
KURTZ: Well, it's not nothing, but some would say it's close to nothing because there's no way of enforcing this, and it didn't even set a firm target for the next round, if there's next round of negotiations.
And do you see this as journalists kind puncturing the administration's hype?
CONTINETTI: Well, I think the puncturing began earlier in the summer with the Nobel Prize announcement and the failure to win the Olympics. And, for me, that's the turning point. That's when the press started to actually start criticizing the Obama administration, not giving it always a free pass.
With this agreement, basically it's an agreement to one day reach an agreement. So it should be taken with the appropriate skepticism.
KURTZ: Does it seem to you that -- you know, oftentimes when an administration announces an agreement, particularly an international agreement, that gets reported and then you go and you quote skeptics and supporters and so forth. Here, it seemed to me the press just kind of skipped that step and said, well, this thing was a letdown, it was a disappointment, it was a papering over of disagreement.
CONNOLLY: Well, I think, interestingly, what's happened over the last few years, and especially the last several months, Howie, is that much of the press core, and the public as well, has become much more educated about this issue around climate change and environmental issues and science. And so you had a group of journalists who really sort of knew their stuff. Many of them had been there for the full 10, 12 days of the conference, listening and talking to experts for quite some time.
KURTZ: Which was even duller, by the way, than the Senate negotiations. It seemed like nothing was happening. It was like watching snowfall.
CONNOLLY: And as Ryan was pointing out, there was so much anticipation and excitement before this event. And, you're right, I mean, it really did kind of fizzle. But I think Obama, trying to repeat sort of his Olympic trip, you know, swoop in, here I am, and I'm so eloquent, and this is just going to be fabulous, interestingly, what you saw afterward was the White House trying hard to build a lot of drama into those final meetings.
We were getting background briefings and things from White House senior unnamed officials who were trying to do the whole, "And there was a meeting going on and he forced his way in."
KURTZ: Right.
CONNOLLY: And so, really, building up even just the logistics of it.
KURTZ: That he crash the meeting with the Chinese and Indian and other officials. Fascinating.
