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New media?

They keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what they think it means.

Five Villagers, comfortably ensconced within the Beltway Bubble and the DC Cocktail Circuit, sit around and discuss how "new media" has changed modern politics.

Except...

Showing themselves to be on the pulse of what's happening right now, they look the 2003 smearing of John Kerry by Swiftboaters and the astroturfed uprising of the town halls prior over the summer before the ACA vote. And they point to YouTube (?) and viral videos as the stuff that changed the world. But really, who played the Swiftboat ads ad nauseam to an audience perhaps not inclined to get their news from the internet (who gets their news from YouTube, for crying out loud?)? It was the mainstream media on the content-starved 24 hour news channels who played those videos and played right into the hands of these insidious partisan astroturf groups. It was Drudge and his rumors that ruled the mainstream airwaves.

Sarah Palin did serious damage to Obama's health care reform? No...the mainstream media that lapped up every ghostwritten Facebook entry and breathlessly repeated them verbatim did damage...and even then, polls showed that most Americans wanted even more than the ACA offered. The whole concept of "death panels" SHOULD have been laughed off by any responsible media outlet, but instead was left for the "new media" on the left to push back against.

Katty Kay tries to give all the Villagers an out, by claiming that these videos reflected the zeitgeist of the American people...but did they? At best, they reflected the zeitgeist of a very, very small percentage of American millionaires and corporations.

I think there are very cogent arguments that new media has changed American politics. But it's also very clear that the old guard of the mainstream media is completely behind the curve on how and why.

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I tend to be "live and let live" when it comes to faith. I come from a multi-faith family and generally feel that whatever gives you comfort personally is fine, as long as you don't try to impose on others and disrespect their beliefs.

However, I get intensely uneasy with discussions of faith as a matter of national discourse. And that's upon which the line that Chris Matthews insists on treading. Why on earth would a current events/news talk show decide upon the topic of "What if there's no Hell"? Granted, it was the cover of Time Magazine this week, as an attention-grabbing headline for an examination of Rev. Rob Bell's feel-good message of his mega-church. But in the hands of Chris Matthews, who frequently filters his own Catholicism into his political commentary, it becomes a somewhat painful "more holier-than-thou" discussion of Jesus and beliefs.

Frankly, I don't want my media or politicians delving into the subject of whether Hell exists. It's exactly this pandering to religious beliefs that makes it possible for creationists to insist on Intelligent Design to be on par with evolution. That allows us to demonize one faith over another and create more and more divisions between us. The debate over the existence of Hell belongs in the heart of the individual and whatever religious teacher one chooses.

But I suspect that Tweety had another agenda in bringing up the topic. After giving his panel a chance to affirm their own piousness, Matthews takes an interesting tangent for anyone tired of hearing Republicans proclaim their ownership of the discussion of faith: “Why does the right wing love the Old Testament so much?”

And bless his little non-Communion receiving soul, Andrew Sullivan comes up with the answer: “Jesus loved the poor. He thought they were better than the rich.”

Amen to that.

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The Republicans' assault on public broadcasting touches something near and dear to my heart. Both my television and my car radio are likely to be tuned to a public broadcasting station as anything else. Wanting to defund such treasures as Terry Gross' Fresh Air or Sesame Street just smacks of the ongoing campaign to dumb down the populace, much like their oh-so-reasonable suggestion to "teach the controversy" of creationism vs. evolution. So I find myself feeling very protective of public broadcasting...especially when Breitbart's stooge James O'Keefe decided to take his puerile and staged flip cam aim at it.

You would think that the Beltway crowd would circle their wagons around one of their own when O'Keefe started up with his antics, especially given his past history. But no, even the damn NPR talent themselves distance themselves. How frickin' sad that even Glenn Beck's Blaze blog takes a more skeptical eye than its own employees.

No one--not a single person--on Chris Matthews' program bothers to add this critical little bit of context to discussing NPR's bias. No one points out that absolutely NOTHING O'Keefe alleges should be taken credibly. Seriously, if he says the sky is blue, one ought to go outside to check. No one points out that PBS and NPR only count federal funding as less than 5% of the whole, but that smaller, rural stations will be greatly affected by the cuts, thereby making Schiller's statement factually true, if a bit tactless. No one points out that the "explosive" charges O'Keefe are so much less than explosive when looked at in full context.

Nope, all that is taken at face value (a measure of respect that should not ever be given to O'Keefe, Breitbart, et al--EVER), and instead the media pushes the ridiculous narrative of PBS being "elitist" and "liberal".

I'm sorry, but any channel that no longer employs Bill Moyers, but continues to give a platform to John McLaughlin & Co can hardly be called "liberal elitists". Media Matters has compiled a list of conservative commentators and pundits who claim that they consider NPR's editorial coverage "fair". Apparently, "fair" is the new "liberal elitist" for Tweety and panel, thus coloring their own editorial slants as something less than that.

Transcripts (courtesy of Heather) below the fold

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It must be so nice to live in the rarified, privileged airs inside the Beltway, where you are untouched by those little things like unemployment, dependence on government assistance, Social Security, the Veteran's Administration or anything else. Because as a member of the Villager Cocktail Circuit, it's possible to talk about the possible government shutdown not as the impact it will have on very real people, but as who wins the political propaganda spin wars.

Chris Matthews questions whether the four letter word to appeal to voters is "cuts" rather than "jobs".

In a word, Tweety: no. In a country where some states have double digit unemployment, the last thing voters want is to have those social safety nets cut. And the sad thing is that they are always the budget items on the chopping block. I suspect voters would be much, much happier if the cuts considered were to the bloated defense budget or even *gasp* to tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations.

As Jon Perr points out, all these state budget cuts (the "winning" meme, according to the panel) do is endanger the economy even more:

As all eyes remained focused on the union-busting face-off in Wisconsin, the Commerce Department on Friday released a revised estimate of U.S. economic growth for the last quarter of 2010. And that downward GDP revision not only shatters prevailing myths about supposedly bloated government spending and payrolls. The numbers confirm once again that budget cutters in states and cities across the country are indeed the "anti-stimulus" putting the pace of American economic recovery at risk.

This week, the government restated its estimate of Q4 growth, lowering its forecast from 3.2% to 2.8%. The disappointing news from the Bureau of Economic Analysis can be attributed in large part to the very bad news from state and local governments. As the AP explained:

Deeper spending cuts by state and local governments slowed U.S. economic growth in the final three months of last year. The government's revised estimate for the October-December quarter illustrates how growing state budget crises could hold back the economic recovery...

State and local governments, wrestling with budget shortfalls, cut spending at a 2.4 percent pace. That was much deeper than the 0.9 percent annualized cut first estimated and was the most since the start of 2010...

The government revised fourth-quarter growth to reflect a steeper contraction in government spending than previously estimated. Government spending declined at a 1.5 percent rate rather than 0.6 percent, due to weak state and local government outlays.

As the National Governors Association meets this weekend, "the financial emergencies -- and what to do about them -- will be issue No. 1." Even with state and local tax revenues finally on the upswing, the worst may still be to come.

What sickens me is the guileless way all of the panel act as if these Republican governors are saying what they mean. We need only listen to the Walker/"Koch" call to know that this union busting has NOTHING to do with "saving" the middle class. Hell, these public unions ARE the middle class: teachers, bus drivers, cops, firefighters. So where are these Americans getting the idea that they should support the Republican governors (that's assuming that many do--the arguable "fact" implying that tea baggers are a greater percentage of the population that they are)? Because the media (I'm looking at you, panel) never, EVER connects the dots and points out the real world implications of the governors' actions: How it will INCREASE unemployment and dependence of government services, how it will kill the middle class, how it will drive income ever upwards to the elite (who donate their money to which party?).

No, the media will never talk about the real reason that the governors want to bust unions: so that there will be no entity that could possibly vie with conservative astroturf groups on the donation level, thus ensuring a permanent Republican majority.

Let's be clear: if the Republicans are successful in busting the unions, the only winners will be the uber-wealthy. The 99.99% of the rest of the country (literally) will all lose.

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You know, I'm not sure that Chris Matthews inhabits the same planet that we do. His is so devoid of history, context or consequences that he's a little like the Drew Barrymore's character in 50 First Dates: a completely blank slate, unable to remember anything that's happened.

Tweety is convinced that the reception of George W. Bush's memoirs, scheduled to be published on November 9, 2010, immediately following the midterms, will be so well-received that the nostalgia will help push little brother Jeb into the Republican presidential candidacy in 2012.

I'm sorry, but WTF?

First, what's with the assumption that there will be this huge wave of nostalgia for GWB due to his book? I think the safer assumption is that waste of trees will be full of rationalizations, lies and spin for what historians have already assessed as one of the worst presidencies in history of the country. Seriously, does anyone doubt that the financial collapse, the huge unemployment rate, the record number of foreclosures, the spiraling debt, two unwinnable wars and the contempt of the rest of the world should be placed squarely upon the shoulders of George Walker Bush? What exactly are we--the bungled and the botched--to wax nostalgic about?

And secondly, how exactly does one make the rather large leap--other than in the fevered mind of Tweety--from feeling all warm and fuzzy about the Shrub to deciding that we MUST have Jeb as the Republican nominee? Even as Andrea Mitchell titters on how Bar's favorite was considered bettered suited for the presidency than his under-achieving big brother (a fact she conveniently omitted for ten years), no one on the panel can quite see how the publication of GWB's book will launch another Bush into the White House.

Thank the FSM that some inside the Beltway bubble have greater sense than Chris Matthews.

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They just don't get it. There's nothing like a bunch of Beltway gatekeepers navel-gazing and completely missing the larger message of the rise of the new media.

Matthews looks at the influence the "new media" has had on politics and where that begins and ends for the Beltway bubbleheads: Drudge. But it's telling how they characterize it: suddenly, DC was turned upside down by the publication on a blog known for sensationalist headlines the rumor that Pres. Clinton was having an affair with a staffer. A rumor that none of the traditional media was ready to touch, because it had not been vetted.

And that's the influence of new media--no filters, no responsibility. Listen as Dan Rather trepidaciously brings up the lynch mob mentality that can be fostered by the new media, where they en masse call out reporters or producers, sending letters to the editors and changing the narrative of a story, irrespective of the truth. And neither Tweety nor Politico's John Harris (who will never be honest about his hard-on for links on Drudge) hear the warning in Rather's morality play.

And so it goes. Even if Katty Kay gushes about the great democratizing effect of the internet tearing down the gatekeepers, the corporate media ignores the true meaning of the rise of the new media: the traditional media stopped doing their job--they stopped vetting stories in the rush to scoop their competition. They stopped practicing journalism. Period. Full stop. And I say this, recognizing my own small cog in the new media machinery. The rise of the new media caused the traditional, corporate media to act like bloggers.

I'm not a journalist, and have never laid claim to being one. I strive to get things accurate, and I try to keep myself intellectually honest about how I cover the stories I do here. But I have never hidden that I come to the posts I do with a bias and an opinion. It's there and you can disagree with me, but what I'm giving you is my slant on stories.

And that's what journalism has sadly morphed into since those days of salacious Drudge headlines about Monica Lewinsky. But they're dishonest enough to deny what I've admitted: they're doing nothing but giving you a slanted story. And half the time, they're simply aping the slant of the source from which they got the story: be it Drudge, or Malkin, or Erickson. I wish I could tell you it's from Amato or Kos or Greenwald, but you and I know it's not. Because Drudge still rules their world and we're still just the lefties on the side, not creating the narratives.

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Revisionist history is in full bloom on The Chris Matthews Show, all in the name of undermining Barack Obama. Now, Barack Obama is guilty of not-connecting with voters, unlike Bill Clinton.

There's been a lot of this revisionism in the remembered legacy of Bill Clinton amongst the Villagers. I have several theories as to why: 1) hindsight is always kinder as the rough edges smooth over in the intervening years; 2) some of the Villagers are too young and too intellectually incurious to know about the toxic culture of the Beltway during the Clinton years; and 3) in true bobblehead fashion, they don't really care that they said one thing during one news cycle and something diametrically opposite in another.

In the case of Chris Matthews, I have to believe that it's the third option in play. Keep in mind that the whole dubbing of the DC media as the Villagers came into play in their reaction to Bill Clinton and how they felt that he and Hillary did not properly show obsequiousness to the powers that be in the Beltway cocktail circuit. And Matthews was definitely part of that group. Even years after Clinton's term was over, Matthews could not let go of Clinton's infidelities and impeachment, even crediting that with Hillary Clinton's personal success as a politician.

But now, Tweety finds him the consummate politician, relating to the crowd in a way that Obama cannot, even editing the video of that CNBC Town Hall to not show Obama's response, and then bemoaning that he did not take the time to relate to her a time when he and Michelle suffered financially.

Um, what? Seriously, Villagers, with your own disregard for the the middle class that you still don't report that the Republicans are fighting desperately to keep "small business owners" like Bechtel and Koch Industries from paying higher taxes, we're supposed to feel that the President should bite his lip more and "feel our pain" for a higher approval rating? I'm not too young to remember how you and your fellow media mates mocked Clinton for doing that.

And ultimately, it's all more of the same push to make voters feel dissatisfied with Obama: he didn't get visibly angry enough during the BP Gulf oil spill, he's not empathetic enough to the struggling middle class now, his agenda is too left wing, his agenda is too centrist, he simultaneously hates big business and is a crony for it.

The question we have to ask ourselves is why there's such a big narrative push to instill dissatisfaction in some way--in any way--against Obama right now before the mid-term elections. I suggest to you that it's a combination of the elitism of the Villagers and the corporations that own them.

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Chris Matthews is at it again. The man who believes that "Life is a campaign" alternates hot and cold with Obama like no one else in the corporate media, but never with any kind of reasonable logic. One good speech and Tweety is effusively telling us about tingles running up his leg. Get a few Republicans to spin some lies about health care and then all of the sudden, he starts likening Obama to Nero.

Now, with all the obstacles and obstruction Obama has had to face in the last two years, Matthews looks at the economy and an approval rating in the low 40s (the lowest it's been), Matthews wonders if Obama isn't ready to just hang it up and refuse to run for re-election.

Mind you, no one on the panel things this is even close to a real possibility, but look how Tweety's face lights up when WaPo's Michael Gerson (also formerly GWB's speechwriter and a member of the WH Iraq Group) suggests that perhaps Hillary could step in for the departing Obama.

But ridiculous Matthews/Machiavellian fantasies aside, this is just part of a larger media meme to continually reinforce in consumers' minds the Obama presidency is a failure. Never mind the fact that his economic plan (as milquetoast-y as it admittedly was) pulled us back from financial collapse and has constantly had the plan lied about and derided by the Republicans. Never mind that the economy failing was the result of 30 YEARS of Republican economic practices and that we can hardly expect to bounce back in 20 months. Never mind that there has been no measure, no bill, no platform for which the Republicans won't try to obstruct. Never mind that job growth is slowly coming back. Never mind that the election is not for another two years. The corporate media wants you to associate "failure" with "Obama" before the mid-term elections too.

Funny how the GOP is in complete disarray, what with the tea baggers kicking out establishment candidates but who will struggle to gain traction in general elections, internecine fights to be the voice of the opposition (I'm looking at you, Boehner and Cantor) and the most popular GOP figure being a rogue, uncontrollable figure who has substituted tweets for press conferences. Yet the discussion on the Sunday shows doesn't reflect that, it instead throws up improbable hypotheticals like Obama declining to run for a second term.

Transcripts below the fold

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What an exercise in non-critical thinking and the wholesale acceptance of right wing talking points without relation to facts. Inside the specious bubble that encapsulates the Beltway and the media elites who reside within it, they've experienced a much different reality than you and I have. According to them, after a relatively "non-controversial" and "bipartisan" decision in Afghanistan, President Obama has aggressively pushed a liberal agenda, alienating the Republican minority and the American people, who have responded to this unapologetic move to the left by distrusting government, hence the overwhelming turnout for the tea parties.

MATTHEWS: ‘Kay, this is the key question. Helene, you’re at the White House too. Last question here: how can you be a man of …or a leader of the progressive movement, really do things that enlarge the role of government in the health care field, for example. And in financial regulations. And still make the country in this kumbaya-we-all-get-along mood? If you change, it bothers people.

COOPER: I think that is so much at the center of why President Obama is having so many problems right now. There’s this fundamental belief that he can change—that the power of his personality and the power of his oratory can change people and that just doesn’t happen. There’s this over-reliance, I think, at the White House if the President gives a very big speech, if he comes out there , that he can persuade people and he can do it and at the same time you don’t have anything changing at the bottom of the way Washington works.

As if. What color do you suppose the sky is in their world?

There are no facts that penetrate their dense skulls. They ignore that Obama was elected with a huge mandate for change, not just for the sake of change, but to do things differently than the train wreck that was the two terms of Bush/Cheney. People aren't afraid of that kind of change, Tweety, we're calling out for it. We are not a center-right country, you addle-pated bubblehead. If we were, why did we elect Obama over the center-right candidate? And please, spare me with the "liberal agenda" crap. Obama has ceded anything and everything that might have made health care reform liberal. There's no big government planned. In fact, that false meme is courtesy of the party who has time and time again been responsible for the expansion of government while blaming it on the opposition.

But all along the way, Obama has been faced with nothing but reactionary obstructionism from the Republicans, which apparently doesn't even rate a mention for the very concerned panel. But the tea-baggers, a scattered-brain group wholly without focus for their anger except for a few notions of "isms" being bad and keeping government out of their entitlement programs, masking their abject racism, they're taking over the country! Again, those pesky facts are ignored, like them being a tiny little segment of the population acting as useful tools for corporate interests . Since the Republicans in DC cravenly pander to them, that inflates their importance and influence for the bobbleheads.

Facts...whodathunk something like that would be in the rarest supply from "journalists" in DC? How far we've fallen from the days of Watergate and Woodward & Bernstein.

Transcripts below the fold:

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I love navel-gazing on the part of the media, where they decide collectively that they were right to create a meme which takes over the media. On this weekend's The Chris Matthews Show, pundits Howard Fineman, Michael Duffy and Ceci Connolly agree that it was appropriate for them to ask President Obama about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., because "it's an important issue."

MATTHEWS: It’s all about identity politics again, and at the same time these people on the far, far right are talking about whether he’s a citizen or not, this comes up.

DUFFY: And when the White House Press Secretary calls it a ‘distraction’, you know it was a mistake. And his mistake was pretty simple, which was that he didn’t really have all the facts, and was not in a position to talk about it. He was right to take it up, because it is an issue that is important, and it’s one in which he is completely versed, and you can see from the rest of his statement, that he knows exactly what to say. But I also think it came at the end of that press conference, which was about a completely different subject, and I think he was a little punchy by then. He was talking about you know what would happen to him in the White House, and it was a joke and he kind of lost the seriousness of the moment and I think got off track…

MATTHEWS: Yeah, I agree with that, the moment was important. I think he was a little angry, a little fatigued. These guys get up at five in the morning and this was eight at night. Is this going to be around a while?

Get the meme? Obama the angry black man being asked to speak on behalf of the entire African American community--and you know he is versed in this. Howard Fineman sort of treads along the edges of why even asking Obama his opinion of Gates' arrest was racist (because, honestly, can you imagine the media doing this to President McCain, had he won? I don't think so), without fully realizing it:

FINEMAN: ...(T)he progress that he made—the Sotomayor nomination—she did convince people, by her bearing, by her knowledge, by her experience, that she was eminently qualified and in that sense, was beyond this. Both of her race, but beyond it. This is not what Barack Obama’s political advisors wanted him to be doing up there. Because it turns it into a racial conversation, per se, at a time when he’s being president of all the country. And trying to be president of all the country and this feeds into the narrative of what I call the RNC—the Rush Newt Cheney RNC—which is all about fear, accusation and division. Barack Obama as president has to be about national unity.

Apparently to Howard, Barack Obama has been doing a good job up until this point of not making white Americans realize that he's African American and making them feel comfortable with other people of color. But now, Howard's worried that Obama has lost his white constituency:

FINEMAN: He went to great lengths as a candidate, to say that he could be president of all America. He understood all the different cultures and wanted to learn about all the different cultures of America. This kind of thing sets him back with working class whites.

Sigh. Can I remind you bobbleheads that it was YOU collectively that raised this subject? This was a local issue, albeit with a semi-famous person involved. This is not a federal issue, nor did it need to be addressed by the President of the United States, especially since the only justification for it is that Obama and Gates outwardly share a skin color (although both are of mixed-race heritage). Isn't it reasonable to assume that the President of the United States has enough on his plate without being thrust the mantle of spokesman for the entire African American community and trying to make white people more comfortable with the age-old issue of racial profiling?

As far as Gates is concerned, there was no clear cut right or wrong on his arrest; both sides escalated the situation beyond where it should have gone. But in terms of pulling Barack Obama into the debate and letting it take over the news cycles for days and days when very real issues (um Afghanistan, any one? Health care reform? The economy? Any of those ring a bell?) are left undiscussed is simply giving red meat to the right wingers eager to derail any actual progress in this country. And the responsibility for that falls on bobbleheads like these clowns, not Obama.

Transcripts below the fold

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