TV political news "reporting" has failed.

It's long been clear that there is little political news being presented to the American public through television. It's a bit of a surprise to realize just how simple the problem is, but it is explained easily and briefly by Steve Benen at the Political Animal.

In recent years, the media has created a truly bizarre dynamic -- news consumers who want to hear a bunch of politicians make a lot of claims can watch television news interviews, and news consumers who want to know if those claims are accurate can go online.

At that point, television news stops informing the public, and simply becomes literally nothing more than a conduit for talking points and pretty pictures. Viewers who want to learn accurate information about current events are told they must go elsewhere -- it's not CNN's job to tell you the facts; it's CNN's job to tell you what "both sides" think about the facts.

So the so-called "political news" from television is nothing more than a Jerry Springer show consisting of "He said. She said" presented without context or history that would provide any perspective.

The Journalism schools apparently love this failed system, and so do the lying politicians. No one else does.

Bartiromo demonstrates how conservatives fail to contribute to the healthcare discussion

CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo demonstrates the combination of partisanship and ignorance that ideological conservatives have brought to the discussion of the American health care system.



Here's how Steve Benen describes her ignorance:

She thinks a public option would undermine quality care, but she doesn't know why. She thinks Medicare somehow offers sub-standard care, but she doesn't know why. She thinks 44 year olds who like Medicare should sign up for it, unaware of eligibility restrictions. She thinks Weiner should choose to opt into Medicare, while simultaneously arguing argument against giving American consumers the choice of a public option.

This is not thought. It is pure reflexive obstructionism.

The absence of an organized American health care system fails a sizable percentage of the American public by not letting them get the health care they need. It has damaged the American economy and made it less competitive in international trade. And it has done all of this while costing a great deal more per person than does the next most expensive national health care system in the industrialized world. And what do the American ideological conservatives offer to improve the American health care system?

A combination of "head in the sand" refusal to even address the problems of the overall system and reflexive obstructionism trying to prevent others from working on the problem. That's what. Nothing else. The conservative ideology is even more bankrupt than is the American health care system.

America's news media system is in as much of a crisis as its system of providing and paying for health care is.

Hey! Someone in the media has figured out the real significance of the Cambridge, Mass arrest of Professor Gates in his own home and why it matters to President Barack Obama. The answer is: it doesn't matter to the President in his role as President at all. But the media would rather run a story about Race than one about health care. That demonstrates that the news media system has failed to meet the needs of the American public as thoroughly as has the American health care lack-of-system. Wonder why?

Race is safe, sexy and attracts ratings for the media at a time when newer and less well-developed issues offer only the danger of feeding conflict that will result in losing readers or viewers. The media does not cover news. It works to increase media revenue.

The much more important policy debate debate about health care is frankly boring. Besides, the media has evolved now to cover race. Race has been the key American topic since World War II, so the dangers to media revenue are well known. The newer and generally more contentions issue of national health care financing is a subject with unknown revenue risks and the media is strapped for revenue. The media has few reporters or editors who understand government or policy well enough to write about it generally. They have even fewer people capable of understanding the issues involved in the disaster that is the current health care lack-of-system together with the parasites who use fear of illness and the lack of easy access to health care to get rich. But the biggest problem is that covering the true issues in the national health care financing debate will not increase media revenue at a time when the reliable revenue streams for TV and Newspaper organizations are under heavy attack by competitors.

Then there is the problem of failed journalistic standards. Whether these failed standards are a cause or a result of the general revenue stream problems for the media is not clear. But the fact that the standard method of reporting political conflict does not tell the public what they need to know about the issues. Here's what journalists today do. The sacred and unquestionable journalistic orthodoxy that there are two and only two reportable sides to a political policy debate. Both sides are of equal importance, the the job of the media is simply to give equal weight to each of the two sides. It is up to the readers to determine which of the two sides is accurate or more meaningful. The journalistic community rarely reports anything that would provide readers or reviewers some standards by which they could measure the relative importance of the two sides, nor does the media ever explain how they determined what the two sides would be. The journalistic substitute for reporting on the standards the readers or viewers could use to evaluate the news is to get biased pundits to offer their opinions in a "he said - he said" conflict that is likely to increase ratings but provides no real information.

Finally, the media is supposed to cover only the political and entertainment aspects, never the boring policy aspects themselves and the reasons why the policy itself matters is irrelevant to the media buying public. The only thing that matters is what draws ratings that can be sold to the media advertisers.

The result is that the media generally tells the public little comprehensible about the health care debate since most of the people on both sides of the debate are already locked into fixed positions and do not appreciate it when the media actually tried to inform them of the real facts.

Here is Frank Rich writing in the New York Times:

You can’t blame Obama if he’s perplexed about the recent events. He answers a single, legitimate race-based question at the end of a news conference and is roundly condemned for “stepping on his own message” about health care. It was the noisiest sector of the news media that did much of the stepping. “Health care is bad for ratings,” explained one cable anchor, Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC, with refreshing public candor. What a relief, then, to drop dreary debates about the public option and declare a national conversation about black-white fisticuffs. Especially when this particular incident is truly small beer next to the far more traumatic national sea change on race that will keep sowing conflict and anger long after Henry Louis Gates Jr. finishes his proposed documentary on racial profiling.

I’ll return to the larger picture, but before the battle of Cambridge fades entirely, let’s note that the only crime Obama committed at his news conference was honesty (always impolitic in Washington). He conceded he did not know “all the facts” and so wisely resisted passing judgment on “what role race played” in the incident. He said, accurately, that “separate and apart from this incident” there is “a long history” of “African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcing disproportionately.” And, yes, the police did act “stupidly in arresting” — not to mention shackling — “somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.” If Obama had really wanted to go for the jugular, he might have added that the police may have overstepped the law as well.

The president’s subsequent apology for his news-conference answer was superfluous. But he might have used it to acknowledge the one exemplary player in Cambridge, Lucia Whalen, the white passer-by whose good deed of a 911 phone call did not go unpunished. In his police report, Sgt. James Crowley portrayed Whalen as a racial profiler by saying she had told him that the two men at Gates’s door were black. She denied it, and the audio tape of her original call backs her up: she had told the dispatcher (only when asked) that one of the men “looked kind of Hispanic” and that she couldn’t see the other. Yet Whalen, who was pilloried as a racist because of Crowley’s report, received no apology from him and no White House invitation from Obama. That’s stupid behavior by both men.

The real matter of importance to the American public right now is the extended health care crisis which the forces of status quo do not want corrected. The media itself is facing its own crisis of relevancy which this health care debate highlights. Both the big city newspapers and the TV networks have been centralizing and building local monopoly positions within larger national near monopolies for the last five decades as they have fought to make more money and show up well to Wall Street.

The technological challenges of removing the sunk cost of news distribution has knocked the pins from under the traditional model of news gathering, bundling and distribution as the Internet has replaced the need for local department story and classified advertisements and for the daily distribution of the news on dead trees or over limited TV air time at a few selected times of day.

The result is that what now passes for TV and big city news organizations are reduced to trying to pander to selected niche markets which demand entertainment or selected reporting that supports the market's political beliefs. The commercial market for entertainment "news" provides all the so-called news that is needed to fill the available TV airtime or the newspaper entertainment news holes. The political partisans provide the needed talking points to fill the political opinion pages and TV pundit air time.

This explains what is wrong with the misnamed "News" media. The media is shrinking the entire news gathering process to whatever pays for itself, and it does so without searching for new sources of news because there is no known business model that pays for that kind of journalism any more. That's why so few news organizations maintain foreign bureaus any more. It's also why the editorial decisions about what is important out of a Presidential News Conference is about a trivial and only peripherally racial incident rather than the crisis surrounding the failed methods America has developed to pay for health care for a lot of its citizens.

So why is the media no longer properly a "news" media? That's because it has become a "revenue generation" media and nothing else. Of course, if they were honest and renamed it the revenue generation media then they would lose more revenue. So they will try to maintain the fiction that they are still a "news" media.

Many of the problems of the American society are based on centralization of power

We have all heard Scott McClellan's words - "[T]he national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation…. the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq." (Quoted from the article published by Josh Silver.) The question is, why did so many journalists ALL go along with the Bush administration and fail to question.

Why didn't the serious questions get more TV air time? Why was the only bandwagon out there the one the Bush administration was driving?

The theory is that much of the Press is independent of the administration and can be expected to ask the embarrassing questions of the administration and then publish and explain the responses. Were all the journalists individually complicit in the Bush-directed rush to an unnecessary war?

Now, fives years too late, we get the answers. From Josh Silver's article:

More and more reporters, including major TV correspondents like Jessica Yellin and Chris Matthews have recently admitted that their bosses were pro-war and that it slanted their coverage.

Then from Ruth Rozen, Journalist and historian, we get her experience at what was the most "liberal" newspaper in America:

I worked as an editorial writer at The San Francisco Chronicle, where a liberal editorial board raised serious objections to the war. And yet, in the years following 9/11, I felt editorial restraints that never allowed us to tell the whole truth about the lies and deception that led to America’s most catastrophic foreign policy disaster. [Snip]

So what did I experience? An editor and an editorial board who felt that, in the absence of inside sources, we could not counter the administration’s lies.

Let me give you some examples. I was raised in a Republican family, but schooled by the great iconoclastic journalist I.F. Stone, who taught me that you can find the truth without inside sources, if only you’re willing to see beyond patriotic fervor and examine voices in the public domain that are marginalized, So, I would read national security experts who countered Donald Rumfeld’s ridiculous predictions; I would read the British, Canadian, Italian and French press; I would read the writings of experts in resource wars and weapons of mass destruction.

No, I didn’t know I was right. But I was sure that the administration was lying. And, I knew that at the very least that our editorials should be asking why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al should be believed when I had found strong evidence that they were cherry picking intelligence, and setting up their own office in the Pentagon, and acting in complete secrecy. [Snip]

When I heard Bush’s inaugural address, I heard two major lies embedded within his speech. But somehow that still wasn’t enough to accuse him of plagiarism and deception.

The truth is, even a liberal newspaper, blessed with a liberal editorial board, did not engage in truth telling. We raised some good questions, wrote about supporting the troops, but failed to describe the deception that led to the catastrophe that was unfolding right before our eyes. [Snip]

This week, I sat with a former colleague from the editorial board in a café, rather than in the room where we used to make our editorial decisions. He admitted that I had been right, but even more, that even in a liberal paper, the editor and most of the board, had felt restrained, afraid of seeming unpatriotic, afraid of saying the emperor wore no clothes, afraid of not giving the President the benefit of the doubt, afraid of truth telling without access to inside sources.

Even without inside sources it was clear early on that the Bush administration was lying and that the Press was either spreading those lies (FOX "News" and the other right-wing liars) or they were shading the news and omitting the opposition.

How did they get away with it?

There are three major TV networks and the cable news organizations, all owned and managed by a very few conservative individuals. The controls in TV regarding what is reported are in the hands of probably fewer than 25 or so individuals. Most local radio stations have been bought up by a very few networks like Clear Channel, and the same controls are applied to what is broadcast. And Newspapers?

The newspapers have lost their revenue streams as the downtown department stored moved to the malls, and the Reagan administration encouraged competing newspapers in the same city to merge or have one buy the other out and shut it down. Control of the news again resides in the hands of two or three people in each city, even if they aren't controlled by the few chains.

News in America is controlled by fewer than 200 individuals. They determine what will get a lot of coverage and what will be ignored.

The result? There is no free market in news in America. The many disasters of the Bush administration starting with Florida 2000 is a direct result of the central control of the news organizations. We have problems that fester because the news controllers do not want to upset the apple cart by telling the public about those problems, and most especially, they don't want to run counter to the wishes of the administration, particularly the Republican administrations.

I would bet that the 200 or so news-controlling individuals are afraid of the vindictiveness of the Republican administrations, which is why they avoid criticizing them while piling on to the Democratic administrations. That's just one of the many biases in the news media.

Another bias is that those 200 individuals are all very wealthy and belong to the class of individuals with great wealth. Chris Matthews gets $5,000,000 a year for what he does. Tim Russert gets even more. And they aren't the top decision-makers. Those top decision-makers can remove Matthews and Russert just as the head of CBS news removed Dan Rather when he became too inquisitive.

Those wealthy news-controllers don't want to upset their own apple carts, so they give labor and the poor short shrift. Better than those groups get propaganda on how to be better Americans (and support the wealthy) rather than that they learn that the social deck as stacked against them (by those wealthy individuals and their wealthy friends.)

Very large organizations do not exist to produce and sell products and services. They exist to make money, and the top CEO's control all their subordinate companies by controlling the money those companies get to keep or receive to invest. Those top CEO's are bankers, generally with little close knowledge of how the products they sell are created or used. All that matters is that revenues increase and costs be reduced.

This also applied to news organizations. Their purpose is not to collect and present their news. Their purpose is to make a profit by selling advertising, and the news department is bait to cause viewers/readers to look at the ads. Increasing revenue means selling more ads or selling ads at higher prices. Reducing costs means cutting newsroom staff - since distribution of the news is pretty much a fixed cost.

As a result, those of us who expected the news organizations to provide the information needed for an informed public who would vote for those who best manage America are sadly disappointed. IN the absence of an active and aggressive news media, we get bad government filled with corruption and ignoring the real problems that government has to deal with in an industrial society.

Welcome to the Reagan Revolution as it works its way into creating a Latin American society with about 10% wealthy 90% poor and no significant middle class. It is the result of too much centralization of power.

The essence of the Pentagon propaganda aimed at Americans

Glenn Greenwald returns to the story of the corps of retired military individuals who became the Pentagon's special propaganda corps on TV "News."

So the Pentagon would maintain a team of "military analysts" who reliably "carry their water" -- yet who were presented as independent analysts by the television and cable networks. By feeding only those pro-Government sources key information and giving them access -- even before responding to the press -- only those handpicked analysts would be valuable to the networks, and that, in turn, would ensure that only pro-Government sources were heard from. Meanwhile, the "less reliably friendly" ones -- frozen out by the Pentagon -- would be "weeded out" by the networks. The pro-Government military analysts would do what they were told because the Pentagon was "their bread and butter." These Pentagon-controlled analysts were used by the networks not only to comment on military matters -- and to do so almost always unchallenged -- but also even to shape and mold the networks' coverage choices.

Even a casual review of the DoD's documents leaves no doubt that this is exactly how the program worked. The military analysts most commonly used by MSNBC, CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC routinely received instructions about what to say in their appearances from the Pentagon. As but one extreme though illustrative example, Dan Senor -- Fox News analyst and husband of CNN's Campbell Brown -- would literally ask Di Rita before his television appearances what he should say (7900, 7920-21), and submitted articles to him, such as one he wrote for The Weekly Standard about how great the war effort was going, and Di Rita would give him editing directions, which he obediently followed.

Among the most active analysts in this program were all three of the most commonly used MSNBC commentators -- Gen. Montgomery Meigs, Gen. Wayne Downing, and Col. Ken Allard.

This is clearly not a public information program run by the Pentagon. It consists of developing a channel of propaganda from the Pentagon directly into the Television news organizations, then manipulating the TV organizations so that they became dependent on the propaganda channel in place of TV controlled news reporters.

By doing this the Pentagon could quickly get it's views out to he public and immediately respond to and quash bad news that placed the Pentagon in a bad light.

No wonder the American people are so poorly informed about the invasion and Occupation of Iraq. The news media have been turned into nothing more than a government propaganda channel.

This is why we are getting such poor international news

dday at Hullabaloo explains it concisely:

...a function of news organizations needing to become profit centers and shutting down costly foreign bureaus, finding it easier to put two talking heads in a room together than do actual reporting, etc. The herd mentality and the hewing to familiar tropes and narratives takes effect from there, and it's important to push back.

This isn't the whole problem, of course, but it sets the entire news system up to provide poor, biased, or even non-existent coverage of places outside the U.S.

America is blind to reality - that's the reason why the recent decade has been so bad

SusanG reviews two extremely revealing books. The stories are frightening.

First is Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon by A.J. Rossmiller. Rosmiller was an analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency. He describes being sent to Iraq where he develops intelligence on the bad guys and hands it off to the troops who go out to pick them up. When the identified bad guys aren't there, the troops pick up anyone in the area. Those innocent individuals were then sent to abu Ghraib on the assumption that the Intelligence people and MPs at the prison would sort out the innocents from the bad guys. But at the prison, the assumption was that everyone who was sent to then was automatically guilty. The best intelligence he would send to the consumers would be kicked back by his supervisors as too pessimistic. They were looking for happy talk that agreed with their bias, not real Intelligence. Rossmiller finally quit and has now written this expose.

The second book is So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits, and the President Failed on Iraq by Greg Mitchell. Mitchell is the editor of the publishing industry's magazine, Editor & Publisher. He describes an American media that, like Rossmiller's DIA, has been going along to get along and publishing happy talk news when the truth is too harsh and negative to face. The result is an ignorant American public which gets angry when someone tries to tell them something different from what they believe. The Editors then cater to the ignorant Yahoos instead of informing them (ensuring their continued ignorance), while also rejecting all criticism of their work as coming from ignorant Yahoos. The book is a collection of six years of Gregg's columns with introductions that describe the actual situation at the time the rotten news he castigates was published.

Since 9/11 America has been flying blind. Our military forces in Iraq are afraid to look at the reality they are operating in, probably because their political masters have carefully promoted only those military officers who tell them what they want to hear. those compliant officers have institutionalized rejection of harsh truths that do not confirm the leader's beliefs. Here at home the Media has performed a similar form of self-blinding to meet the desires of the Republican Party who depends on public ignorance if they are to remain power.

The conservative Republicans cannot remain in power unless the American public is frightened and ignorant, and with control over the White House and Congress they have been able to ensure that those conditions existed. But it appears that the Republicans have swallowed their own blinding Kool-aide. A government that fakes its Intelligence cannot operate effectively in reality, which explains the Katrina disaster and the almost total failure of Republican governance. With FOX News, the Washington Times, and a totally encompassing set of propaganda outlets masquerading as News outlets they have been able to fool the American public for the last six years, but it is beginning to unravel.

The current economic situation, being spun by, among others, our illustrious President as "not a recession and not likely to become one", is another example. This comes from the guy who is so unaware of reality that he does not know that the price of gasoline is approaching $4.00 per gallon. The government does not recognize reality because they have the best experts pumping out happy talk instead of real analysis. I would not be surprised to find out that they have been "cooking" the economic data that the federal government publishes, at least around the edges. That would make the economic reports we all depend on to tell us how the Macro economy is performing little more than the same economic happy talk the financial sales people and the politicians have been feeding us.

Napoleon warned against the General who lost contact with his enemy. Such a general, operating blind, can expect to be defeated. America is in much the same situation right now. Our political leaders are unaware that accurate bad news is completely superior to inaccurate news that confirms what they want to believe, so they manipulate the news - the Intelligence - they are given. They have lost contact with reality.

Those two books SusanG reviewed are efforts to make reality impinge on the rest of us.

FOX whines about being ignored by Democrats

Jonathan Zasloff at the Reality-Based community has the right idea about FOX 'News.' They are beginning to feel the pain of being left out in the cold by the Democrats.

The bipartisan crowd, I am sure, would recommend that Democrats start appearing more often on FOX's shows. No way. If they show up at the Democratic Convention, give them the same access an uncredentialed stringer for an unknown publication gets. Let them stand out in the rain (if it ever rains in Denver) and search for unused electric plugs.

They have proven repeatedly that they are enemies to the Democrats. Now they are drowning. Throw them an anchor.

Hoagland's fear of change and loss of his news gatekeeper status

Yesterday from Jim Hoagland we got another defensive meme from the conservative Republicans who lost power in the elections last November. He buried the meme deeply behind a warning that in spite of the many, many scandals in professional sports this summer, cynicism is not the answer. Things change, and rules change. People who use such changes to attack 'serious people' and take pleasure at the destruction of individual reputations and careers need to be avoided. Those who do that, like Bloggers, are just trying to build their own reputations on the gravestones they use to bury the currently established leaders and representatives of the status quo. Here is the core of his lament:

The most vindictive bloggers and many others eager to push the mainstream media, established politicians or other remnants of the status quo off a stage that they want to occupy smash reputations with abandon to call attention to themselves. What do they have to lose in the unpoliced badlands of the ether? They contribute to a general deepening of cynicism in the land at no perceived cost to themselves.

But deeply polarized nations that devote an inordinate amount of their time and energy to hunting and prosecuting both real villains and convenient scapegoats -- at the expense of failing to recognize and respect heroes and helpers of the common good -- do pay an enormous collective price. Such nations descend into easily manipulated despair and resentment that inevitably lead to ever greater destruction. Americans would do well to ponder that in a summer of doubt and division.

His concern seems to be that if we destroy all the negative elements of the status quo, we will also be destroying the things that maintain stability in our nation. He says "nations," but I see no indication that he looks outside the U.S. borders.

Well, if he is trying to defend the existing mainstream corporate owned media and pundits such as himself as valued defenders of the status quo, how much defending of the "status quo" (example: "America does not conduct unnecessary preemptive wars") was he dong when he was uncritically feeding the NeoCon line to the public to urge the War in Iraq? Hoagland himself was a stenographer for the NeoCon Iranian agent Ahmed Chalabi, publishing disinformation directly from Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. At the time he was publishing their propaganda, the CIA and the Department of State had already refused to deal with Chalabi. Hoagland, like so many pundits being published in the Washington Post, remains a cheerleader for the status quo - even though the status quo is presently the most radical regime America has ever suffered under.

Hoagland is warning us against an orgy of investigations and destroyed reputations and careers because it could be destructive of the status quo. Yeah, that idea worked so well (for the Republicans) after both the Nixon debacle. The Nixon Pardon by Ford was to prevent loss of public acceptance of the legitimacy of the government. The Pardon for Nixon was to prevent social disruption - and prevent the public from learning how bad the Nixon regime really was. The lack of full investigation into the Nixon administration allowed the conservative cancer to continue growing on the American body politics. Because they were not exposed the same idiots like Lee Atwater kept coming back like the undead without stakes in their hearts. The same excuse was used after Iran Contra. Pardon the worst, ignore the rest, and stop the damned investigations that would destroy careers and reputations. The cancer kept growing until we got Bush 43, Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld. Hoagland wants to avoid anything that will keep the conservatives from being recognized as the greatest danger to American values since the Confederate States of America revolted. If they aren't investigated and exposed, they will be back again. This time we need to put a stake through the heart of conservatism. That will require that what they really have done be exposed, and that will destroy some careers and reputations of those who have been trying to destroy the American Constitution.

The solution this time requires in-depth investigations and truth commissions that expose what has happened to America in the last 50 years. It will require that kind of effort to get to the truth at the bottom of the nightmare the American conservatives have brought to America. That kind of effort WILL destroy reputations. But it will do so in the interest of trying to bring America back to some form of consensus as to what America is and how it should be governed, not for the personal gain of those who expose the evil-doers.

This solution, honest open exposure of the illegal actions of the current radical regime, is not the one that Jim Hoagland recommends. Instead he suggests that we protect those currently in power with good reputations as an effort to protect American stability. He blames "...vindictive bloggers and many others eager to push the mainstream media, established politicians or other remnants of the status quo off a stage that they want to occupy smash reputations with abandon to call attention to themselves."

He personalizes the destruction of the status quo, looking for someone to blame ("vindictive bloggers and others") and glorifies a non-existent status quo. The first part of his article, in fact, makes a point that the status quo in sports is no longer any form of stability. I would suggest to him that he reread the economist Joseph Schumpeter's description of Creative destruction.

His own newspaper industry is a great example of creative destruction. Newspapers are dying because of competition from radio, Television, as well as the shift from downtown department stores that advertised to attract customers to WalMarts, Targets and K-Marts that place stores closer to the customers and compete on low prices instead of advertisements. More recently, the Internet offers news that dispenses with the newspaper gatekeeper-on-the-news function. Gatekeepers protect the status quo, good or bad. Individual choices as facilitated by the Internet are more likely to lead to a generally acceptable consensus than hidebound gatekeepers. Is it any surprised that the Washington D.C. news gate-keepers are screaming like stuck pigs as they are displaced and disrespected? But let's look at this "status quo" that we have to protect if we are to maintain "stability."

Currently the so-called status quo consists of two American world-view competing for political domination of America. One set fears the future and wants to be protected from it. They are out to gain control of the military, police and judicial powers of government to stop the changes they fear and hate. The other set is apprehensive about the future, but does not believe that we can be protected from it, so they want to know about it and be able to take advantage of whatever elements there are to take advantage of.

Jim Hoagland fears the future, but it is coming right at us anyway. It is dangerous and highly unpredictable, but it is coming at us whether we like it or not. Our choice is to either let the old-line news gate-keepers hide the facts from us and feed us a feeling of normality and safety, or to open up the news channels and let each of us get ready for the inevitable as best we can.

Such preparations will require a great deal of government planning and organization. Government can't stop the future from happening, but it can prepare us to deal with it. The government couldn't prevent Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, but there was a lot that could have been done to limit the damage they did and help people recover.

The recognition of the total failure of refusing to prepare for the inevitable future will include a lot of destroyed reputations and careers. Tough. There are a lot more Michael Browns and yes, Jim Hoaglands, who need to be exposed and disposed with. Failures ion both government and the media need to be dealt with, including dealing with the responsible people. The old-line news gate-keepers need to recognize the elements of creative destruction and try to get out of the way while the rest of us start living in tomorrow.

Oh, and why do I call Hoagland's meme a Republican one? Because they are the ones who want to hide from the future and deputize the military to defend themselves from it. That is what Cheney and the NeoCons (including Hoagland) were trying to do in Iraq. It didn't work and couldn't work. As Hoagland's article points out, the future is showing up in sports all over this Summer. It is also showing up in prices at the gas pump, in the transfer of high-paying jobs from the U.S. to India and China, and in the dangerous foods entering the world market from China.

The future starts one-second from now and can't be stopped. Only our adaptation to the new future can be prevented. It is stopping that adaptation that is the core of American conservatism, as if by some magic (or miracle if you are fundamentalist) by hiding from the evidence of future and refusing to adapt to it, it can be somehow stopped.

The fall-out for the Republican Party failure is now showing up in the election booths. They lost control of Congress in November 2006, where they were trying to cram their failed solutions down the throat of America using votes of 50% plus one vote and totally removing any opposition from power. They really think that they will regain power because the only possible solution they can see is to ignore the future, refuse to prepare for it, and use the military to keep the rest of the world under their control.

Since they expect to return to power, they are now pushing the media to demand that Democrats and vindictive bloggers avoid destroying the careers and reputations of people whose only sin is to protect the status quo. Another media meme that the Republicans are pushing is that 'serious people' should act in a bipartisan manner, giving equal respect to conservatives. Both of these memes, if listened to, will have the effect of leaving the conservatives with some power to prevent preparations for the inevitable changing and very frightening future.

Both of those memes should get the trash-can treatment they deserve. To the extent that either is adopted, it will be as dangerous to America as the War in Iraq has been and remains. Neither has any value. If the conservatives want to get on the band wagon to the future, they have to do as an addict does. they have to recognize that they have reached rock-bottom and decide themselves to change and adapt. They should not expect the rest of us to be protective of their insanity.

More media crap to scare the American public

Shock! Horror! Fear! There was a bombing attempt near a London West End night club!

Don't believe it? OH! Oh! CNN has the story, and it's not one car bomb. It's TWO! The first one was filled with nails and had two (not one, but two!) canisters of ... gasoline?

Wait a minute! Isn't that a suburban homeowner on the weekend with a carpentry project and the fuel for the lawn mower?

OK. So one Mercedes with nail and gasoline. But there was also a second nearby with propane canisters and nails inside. Coincidence? Well, CNN doesn't want its faithful viewers to think so.

For those of you not yet suspicions that we are hearing another media over-hyped provocation to fear, go check out Larry Johnson at his blog No Quarter.

For starters, gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incendiary. If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapenal.

And you wonder why I treat the so-called news media as delivering a load of really smelly crap? Especially FOX, CNN, and MSNBC.

There is NO TV NEWS that can be trusted. The do not deliver news to their viewers. Lies and over-hyped packaged efforts to manipulate the audiences' emotions? Yeah, that they deliver. But if you want news, turn off the TV.

Here is what even the so-called journalists on MSNBC think about the so-called news on their channels:
But the public will get what they ask for, right?

Rick Perlstein on why the media sucks

Rick Perlstein was at a conference in which members of the media attempted to defend themselves for their poor performance, and blamed the liberal blogosphere for countering the right-wing noise machine attack on the media by creating a similar conspiracy of noisy attacks on the media from the left.

Really worth reading.

D.C. Pundit Corps motto: "Keep them in the dark and feed them B.S."

Glenn Greenwald states it very nicely:

One could write media criticisms for the next several years and not come close to capturing the essence of our Beltway media the way [Richard] Cohen [Washington Post] did in this single paragraph:

With the sentencing of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald has apparently finished his work, which was, not to put too fine a point on it, to make a mountain out of a molehill. At the urging of the liberal press (especially the New York Times), he was appointed to look into a run-of-the-mill leak and wound up prosecuting not the leaker -- Richard Armitage of the State Department -- but Libby, convicted in the end of lying. This is not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither should they be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics. As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off.

That really is the central belief of our Beltway press, captured so brilliantly by Cohen in this perfect nutshell. When it comes to the behavior of our highest and most powerful government officials, our Beltway media preaches, "it is often best to keep the lights off." If that isn't the perfect motto for our bold, intrepid, hard-nosed political press, then nothing is.

That is the motto that should be inscribed at the top of Fred Hiatt's Editorial Page in pretty calligraphy. And let us acknowledge what a truly superb job they have been doing in keeping the lights off.

A better example of what the old statement "Keep them in the Dark and Feed them Bullshit" means could not be written.

The "them" in that statement is, of course, the American public. You. Me. Ambiance is "Dark." Menu is "Bullshit." In the past this was the only restaurant in town, and we were expected to pay for what we could get and leave quietly. The pundits even got to where they expected a Tip for their service.

What has happened is that the politicians - the denizens of Washington, D.C. on who the pundits started their careers as reporters describing and reporting on, are also the people who the reporters and pundits talk to. Those "denizens" operate in the murky realms of politics where much of what is done really is, to say the least, highly unsavory. Those "denizens" operate based on the idea that their murky doings are best not revealed.

The reporters and pundits are, in theory, in the business of revealing and reporting those murky dealings to us - to the American public. But here is the problem. While they are supposedly being paid to report to us, they don't listen to us! Never have, and that is the way they like it. They listen instead to the politicians on whom they are supposed to report, and those politicians really, really don't like being investigated and reported on. They want someone supposedly reporting on them to actually be speaking for them.

That's what Richard Cohen is doing. He is speaking for the politicians, not reporting on the politicians. Want examples? Go read Eric Boehlert at (the blog, natch) Huffington Post (via .)

Gee. It should not come as a surprise that the politician spokespersons who call themselves reporters and who have spent their full career speaking for politicians feel put upon when some of their mere audience stand up on their hind legs and tell them You are failing to do your jobs as reporters!

That is the basis of the "reporter/pundit" put-downs of bloggers. Many Bloggers are telling the most experienced old hands in the D.C. pundit corps that they have spent their professional lives as so-called reporters living a lie.

Uh, oh. Some of the bullshit is being exposed to the light, and the professional bullshit artists (pundits - Cohen, Hiatt, Klein, etc.) are reacting like spiders who have lived their lives in the dark do when a spot light is shined on them. We are watching them react with high anxiety as the D.C. pundit/reporters scramble to find their comfortable, dark niches so that they can again be comfortable.

There are still things that the "Spiderhole Restaurant" have on the menu that can't be found in any of the newer, alternative restaurants. But I'm damned sure not going to Tip for what I now find is and has been really rotten service. I don't care how anxious it makes the pundits. Their anxiety and refusal to face the new environment is not MY problem. They will just have to adapt.

I have always enjoyed shining lights on spiders in the dark and watching them scramble. As a blogger, I have a new flashlight. The D.C. pundit spiders will just have to learn that they are now a part of my entertainment.

Bwahahahaha. Run, spiders, run! And thanks, Glenn.

Has anyone read "First Post?"

This is not an on-line news source that I am familiar with. I was looking at my own blog, and there was a paid google ad at the top for an article Is Osama bin Laden dead from Typhoid?, so my curiosity get the better of me. I checked out the article and then went to the home of First Post to see if I could find out more about it. All I can say so far is that it is slickly produced, appears British (with a URL ending in UK), and has several articles on subjects that interest me. Osama bin Laden and Paul Wolfowitz.

The Osama article was first published September 23, 2006. I had to go to page 2 to find that. You'd think that there would be confirmation or disconfirmatiion since then, but I have seen neither.

Just wondering what is behind "First Post." Anyone know?

Great reporting by the Main Stream Media experts

Here (from Glenn Greenwald) are a few of the significant things that have been happening in the world very recently:

This week, the Bush administration sought vastly increased powers to spy on the telephone conversations of Americans, and then threatened to begin spying again illegally and without warrants. It was revealed that Condoleezza Rice would meet with Syrian officials, a significant shift in Middle East policy.

Yesterday, it was disclosed that Iraq's government is actually purging itself of anyone who seeks to impede lawless Shiite militias. And one of the right-wing's most influential academicians published an article on The Wall St. Journal Op-Ed page explicitly advocating "one-man rule" in America whereby the President can ignore the "rule of law" in order to fight The Terrorists.

Then we get the big story from the new online political reporting agency, the Politico.

This is also from Glenn greenwald:

None of that -- or virtually anything else of even marginal significance -- was reported by The Politico, an online political magazine founded by some of the nation's most prestigious and admired (in Beltway terms) political journalists. But yesterday, The Politico's so-called "chief political columnist," Roger Simon (Bio), published a 674-word article -- prominently touted on The Politico's front page -- exclusively about John Edwards' haircuts, cleverly headlined "Hair today, gone tomorrow."

OK. My question is, where is Mr. Simon's sense of priorities? Is this really the best story he could find to write? The "Edward's haircut" is purely a story made up by reporters. Surely Mr. Simon could have used his time, talents, and access to media space to tell the public something significant about some of the many, many politicians who are presently working hard to get government jobs.

Are we really watching the beginning of a political sea change?

When I read this from Glenn Greenwald, I was rather sucked in and feeling good. It's a very good article, and I feel like there is a lot of truth in it. I also watched the Friday Night Bill Moyer Report on PBS with Jon Stewart followed by Josh Marshall. Stewart is a very bright man with singular insight into current politics. Josh Marshall is another bright, capable person, but he goes back to an older form of journalism. You know, fact-based and carefully sourced. He makes sure he follows leads and finds out where his stories come from, and then follows up. I don’t see much of that these days.

News narratives.

I wasn’t the only person in the blogosphere to believe there was something special in that PBS show. Here is Booman at Booman Tribune. Then someone named "Gator" presented this diary at dKos. The common thread seems to be that with the blogosphere, shows like that of Bill Moyers and Jon Stewart, and Josh Marshall's return to solid journalism we seem to be seeing a new source of “news narrative” in American politics.

The older narratives came from the two political parties mediated by the journalists. Each party presented the narrative as they see it and the journalists are there report those narratives and to give readers a feeling for how closely the reported narratives matched with reality. This is not working as well as we used to think it did.

News organizations, financing and centralization.

Political journalism is a side effect of a healthy, competitive group of well-financed mass news organizations. Those mass news organizations are financed primarily by advertising revenue. News must be collected and then distributed. As more methods of distributing news are developed (newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, and now the internet) each method of distribution competes with more organizations for the same advertising dollars. As revenue for each organization drops, costs must be cut. But distribution costs are fixed by the technology used, and can’t be reduced significantly for mature distribution technologies. That means that organizations tend to centralize news collection and distribute the news through more outlets. Two reporters at a central location feeding news to half a dozen newspapers can often replace a single reporter at each newspaper. This has reduced the number of outlets that offer different points of view for national and international news.

The technology of both Radio and broadcast TV allows an organization that centralizes production of content over a number of outlets to under price individual outlets that produce their own content. The more outlets any one corporation has, the lower the cost of content for each of them. Since the cost of distribution is already established, the networks have a big cost advantage.

News versus entertainment.

News is not a major factor in this, since entertainment is what draws the big bucks advertising. But for TV, with four broadcast networks and any number of cable networks drawing off low-cost high-audience productions like sports, content production funds are best spent on providing entertainment. For news itself, to become a revenue producer requires that it be both entertaining and cheap. That’s what gives the public news of O. J. Simpson, Lacey Peterson, Brittany Spears and Anna Nicole Smith. Those are cheap. Investigatory stories and foreign news bureaus are expensive luxuries most TV news providers and no radio news can afford.

Newspapers face the same competition for advertising dollars, and ALL they can offer is news and advertisements. Since TV news sets the news agenda, foreign news bureaus are unnecessary for regional newspapers and too expensive to maintain even for cachet. Real news is a loss leader to attract readers to advertisements. Expensive news can be less and less afforded. So the major newspapers also centralize into a few groups that exchange news. The larger groups have a Washington bureau, the rest depend on news services like the Associated Press. National political news produced by experts in politics has become a specialty of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun Times, and the Los Angeles Times, with only the first two really having a large effort. Foreign bureaus are primarily for the New York Times and the Washington Post. The LA Times still has some Latin American bureaus (I think) but they are under pressure to close them.

National politics is not a big draw to newspaper audiences. TV presents the headlines, and very few people who read advertisements also look for extensive explanations behind the headlines. Except for extremely unusual news items like the tsunami in the Indian Ocean or the (misnamed) Iraq War there is no demand for foreign news at all. (Consumer Demand is not the same as the NEED for that news. A lot more is needed.) TV does not do in-depth investigations, nor do most newspapers. Investigatory journalism of any kind is being priced out of the market. Name the last big story CNN or FOX has broken based on an in-depth investigation. I don't know of one. Such stories cost too much and don't increase advertising rates.

The political reporting process.

The result of the above competitive pressures is that national political journalism has been reduced to a few overworked reporters each getting a statement from a candidate or incumbent from one party, sometimes (clearly not always) asking for the response from the other party, typing it up and publishing it. Getting additional statements from independent experts has become quite rare. The reporter probably knows when one side is lying and the other is not, but to say so is "unbalanced" and unbalanced is "Unfair." If nothing else, it will cause a conflict the editors don’t want to deal with. So the readers or viewers are given two sides in what may be a multi-sided story (or may be a one sided story contradicted by lies from opponents like the Swift-boaters) with no information that allows the news consumer to determine which side is closer to accurate.

The result is that the major journalism outlets have become little more than channels for the two political parties to use to present their spin. There is no one in journalism with the time, expertise, or independent stature to present a judgment on what each side says.

Most of this is because of the inherent economics journalism, primarily broadcast TV journalism, together with the ability of the executives who control the TV and radio networks to get government to let a few of them centralize and shut out the competition from independent stations and smaller potential network groups. The Republican Party, with its "Free Market" ideology and objection to government regulation is the natural place for the executives of the TV and radio networks to go to get what they want.

Control of centralized news organizations.

There is a good argument that the pressures forcing centralization of control of the news allows too few people to determine what everyone can read or see. If the current economic market remains, then the results will be a small number of generalist reporters acting as stenographers for the two major parties. Their results will dominate all the news outlets. This will give the cheapest, lowest quality news to the widest possible audiences.

The Democrats have generally bought into the misplaced free market rhetoric and let them get away with it. The last time they did this was with banks in the 1920's. Banks create the majority of the money supply. The Great Depression was a result, in part, of unregulated and unprotected banks going bust, taking many of their customers with them, and causing a sharp contraction in the money supply, which led to even more banks and businesses going bust. (Or so Milton Friedman rather convincingly wrote.)

For the banks this has required the government to change market conditions so that banks do not independently manipulate the overall money supply. This has become the job of the Federal Reserve and is accomplished by control of the fractional banking system. To shrink the money supply the Fed will increase the amount of bank assets required to support each dollar of loans they make. But the key is that the government modified the market so that banks competed in areas where their expertise provide the best results for the overall economy.

A change in the market for news could be mandated to create a market for competing organizations that provide National news, political news and foreign news. One way to do this would be to limit the amount of allowable news organization centralization, and require each local news outlet to buy its national, political and foreign news from specialized news producers. Long-term contracts for this kind of news would be prohibited. This would create a new market for these types of news. The Associated Press and UPI used to fill this market. The Washington Post and New York Times news services would have to be set up as independent news services to compete with AP and a newly independent UPI.

Then reestablish the Fairness Doctrine together with the idea that radio and TV stations used the public airwaves and needed to return public benefits for the right to do so have been effectively eliminated.

The blogosphere provides a new look at all this, but it will not eliminate the need for decentralization of news organizations.

The blogosphere is a new factor.

The blogosphere is an additional way for those of us who feel left out by the executives running the Democratic and Republican Parties and the excessively centralized news organizations to get the additional information they don't want us to have. The blogosphere is not going to replace the mass media. But it will sharply effect how many of us react to it. It is becoming a major source of “truth-squadding” the news. It is far from perfect, but it is still in an infant stage.

The mass media depends on customers who want other things, like being entertained, to tune in and as a side effect, get some news. The mass media assumes that we are all alike, and that as customers our news needs can be predetermined and packaged for a few large groups. Those groups are then sold to advertisers who want to sell something to them.

The political effects of this kind of news distribution.

Since the media operates that way, the two American political parties operate that way. That is a requirement of using the top-down media system. Polls are a method of getting some idea of what the market wants, but even the polls are designed as top-down systems. They present the questions and the customers respond. Anything else is too expensive to be efficient.

Centralized political organization.

The Republican Party is also a very centralized organization. This is in part because of the psychological needs for certainty of many of the people who currently vote Republican, and in part because such an organization works better with centralized media organizations, large centralized businesses, and centralized religious organizations.

Centralized and tightly controlled organizations have a real advantage when getting large numbers of people to quickly work for the same goal is important. Centralized and tightly controlled organizations are also quicker to react to existential threats to their being. That's why a major rule of war is unity of command. Such organizations are frankly more efficient, especially when a fast response is required.

Decentralized political organization.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of many groups with different goals and needs. As such it does not have a strong central hierarchy to control it.

(I'm going to speculate here.) Once upon a time the Democratic Party had its own internal sources of information, but when America became a nation that was essentially run by the Democratic Party those sources were no longer needed. The national news media was enough. As long as the news organizations reported what was really happening, an internal news organization for Democrats was redundant. So it disappeared.

The Republicans did not have the luxury of depending on the public news media. Its assumptions, procedures and traditions frequently conflicted with conservative beliefs, particularly since the news organizations saw themselves as reporting the independent truth. So the Republicans began to develop their own news channels.

This news channel development took two routes. The first was the Fundamentalist Christian route. They operated through their churches, bookstores, and more recently their specialized radio and TV stations. These were both self-financing and were a way to cut the true believers off from the rest of the media world.

The second route is newer. It is the takeover and control of what were previously normal news distribution outlets. It includes the establishment of the Washington Times, its takeover of United Press International, and the creation of the FOX TV channels. These were more purely political. But with these sources as a base, the conservatives have moved on to try to take over the rest of the media - or at least to force it to act more conservative.

The growth of these conservative channels was accompanied by the massive attack on the rest of the media for its' liberal bias. Since there is no liberal hierarchical organization to feel threatened and respond, this pincer movement on the mainstream media was not responded to. Since the mainstream media was also under massive economic pressure, they caved in to much of the political pressure. They were already losing audience/readers anyway. Perhaps the conservatives could replace the ones they were losing.

My reaction to these things.

Enter the blogosphere, stage left. No one else was responding to the rather massive attack on the media from the political and religious right. The right-wing top-down hierarchical corporate anti-democratic anti-Union anti-woman and anti-minority views do not represent me, nor do they represent what I think the Anglo-Saxon history, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the (small “d”) democratic history of America have given us. The Right-wingers want to take democracy, Human Rights, freedom and opportunity away from those of us who are not heads of corporations or their equivalent. Today it is my opinion that American politics and the American media are becoming less American and more authoritarian. After Reagan and Bush 41, Clinton was a Godsend. AL Gore was the logical savior of the American Dream.

Then Bush 43, Jeb Bush and the U.S. Supreme Court stole the election in Florida in 2000. There were enough news stories to show that the most likely outcome of any real recount statewide was a decision for Gore. But there were no real news follow-ups.

I did not know anyone - or even know of very many people who I trusted who agreed with me. But no one ever disproved the reports from Greg Palast or even discussed them. It was an effective tie, the Florida courts went for a recount, and the Federal Supreme Count decided, by a five to four decision on very weak grounds, to shut down any recount. Then they did it with a decision in which they specifically stated in their decision could not be used as a precedent for any future Supreme Court decisions. No law. No precedent. Just an arbitrary decision in which they were not willing to say it was a precedent for future decisions. That was a decision outside the Constitution and the law if there ever was one. That one incident told America what to expect from the Bush 43 administration and the movement conservatives. The major news organizations effectively ignored all this. They might have started some digging, but 9/11 shut that down.

The news I got from the newspapers, TV news and the newsweekly magazines let these issues drop. But something was really missing. I started searching the Internet for better news and analysis to explain what had happened.

I quickly found Talking Points Memo, Digby's Hullabaloo, daily KOS, Kevin Drum and Billmon. They all pointed me towards the smaller news items that reflected the really important events. Each time I found something that was interesting I would file it away or go Google for similar news reports. What I was doing (but didn't realize it then) was establishing some new narratives for myself, narratives not supported by the mainstream media or the two main political parties. I'm still doing that.

The sites I went back to provided analysis and sources rather than insults and politically inspired rhetoric. The analysis I found on the Internet let me work on the narratives that the mainstream media was glossing over. To my surprise, those sources have also been feeding back into the mainstream media and letting them know that important stories were being overlooked.

I think that is going to be the future of the blogosphere. It will not replace the major news media, even as that news media continues its economic decline. But the Blogosphere is going to play much the same role of evaluating the reporting of the major media and truth-squadding the rhetoric put out by the two major parties.

Most people won't bother with the blogosphere. It's too much work and takes too much time. But for the people who want that level of information and analysis, it has no real competition. There is no effective barrier to entry for any contributor. No paycheck, so you can't be fired. No editor to hold up publication of your best work. Blogger lets anyone establish a blog for publishing. Getting attention means having something (hopefully worthwhile) to say on subjects that other people want to know about, and getting on the search engines. Traffic and referrals provide an indication of when something is worth looking at. With all of that providing date, most of my time has been trying to learn enough to judge what is and is not reasonable.

To recycle the excellent quotation from Glenn Greenwald's article:

I have to say that a remarkably intimate, yet expansive, community of thought seems to be forming across television, film, and the Internet. There's a rather quiet, yet intense, movement of thought and expression building. It focuses not so much on any particular ideology ("right" or "left"), but on a common, critical-mass thirst to dispel the deception, irrationality, and utter hubris that has been corroding our proud country for what seems like an eternity.

An undeniable intellectual and social confluence is rapidly gaining momentum and solidarity. This solidarity is amazingly organic, not hierarchical -- its only guide is the sixth sense of skepticism, outrage, and, yes, reason. It transcends party. It is oceanic, atmospheric. An intellectual, moral, societal, and psychological gestalt as ancient as humanity itself, kept underfoot by a long winter, but indelibly germinating once again with the thaw.

It is literally everywhere now. The voices of blindness and rage cannot shake me anymore. I haven't felt such hope in a very long time.

I think there is something to that. I'm not sure what it is yet, but is seems quite positive compared to the way information is currently being shut down or drowned out.

The near future should be quite interesting.

[Note: Article revised significantly for clarity and organization - April 30, 2007 9:50PM.]