« Get him a body-bag, Johnny | Main | Let us now speak of pig-skin » Shep Smith sons some herb...13 Nov 2008 06:00 am
I was glad to see this. I think the power of media is, all-around, overstated. I don't think media had any love for Al Gore in 2000. They clearly had love for McCain that year, but it did nothing. I think the liked the Obama story--but one shouldn't misconstrue that with liking Obama, per se. "Obama felled by Rev. Wright" would have worked too. That said, it is a bad idea to go to war with media when you've got a VP nominee like Palin. Has anyone been watching her interviews? Whenever I hear someone using too many words in a sentence, I think they're trying to distract me while they slip their hand in my pocket. Or they're just lying. Anyway back to the mud-hole Shep Smith administers...
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Or they're trying to bludgeon your brain with a steady stream of semi-connected words. Soon your brain overheats under the stress of trying process what your ears are transmitting and before you know it you're dumb enough to think Sarah Palin would make a good president, also, though, you betcha!
This idea that the media has to be equally nice to both candidates is just bizarre...yes, they have to hold both candidates to the same standard, but if one of them doesn't meet that standard, the media has a right to say so. Objectivity doesn't mean that one can be a liar, incompetent and a fool, while the other can be brilliant, intelligent and capable, and yet you have to treat both candidates the same. It's about having equal standards, and treating them equally badly if they fail to meet those standards, and equally well if they meet or exceed those standards. And if one fails and the the other one does well, then yeah, the media is going to treat them differently based on performance. But to say they deserve equally good treatment just because...?? The guy doesn't understand the definition of objectivity.
When I coached hs football, we used to joke that the head coach needed a coach all his own to stand behind him and chill him out when he got too intense. That coach would be called the "get back coach." Shep Smith needs a get back coach! He was 7.3 seconds away from causing bodily harm!
Anyone else disappointed that it doesn't turn out Smith is holding?
Good for Shep -- I think that both he and his opponent have a point, though. I think that "the media" was indeed more supportive of Obama than of McCain. Some of that was liberal bias and some of it was "change" bias -- we are often charmed by new faces.
But I also think some of that was "everyone loves a winner" bias. When you're a winner, everything you do looks like genius. When you're a loser, the story is basically how much of a loser you are. When Obama is an old story, the worm will turn.
To be broadly dismissive of the idea of the media having any bias at all, though, is inaccurate - as much as I'd like to cheer for Shep for making that assertion. You can't pretend it's not there. The Washington Post ombudsman wrote an assessment of the Post's coverage during the election, and she basically showed that the paper was more positive to Obama. That doesn't actually bother me as much as where she showed how much time was spent on horse-race stories in the paper as opposed to analysis of what those two guys were actually proposing. That's what we all need more of.
Regarding the liberal media...
I grew up in a very Republican area and went to a pretty conservative college. Of my many Republican friends, 99 percent are in salary-maximizing jobs like investment banking or big law. I know one guy who does missionary work abroad full-time and one girl who is a church youth leader. There just aren't that many budding Ross Douthats out there who want to be conservative intellectuals.
Of my professed liberal friends, probably half have sought careers that are not salary-maximizing. Teach for America. NGOs. Academia. Media. If you go to work at my major metro daily, you're probably starting out at around $40k and, if you career goes well, ending around $75k. That's simply not enough money for a lot of high-achieving people.
I think TNC is one of maybe 10 people alive still calling busters herbs.
Smith wasn't saying the media isn't biased, he was calling out that clown who was claiming it was "in the tank" and (in so many words) that MSM bias swayed the election.
Which is just stupid. The obvious response, which Smith gave, was "how did George Bush win, then?"
Media members are, on average, more liberal than conservative. But the real truth behind their coverage isn't political bias, it's (as TNC alluded) a bias towards NARRATIVE. That, and congenital laziness.
The only surprise to me, was that "the race is tightening" wasn't sold harder in late October. I suppose that the total lack of real factual support for that storyline made it untenable to anyone but Drudge.
Back in October, I remember reading a comment to one of those "who's-getting-more-positive-press" articles: the comment was (paraphrasing here), If McCain were running a better campaign he'd get better press. By "better," what was meant was "competent."
Actual winning and losing aside, never mind McCain's actual proposals--his campaign was a failure at the level of basic competence. The current President Bush's campaigns were successes by that same standard. To say that someone's campaign succeeds or fails is to make an objective statement that shouldn't cause partisans to claim that the press doesn't favor their guy. Would the press have been doing its job if it had chosen not to report on the McCain campaign's incompetence or Sarah Palin's actual record being at variance with her claims about that record? Or, for that matter, should it not have reported on the Obama campaign's competence?
Hard to measure objectivity, isn't it?
It is pretty clear that most reporters are more liberal than they are conservative, but there are more than enough sources out there today that much of any bias can be overcome with minimal effort on behalf the news consumer.
Certain segments of the left have become almost as big of crybabies about the press as the right. Many believe the only reason we don't have singlepayer health care is because the corporate media, post-consolidation, has fooled the sheeple into thinking it is bad.
My biggest problem with the press isn't a left right bias, it's that the media seems to so NYC centric.
DB Cooper: But the real truth behind their coverage isn't political bias, it's (as TNC alluded) a bias towards NARRATIVE
===
Exactly. A friend of mine has run state and congressional campaigns, and to him press relations are all about narrative. "The press" are just people with jobs to do and deadlines to meet. If you can feed them a narrative, you're doing a big chunk of their work for them. When you help people do their jobs, they usually like you.
Now you can't play the press for chumps and just feed them any old story. But the candidate who presents a plausible narrative is more likely to get the coverage he or she wants.
As John B. said, that's a big way McCain's campaign failed in basic competence. By changing the storyline every few days, they made it difficult for reporters to write a coherent narrative. Reporters had a choice: look like fools who don't understand how things are changing, or look like suckers who swallow every line the campaign rolls out.
McCain's campaign made it harder for the press to do its job. They shouldn't have been surprised when the press returned the favor.
One of the "how do we rebuild our party" blog discussions detoured into the media, with one group boldly calling for purchasing the NYTimes and the AP to better drive their story, and the occasional sane person pointing out that this is hard to do with a family business that isn't for sale, and reporting actually has some standards beyond "what message do my corporate overlords wish me to promote today."
I think Acorn fizzled--the sheer math of claiming that an extra million votes in many swing states, with the fake ids and transport to polls and keeping it straight and none of the 5 million double voters talking, it just wasn't going to work. So we're back to blaming the media. Which, as those above point out, need a narrative.
Christina, connect the dots. The reason Obama got more favorable coverage is BECAUSE OF the horse-race mentality. He was leading the horse race, so he got better coverage. When you're losing the horse race, guess what-- you get stories about infighting, slipping up, what went wrong, why is everything going to shit, etc. That would have happened to Obama if he hadn't stemmed the tide of Wright stories with his speech, had tried to defend his "bitter" statements more than he did. Basically, he would have collapsed under negative coverage if not for the fact that he ran a better campaign, and led the horse race for more of the time.
Nick DaPaolo has always been an ass. I mean, you're a comedian!!! And the best you can come up with is the verbatim Limbaugh point "The mainstream media's in the tank for Obama." For Christ's sake, come up with an original phrase or joke or something. Colin Quinn doesn't have a show for hacks like you to be on anymore-- you're on your own.
Good on you, Shep. I think the Mississippi boy has known in his heart this year how transformative Obama's run is, media or not. He's stuck up for Obama on Fox more than anyone else there.
Shep is on a roll the last couple of weeks. Methinks he might be mad as hell about Prop-8 and he's not gonna take it anymore.
Maybe they'll replace that empty suit Colmes with him. Shep might not be a liberal but he seems gay, and to the FOX audience, that's pretty much the same thing.
Shep's really the only reason to ever flip over to FOX News. I think that the MSM did a pretty good job covering the election on the whole, but some individual outlets were unacceptably biased. FOX as usual was too hard on Obama, and the NYTimes was surprisingly and unfairly hostile towards McCain. But Obama ran a great campaign, he was the change candidate in a year where the electorate was righteously pissed at all things incumbent, and to blame the media for his win is just dishonest.
Stick to the Jokes DiPalo.
Help me figure something out: When did Nick DiPaolo go from being a marginal comedian to an astute political and media analyst? Did I miss the change in careers somehow?
Shep Smith's honesty has been refreshing.
Shep is really creepy-looking, but I respect what he's doing. The Ralph Nader thing was beautiful as was this. I always thought conservatism was about telling people to "stop blowing smoke up my ass." Seems Shep is the only one doing that, even occasionally, over at Fox News.
The right is doing the same mindless fingerpointing that the left did when Reagan was laying waste to the donkey party. It is simply a cop out to blame "the media. The problem with the GOP is that they no more got Obama's appeal to the masses than the Dems got Reagan's. Obama was an obviously smart, youngish, charismatic POSITIVE thinking candidate; the GOPers ran the oldest major party candidate ever, let him flit around on policies like a mosquito attracted to a light fixture, then paired him with an idiot. And yet they blame "the media" for their loss?
Another thing: "in the tank", just like "under the bus" are nice sound bites, but they mean nothing. "The media" was "in the tank", yet how many times did we see the Jeremiah Wright clips on CNN, etc.? Who among us DOESN'T know the names Rezko and Ayers? Not only did the media report extensively on them, but the media would THEN show Palin talking about them to her unhinged crowds. But you know what the media DIDN'T show? Any of the YouTube clips of said unhinged nutbag right wingers making racist and nutty comments.
Nick DiPaolo is a failed comedian who's now playing up this conservative act in an effort to keep his career going.
Is the world crying out for an Italian-American Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity? Nick thinks it might!
He, also, exaggerates the Italian stuff. He's from New England but comes on uber-Brooklyn king Guido. There are, of course, Italians in New England, but Nick can't be bothered to talk like one. Why? It might confuse his audience! Better to play the stereotype and that's a NY accent! An interesting choice for a kid from Danver, Massachusetts.
A fraud and an oppurtunist looking to make it as a right-wing rabble-rouser catering to Joe the Plumbers in the NY/NJ area.
Sad.
Nick DiPaolo was one of Colin Quinn's go-to guests on his failed show, "Tough Crowd." He was the "comedian" (and, oh, I use those quotes advisedly) who reliably took the most right-wing wingnut position; the show was on about 5 years ago, and he was completely in the tank for George Bush, for the invasion of Iraq, for Abu Ghraib, you name it.
This, apparently, is why he is now considered someone suitable for punditry on news shows.
But, as his argument demonstrates, he is a Ass. The press has always been liberal? Where were the articles defending Clinton, then? Why did the NYTimes fan the flames of the Iraqi invasion? It is a crock.
Even the Washington Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, missed the mark in claiming that the WaPo was biased ni favor of Obama:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/07/AR2008110702895.html
Really? If one candidate runs a sensible, efficient, issues-based campaign, and the other candidate runs an erratic, loose-cannon, smear-tactic campaign, then why on god's green earth should the coverage of the two be equally favorable? How does that fulfill the press's obligation to the public?
That is just rank bullshit. The press isn't a publicity department; it's not their job to make both sides look shiny and bright. Their job is to report the news.
Good for Shep Smith. I wonder how much longer he'll be employed at FOX--and whose decision it will be for him to leave?
When I was a kid, "herb" meant "marijuana".
I must admit to being confused by the title and disappointed when I realized was the actual discussion was about.
I bet Shep moves to CNN by the end of Obama's first 100 days.
Yeah, Jaybird, I thought maybe Shep had been busted. T-NC, I'm just getting used to recognizing "son" as a verb. So whaddaya expect me to think of when I see "some herb?"
There is something perhaps a little more complicated going on here. For a moment stop thinking of Fox News as the great enemy and think of them as a business. Fox News has a demographic problem. Murdoch, who leaked to Michael Wolfe that he was sometime embarrassed by Fox News, knows this. That leak, I believe, although later weakly denied, was quite intentional--a shot across the bow to Ailes and his management staff. The overwhelming majority of the demographic that television advertisers want voted for Obama. In state after state Obama won 65 to 70% of the voters under 40. The audience of Fox News is old and getting older. Murdoch doesn't like old and older--he bought MySpace, after all.
Shep has been a bit of an outlier on Fox ever since Katrina. Could it be that he is being allowed to stretch a little more as a kind of trial run of a new kinder and gentler Fox News? Think of how quickly Murdoch changed his U.K. media's backing to Labour under Blair--once he saw how powerful the public's support for Blair was. Once he saw, in fact, that Blair had the demographic that he wanted for his media outlets.
Does anyone else mentally recite the "We are all now dumber for having heard you speak," speech by the principal in Billy Madison when they hear her in an talk? Or is it just me?
Sorry, I had a Palin caught in my post. It should be: when they hear her speak.
Again, sorry.
I think Jon Stewart covered all this in an hour-long CSPAN interview in 2004 -- google it for it is worth the time.
Obama was only perceived as competent because he played the game better than all of his rivals. His campaign didn't change the press' behavior so much as amplify the details that they liked to chase (the newness, the inspiration, his above-it-all snark) and dialing down the stuff that they don't like or at least limited their access to the usual campaign peccadilloes (his lack of daily press briefings, his controlled image and message with minimal leaks from the higher-up staff).
This consistency managed a good front against all the other stuff lodged against his campaign -- the accusations of cultiness, the shallowness, the lack of experience, the "flip-flopping".
It's not that the media has a liberal bias, it's that they like consistent narratives and Obama delivered a nice one. And he started to win, and this dominated even when he started making hard-hitting attacks on his opponents because people could see both a negative and positive attribute to his image (in other words, he had enough $$ to make sure the negative stuff wasn't the only thing people took away from him).
Whatever. GWB won by the same token. Obama has clearly learned the lesson from his two victories, and it was one of the reasons why I figured he would be a better candidate than most of the others on the Dem ballot. None of it speaks to his superiority as a man and as a policy-maker, but goodness knows we need competence right now.
None of it speaks to his superiority as a man and as a policy-maker, but goodness knows we need competence right now.
This isn't exactly a small thing. I would LOVE to have competence in my elected officials. I voted for Obama because he's an excellent politician who appears to be able to get things done, and he and I are reasonably close on the issues. (McCain lost me when he flipped on torture--issue not affecting his competence--but he should have lost everybody when he named Palin--incompetence at appointing people.)
This is the most bizarre video. No one listening and everyone talking. And is that Captain Crunch at the table?
There you go again, denigrating entire swaths of Herbal-Americans with a few clicks of a keyboard...
Herbs have rights too!
Look behind and just right of Shep in the studio and you can see that someone at Fox enjoys playing Xbox 360.
Dagnabbit, Jon O., you beat me to it. (Is it just me, or is there only one controller for it? I guess it's better for network play anyway... ^_^)
(On topic, though, that was one magnificent takedown by Shep Smith. Still, I think the blogs were worth a few tenths of a point to the O'Bomber's lead...)
Hee Hee Hee! The Embarassed Italian-American from NY must not recognize a New England accent when he hears one! "Yeaaahs and Yeaaahs of pounding" are you serious? Even the judge commented on DiPaolo's New England accent at the end and said he must love the Red Sox. If you saw the whole show, he also went on to explain he wasn't referring to News organizations only, as "the media", but television in general (sitcoms and commercials - which is also media) promoting a more liberal view - NOT Obama loving reporters and slanted journalism. When Shep finally shut up and he had a chance to talk, I got what he was saying. Also, I used to work at a club on the east side and he's been living in NY for 20 plus yeeeahs.
That IS an Xbox 360! Right after this discussion, Shep and Dipaolo had a Samurai Showdown. It was amazing. They settled their differences and are the best of friends now.