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Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Public confused about Obamacare

Posted on 4:41 PM by Unknown
A new poll from Kaiser Family Foundation shows a majority oppose defunding Obamacare. Only 36% would approve, whereas 57% would disapprove. Which makes the GOP's grand plan of shutting down the entire federal government rather than pass any appropriation bill  funding the ACA even more tone deaf than they usually do.

Meanwhile, Americans remain entirely confused about what Obamacare actually does, which is not surprising given the enormous amount of disinformation and outright lies circulating about the law. Especially egregious are the number of mega-corporations lying about Obamacare forcing them to cut their workforce and/or dropping coverage. As Think Progress points out at the link:
Large companies are blaming this move specifically on the health law. But in reality, Obamacare just serves as a convenient scapegoat for anti- labor practices. Employers have been attempting to shift more health costs onto workers for the past decade, and workers’ health care costs have been skyrocketing as the same time as their wages have stagnated. Indeed, studies have shown that large employers were trying to slash workers’ hours long before Obamacare was around. Most large companies aren’t actually planning to slash their employees’ benefits specifically in response to health reform, despite the headlines proclaiming otherwise.
The Kaiser poll also finds only 8% consider BigMedia as a trusted source of information. Ironically fully 81% are getting information from BigMedia. Small wonder everybody is so confused.
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Posted in Media, Obamacare | No comments

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Why Americans are so uninformed

Posted on 3:16 PM by Unknown
Not sure if this says more about the media, or the markets.


Each week, TIME Magazine designs covers for four markets: the U.S., Europe, Asia and the South Pacific. Often, America's cover is quite, well – different. This week offers a stark example. [...]

This is not an isolated incident, for perusing TIME's covers reveals countless examples of the publication tempting the world with critical events, ideas or figures, while dangling before Americans the chance to indulge in trite self-absorption.
Click over to see more.

It's easy to blame Time for dumbing down the public but they're in the thankless business of selling magazines. I'm not sure who reads Time in the paper version these days but my anecdotal experience is far too few Americans care about world politics anymore. Time's US cover stories reflect what they think the US market will buy. I'm not sure they're wrong.
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Posted in declining America, Media, World politics | No comments

Woodward and Bernstein did it without computers

Posted on 2:44 PM by Unknown

[Guardian photo]

Adding a bit to my earlier post on trusting BigMedia, here's The Guardian on the destruction of their computers. Not sure which iteration of the story this might be but I'm told this is not a photograph of destroyed hard drives.

Read it and see if it makes more sense to you, but for me the real tell was the last graf:
"I hope what [the Miranda detention row] will do is to send people back to read the stories that so upset the British state because there has been a lot of reporting about what GCHQ and the NSA are up to. What Snowden is trying to do is draw attention to the degree to which we are on a road to total surveillance."
As I said when the story broke, Miranda's detention was entirely predictable. And as I asked John Cole, who would have known Mr. Miranda was even traveling if he hadn't been detained? I didn't. And really? No other route  to Brazil available except going through Heathrow?

Clickbait journalism is all about traffic. As Politico editor-in-chief John F. Harris said in an interview, "We have an obligation to be interesting. We don’t think of ourselves as the electric company or the water company: Well, we have a responsibility ...”2 That was a mindset in a previous generation of journalists. That mindset might have even been legitimate."

In other words, the big money is in infotainment. It's about amusing the people for profit, not some quaint, last century concept about a responsibility to inform the public.
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Posted in Media, Snowden, What's Wrong with Everything | No comments

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Who do you trust?

Posted on 2:39 PM by Unknown
I have never trusted any government to tell me the whole truth. All my life they've lied to me. Sadly, outside of handful of responsible journalists and bloggers, now that click bait journalism has become the accepted business model, I don't trust the media to tell me the whole truth either.

I do trust Charlie Pierce. I don't always agree with him entirely, but I always listen to what he has to say because he's honest, he's smarter than me and his institutional knowledge is deep. I completely agree with him about the NSA:
...(There is simply no logical reason to take anything the NSA says on this topic in good faith.)

I would like to believe that this is not simply another salvo in the ever-escalating Toobin-Greenwald pissing contest. The issues are simply too important to get buried under a mudslide of personal pique, even though they're half-interred in that already. But, Green Room hooleys aside, Toobin here fundamentally is telling us, again, that they are all honorable men. I don't care what you think of Glenn Greenwald or Edward Snowden. In this democracy, "trust us" is not half good enough any more.
So then the question becomes, what's a concerned citizen to do? Where do we get the facts? Are we seriously supposed to trust a media that rushes to print every wild rumor, (often from an unnamed source), they can dig up in their frenzy for a ten minute exclusive on the internets? The media standard for publication is no longer are we sure this is true, it's now if it's at all plausible -- run with it and maybe make corrections later.

Take the instant matter of Greenwald's spouse and his troubling detention at Heathrow. The Guardian rushes the story to print, inciting instant mass hysteria about innocent spouses of journalists being detained for no reason. But they omitted a couple of pertinent facts. Within hours the NYT tells us Mr. Miranda was acting as a courier for secret documents between Glenn and Lynn Poitras and his trip was financed by The Guardian. Only then did The Guardian amend its story and I'm told they didn't bother to note anywhere it had been amended. So most people who read their story in the hours before that wouldn't be aware of those salient facts. This does not make for an informed public or a reasonable debate.

Meanwhile, Atrios posts today that "the lack of noise about the destruction of the hard drives has been a bit unsettling." He's referring to the Guardian's story about the UK government destroying their hard drives. Well, at least that's what the first story implied. The second story today tells us they actually destroyed the drives themselves, voluntarily, under the watchful eye of a couple of agents, rather than force the government to get a court order. Which doesn't really make sense to me on any level. But the really weird thing is this happened a month ago. Have to wonder why are they just printing it now?

It's not like this is an isolated instance and it's not confined to The Guardian. Every major story in the last few years has played out the same way. The first 48 hours (or longer) are complete chaos with conflicting reports. Anything incendiary enough to drive traffic gets posted immediately. The subsequent mitigating information is downplayed or sometimes ignored. It takes an enormous amount of effort to glean the complete story from numerous news orgs. Frankly, I'm tired of it. In fact, I'm just plain tired of the hysteria, of the in-fighting, of being told what I'm supposed to feel and do. So sorry if it makes me a bad liberal that I just watch and wait from the sidelines instead of immediately jumping into the melee but I just don't the see the point of adding to the noise.
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Posted in Internet Outrage, Media, police state, World politics | No comments

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Voice inflection is everything

Posted on 11:11 AM by Unknown
Internet outrage of the moment is Michael Grunwald's loaded tweet in which he said, "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange."

Maybe it's because I'm inclined to think the best of people unless they've proven to be vile. Maybe it's because I don't really know who Grunwald is. He's not on my regular read list. I vaguely recall reading a post of his some time back that somebody linked to that I thought was quite good. So in the absense of knowledge about his general ideology, I took it as sarcasm rather than the expression of actual murderous intent. I mean, I've seen bloggers I do follow and know well post countless requests to DIAF (die in a fire) and don't take those as serious threats either.

Of course, it's August. The news cycle is mostly trivial. The poli-junkies are bored. Many pick somewhat silly internet spats and instant outrage rules the twitter.

That tweet could have been read in several ways. Could just as easily been a diss on the drone program or subtle dig at the state of media today. Which is not to say it wasn't stupid to post it. That statement desperately needed voice inflection to make its intent clear. Maybe Grunwald really meant it murderously, (in which case I would condemn it too even though I've always found Assange to be creepy and self-interested), but I've seen nothing to suggest Grunwald is prone to violent ideation. So I guess I'll save my outrage for things that really matter rather than some awkwardly worded tweet probably posted after a couple of drinks on a Saturday night.
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Posted in Internet Outrage, Media, Twitter | No comments

Friday, August 9, 2013

What the left could love about the NSA Presser

Posted on 5:56 PM by Unknown
Time was when President Obama's forceful style at today's presser would have had "teh left" exploding with approval on the social nets. Those days are over. Opening with the appointment of a blue ribbon commission to study the NSA didn't thrill the spectators. We've seen that movie many times before and it rarely has a satisfactory ending.

That's not to say there wasn't a couple of (largely ignored) satisfying moments hidden in the Q & A. The two standout quotes for me came first in answer to Major Garrett's question on appointing a new head for the Federal Reserve. Obama answered in part:
But the other mandate is full employment. And right now, if you look at the biggest challenges we have, the challenge is not inflation; the challenge is we’ve still got too many people out of work, too many long-term unemployed, too much slack in the economy, and we’re not growing as fast as we should. And so I want a Fed chairman who’s able to look at those issues and have a perspective that keeps an eye on inflation, makes sure that we’re not seeing artificial bubbles in place, but also recognizing, you know what, a big part of my job right now is to make sure the economy is growing quickly and robustly, and is sustained and durable, so that people who work hard in this country are able to find a job.
Seem to remember many calls for exactly this statement from the bully pulpit. Saw the sum total of one tweet from someone else having noticed it. Neither have I seen any recognition for the strength of Obama's defense of the ACA outside of one tweet afterward from Ed Henry, who asked the question.
[Obama]: Now, what’s true, Ed, is, is that in a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the Speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law -- it has to do with, for example, are we able to simplify the attestation of employers as to whether they’re already providing health insurance or not -- it looks like there may be some better ways to do this; let's make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. [...]

Now, I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail, their number-one priority. The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don't have health care and, presumably, repealing all those benefits I just mentioned...

And let me just make one last point about this. The idea that you would shut down the government unless you prevent 30 million people from getting health care is a bad idea. What you should be thinking about is how can we advance and improve ways for middle-class families to have some security so that if they work hard, they can get ahead and their kids can get ahead.
Read the transcript for the full remarks. Our POTUS delivered as brilliant a defense of Obamacare as is possible for a black President leading during the biggest resurgence of institutional racism since the days of Jim Crow. That deserves more notice than it's likely to get.
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Posted in domestic surveillance, health care, Media, President Obama | No comments

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Taking care of Bezos

Posted on 9:40 AM by Unknown
By now you've heard that the gazillionaire owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, bought the WaPo. (Moment of silence for the untimely end of Kaplan test prep daily jokes.) This of course will be a topic of endless fascination among the insider media types for the duration of the summer.

Henry Blodget at Business Insider has already been living life under a Bezos investment at his publication and tells us it's not a bad thing. He offers up his own speculation on why Bezos decided to make the purchase.

Over at The Week, Peter Weber surveys the internets and collects the five best reasons why Bezos bought the WaPo.

For myself, damned if I know why he did it or what's going to happen to it now. The vindicative bitch in me would love to see some of the smug pundits have to deal with the reality of unemployment they so blithely dismiss when it happens to other people. Rather doubt that's going to happen, at least to those who deserve a pink slip the most.

As for Jeff's reasons, I suspect he did it a) because he could and b) because he who controls the information delivery to the masses can control public opinion. He's a uber-rich guy with an agenda and so far, I'm told, had only a small footprint inside the Beltway bubble. This buy enlarged that with a speed and weight that couldn't be achieved so expeditiously any other way.

What he intends to do with it remains to be seen but I don't have high hopes that he's going to change anything for the better. Would be thrilled to be wrong though. The optimist in me lives in hope.
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Posted in Corporatocracy, Media, politics | No comments

Friday, July 26, 2013

Groundswell

Posted on 4:37 PM by Unknown
Still having major internet issues. Limited computer time, so outsourcing to Anne Laurie. This appears to be the crackpot con's version of the famed librul  Journolist they were so fond of smearing back in the day.
Dubbed Groundswell, this coalition convenes weekly in the offices of Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog group. During these hush-hush sessions and through a Google group, the members of Groundswell—including aides to congressional Republicans—cook up battle plans for their ongoing fights against the Obama administration, congressional Democrats, progressive outfits, and the Republican establishment and “clueless” GOP congressional leaders. [...]

One of the influential conservatives guiding the group is Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a columnist for the Daily Caller and a tea party consultant and lobbyist. Other Groundswell members include John Bolton, the former UN ambassador; Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy; Ken Blackwell and Jerry Boykin of the Family Research Council; Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch; Gayle Trotter, a fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum; Catherine Engelbrecht and Anita MonCrief of True the Vote; Allen West, the former GOP House member; Sue Myrick, also a former House GOPer; Diana Banister of the influential Shirley and Banister PR firm; and Max Pappas, a top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)….

… Groundswellers constantly brainstorm via their Google group in search of a magic talking point, or a silver bullet of messaging. On April 24, Keli Carender, the national grassroots coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, posted a message to the Google group, writing, “We should have a unified name for the immigration bill so that as the other side is calling it ‘reform,’ we present a unified front against that notion. If we’re all calling it different things, their ‘reform’ message will win. We only combat the idea that it is reform if we hammer back with one different phrase/name.” She tossed out a few ideas: “Schumer-Rubio bill,” “anti-security bill,” and “amnesty bill.” Sheryl Kaufman, the communications director for Rep. Jim Bridenstine, chimed in that she was fond of a phrase derived by MonCreif: “‘OBAMAGRATION’—I love it!! Communicates the similarity with Obamacare.” …
You have to give the crackpots some credit. The one thing they are rather good at is inventing bumper sticker slogans. Much more at the link.
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Posted in Crackpot Conservatives, Media | No comments

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

When Republicans refuse to govern

Posted on 3:09 PM by Unknown
It's not exactly news to anyone who has been paying attention that Republicans have embraced full out obstruction of any meaningful legislation at all since the day Obama took office. What is news is that the Beltway BigMedia is finally acknowledging it. Today Jon Chait remarks on how obstruction has become the guiding principle of the GOP to the detriment of our country. At least for as long as that "blah" man holds the Oval Office.
A rational legislative strategy would consider the relative benefits of a law to maintaining the status quo, and weigh the possibilities of a better bill emerging over time. But tea-party logic simply regards the existence of compromise as disqualifying. The moral purity of opposition has become untethered from any political or policy objective, and appears to have sprouted into an actual freestanding principle.

It’s not such a strongly held principle that it would survive if and when Republicans regain control of government. Lowry, Kristol, and the entire tea party will surely forget their hatred of side deals when they are needed to pass the next tax cuts. But the hatred for legislating has gained a strong enough hold over the conservative mind as to render them unable to consider the merits of any bill at all.
Even more significant, yesterday, Chuck Todd practically accused Republicans of criminal negligence for sabotaging our entire process of governance. Worth reading Greg's excerpts in full. It's that astonishing to see language like this on First Read.
And this all raises the question: What’s the line between fighting for your ideology and ensuring that the government that pays your salaries actually works — or even attempts to work? At some point, governing has to take place, but when does that begin? We know what opponents will say in response to this: These are bad laws, and we have to do whatever it takes to stop them. But at what point does an election have a governing consequence?
Strong words coming from one of the Beltway's most realiable fluffers of establishment politics and biggest promoters of insidery access journalism.
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Posted in Broken Government, Media, Republican obstructionism | No comments

Sunday, June 30, 2013

Edward Snowden is screwed

Posted on 5:57 PM by Unknown
For guy who's smart enough to hack into the NSA's database, Ed Snowden was shockingly unprepared for the aftermath of publicly admitting his crime. For one thing, he clearly didn't think through his route to asylum thoroughly. It's like he believed he could just cleverly sneak aroung the globe until he found a comfortable home in self-imposed exile where he would live out his days as a folk hero or something. It's as if, in his head, he was living out a spy novel but Snowden's immediate reality is grim in ways that suggest an unhappy ending to his story.
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa on Sunday said that the fate of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden is in the hands of Russia, where he is currently staying, awaiting asylum from the South American country.

"This is the decision of Russian authorities," Correa told the Associated Press in an interview. "He doesn't have a passport. I don't know the Russian laws, I don't know if he can leave the airport, but I understand that he can't. At this moment he's under the care of the Russian authorities.

Correa said that Ecuadorian officials would only consider an asylum request if Snowden was able to make it to an embassy or their country.
The problem is without a valid passport, he may well be living in limbo in the holding area at the Moscow airport under Russian security for a long time, which as Steve M discovered is an unpleasant existence for those without the proper papers.

Equally surprising is how clueless Snowden appears to be about how the internets works in the age of Twitter. It seems he expected to drop his bombshell into the news cycle and still be able to maintain as he once put it, "a quiet life." Neither does it appear he understands the new business model of BigMedia which Bussfeed's Ben Smith described perfectly a few days ago in response to the debate over Snowden's morals and motives that's been raging on the internets for days on end. This is the new reality of the Beltway media:
...These seem like good questions for a philosophy class. They are terrible, boring, ones for reporters, and have more to do with the confusing new news environment than with the actual news.

Snowden’s flight is a great, classic international story. It is, as Glenn Greenwald tweeted today, a kind of global White Bronco moment. His roots in web culture; his ideology; his decision-making; these are all great stories. He’s a much more interesting figure than Mark Felt because, at least, he’s a new figure, not a familiar one.
You might think a computer wunderkind like Snowden would have understood and considered the 24/7 news beast's insatiable hunger for fresh meat in his dealings with the media. Apparently, you would be wrong. The kid really is screwed.
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Posted in domestic surveillance, Media, Snowden | No comments

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Off the record with Olivier Knox

Posted on 12:37 PM by Unknown
Well after all the ballyhoo about Eric Holder's invite to the major media chiefs for a sit-down, the initial holdouts are drifting in to meet with the AG after all. Reuters Chief Operating Officer Stuart Karle, with Marilyn Thompson met with Holder yesterday once he agreed they could report the general drift of the meeting.
"Long-term, I think they're looking for changes in how the rules operate and regard this as an opportunity to make sure that happens," Karle said.
Which I thought was clearly the point of the meetings from the beginning, but no matter, good to see cooler heads are prevailing at last. Meanwhile, one of my favorite insider DC journos, whom I do genuinely like and respect, posts a useful guide on how to define off the record in the first place and how it differs from background briefings.
But just what does “off the record” mean? Is it always bad? Who are those unnamed "senior administration officials" you read so much about? And how can you sound smart at the bar if you’re unlucky enough to be trapped in a discussion of Beltway media jargon? [...]

Why does it matter? Reporters want to inform their audience, and to do so they need to be informed themselves—and to do that they generally need to build trust with their sources. If you quote Official A by name as saying His Boss is screwing something up —after you agreed to cite Official A only as "person close to His Boss"—that person is unlikely to talk to you again. The same goes, or should go, for sources who deliberately mislead reporters. [...]

In practice, though, "off the record" informs a lot of reporting.
That's obvious to close observers of the Beltway. Which is why it looked so silly for the media to suddenly be standing on some pious refusal to compromise their principles. Outside the beltway bubble most people don't think they have any and even casual news consumers can see how often they use unnamed sources. Furthermore, I've can't recall a single time any journo, ever burned a source who lied to them. I doubt I'll live to see it happen but it's good to know that journalists of good conscience believe in the concept.

Worth a read in full to see how the various big name media players define the terms. Also to catch Olivier's subtle rebuke of Rosen. As a practical matter, Rosen brought the scrutiny down on himself with his arrogant disregard for protecting the secrecy of his source. He couldn't have been more obvious. If a reporter wants to avoid having their electronic records seized, they should pump their sources the old fashioned way -- at a local bar.
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Posted in domestic surveillance, Media, national security | No comments

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Why MSNBC's ratings are down

Posted on 1:07 PM by Unknown
Everybody has a theory. Certainly Steve M. points to some valid reasons for MSNBC's ratings drop. It's true compelling current events will trump opinion programming. Perhaps some of their core audience is disillusioned because of the scandals, but I don't think that applies as strongly. And as far as the summer lag in readership for left wing political blogs, as long as I've blogging these ten years, that happens every summer. I think that's more because every damn summer brings some blitz of GOP generated faux outrage that draws their base and the lack of real news leaves liberals with more free time to do real world stuff like create Vines and take Instagrams of their cute pets. Also liberals tend to travel more than conservative poli-junkies. Liberals post travel pix. Meanwhile the cons are caught up in pushing the lastest haterage. It never ends for them.

The other thing I'm seeing in terms of the current drop in ratings is based solely on what I see on social nets. I don't watch any of the talk shows anymore, but I do *watch* Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow on the twitter every night. I'm seeing mostly viewer dissatisfaction with Hayes new format. What they loved about Uppers was the comprehensive coverage of undercovered stories and the mix of mostly liberal guests. What I'm seeing now is a lot complaints about too many conservatives on his show and a notable lack of pushback by Chris. In fact, I've seen more than one accusation about Hayes "going emo" and gettin all anti-Obama. That's not what they're tuning in for. They want to see right wing memes get shot down, not validated by yet more exposure.

To some extent that's Rachel's current problem too. Lately I've been seeing a lot of -- oh, you're giving air time to that right wing idiot ... click. This was especially true about her show that joined in on the Obama bashing over the leak investigations. The complaints about that one survived well past the actual airing of the program. However you want to define Chris and Rachel's viewer base, within my circle of view anything that smacks of both sides do it turns them off. We're inundated with that sort of journalism already. They want a refuge where the liberal view is fully aired and undiluted by too much conservative view balance.

Far as I can see, Rachel is already turning that around. Last night's program was being cheered again. As for Chris, not seeing any love for his new format. Apparently it's just not the same kind of show anymore. They should probably work on that.
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Posted in liberals, Media, Progressives | No comments

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Behind the scenes at Fox News

Posted on 4:26 PM by Unknown
Joe Muto wrote a book about his eight years at Fox News as an alleged undercover liberal. This excerpt article is mostly about Bill O'Reilly but the description of the Fox News hierarchy is fascinating.
For example, some unlucky guests were banned for life from every show on the network, a result of a diktat from the Second Floor. Comedian Bill Maher, once a semi-regular guest on “The Factor” and some other Fox shows, made too many cracks about Sarah Palin over the years, raising the ire of a powerful female VP who banned him from our air and demanded that all Fox-affiliated websites refer to him only as “Pig Maher.”

Sometimes entire organizations were given lifetime bans. The website Politico wrote something a few years back that rubbed Roger the wrong way (we were never told what exactly the transgression was) and word went out to all the shows: No more Politico reporters as guests. Also, any anchors who mentioned the site on air had to use the phrase “left-wing Politico” — an absurd designation for a publication that usually played it down the middle.
The rest is an hour by hour visit inside Fox's star hothead. Doesn't make me want to buy the book, but interesting read for the curious.
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Posted in Fox News, Media | No comments

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Leaks and the limits of the First Amendment

Posted on 7:56 PM by Unknown
Walter Pincus gets to the heart of what's wrong with the media freakout about DoJ's leak investigations. Do read it all, it's short but here's the main point. The media may "just be doing their job" but the leaker is in breach of their contract. The leaker is breaking the law to give them the information. So why is it so damn scandalous for the DoJ to seek to enforce the law? That is their job.

As Pincus points out:
Applying labels such as co-conspirator provides a probable cause for the judge to grant the warrant, as in the Rosen case. If Rosen offered money or some other reward, it might be a different case. I believe the First Amendment covers the right to publish information, but it does not grant blanket immunity for how that information is gathered.
Rosen actively encouraged his source to break the law. He brazenly waltzed in and out of the State Department wth barely an attempt to cover his tracks. I used more sophisticated subterfuge to hide my underage cigarette smoking from my parents. And I'm not moved by the wailing about leak investigations “intimidating a growing number of government sources.” The DoJ's job is not to make it easy for lazy journalists to get a scoop. Furthermore, exposing active undercover counterterrorism operations being conducted in the interests of national security is not whistleblowing. It just isn't.

The White House Correspondents’ Association board was late to the defense of the reporters. When they say, “Reporters should never be threatened with prosecution for the simple act of doing their jobs,” it should raise the question, what the hell is their job? Traditionally it was to watchdog government misconduct, not to expose our intelligence assets who are risking their lives to provide inside information on foreign plots against our country.

The principle of freedom of the press on which our country was founded was designed to protect criticism of corrupt politicians. Our founders designed it protect the press from retribution when it exposes government misconduct. It's not a blanket exemption for exploiting insider connections to expose rightful government process conducted for our protection simply to win a news cycle.

As Pincus notes there's a big difference between nothing being more sacred to the profession of journalism and the notion that “nothing is more sacred than our profession.” At some point we have to ask, is journalism even a profession anymore, or is it just another Big Business conducted for no loftier goal than corporate profit.
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Posted in Corporatocracy, Justice, Media, Rule of Laws | No comments

Monday, May 27, 2013

News Corp can't find DoJ notice on Rosen subpoena

Posted on 2:36 PM by Unknown
Well how interesting. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation says they don't know nothing 'bout any subpoena:
News Corporation said on Sunday that it had no record of being notified by the Justice Department nearly three years ago of a subpoena for the telephone records of a reporter at its Fox News cable channel.

The company’s chief legal counsel at the time also said that he had never seen material from the government related to the subpoena.
The Justice Department says they notified News Corporation on Aug. 27, 2010, that it had seized Rosen phone records by fax, email, and certified letter, as it the custom in all legal matters.

You may remember that this is the same News Corporation that claimed for months on end it didn't know nothing 'bout phone hacking and police bribery until the proof finally caught up with them. But hell, they pretty much got away with lying about that without any major punishment, so why wouldn't Murdoch's US enterprise lie about this now?

Not making any accusations until the facts are all in, but thinking the circumstantial evidence and history is on the DoJ's side. Surely DoJ will have copies of the notifications. Lawyers never throw anything away.
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Posted in First Amendment, Justice, Media, rule of law | No comments

Sunday, May 26, 2013

How big is media surveillance under Obama

Posted on 1:06 PM by Unknown
I'm as unhappy as the next guy about government surveillance on journalists and private citizens but I sure wish the media had been this focused when the Bush administration was doing it illegally. Even the NYT is verging on scaremongering about Obama's DoJ. I mean the hed screams US Leaks Inquiries Show How Wide a Net is Cast. About midway through the article it admits, "It is not clear how often the government has obtained reporters’ communications records."

The only person they could get on record for the story is one government guy whose life was ruined under the Bush administration for allegedly leaking about warrantless wiretaps -- on everybody. Meanwhile here's an interesting twist to the Rosen saga.
On Saturday, a Fox News executive said that the notice had gone to News Corp., its parent company, on Aug. 27, 2010, but that Fox News was not told until Friday. The executive said they were still trying to sort out how the notice fell through the cracks.
You might have thought this would be something the parent corp would have brought to their news station's attention right away. Kind of convenient they suddenly discovered it after the AP got all sorts of steam out of their surveillance. And again, in these Obama era cases it's not about wholesale spying on the population or the media. As the government states, "law enforcement officials said the leaks were alarming because someone had shared information while overseas intelligence operations were still under way."

If somebody can show me where any of these stories exposed government misconduct, I'm happy to join in the outrage but so far all I see is a few journos outing active counter-terrorism operations in countries that do pose a danger to our national security, effectively shutting them down because of the exposure. I don't feel so well served by that kind of traffic baiting journalism.

I have to agree with Kevin Drum about this hue and cry over this.
Something about the Rosen case just doesn't add up. But a lot of people don't seem to be taking the possible outing of an intelligence source very seriously. They're acting as if the DOJ prosecution is over a completely meaningless story. That might be, but I think a bit less circling the wagons, and a bit more serious questioning, might be in order here.
I often watch these big journos on the twitter. They hate Obama, not for his politics but because he doesn't treat them with the respect they believe they deserve. Sadly, I don't believe the vast majority of them deserve the respect. They aren't informing the public. When he does hold a presser, they leap to find a single phrase out of hundreds of words and manufacture some kind of fauxtroversy out of it. They skip most of the salient points he makes about policy. Too boring. Doesn't bring in the eyeballs. Maybe if they showed the POTUS the kind of respect he deserves, they would get some in return.
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Posted in Media, Obama administration, rule of law, Terrorism | No comments

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Why I don't defend Rosen or the government

Posted on 12:37 PM by Unknown
It seems my friend Dan at Pruning Shears and I are having a disagreement. I don't think we're actually as far apart on the government surveillance of the media as he does. I think I made rather clear in my earlier post on James Rosen and also on the AP records grab that I don't condone secret government surveillance on the media -- or anyone. Unfortunately it doesn't appear that the government conducted these investigations illegally. The laws that make it possible have been creeping into our judicial system long before the Obama administration arrived. And let's not lose sight of the fact that Rosen isn't being charged with a crime regardless of the dicey allegations made by the government to get its authorization for his records.

Booman and I differ on that point. I don't consider Rosen a criminal. I think he's an irresponsible journalist. Rosen's email to his source made clear his main interest was in scooping his competitors, not in changing any policy. However, his piece was written in a way that revealed our intelligence operation. If he had simply done the usual anon source says N. Korea will blah, blah blah... without revealing we had an inside source in N. Korea and had lost track of their missiles, I wouldn't have seen it as damaging.

While Dan Ellsberg would probably disagree, I don't see any comparison between the Pentagon Papers and what Rosen did. The Pentagon Papers revealed serious government misconduct. Our government lied to the people and to Congress. Big lies that resulted in tens of thousands of lost lives. That was whistleblowing in the service of public interest. I'm wondering what government wrongdoing Dan sees as having been revealed by Rosen.

I don't suggest we blindly accept every government claim of acting in the interest of national security while they abridge our civil rights. We need to look no further than the odious NSLs the Bush administration was so fond of to see the danger in that. But neither do I trust the motives of our present day media so much that I'm willing to unequivocally defend them. Surely Jon Karl and his anon source who provided altered emails to perpetrate a false GOP narrative would suggest our skepticism should go both ways. What good is a free media if they lie to us too, or jeopardize our intelligence assets, simply to drive traffic? As far I'm concerned neither secret surveillance nor irresponsible journalism should be defended. We deserve better from both sides

[Crossposted at my long dormant FDL account]
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Posted in domestic surveillance, First Amendment, Media | No comments

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

President Obama, cool, calm, collected

Posted on 10:14 AM by Unknown
Some insights from former speechwriter Jon Favreau, on how President Obama deals with media driven scandals. Worth a read in full, but here's the standout grafs:
In the case of the AP phone records, Obama the former constitutional-law professor cares deeply about the balance between freedom and security. This is the president who began the foreign-policy section of his inaugural with the words “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” And he wants Congress to debate and finally pass a media-shield law. But can you imagine if the president of the United States had quashed a court-ordered subpoena in an independent investigation he wasn’t even supposed to know about? A subpoena aimed at finding the person in his own administration who leaked classified information that may have jeopardized American lives? Talk about a political scandal. [...]

That is who he is. The handwringers and bed wetters in the D.C. punditocracy should know that Barack Obama will never be on their timeline. He does not value being first over being right. He will not spend his presidency chasing news cycles. He will not shake up his White House staff just because of some offhand advice offered to Politico by a longtime Washingtonian or a nameless Democrat who’s desperately trying to stay relevant. And if that means Dana Milbank thinks he’s too passive; if it means that Jim VandeHei will keep calling him arrogant and petulant; if it means that Chris Matthews will whine about him not enjoying the presidency, then so be it. He’ll live.
We could use some of that "not valuing being first over being right" ethic in our punditocracy right now. In fact we could use a metric ton of it. Not that we will get it as long as the big money is in chasing news cycles and creating outrage.
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Posted in Media, President Obama, punditry | No comments

Monday, May 20, 2013

You can't yell fire in a crowded theater

Posted on 3:06 PM by Unknown
Well we have a brand new brouhaha about surveillance on a journalist. Today it's James Rosen of Fox News over a story he published in 2009 about North Korea, based on an insider leak. To be clear, it's important to protect journalists. It's equally important to protect leakers when they're exposing government wrongdoing. But once again, this is not really the case here.

I'll spare you my thoughts on how ineptly they covered their tracks. Hell they were practically asking to get caught, but here's my big problem with James Rosen's reporting. His motive appears to more about career enhancement than truth telling.
[Rosen] also wrote, according to the affidavit: “What I am interested in, as you might expect, is breaking news ahead of my competitors” including “what intelligence is picking up.” And: “I’d love to see some internal State Department analyses.”
I've read a few posts about this today and noticeably missing from most of them, is a link to Rosen's original article. Here, via Booman, is the key flaw in his reporting.
What's more, Pyongyang's next nuclear detonation is but one of four planned actions the Central Intelligence Agency has learned, through sources inside North Korea, that the regime of Kim Jong-Il intends to take -- but not announce -- once the Security Council resolution is officially passed, likely on Friday.
As Booman explains:
It's important that the policy advisers and policymakers inside our government know if the intelligence they are reading is coming from straight inside the Pyongyang government. It is equally critical that the North Korean government not know that.

If someone in Pyongyang sticks their neck out to talk to the CIA, they should not be reading about it the next week on the Fox News web page. The government was basically forced to try to figure out who leaked that information, and the only thing that should be up for debate is how far the government should be able to go to solve the mystery.
I'd add I'm not sure it was in the national interest to tell North Korea we lost track of their missle movement either, but I guess that's a judgment call. Thinking it's better the North Koreans not know that, but an argument could be made that the public has the right to know.

In any case, in striking a balance between national security and protected speech, there are competing interests. This is point worth remembering as we seek to strike that balance.
Adam Weinstein: We as journalists have the right to work with leakers to report the truth. The gov. has the right, within the laws, to find/punish leakers.
First Amendment protections are not absolute. The press enjoys greater protection than most of us. The onus is on them to use it responsibly. I have to agree with Booman. This is yet another case where it wasn't.
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Posted in First Amendment, Media, rule of law, World politics | No comments

Friday, May 17, 2013

The biggest Benghazi scandal

Posted on 1:45 PM by Unknown


In a startling new first, Major Garrett called Republicans liars -- on the teevee. Never would have expected Major to be the one to break that taboo.

Kevin Drum, who lately has dropped his old squishy style in a favor of a refreshingly bold persona, sums up the details of the GOP's ratfuckery:
So here's what happened. Republicans in Congress saw copies of these emails two months ago and did nothing with them. It was obvious that they showed little more than routine interagency haggling. Then, riding high after last week's Benghazi hearings, someone got the bright idea of leaking two isolated tidbits and mischaracterizing them in an effort to make the State Department look bad. Apparently they figured it was a twofer: they could stick a shiv into the belly of the White House and they could then badger them to release the entire email chain, knowing they never would.
Except the White House did release them, proving that the GOPers lied their faces off and burned Jon Karl. Not that Jon will pay a price for pushing it without confirming, but can't have everything. What should happen next is obvious, but since he got there first, over to you, Charlie Pierce:
The right thing to do here is for ABC to reveal the source that fed it bogus information. This is what should happen for two reasons: 1) it should happen to demonstrate the consequences of feeding bogus information to ABC, and 2) it should happen to demonstrate that there is something of a campaign among Republican congressional staffers to wound an elected president with bogus information, because (as I think we would all agree) that's a helluva news story, too. (Those of us who remember ABC's performance during Whitewater are not optimistic, by the way.) Ball's in your court, folks. Who do you really serve? The country, or the liars in your BlackBerries?
I'm not optimistic names will be named, but I'll take what we can get. Seeing generic Republicans called out by BigMedia for their mendacity is a damn good start. [graphic via]
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Posted in Broken Government, lies, Media, Republican corruption | No comments
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