Today's Must-Read: Let's Beat Up on Hillary Again

Via Digby, this piece by Paul Waldman. Digby leads off thusly:

I'm going to change the channel and skip the tweets, posts and articles about Clinton's book because I'm sick to death of hearing the media demand that she don yet another hair shirt and flagellate herself for their amusement. I've never seen anyone in politics so relentlessly required to repeatedly debase himself before the media. It's beyond uncomfortable at this point. It's sick.

It's the latest chapter in the twenty-plus year old hate campaign against the Clintons, which I've been sick of forever.

Waldman:

Hillary Clinton’s book about the 2016 campaign, “What Happened,” won’t be out for a few weeks, but this morning a few brief excerpts from the audiobook were played on “Morning Joe.” And as usual, a great deal of the focus is on whether Clinton is taking sufficient responsibility for her defeat.

So we need to ask ourselves: Why is it so important to so many people that Clinton perform a ritual of self-abasement?

If you don’t recall a chorus of angry calls for Mitt Romney or John McCain or John Kerry or Al Gore to get down on their knees and beg forgiveness for their failures every time they appeared in public after losing their presidential elections, that’s because it didn’t happen. Only Hillary Clinton is subject to this demand.

And when she takes responsibility, as she has before, her words are carefully scrutinized to see if she’s being self-critical enough. When she said in May that she took responsibility for her loss but also pointed out that she would have won had James B. Comey not made that dramatic email announcement 11 days before the election — which is almost certainly true — the comments were greeted by a round of scolding from reporters who obviously felt that she was not sufficiently humbled.

At the risk of repeating myself, the press deserves as much credit for Trump's win as the Russians do -- maybe more.

The Link

Josh Marshall articulates something that's been in the back of my mind for a while but that I couldn't quite pin down:

Which gets me to the larger point about the mainstream media. Let me start by defining terms. We are talking about large news organizations which at least purport to be apolitical in their editorial outlook and are owned and controlled by large corporations. People have lots of different definitions of the "MSM". But I think this is the most valuable one for present purposes.

Two things to keep in mind: all of these organizations have business models which are based on appealing to people across the political spectrum. So for instance, CNN cannot afford in business terms to get too out of sync with Trump and his supporters. (This is one of the big points about the campaign. Trump harped continuously on CNN but it was in fact one of his most accommodating news organizations. It even hired a group of bespoke supporters as pundits for the duration of the campaign. He harped on them because he saw them correctly as the most vulnerable.) Second and just as important, every big media organization and especially every big diversified corporation that owns a media organization have lots and lots of business before the federal government all the time. Even for broadcast TV networks alone there are regulations about how many local stations they can own. Telecoms like Comcast, which owns NBC, have a long, long list of business before the government.

(Emphasis in original.)

The government and the business sector are so intertwined -- and not just in lobbying and the "revolving door" between the two, but also just in the normal course of each taking care of its business -- that it's inevitable that government -- being, in bare bones respects, the more powerful -- is going to influence the workings of the media. There's been a lot of bitching since the Reagan years about news organizations soft-pedaling their criticisms of the government for fear of losing access. And now various news organizations have become more partisan, also affecting their coverage and the impartiality of their reporting.

I suspect we're about to see a lot of more that.

Read Marshall's full piece.

We're All Fox News Now

I was going to write on the coverage of the latest Clinton "scandal" by the New York Times, but Paul Waldman has done a very thorough job:

Whenever some new piece of information emerges about Hillary Clinton or people close to her, we’re told that it “raises questions” of some kind, which means it’s being shoehorned into a larger narrative that says something fundamental about her: That she’s tainted by scandal, or corrupt, or just sinister in ways people can never quite put their finger on.

Yet somehow, stories about Donald Trump that don’t have to do with the latest appalling thing that came out of his mouth don’t “raise questions” in the same way. They’re here and then they’re gone, obliterated by his own behavior without going deep into question-raising territory.

The "newspaper of record" has had a kind of tarnished reputation since the days of Judith Miller and the lead-up to Bush II's invasion of Iraq. The real problem is, since the major news outlets have become so unreliable, if you really want to know what's going on, you have to hit a lot of sources, and most people won't.

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Via Digby, who sums it up nicely:

The papers have done a good job reporting on many of Trump's business dealings over the years. But since there isn't any left wing Judicial Watch or Citizens United spoon-feeding them new new drips of information on a daily basis, they report it out and that's the end of it.

They are being manipulated by the character assassins and they know it. But they don't care. They seem to convince themselves that at some point one of these scandals will add up to a big scoop (Monica!) and until then they'll keep the scandal mongers happy by publishing their hit jobs. The way they drool and grunt over every little nugget the right wingers throw in front of them, however, is embarrassing. (Some of them should stay off twitter.)

How Times Have Changed

Here's an interview with Keegan Hirst, the first professional rugby league player to come out as gay:

If you can decipher his accent (even I'm having a bit of trouble with it, and I've been watching English murder mysteries), it's pretty interesting, not only for the actual content, but perhaps even more for the subtext: it's all very matter-of-fact, as though the interview was about the upcoming rugby season or something.

Of course, this is from BBC.

Today's Must Read: It's the Economy, So Let's Lie About It

It was made clear to me some while ago that the economy does better under Democratic administrations. There are a number of reasons for this, the major one in my mind being that Democrats understand how our economy works, while Republicans understand how they think it should work. (That seems to be the prevailing right-wing mindset -- see "natural law" as an example.) There's an interesting post at Mahablog about a fairly recent study that lays out very clearly the Democratic vs. Republican record on the economy since World War II:

Last year some Princeton economists came out with a study that showed a rather startling gap between Dem and GOP administrations in how the economy performed, going back to World War II.

“The U.S. economy not only grows faster, according to real GDP and other measures, during Democratic versus Republican presidencies, it also produces more jobs, lowers the unemployment rate, generates higher corporate profits and investment, and turns in higher stock market returns. Indeed, it outperforms under almost all standard macroeconomic metrics.”

Strangely enough (hah!) the story somehow got mostly ignored in the "liberal" press. Not completely, but the spin from those who did note it is breathtaking:

But the two articles I found about this, one by Chris Matthews (the one linked above) and the other by Robert Samuelson, both go to great lengths to not give Dems credit for being better on the economy. Samuelson is particularly brilliant —

If Republican presidents were saddled with most recessions, their growth and job creation records would naturally be worse. And that’s what the Blinder-Watson study shows. Since the late 1940s, the economy has spent about 12 years in recession. But 10 of those 12 years occurred under Republican presidents; only two occurred under Democrats. On average, the economy spent slightly more than a year in recession for each Republican term and only three months for each Democratic term.

If only Republicans hadn’t been saddled with those damn recessions!

Talk about flipping reality on its head. . . .

A Couple of Thoughts on Ferguson

From Digby, this observation:

Forget the shooting of an unarmed man. Let's talk about the reaction to it instead. That seems to be the M.O. of the right when it comes to dealing with Ferguson and the hideous underbelly of American racism. Elias Isquith at Salon talked a bit about this last week:

From the very beginning, before St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch had uttered the first word of his defensive and dissembling speech, the fix was in. The conspiracy this time was not to protect Officer Darren Wilson from standing trial for the killing of Michael Brown, though that was certainly related. This time, the conspiracy was to organize the announcement of Wilson’s exoneration in as provocative a way as possible. The ultimate goal was to manipulate the public and the press into forgetting the real story of Ferguson — of police brutality and racial injustice — and bickering about the morality of rioting instead.

Thinking back, Digby and Isquith hit it right on the head. It's been a pattern for a while, and the sad thing is, it works: we're led to focus on the reaction and not the trigger, and not the underlying causes.* It's a long post, but worth reading -- Digby has a lot of examples going back over the past several years, detailing not only the misdirection, but the lies used to support it.

This is the sort of thing that Digby's talking about: That paragon of journalistic integrity, Rich Lowry (and if you don't know who Lowry is, yes, that was meant to be snarky) rode along with Darren Wilson earlier in the day that he shot Michael Brown, so Lowry, of course, knows exactly what happened when he was no longer there.

Thinking about this, I've come to the conclusion that labeling the press as "complicit" assigns them too much agency: they're lapdogs, nothing more. (The ones who aren't tend to be in exile or relegated to the sidelines. Think about what happened to Soledad O'Brien for giving Tony Perkins a hard time -- she's now with Al Jazeera.) It's at the point now where, if you want to know what's happening in this country, you have to go to the foreign press, because the domestic press has an agenda dictated by the powers that be, and it doesn't include honest reporting.

* Footnote: plug this post by Tom Sullivan into the mix to get an idea of those underlying causes.

Freedom of the Press

To self-censor?

From Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice:

If there was a golden age for American media, it was long ago and it was short.

Over at The Atlantic, Torie Rose DeGhett has an excellent, utterly unsurprising article about a photograph taken in the last hours in the first Gulf War.

The work of the the then 28 year old photographer Kenneth Jarecke, the image captures a fact of war hopelessly obscured by the shots that angered Jarecke enough to postpone a planned hiatus from combat photography. “’It was one picture after another of a sunset with camels and a tank.” — or, once combat actually began, gaudy displays of gee whiz toys, the disembodied beauty of missile exhausts, or bloodless shots of tires and twisted metal. War as video game, or a spectacle for the folks back home.

The bulk of Levenson's post is an embroidery on DeGhett's article (at the link, where you can also find the photo, which is under copyright and so does not appear here) detailing the history of this photograph and the fact that no major "news" outlet would touch it.

DeGhett goes farther, though:

Let me say up front that I don’t like the press,” one Air Force officer declared, starting a January 1991 press briefing on a blunt note. The military’s bitterness toward the media was in no small part a legacy of the Vietnam coverage decades before. By the time the Gulf War started, the Pentagon had developed access policies that drew on press restrictions used in the U.S. wars in Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. Under this so-called “pool” system, the military grouped print, TV, and radio reporters together with cameramen and photojournalists and sent these small teams on orchestrated press junkets, supervised by Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) who kept a close watch on their charges.

The "free press" has learned its lesson. Granted, it's impossible to present all the news that's happening every day. Editorial choices have to be made, priorities implemented, but if you view more than one news source, you know some stories are being buried. Levenson, though, points out something from DeGhett's article we all need to keep in mind:

The key here, as DeGhett writes, is that there was no military pressure not to publish Jarecke’s photograph. The war was over by the time his film got back to the facility in Saudi Arabia where the press pools operated. The decision to withhold the shot from the American public was made by the American press, by editors at the major magazines, at The New York Times, at the wire service. The chokehold on information at the top of the mainstream media was tight enough back then that most newspaper editors, DeGhett reports, never saw the image, never got to make their choice to publish or hide.

You can guess the excuses. “Think of the children!” For the more sophisticated, a jaded response:

Aidan Sullivan, the pictures editor for the British Sunday Times, told the British Journal of Photography on March 14 that he had opted instead for a wide shot of the carnage: a desert highway littered with rubble. He challenged the Observer: “We would have thought our readers could work out that a lot of people had died in those vehicles. Do you have to show it to them?”

Why yes, Mr. Sullivan, you do.

Emphasis added.

There are days I just want to give up. Read both articles.

AP and "Teh Gay"

John Aravosis has been reporting on this for a few days. It marks a particularly bone-headed move on AP's part, almost on the order of threatening legal action if anyone quotes one of their stories. Here's the bones, via Jim Romenesko. From the first leaked memo:

From: AP Standards
Sent: Mon 2/11/2013 2:45 PM

STYLE WATCH

SAME-SEX COUPLES: We were asked how to report about same-sex couples who call themselves “husband” and “wife.” Our view is that such terms may be used in AP stories with attribution. Generally AP uses couples or partners to describe people in civil unions or same-sex marriages.

Tom Kent
Dave Minthorn

That's outrageous enough, but here's the "fix":

SAME-SEX COUPLES: We were asked how to report about same-sex couples who call themselves “husband” and “wife.” Our view is that such terms may be used in AP content if those involved have regularly used those terms (“Smith is survived by his husband, John Jones”) or in quotes attributed to them. Generally AP uses couples or partners to describe people in civil unions or same-sex marriages.

WTF? That fixes something? Excuse me gentlemen -- these people are married.

Aravosis points up something that struck me as well:

And what about this:

Generally AP uses couples or partners to describe people in civil unions or same-sex marriages.

So clearly AP is admitting that it has a different standard for legally-wed gay couples than it has for legally-wed straight couples. What possible reason does AP have? Marriage is not a federal issue, it’s a state issue – states decide who is married. The feds can say they’re not going to give benefits, but they don’t overrule the state’s marriage – gays are still married in those states, just as straight people arte. Who is AP to say they don’t agree with the states’ legal determination as to who is married?

AP is overruling the 9 states and the District of Columbia that have legal marriages for gay couples. AP says no. They’re not really marriages.

And what about foreign marriages? Same-sex couples can marry in a growing number of countries now. AP has also decided that they’re not really married either.

What business is it of the Associated Press to determine that it doesn’t believe legally wed gay couples, in the US or abroad, are actually legally wed?

OK -- Aravosis gets to be a bit shrill sometimes, but he has a very good point: why the double standard? And as he points out, this comes on the heels of AP banning the use of the word "homophobia" for its reporters.

I've noticed a subtle anti-gay bias in AP stories before this -- as I say, it's subtle, but it's there. What surprises me is that they'd be so blatant about their prejudice, especially considering the general acceptance of gay people in society.

Here's the story on the latest wrinkle from Chris Geidner at BuzzFeed:

The Associated Press is holding firm against criticism — some of it internal — of a Feb. 11 guidance issued to its reporters and editors that they were to "[g]enerally ... [use] couples or partners to describe people in civil unions or same-sex marriages."

AP spokesman Paul Colford told BuzzFeed Thursday evening, "This week's style guidance reaffirmed AP's existing practice. We've used husband and wife in the past for same-sex married couples and have made clear that reporters can continue to do so going forward."

When covering same-sex couples who have waited decades in some cases for that marriage license, however, the idea that the AP would treat those couples' marriages like civil unions — and not like opposite-sex couples' marriages — has sparked questioning responses from some of AP's own reporters and calls for a change from LGBT organizations and activists.

According to Aravosis, this is so much bull-pucky. He quotes AP Style Guidance:

1. When one of the gay spouses being written about mentions the term husband or wife in a quote, and AP uses the quote. (I.e., The couple could call themselves “blueberries,” and AP would quote it, since publishing a quote doesn’t necessarily mean that AP agrees with, or endorses, the substance of that quote. This is a modified version of the scare-quote defense: “If it’s in quotes, we don’t really mean it.”)

2. AP reporters may use the terms husband and wife if the gay couple “regularly uses” the terms husband or wife about themselves. (And no one has any idea what “regularly uses” means.)

Read Geidner's whole article -- some of the reactions are great. My favorite is from the Fake AP Stylbook (which for some reason I can't copy and embed):

Fake AP Stylebook
@FakeAPStylebook

Avoid using "husband" or "wife" in reference to same-sex married couples; instead use "roommates" or "confirmed co-bachelors."

That sort of says it, I think.