No Girlz Aloud

/40 Comments/in /by

Here’s the lineup for the big newsmakers on tomorrow’s shows.

ABC News this Week:  Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA).  Topics: The nation’s economy, a possible national stimulus plan, and the fiscal crisis facing his state.  Plus, Schwarzenegger’s thoughts on the future of the Republican Party and his state’s passage of the same-sex marriage ban Proposition 8.

CBS’ Face The Nation:  Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) Chairman, House Financial Services Committee; Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) Ranking member, Senate Banking Committee; Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA); Newt Gingrich (R) Former House Speaker.

Fox News Sunday:  An update on Capitol Hill’s plans for dealing with the financial crisis from Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ)., and Byron Dorgan (D-ND).  Plus  Gov. Tim Pawlenty, (R-MN) and Michael Steele.  And the Fox News All Stars.

NBC’s Meet The Press:  Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), Co-Chair of the Senate Auto Caucus and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), Ranking Member of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee.  Topics: Pressure on the Government to bailout the U.S. auto industry.  Then, T. Boone Pickens on how our nation’s energy dependence effects both our environment and our economy.  Roundtable: New York Times Columnist Tom Friedman; Washington Correspondent For BBC World News America, Katty Kay, NBC News Correspondent Andrea Mitchell; and Tavis Smiley.

Notice something different from what the shows had for the last nine months or so, when we had a girl (either Hillary or Palin) competing to be President or Vice President of the United States?

No more girlz–at least none besides the Washington villager pundits.

Now, some of these decisions make sense. I have no complaint that Carl Levin–one of the biggest auto bailout champions in Congress–is matched up against Richard Shelby–who’s trying to make the world safe for Japanese SUVs built in Alabama’s non-union plants. Similarly, House Financial Services Chair Barney Frank against Senate Banking Ranking Member Richard Shelby makes sense for partisan balance. Hopefully Arnie will get on and talk about how Prop 8 is evil and bad for the economy. Though if you really wanted to talk about Prop 8, don’t you think it would have been a good idea to get someone whose marriage may have just been dissolved, like Ellen Degeneres? Pawlenty and Steele make sense if you want to talk about how the Republican party might drag itself out of the hole it’s in. Bobby Jindal, for the same reason … But Newt? And are Kyl and Dorgan the only people who know about a potential financial bailout? 

Read more →

Fox News Prepares to Go into Opposition by Hiring Judy Judy Judy

/19 Comments/in , /by

Fox News is preparing for what comes after the election. First came the news that Fox News was hiring Glenn Beck, replacing one of its election shows with yet more wingnuttia.

And now, they’ve hired someone whose greatest expertise is in laundering politically motivated leaks to give those leaks "respectability."

Fox News is expected to announce today the hiring of a new contributor, a veteran national security correspondent who has shared a Pulitzer Prize.

Her name is Judith Miller, and she is nothing if not controversial. Miller left the New York Times in 2005 after testifying in the trial of former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby that he had leaked her information about a CIA operative. Miller’s conduct in the case, which led to her serving 85 days in jail for initially refusing to testify, drew rebukes from the Times executive editor and some of her colleagues.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller reported stories on the search for Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be untrue, some of which were cited in a Times editor’s note acknowledging the flawed coverage. Miller, now with the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote when she left the paper that she had "become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war."

Miller will be an on-air analyst and will write for Fox’s Web site. "She has a very impressive résumé," says Senior Vice President John Moody. "We’ve all had stories that didn’t come out exactly as we had hoped. It’s certainly something she’s going to be associated with for all time, and there’s not much anyone can do about that, but we want to make use of the tremendous expertise she brings on a lot of other issues. . . . She has explained herself and she has nothing to apologize for."

No, I’m not surprised that Judy Judy Judy has finally ended up at the one place worthy of her, um, talents. But I would invite you to imagine why Fox wants Judy on board.

Read more →

McCain Campaign Whines that NYT Paid Heed to Their Letter

/40 Comments/in , /by

There’s something funny about the McCain campaign’s complaints about the NYT’s front page piece on Cindy today. They released a letter that John Dowd sent to the NYT on October 1. He writes:

I write to appeal to your sense of fairness, balance and decency in deciding whether to publish another story about her. I do this well knowing your paper’s obvious bias for Barack Obama and your obvious hostility to John McCain. I ask you to put your biases and agendas aside.

[snip]

I am advised that you assigned two of your top investigative reporters who have spent an extensive amount of time in Arizona and around the country investigating Cindy’s life including her charity, her addiction and her marriage to Senator McCain. None of these subjects are news.

I am also advised that your reporters are speaking to Tom Gosinski and her cousin Jamie Clark, neither of whom are reliable or credible sources. Mr. Gosinski has been publicly exposed as a liar and a blackmailer on the subject of Cindy McCain. Jamie Clark has very serious drug and stability issues and has failed in a number of attempts to blackmail Cindy. She is simply not credible.

[two long paragraphs on Gosinski] 

Any further attempts to harrass or injure her based on the information from Gosinski and Clark will be met with an appropriate response. While she may be in the public eye, she is not public property nor the property of the press to abuse and defame.

[snip]

I ask you to let Cindy McCain carry on in her usual understated, selfless and dignified way. The fabrications and lies of blackmailers are not fit to print in any newspaper but particularly not the New York Times.

In short, this letter is primarily a thinly disguised (and, IM[NAL]O, legally suspect) warning against repeating the stories of Gosinski and Clark. Note, for example, that Dowd’s letter was written more than two weeks after the WaPo published a story heavily reliant on Gosinski as a source, which Dowd has apparently not responded to with threats of "an appropriate response." Nevertheless, Dowd wrote Bill Keller and tried to scare Keller away from reporting on Gosinski.

So, 18 days after Dowd wrote his letter, the NYT wrote their piece. Look closely at it. See what’s not in it?

Any reference to Gosinski or Clark. Read more →

Big Time Newspaper Endorsements

/40 Comments/in , /by

Because this seems to be the weekend when all the big newspapers decided that they had better endorse Barack Obama. I will update this going forward–please alert me to endorsements in the thread [my emphasis throughout].

Chicago Tribune (has never endorsed a Democrat):

Many Americans say they’re uneasy about Obama. He’s pretty new to them.

We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.

The change that Obama talks about so much is not simply a change in this policy or that one. It is not fundamentally about lobbyists or Washington insiders. Obama envisions a change in the way we deal with one another in politics and government. His opponents may say this is empty, abstract rhetoric. In fact, it is hard to imagine how we are going to deal with the grave domestic and foreign crises we face without an end to the savagery and a return to civility in politics.

[snip]

Obama is deeply grounded in the best aspirations of this country, and we need to return to those aspirations. He has had the character and the will to achieve great things despite the obstacles that he faced as an unprivileged black man in the U.S.

He has risen with his honor, grace and civility intact. He has the intelligence to understand the grave economic and national security risks that face us, to listen to good advice and make careful decisions.

When Obama said at the 2004 Democratic Convention that we weren’t a nation of red states and blue states, he spoke of union the way Abraham Lincoln did.

It may have seemed audacious for Obama to start his campaign in Springfield, invoking Lincoln. We think, given the opportunity to hold this nation’s most powerful office, he will prove it wasn’t so audacious after all. Read more →

The Secret Service Eliminates Violent Racism!!!

/in , /by

Using the same techniques the Bush Administration used to eliminate torture and at Gitmo and vulnerabilities that might make easy targets for terrorists: by refusing to let journalists see them (h/t TP).

In cooperation with the Palin campaign, [the Secret Service have] started preventing reporters from leaving the press section to interview people in the crowd. This is a serious violation of their duty — protecting the protectee — and gets into assisting with the political aspirations of the candidate. It also often makes it impossible for reporters to get into the crowd to question the people who say vulgar things. So they prevent reporters from getting near the people doing the shouting, then claim it’s unfounded because the reporters can’t get close enough to identify the person. [my emphasis]

Who do you think came up with this solution first? The Secret Service, which I guess prefers just pretending that these rabid racists aren’t being incited? Or Sarah Palin, who realized the exposure of her ugly side was hurting her chances for 2012?

Brand New McCain

/in , /by

picture-45.pngThis John Heilemann column asking why McCain’s brand has tanked among journalists has gotten a lot of attention in the blogosphere. I’m fascinated more by what it says about the press than what it says about McCain.

Here’s Heilemann’s premise.

In the past several weeks, the shift of press-corps sentiment against McCain has been stark and undeniable, even among heavies such as Matthews long accused by the left of being residents of the Arizonan’s amen corner. Jonathan Alter, Joe Klein, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, Jacob Weisberg: all former McCain admirers now turned brutal critics. Equally if not more damaging, the shift has been just as pronounced, if less operatic, among straight-news reporters. Suddenly, McCain is no longer being portrayed as a straight-talking, truth-telling maverick but as a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist with acute anger-management issues.

Note Heilemann’s assumption: this change happened in the last "several weeks." And because the press sentiment shifted, John McCain is now portrayed "as a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist with acute anger-management issues." Though he doesn’t say it explicitly, Heilemann weakly concludes that John McCain’s fall-out with his press buddies has at least exacerbated–if not caused–his recent failures.

From his initial assumptions, Heilemann tells the following narrative. He traces McCain’s popularity to his 2000 run.

McCain’s darlinghood was largely a vestige of his 2000 race in the Republican primaries, when his challenge to George W. Bush and the GOP Establishment, his reformist stances, and, not least, his freewheeling open-access press policy on the Straight Talk Express earned him countless fans among inky-fingered wretches. 

And notes all the McCain BS that the press ignored.

Over the past eight years [McCain’s brand] had proved durable, most of all with the press, which consistently saw McCain’s deviations from what were supposed to be his core beliefs as aberrations. The speech at Falwell’s university? The reversals on the Bush tax cuts and torture? The support for the teaching of “intelligent design”? All had been dismissed by the press corps as necessary hedges, as a matter of McCain doing what he had to do to win the GOP nomination.

Heilemann repeats McCain’s bogus claim that everything changed when Obama refused McCain’s town hall proposal. 

But many longtime McCain watchers say that the candidate’s own gathering sense of frustration made him ripe for such a change. Read more →

The YouTube Nielsens

/in , /by

When I discovered that CBS had put out an embeddable clip of the exchange they used for the teaser advertising yesterday’s installment of the Couric-Palin comedy hour (effectively pre-empting their own broadcast), I wrote this in an email:

I actually wonder if they haven’t gotten as much traffic as they expected.

AFAIK, they treated today’s clip differently than they did the last ones–they made the clip available for embed at the same time as they released the teaser of that clip (which is the one I put up on a post).

In other words, I suspect that they didn’t get the traffic they wanted, because people were watching the fun bits on YouTube the next day. So they pre-empted those YouTubes and have the embed up with two ads.

I guess the proper word is "viewership"–meaning I suspected that CBS’s ratings for their Couric-Palin interviews weren’t all that great.

Turns out I was right.

Katie Couric’s newsmaking interviews with the Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, last week had only a slight impact on the ratings for her CBS newscast. But if the network could have added up all the other viewers the interviews (and its spoof) racked up, on places like CNN, YouTube and “Saturday Night Live,” Ms. Couric would surely have been more seen and talked about than in any week since she began her tenure as anchor.

Ms. Couric received a rush of attention for the two interviews, in which Ms. Palin, governor of Alaska, spoke haltingly on, among other topics, her state’s “narrow maritime border” with Russia. Clips turned up across the spectrum of television and Web sites.

The first interview last Wednesday, for example, has been viewed more than 1.4 million times on YouTube, while the parody of the interview on “SNL” was streamed more than 4 million times on NBC.com, viewed in full more than 600,000 times on YouTube and in shorter clips many more hundreds of thousands of times.

Still, the “CBS Evening News” gained only about 10 percent in audience from the previous week — and it was actually down from the same week the year before. The newscast averaged just under 6 million viewers for the week, up from 5.44 million the previous week. A year ago Ms. Couric’s program drew about 6.2 million viewers. (CBS was also a distant third last week behind ABC, which won with 8.07 million viewers, and NBC, with 7.98 million.)

Read more →

The Gray Lady’s Lizard-Brain Logic

/in , /by

lime-green-cottage-cheese.jpg

Here.

Fact One: After McCain appeared before a lime jello and cottage cheese background in June, Steve Schmidt swore that he would never let the campaign embarrass John McCain like that again.

Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain and a veteran of President Bush’s 2004 campaign, could barely hide his fury in the coming days, as he announced — to anyone who would listen — that he personally would make certain the McCain campaign would never again embarrass Mr. McCain.

“Fun Steve is dead,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Fact Two: After the lime jello cottage cheese incident, McCain had Evil Steve Schmidt take over the campaign.

Mr. Schmidt traveled with Mr. McCain for the first part of the year. But Mr. McCain sent him back to the headquarters in Crystal City, Va., after Republican complaints about Mr. McCain’s struggling campaign, epitomized by that Green Wall episode.

Mr. Schmidt gave the war room a more central place in Mr. McCain’s campaign, streamlining its decision making so only a few key aides decide what is worthy of response and, more important in Mr. Schmidt’s view, what presents an opportunity to attack Mr. Obama as elite, out of touch and lacking substance.

Fact Three: Thursday night, John McCain was once again embarrassed by being placed in front of a green backdrop–made even worse because it was an image of Walter Reed Middle School that should have been an image of Walter Reed hospital.

Three months after Mr. Schmidt’s “Fun Steve is dead” declaration, there was Mr. McCain giving his acceptance speech at the convention on Thursday night. His backdrop? A shimmering screen of green, until it was switched over to a more dignified blue.

Conclusion: AdNags and Jim Rutenberg conclude that this represents great improvement and the sign of a masterfully competent campaign, all thanks to Schmidt.

In the three months since that night in June, the McCain organization has become a campaign transformed: an elbows-out, risk-taking, disciplined machine that was on display last week at the convention that nominated Mr. McCain. And the catalyst for the change has largely been Mr. Schmidt, a 37-year-old veteran of the winning 2002 Congressional and 2004 presidential campaigns, where he worked closely with Karl Rove, then President Bush’s senior strategist.

China Exhibits Very Bad Judgement in Whom to Intimidate

/in /by

Don’t get me wrong. There’s absolutely no excuse for a country hosting the Olympic games to detain the press corps traveling with one of the visiting dignitaries.

A charter airplane carrying the White House press corps was detained for nearly three hours Friday at Beijing’s international airport not long after President Bush arrived to attend the Olympic Games.

The flight crew of the Northwest Airlines 747 had been expecting to park at a VIP terminal, but after landing was instead directed by the control tower to a normal international gate.

White House officials would say only there were "logistical problems" getting clearance to unload the aircraft. The flight crew was told the Chinese were insisting that all luggage be inspected.

Detaining the plane carrying the White House press corps makes China look like the still-authoritarian nation they denied they were (and are) when they first got the games.

And, no doubt, when they were "inspecting" all the baggage on the plane, I’m sure they snuck a few bugs in here and there among the electronics, just for good measure.

But really, China. Of all the journalists covering the games this year, do you really think the White House press corps are the journalists you ought to be intimidating? By habit, these journalists are among the most domesticated of western journalists, wiling to cow to authority to retain their spot on the plane (particularly since Helen’s out still sick). Both from a PR perspective–in that, before this happened, China was likely to get a good review from these journalists–and from a power perspective, I’d be a little more worried about the ESPN crew than the White House press corps.

Nevertheless–may all the journalists on board check their equipment carefully and have a safe rest of the trip.

Michael Isikoff’s Chat with Cheney’s Lawyer

/in , /by

One of the details that most surprised me in Scott McClellan’s account of the CIA Leak investigation and aftermath was his description of the White House response to the confirmation–on April 5, 2006–that Libby had testified he had leaked the NIE with the authorization of the President.

Now the fact that he himself had authorized the selective leaking of national security information to reporters made him look hypocritical.

[snip]

In time, we would learn that the president’s penchant for compartmentalization had played an important role in the declassification story. The only person the president had shared the declassification with personally was Vice President Cheney. Two days after the Fitzgerald disclosure, Cheney’s lawyer told reporters that the president had "declassified the information and authorized and directed the vice president to get it out" but "didn’t get into how it would be done." Then the vice president had directed his top aide, Scooter Libby, to supply the information anonymously to reporters. [my emphasis]

Granted, I was on a business trip in India when this all went down. But this was a detail I missed. "Cheney’s lawyer told reporters"? I was used to Libby’s lawyer prior to the indictment, Joseph Tate, telling reporters all manner of things under the cover of anonymity. Robert Luskin’s anonymous, wild spinning of reporters? Kind of goes without saying. But Cheney’s lawyer, Terry O’Donnell?

But it all made sense when someone pointed me to the one piece of journalism he could find repeating that citation–would you believe it, a Michael Isikoff piece?

A lawyer familiar with the investigation, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, told NEWSWEEK that the "president declassified the information and authorized and directed the vice president to get it out." But Bush "didn’t get into how it would be done. He was not involved in selecting Scooter Libby or Judy Miller." Bush made the decision to put out the NIE material in late June, when the press was beginning to raise questions about the WMD but before Wilson published his op-ed piece. [my emphasis]

I double checked with McClellen to make sure that’s the public statement he meant, and he said,

Dan Bartlett volunteered to me that the vice president’s lawyer was telling at least some reporters anonymously what I reference on page 295, which is specifically referring to the Newsweek article …

In other words, yes, Cheney’s lawyer was the one spreading that story to–of all people–Michael Isikoff. Now everything began to make sense.

Read more →