|
Banned
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy
......you can see this symbolic logic playing out in the republican defenses of sarah palin, which hinged on presenting her as an "every woman" victimized by the conspiracy of "entrenched elites" who dominate "the press"....
from this three questions:
a) maybe use this thread to make other little histories of the construction of signifiers which circulate in the tele-funhouse to the exclusion of reality that we might know about in a non-telefunhouse environment...
b) if you were running obama's media strategy, how would you react to this tactical state of affairs?
if you were running mc-cain's media strategy, how would you react to it?
c) i find this process simultaneously disturbing and kinda fascinating, in a watching-the-car-crash sorta way. what do you make of it? is this just an aspect of contemporary american political reality, or do you think something is basically wrong about it?
if the latter, what do you propose be done?
|
I guess I'll just continue my outsized wonderment and frustration about the disconnect that it must take to assert (and to actually believe or to buy into....) the idea that the wealthiest and most influential corporations and individuals who enjoy a near monoply ownership of the media, cede the influence and opportunity of that ownership to some mythical "other", the aforementioned "liberals", to step in and use the "Mighty Wurlitzer" for their own, sinister purposes..... The stories of Jesus and of the tooth fairy, in comparison, are much easier to eagerly embrace.....
Quote:
How Palin will beat the press: by running as the new Spiro Agnew. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine
How Palin Will Beat the PressShe'll run as the new Spiro Agnew.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008, at 5:56 PM ET
Sarah Palin. Click image to expand.Sarah Palin
As That Republican Show shuffles to a close in St. Paul, the networks strike the set, and the anchors chisel the baked-on greasepaint from their faces, vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin will return to her campaign bubble with her staff to size up her fall opponent—the press.
Ever since Richard Nixon discovered that running against the press was better for stirring up the animals and getting them to vote than merely attacking your political opponent, politicians—usually Republican politicians—have saved their best shots for reporters.
A politician can't launch an effective anti-press campaign until he attracts the sort of coverage that he's able to frame as unfair or inaccurate. Sarah Palin was doubly blessed in the last week, as the press asked questions about Bristol Palin's pregnancy and completed the vetting that the McCain never really started. Last night in her acceptance speech, Palin seized the advantage with this opening dig at the press: Sarah Palin GOP convention speech. Transcript. - Lynn Sweet
chelsea ugly reno father - Google News Archive Search
MCCAIN APOLOGIZES TO CLINTON FOR JOKE ABOUT CHELSEA, RENO
$2.95 - Contra Costa - NewsBank - Jun 13, 1998
... the Arizona Republic newspaper that the joke went something like this: Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father. ...
Salon Newsreal | A joke too bad to print?
BY DAVID CORN
During the last few months, many established media outlets have decided to report innuendo and rumor about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, as long as they have a source they can cite (at least anonymously), or another media player has reported the same.
But this new standard in the practice of journalism seemingly does not extend to other political figures, at least not media darlings like Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Earlier this month, at a Republican Senate fund-raiser, McCain told a downright nasty joke making fun of Janet Reno, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton.
The fact that McCain had made the tasteless joke was reported in major newspapers, as was the vain attempt by his press secretary to initially deny what McCain had done. But in several major newspapers, the joke itself was kept a secret. When McCain subsequently apologized to President Clinton, the Washington Post, in its personality section, noted the apology but said the joke "was too vicious to print."
The Los Angeles Times, in its Life & Style section, provided an oblique rendering of the joke that did not fully convey its ugliness. When Maureen Dowd penned a column in the New York Times about the joke, she wrote that McCain "is so revered by the press that his disgusting jape was largely nudged under the rug." But Dowd chose not to relay the joke, either. .....
|
Quote:
Sarah Palin and Mark Halperin's complaints of "liberal media" - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
Wednesday Sept. 3, 2008 14:25 EDT
Sarah Palin and Mark Halperin's complaints of "liberal media"
....Halperin continues to play this self-flagellating role in order to please the Right. Today he published a chart arguing that part of what was driving the scrutiny of Sarah Palin is "anti-Republican liberal media bias," and he then went on Joe Scarborough's MSNBC show this morning to make the same claim:
There are three bad reasons [for the "frenzy" against Palin]. One is the liberal press. I think the McCain campaign is right that people are going after her harder than they would go after a Democratic Vice Presidential nominee.
The very notion of the "Liberal Media" is one of the most inane myths in American politics -- something spat out and repeated in the lowest right-wing sewers for so long that it has become conventional wisdom -- but Halperin's frequent vouching for that myth, in his role of "journalist," illustrates all one needs to know about him. The media's contempt for both John Kerry and Al Gore was matched only by their reverence for George Bush's swagger. The first several months of media coverage this year was dominated by Jerimiah Wright, lapel pins, bowling scores, Bittergate and elitism. And it is highly unlikely that there has even been a time in American history when the media was as subservient to Government as they were during the Bush era. It's literally hard to imagine a claim that ought to be more discredited in general than the notion of the "liberal media" and its "anti-Republican bias."
But specifically to attribute the media scrutiny of Sarah Palin to this mythical "anti-Republican bias" is absurd beyond description. Palin is undoubtedly the most mysterious and unknown individual to be inserted into our national political scene in decades, if not longer. The first time her name ever appears in any news accounts, at least according to Nexis, was an April 3, 1996 article in The Anchorage Daily News that reported this:
Alaskans Line Up For a Whiff of Ivana
Sarah Palin, a commercial fisherman from Wasilla, told her husband on Tuesday she was driving to Anchorage to shop at Costco. Instead, she headed straight for Ivana.
And there, at J.C. Penney's cosmetic department, was Ivana, the former Mrs. Donald Trump, sitting at a table next to a photograph of herself. She wore a light-colored pantsuit and pink fingernail polish. Her blonde hair was coiffed in a bouffant French twist.
"We want to see Ivana," said Palin, who admittedly smells like salmon for a large part of the summer, "because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture."
Ivana Trump, the former Czechoslovakian Olympic skier who found fame and wealth as the wife of the New York tycoon, came to Anchorage Tuesday to push her line of perfume.
More than 500 people waited as long as half an hour in J.C. Penney to chat with her and receive an autographed photo.
That was 1996. It was that same year -- in October -- when Palin was elected Mayor of Wasilla. According to The Anchorage Daily News article reporting her victory, "the final tally was 617-413." There are High School Student Council elections with more votes than that. She ran her campaign, and won, based on the precise GOP wedge strategies that John McCain, to this day, pretends to decry. As a Wasilla councilman put it at the time:
Palin offers no management qualifications, basing her campaign on the buzzword planks and the political might of the far-right Republicans. She obtained endorsement by the NRA. Why is the Republican Party so interested in local elections? Why is the NRA involved in such a contest? The three council seats up this year also saw challengers running on the basis of the Republican Party platform, using the same tactics.
I would never suggest that an individual or organization refrain from participating in any election, but I had hoped this valley and Wasilla could avoid the nationwide tendency that sees such elections become more and more partisan. Bad enough that state decisions are made more often on the basis of party politics and in party caucuses. We don't need that at the local level.
Time today reported the same thing: "While Palin often describes that race as having been a fight against the old boys' club, [then-incumbent Mayor] Stein says she made sure the campaign hinged on issues like gun owners' rights and her opposition to abortion (Stein is pro-choice)."
The first thing Palin did after being elected was fire six department heads in the City, including the Police Commissioner and the librarian. As The Anchorage Daily News put it: "the newly elected mayor of Wasilla has asked all of the city's top managers to resign in order to test their loyalty to her administration." It added:
She's also been criticized by the local semiweekly newspaper for a new policy requiring department heads to get the mayor's approval before talking to reporters. An editorial in The Frontiersman labeled it a "gag order."
In January of 1997, Palin seemed actually to lie about what she did, as the same paper reported:.....
|
The republican nonsense machine....and mindset....has not exhibited this much audacity snce 1988....the year of J. Danforth Quayle. Their faithful would defend the nomination of a ham sandwich for VEEP, if the press was accused by the campaign of being unfair to their candidate......
Last edited by host; 09-05-2008 at 09:11 AM..
|