welcome to the funhouse--making political signifiers - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 09-05-2008, 08:21 AM

a short history of how the "liberal" press has enframed obama in straight-up populist conservative terms by appending the label "elitist" to him--because amongst other important facts, he can't bowl.

read on.

source: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting

Quote:

Extra! July/August 2008

Obama the Snob?
Hanging the ‘elitist’ label on another Democratic candidate

By Peter Hart

It’s safe to assume that Barack Obama knew he could expect certain lines of attack when he decided to run for president: whispers about his religious beliefs, for example, or questions regarding his patriotism. And sure enough, those issues came up almost as soon as the campaign started. But it’s difficult to imagine that Obama—whose one grandfather was a high-school dropout and the other a colonial servant—expected to fend off the accusation that he is “elitist.”

Corporate media coverage of political campaigns often rests on certain storylines, though, that don’t necessarily bear any relationship to reality—Al Gore the exaggerator vs. compassionate conservative George W. Bush in the 2000 election, to take one example (Extra!, 1–2/01). Somewhere along the way in 2008, pundits decided to rerun the storyline used for Democratic nominee John Kerry in 2004 (Extra!, 7–8/04), asking of Obama: Is he one of us?

This storyline was most conspicuous in April, when comments Obama made at a San Francisco fundraiser were reported on the Huffington Post website (4/11/08). Having a casual conversation about the challenges of the Pennsylvania primary, Obama attempted to explain why some voters were politically apathetic: They’ve “been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government,” Obama said. “They feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it.” He added that “our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives.”

Then Obama made the comment that would provide the controversy:

So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The ensuing media frenzy—christened “Bittergate”—fleshed out a campaign narrative for Obama that had been developing for some time. The media weren’t always clear about what they meant by “elitist” (see sidebar), but Obama’s lawyerly, academic pedigree paired with his liberal political worldview seemed enough to qualify him for the label. With “elitist” routinely paired with “liberal” in corporate media discourse, the fact that Obama had recently (albeit dubiously) been named the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate only reinforced the message. (See sidebar)

The arugula issue

The “elitist” tag was hung on Obama’s lapel long before the “bitter” comments were reported. Before the Iowa caucuses, for example, there was a minor flare-up when the candidate spoke to farmers about crop prices: “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” As a New York Times blog pointed out (Caucus, 7/27/07), there aren’t any Whole Foods stores in Iowa; the nearest one from where he was speaking was 100 miles away, in Omaha, Nebraska.

Columnist George Will (Washington Post, 8/12/07) chimed in with a column charging this was a Michael-Dukakis-in-a-tank moment, and was able to reprise the line months later on ABC’s This Week (4/13/08), with help from host George Stephanopoulos. This was apparently a “gaffe” because Iowa farmers presumably wouldn’t know a thing about exotic salad greens—even though some noted at the time (Media Matters, 9/24/07) that arugula is sold in Iowa—and grown there too.

But if it wasn’t arugula, it was something else.

Campaigning in Iowa, Obama “sounded self-consciously pristine at times, as if he was too refined for the muck of politics,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd declared (2/14/07), before issuing a warning: “That’s not how you beat anybody but Alan Keyes.”

Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier penned an outraged column (3/17/08) warning that Obama had “better watch his step,” since he was “bordering on arrogance” and “can be a bit too cocky for his own good.” (An example of his “self-importance and superiority”: citing his 2002 opposition to the Iraq invasion as a sign of courage.) Obama and his wife, for that matter, “ooze entitlement.” Fournier stopped short of calling the Obamas “uppity.”

Bowling for authenticity

And, of course, questions were raised about Obama’s “authenticity” when he stopped at a bowling alley in Pennsylvania on March 29. Obama’s reported score of 37 (albeit for only a partial game, with some frames bowled by children) was taken as evidence that the press was onto something with this “elitist” thing, and the footage ran incessantly on cable news shows.

On MSNBC’s Hardball (3/31/08), host Chris Matthews declared, “This gets very ethnic, but the fact that he’s good at basketball doesn’t surprise anybody, but the fact that he’s that terrible at bowling does make you wonder.” What Matthews thought you were supposed to wonder about was not exactly clear, but the footage ran repeatedly as Hardball’s assembled pundits cackled at Obama’s performance, with Newsweek’s Howard Fineman saying: “This is just killing him, Chris. Don’t show this over and over again.” Matthews added that “it isn’t the most macho form there.”

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd seemed genuinely miffed by Obama’s performance, writing (4/16/08) that her working-class upbringing instilled “a passion for bowling. . . . My bowling trophy was one of my most cherished possessions.”

The problems of using bowling scores as a gauge of authenticity were brushed aside. As Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez (4/3/08) reminded, “While jokes are being made of Obama’s bowling skills, 40 years ago it was not easy for a black man to even enter some bowling alleys in the country.”

As the campaign wore on, similar episodes would capture the pundits’ attention. MNSBC’s Chris Matthews and David Shuster seemed perplexed (4/10/08) by Obama’s choice of beverage during a campaign stop at an Indiana diner. Obama apparently turned down a coffee in favor of orange juice, which both reporters seemed to think an obvious no-no. “It’s just one of those sort of weird things,” explained Shuster.

You know, when the owner of the diner says, “Here, have some coffee,” you say, “Yes, thank you,” and, “Oh, can I also please have some orange juice, in addition to this?” You don’t just say, “No, I’ll take orange juice,” and then turn away and start shaking hands.

Matthews chimed in with further lessons in diner etiquette: “You don’t ask for a substitute on the menu.”

‘Bittergate’

The next day, the Huffington Post “Bittergate” story would break, and the Obama-is-elitist storyline would seem to be cast in stone. Time magazine’s Karen Tumulty led her April 28 piece by wildly exaggerating Obama’s comments:

It’s hard to know which was worse about Barack Obama’s dismissal of small-town voters as narrow-minded, churchgoing gun nuts: the original arrogance of his remarks or his repeated attempts to explain them.

Noting that Obama had made the remarks “at a private fund raiser, where the rich and powerful gather for shrimp and special access,” Tumulty warned that the Democrats risked nominating someone “who seems alien to the average working stiff. . . . [Obama] is seen by many downscale voters as the candidate of elites, if not elitist himself.” Tumulty lectured Obama as someone who “should know better than any the sting of being lumped into a stereotype and dismissed”—which struck an odd note, coming as it did in the same paragraph where Tumulty dismissed San Francisco as “a regional headquarters for secular condescension.”

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd penned her furious April 16 column (“I’m not bitter,” was her lead sentence), highlighting her own working-class credentials, in particular her religious upbringing in a family of Reagan Democrats who “weren’t bitter; they were bonding.” She contrasted her just-plain folks with Obama, who came off not only as an elitist but an intellectual to boot, with a “detached egghead quality.” “Obama comes across less like a candidate in Pennsylvania than an anthropologist in Borneo,” Dowd wrote:

He has often appeared to be observing the odd habits of the colorful locals, resisting as the natives try to fatten him up like a foie gras goose, sampling Pennsylvania beer in a sports bar with his tie tight, awkwardly accepting bowling shoes as a gift from Bob Casey, examining the cheese and salami at the Italian Market here as intriguing ethnic artifacts, purchasing Utz Cheese Balls at a ShopRite in East Norriton and quizzing the women working in a chocolate factory about whether they could possibly really like the sugary doodads.

How exactly looking at deli products or buying cheese-flavored snacks marks you as an elitist Dowd didn’t make clear. One might argue that Dowd is such a savvy student of social interaction that you should take her word for it—but her claims of expertise on such matters were undercut by the fact that she was unable to figure out that Obama was giving the bowling shoes to Casey, not receiving them, as a New York Times correction acknowledged (4/23/08). What Dowd’s list really illustrates is that once media have hung a label on you, anything that you do—or don’t do—can be depicted as confirming it, with the most unremarkable behavior (buying Cheese Balls?) presented as evidence that Obama is “unable to even feign Main Street cred.”

Days later, Dowd would write (4/27/08) that at a campaign stop in Indiana, “Obama did his best to shoo away the pesky elitist label,” but the Times columnist was unimpressed. When Obama responded to a reporter’s question about his fashion sense by saying he buys “five of the same suit and then I patch them up and wear them repeatedly,” Dowd noted that he did not disclose the brand.

‘The way we live’

Obama’s supposed efforts to shed the label that media had affixed to him became a popular theme in coverage; “with sleeves rolled up and folksy on his mind” was the beginning of a New York Times story (5/6/08) about Obama’s alleged change in style. Of course, the pundits didn’t describe themselves as the audience for Obama’s makeover; the media establishment was just worried whether Obama could, as NBC’s Chris Matthews put it (5/18/08), “win over regular Democrats.” On NBC Nightly News (4/26/08), anchor Lester Holt noted that Obama, “stung by accusations of elitism, seems to be taking some unusual steps to recast his image among so-called regular voters.”

On PBS’s NewsHour, New York Times columnist and amateur sociologist David Brooks mused (4/18/08): “The larger issue is, what kind of guy is Obama? Is he someone who bowls a 37 and doesn’t know anything about the way American people actually live, or does he actually get the way we live?”

In an April 18 Times column, Brooks raised the same issues, noting that “voters want a president who basically shares their values and life experiences.” Brooks wrote:

When Obama goes to a church infused with James Cone–style liberation theology, when he makes ill-informed comments about working-class voters, when he bowls a 37 for crying out loud, voters are going to wonder if he’s one of them.

Brooks, it should be noted, later claimed on MSNBC (6/2/08) that “Obama’s problem is he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who can go into an Applebee’s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there”—despite the fact that Applebee’s doesn’t have a salad bar (Hoffmania, 6/2/08).

But it was hard not to find a racial subtext in a group of highly paid white journalists worrying that a black candidate might not be “one of us.”

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews (5/13/08) commented that “being an African-American” meant that Obama had to put more effort into showing “who you are, introduce yourself as a person, not as an identity group, but as a human being, and connect with people.” But such efforts need to meet Matthews’ standards; Obama’s choice of pool as an alternative to bowling was not quite there. “Playing pool, not a bad start, but it’s not what most people play. People with money play pool these days,” Matthews said. “The guys who have pool rooms in their house in the basement. You know what those tables cost?”

Some reporters are at least aware that these storylines can be grafted onto a campaign whether or not they reflect any underlying reality. On CNN’s media show Reliable Sources (5/11/08), Time’s Tumulty commented:

There are a lot of narratives that the press bought into in this campaign. Don’t forget the inevitability of the Rudy Giuliani campaign and Fred Thompson’s great appeal. And John McCain is dead. I think the number of times we’ve been wrong in this campaign is far greater than the number of times we’ve been right.

New York Times reporter Kate Zernike was also on hand, though, to defend the media. When host Howard Kurtz asked if “the media went totally haywire over a couple of gutter balls and we sort of traffic in this world of symbolism,” Zernike said the candidates “protest too much,” arguing that they were “sort of riding on this train”; as evidence, she pointed out that John and Elizabeth Edwards gave an interview to People magazine.

From ‘us’ to us

Another matter is whether voters have actually bought the idea that Barack Obama is some sort of elitist. According to the New York Times (5/1/08), the Republican plan to brand Obama as an out-of-touch elitist did not appear to be working, since “he is not viewed that way by most Americans. Nearly two-thirds of registered voters said they believed he shared their values, about the same number who felt that way about Mr. McCain. (Fifty-eight percent said Mrs. Clinton shared their values.)”

According to the same CBS/New York Times poll (4/25/08–4/29/08), when voters were asked how much the candidates care about “people like you,” Obama did slightly better than McCain—31 percent answering that McCain cared “not much” or “not at all” about people like them, while 25 percent said the same about Obama.

Newsweek (5/5/08) pointed to a Gallup poll that asked if a candidate “looks down upon the average American,” in which 26 percent of respondents attributed that point of view to Obama—just 4 percentage points higher than McCain, and 6 points lower than Hillary Clinton. The magazine also noted that exit polls in Pennsylvania showed Clinton and Obama tied on the question of whether a candidate is “in touch with people like you.”

As Tumulty wrote in her piece scorching Obama over his “bitter” comments (Time, 4/28/08), the media brouhaha didn’t seem to make much of an impression on Pennsylvania voters, where “some of the working-class Democrats in that state said they understood what Obama was trying to say, even if the professional political class didn’t.”

so there you have it.
a little history of signifier construction.

obviously, it is of little consequence the relation this construction has to the actually existing barak obama---rather it is a measure of the extent to which the populist conservative framework and that of the talking head class on 24/7 cable "news" outlets, and the ancillary mechanisms of circulation/repetition in the print media, are fit to each other.

and this sort of process explains something of the mc-cain campaign's assumption that the election can be separated from debate about problems and ways of addressing them and instead be reduced to a matter of "personalities"---which refers not to the actually existing human beings, but to the way they end up being enframed by repetition in the funhouse that is a television-dominated mediascape.

on the other side of the equation, you could argue that mc-cain is accidentally a perfect encapsulation of the populist conservative ideological frame, in that he embodies the victim narrative which is at its center by virtue of having been a pow during the vietnam period. this is the center of the potential for identification on the part of the far-right base with the "personality" of john mc-cain, here as everywhere functioning in meme-space.

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?

host · 09-05-2008, 08:54 AM

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......

roachboy · 09-08-2008, 03:42 AM

this is a report on the overall american mediascape in 2007 put together by the "center for excellent in journalism" which is funded by the pew charitable trust for the most part. it is an interesting and extensive mapping of the mediascape which provides some reference=points in the context of which the mapping of the funhouse might go forward.

http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2008/index.php

the main page of this site features running analysis of coverage trends, on the order of this:

http://www.journalism.org/node/12653

which documents the disappearance of anything like substantive issue coverage behind the scrim of vice-presidential candidate personality stories...
-----Added 8/9/2008 at 09 : 31 : 55-----
here's another resource, geared around systemic critique of corporate media:

medialens - correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media - corporate media issues

Derwood · 09-08-2008, 08:36 AM

would the warping of Reagan's policies count? the GOP props up The Gipper as the bastion of fiscally conservative ideals (low taxes, small government), while Reagan's actual record shows that he raised taxes on the upper class 6 times, etc.

roachboy · 09-08-2008, 08:52 AM

derwood--sure--but for consistency's sake, see if you can locate a piece that tracks the history of it---something that assembles the funhouse mirror a bit. if you can find such....

===============

btw: a map of the news-scape, continually changing, nice layout:

http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/

host · 09-08-2008, 10:04 AM

"roachie:, it does not cease to amaze me that "they" post opinions on this forum that they "think" are their own..... and the question, "how do I know what I know", is never seriously contemplated.

The "Mighty Wurlitzer", aka "operation Mockingbird", is alive and well, and it's newest components, as indicated in the articles near the bottom of the post, are Salem Comm., owner of townhall.com and a huge evangelicized, political content radio propaganda network, and, as can be observed in last month's article about Navy outsourcing it's "PR", Rendon and the Lincoln group..... so predictable, boring.....damaging, it perpetuates the malignancy that are "one party", the "property party, with two right wings, democratic and republican", in Amerika, somehow, "oppose" each other. Just as "impeachment was off the table" in January, 2007, when Nancy Pelosi became democratic house speaker, so was opposing the republican malignancy of pre-emptive war, off budget supplemental appropriations to fund the war without let up, and for as long as republicans desired, as well as the accountability to congress, the people's representatives....that the option of impeachment investigation are intended to encourage.

Quote:

FederalTimes.com
Navy plans to outsource some public relations tasks
By PHILIP EWING
August 15, 2008

....The contract is for “indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity,” so it isn’t clear yet how much it will cost. When the vendor is settled, likely in September, its job will be to provide a “menu” of services intended to make complex jobs easier for Navy public affairs, Davis said, such as video production work and Web design.
The work won’t be limited to the Pentagon; the Navy hopes the “menu” concept will make life simpler for public affairs officers worldwide.
Greater Internet outreach is one of the most crucial parts of the deal, Davis said. Beyond its current jobs, CHINFO is looking for help especially with reaching people on the Internet through blogs, video-sharing sites such as YouTube and social networking tools such as MySpace. .....

.... According to the watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy, representatives from several major public relations firms attended a Navy presentation this summer on the contract. They included the Washington-based Rendon Group, which already has been involved with several Pentagon PR campaigns.
Other PR firms that attended the Navy’s briefing included the global agency Burson-Marsteller, which has had accounts with the tobacco industry and the U.S. Postal Service; the D.C.-based Lincoln Group, which was involved in the DoD program to pay for positive articles in Iraqi newspapers; Chicago-based GolinHarris, which has many well-known corporate clients, including McDonald’s and Nintendo; and the New York-based Hill & Knowlton, which handled many tobacco industry campaigns, major nonprofit organizations and many other large clients. ......

Quote:

FreedomOfThePress.net - Journalism And The CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer by Daniel Brandt

Journalism And The CIA:

The Mighty Wurlitzer

by Daniel Brandt, NameBase NewsLine, April-June 1997

....After World War II, these psywar techniques continued. C.D. Jackson, a major figure in U.S. psywar efforts before and after the war, was simultaneously a top executive at Time-Life. Psywar was also used with success during the 1950s by Edward Lansdale, first in the Philippines and then in South Vietnam. In Guatemala, the Dulles brothers worked with their friends at United Fruit, in particular the "father of public relations," Edward Bernays, who for years had been lobbying the press on behalf of United. When CIA puppets finally took over in 1954, only applause was heard from the media, commencing forty years of CIA-approved horrors in that unlucky country.[2] Bernays' achievement apparently impressed Allen Dulles, who immediately began using U.S. public relations experts and front groups to promote the image of Ngo Dinh Diem as South Vietnam's savior.[3]

The combined forces of unaccountable covert operations and corporate public relations, each able to tap massive resources, are sufficient to make the concept of "democracy" obsolete. Fortunately for the rest of us, unchallenged power can lose perspective. With research and analysis -- the capacity to see and understand the world around them -- entrenched power must constantly anticipate and contain potential threats. But even as power seems more secure, this capacity can be blinded by hubris and isolation.

Troublesome notes were heard from the Wurlitzer in the 1960s -- but not from American journalism, which had already sold its soul to the empire. Instead, the announcement that the emperor had no clothes was made by a new generation. Much that was dear to this counterculture was stylistic and superficial, and there were many within this culture itself, and certainly within the straight media, who mistook this excess baggage for its essence. Nevertheless, the youth culture's rumpled opposition was sufficient to slow down the machine and let in some light. .....

Operation Mockingbird - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Operation Mockingbird

In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."

Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great): "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."

In 1951 Allen W. Dulles persuaded Cord Meyer to join the CIA. However, there is evidence that he was recruited several years earlier and had been spying on the liberal organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s. According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird's "principal operative". .....

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Townhall.com::About Us
.....By uniting the nations’ top conservative radio hosts with their millions of listeners, Townhall.com breaks down the barriers between news and opinion, journalism and political participation -- and enables conservatives to participate in the political process with unprecedented ease.

As a part of Salem Communications Corporation, Townhall.com features Salem’s News/Talk radio hosts, Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, and Dennis Prager, who are heard on over 300 stations nationwide. Of our five hosts, three are among the top 10 radio talk shows in the nation!

For the first time, the grassroots media of talk radio, the internet, blogging and podcasting will be brought together in one place to activate conservative political participation.

By providing daily news and opinion articles, sophisticated activism tools, a vibrant blog community, online radio shows and more, Townhall.com will arm conservatives with the tools and information necessary to have an impact in shaping the news. ....

......Townhall.com
1901 N. Moore Street | Suite 205 | Arlington, VA 22209
Phone: 703-294-6046

Salem Communications is the leading US radio broadcaster targeting the large and growing audience interested in programming related to religion, family and culture and owns and operates 105 radio stations, with 66 stations in 24 of the nation’s top 25 metropolitan areas. As the 2006 and 2008 elections approach, Townhall.com and Salem are building a strong, active conservative community by combining the power of the internet with the influence of talk radio.

Making Airwaves | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction
Making Airwaves | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical ...
Jan 26, 2007

.....Christian broadcasting has become professional, national, and, yes, even profitable. And the engine driving this transformation—indeed, the company more responsible for it than any other—is Salem Communications.

Based in beachside Camarillo, California, Salem owns many of the frequencies that feature programs like Focus and Insight. It operates 97 stations, 61 of them in the country's top-25 markets.

By comparison, other significant Christian chains barely touch the country's largest cities, where half of all Americans live. Contemporary music's K-LOVE owns more total stations than Salem, but only 10 in major markets. Moody Broadcasting operates 31 frequencies, but just 3 in the big cities of Chicago and Cleveland. And Bott Radio,with 38 stations, holds none in major markets.

With far and away the largest audience of any Christian radio network, Salem's industry competitors aren't Christian broadcasters at all—they're the giants of secular radio, companies like Clear Channel Communications and CBS Radio.

Salem also syndicates its own shows, which air on more than 2,000 stations around the country. Popular Salem hosts include Bill Bennett, the elder President Bush's drug czar and author of The Book of Virtues; Janet Parshall, a former housewife turned political commentator; and Al Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Attuned to new media realities, Salem has led Christian radio beyond the airwaves as well. Beginning in 1999, the company purchased websites like OnePlace.com, Crosswalk.com, now among the most-visited Christian destinations on the internet, and Townhall.com, a clearinghouse for conservative news and opinion. It publishes seven magazines, including CCM Magazine and Youthworker Journal, and in 2006 it bought on-demand publisher Xulon Press.

All of this makes Salem's influence among conservative Christians "unparalleled," says Craig Detweiler, Reel Spirituality professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. Lochte agrees, calling Salem "the undisputed leader" in Christian radio.

Although few listeners know Salem by name, one thing is certain: The company dominates Christian broadcasting in a way that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. "They're just doing it in a way that hasn't been done before," says Frank Wright, president of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB). "They're breaking new ground."
The Price of Success

As the biggest Christian broadcaster in the nation, though, Salem attracts its share of critics. Most, especially radio insiders, keep their complaints quiet. After all, Salem is the industry's largest employer; it's not wise to burn a bridge of that size and importance.

But CT heard plenty of off-the-record, private critiques during the reporting for this piece. Most fell into two general categories: money and ministry focus. Fair or not, Salem has gained a reputation in some circles for pursuing market dominance with businesslike indifference. Salem doesn't coexist peacefully with other Christian radio stations and websites, the criticism goes, but instead seeks primarily to increase its share of the Christian audience—and the accompanying advertising revenue. Such critics envision small, gospel-oriented stations and local programs with loyal audiences being forced off the air, unable to compete with Salem. The company's 1999 entry into public financing cemented such fears.

Other critics see Salem as compromising its ministry commitment by expanding beyond Christian teaching and talk into Christian music—it owns 13 contemporary Christian music stations, most tagged The Fish. It's also begun to engage in politics: The company is actively growing a series of secular talk stations that air conservative heavyweights like Dennis Prager and Michael Medved, but little or no explicitly Christian content.

In the end, both sets of critics conclude, it is the listeners who suffer, as the overall ministry of Christian radio gets monopolized and diluted of the gospel

. click to show

Mark Elfstrand, now a Moody Radio host, worked for Salem's Pittsburgh station WORD-FM throughout much of the 1990s. During a hiring interview, he says, CEO Atsinger asked questions to get a feel for Elfstrand's political leanings. One such question: What did Elfstrand think of Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry?

"At its worst, Salem has a political orthodoxy that guides its coverage," says Sojourners president Jim Wallis. He sees evangelicals broadening their political concerns to include issues such as Darfur, sex trafficking, the environment, and poverty. "If there is a political orthodoxy at Salem, [I think] it's not only bad theologically, but they're going to have a market failure here [eventually]," Wallis says. "Because they'll be misreading where evangelicalism is going."

Harold Feld, senior vice president of Media Access Project, a public-interest telecommunications law firm, bemoans the monopoly of perspective created by any large radio chain, Salem included.

"Within the Christian community, there are debates that people should be having, [such as], 'What is an appropriate way to be looking at war and politics and local affairs through a Christian perspective?'" Feld says. "So to have a company that creates just one perspective, and brands it as the Christian perspective—and this is the only Christian perspective you will find on the air—creates a very serious problem."

Detweiler agrees, somewhat. He says Salem represents some listeners' views well, "but one must never assume that they represent all of the evangelical community." Detweiler says he would "challenge [Salem] to create a more progressive or inclusive Christianity for the 21st century."

No doubt a certain segment of Salem's listeners would be pleased by such a change. But it's not likely to happen. Both Epperson and Atsinger have been active in conservative political causes for decades, and Epperson ran for Congress as a Republican twice in the mid-1980s. For Salem's co-founders, the connection between Christian talk and conservative talk springs from deeply held convictions.

Besides, points out CFO Evans, Salem's research indicates that when listeners leave its Christian talk stations, they tend to tune in to news or talk. Expanding into the conservative talk format represents just another way of reaching Salem's target audience.

"Many people have criticized Salem for being right-wing politically in terms of their programming," says Grand View College communications professor Stephen Winzenberg. "I think it's all in your perspective. Because [most] of us who are Christians would call them a fairly traditional Christian radio programmer. . . . I think they're very mainstream conservative."
Good Night and Good Luck

While the debates swirling around Salem show no sign of resolution, the company continues to serve more listeners than any other Christian broadcaster, redefining the ministry of Christian radio. In 1999, Salem became the sole provider of Christian programming on xm Satellite radio, and it continues to innovate with radio formats, Web-radio synergy, and other new technologies.

In short, whatever direction Christian broadcasting heads in the future, Salem will likely be at the forefront. NRB president Frank Wright believes Salem's leadership is good for all involved—for other Christian station owners, who benefit from Salem's industry trailblazing; for the ministries that produce Christian programming, who reach more listeners than ever through Salem's expanded reach; and for listeners who tune in for teaching and encouragement, who regularly hear the highest-quality Christian programming.

"I think it's pretty hard to criticize Salem," says Wright, citing the company's "strong leadership" and "very high commitment to their Christian mission."

One question highlights Salem's importance: If the company were not in 23 of the country's top-25 markets, would many of those cities lack any Christian radio presence?

09-08-2008, 03:42 AM	#3 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	this is a report on the overall american mediascape in 2007 put together by the "center for excellent in journalism" which is funded by the pew charitable trust for the most part. it is an interesting and extensive mapping of the mediascape which provides some reference=points in the context of which the mapping of the funhouse might go forward. http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2008/index.php the main page of this site features running analysis of coverage trends, on the order of this: http://www.journalism.org/node/12653 which documents the disappearance of anything like substantive issue coverage behind the scrim of vice-presidential candidate personality stories... -----Added 8/9/2008 at 09 : 31 : 55----- here's another resource, geared around systemic critique of corporate media: medialens - correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media - corporate media issues __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 09-08-2008 at 05:31 AM.. Reason: Automerged Doublepost

09-08-2008, 08:52 AM	#5 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	derwood--sure--but for consistency's sake, see if you can locate a piece that tracks the history of it---something that assembles the funhouse mirror a bit. if you can find such.... =============== btw: a map of the news-scape, continually changing, nice layout: http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/ __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 09-08-2008 at 08:57 AM..

09-08-2008, 08:36 AM	#4 (permalink)
Derwood Who You Crappin? Location: Everywhere and Nowhere	would the warping of Reagan's policies count? the GOP props up The Gipper as the bastion of fiscally conservative ideals (low taxes, small government), while Reagan's actual record shows that he raised taxes on the upper class 6 times, etc.