Obama Press Conference

I am listening to Obama’s Press Conference right now. The first thing I notice is that I don’t immediately want to give him the finger. That was my first reaction whenever Bush appeared on television.

Unlike Bush, Obama sounds intelligent. He is a vast improvement in that regard.

I think that Obama is right when he says that what America needs right now is jobs. Government spending that may result in more Americans working is something I’m willing to give a chance. Bush’s way was simply a transfer of wealth to the richest Americans. The TARP program gave billions to the banks without much oversight. It wasn’t what I wanted to see, more money given to wealthy bankers. At least Obama seems to want to focus on regular working class Americans. They are the true backbone of this country, and it’s time the government stopped giving them the shaft.

A lot of people in the press haven’t changed, however. Many of them still sound like idiots.

"The paradox of a Rush Limbaugh"

From Bill Moyers is Insightful, Erudite, Impassioned, Brilliant and the Host of PBS' "NOW":

BUZZFLASH: Have we created a circumstance where we have little perspective beyond the most recent news cycle? The words of the White House on one morning, for instance, may be contradicted by events in the afternoon, but the news coverage rarely seems to bring any information or comments from the past to compare them to the unfolding news of the moment. It's almost as if news no longer has a historical context.

MOYERS: Down the memory hole, as George Orwell would describe it. And yes, it's all about stimulation now. Watching the opening of the second game of the World Series, I was struck at how effectively the Fox producers mixed patriotic imagery with prurient promotions for upcoming programming in what amounted to a sedation of the viewer's critical faculty. It's a fitting metaphor, I think, for what's happening in politics as the mainstream media have been silenced and the partisan media have turned propaganda into "news." Wave the flag, stroke the sentiments, stir the prejudices -- and you can keep the masses distracted from the real game happening out of sight, behind closed doors in boardrooms and oval offices.

BUZZFLASH: And what is that game?

MOYERS: Class war. The corporate right and the political right declared class war on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won. The rich are getting richer, which arguably wouldn't matter if the rising tide lifted all boats. But the inequality gap is the widest it's been since l929; the middle class is besieged and the working poor are barely keeping their heads above water. The corporate and governing elites are helping themselves to the spoils of victory -- politics, when all is said and done, comes down to who gets what and who pays for it -- while the public is distracted by the media circus and news has been neutered or politicized for partisan purposes.

Take the paradox of a Rush Limbaugh, ensconced in a Palm Beach mansion massaging the resentments across the country of white-knuckled wage earners, who are barely making ends meet in no small part because of the very policies of those corporate and ideological forces for whom Rush has been a hero. I recently came across an account of the tabloid era of British journalism in the late 1950s when the Daily Mirror, for one, presented itself as the champion of the working man, fearlessly speaking truth to power, when out of sight its gluttonous and egomaniacal chairman was demanding and extorting favors from frightened or like-minded politicians and generally helping himself to greater portions of privilege like any other press baron. It's the same story for Limbaugh, Murdoch and his minions, and the tycoons of the megamedia conglomerates. They helped create the new Gilded Age to whose largesse they have so generously helped themselves while throwing the populace off the trail with red meat served up in the guise of journalism.

As Eric Alterman reports in his recent book -- a book that I'm proud to have helped make happen -- part of that red meat strategy is to attack mainstream media relentlessly, knowing that if the press is effectively intimidated, either by the accusation of liberal bias or by a reporter's own mistaken belief in the charge's validity, the institutions that conservatives revere -- corporate America, the military, organized religion, and their own ideological bastions of influence -- will be able to escape scrutiny and increase their influence over American public life with relatively no challenge. Eric calls it "working the refs," and it's worked.

Nothing Sacred

From God's Word by Wendy Kaminer:

Whether the media lead or follow cultural trends, they rarely, if ever, challenge them. The mass media cover religious belief faithfully, in accordance with conventional wisdom about its virtues. Mark Silk, author of Unsecular Media, observes that print coverage of religion "tends to be softball" because "a lot of readers go to church" and, in general, "newspapers and newsweeklies are not in the business of offending their readers."

I'm not arguing that the media should make a practice of attacking religious beliefs as mindlessly as it promotes them, airing the invectives of militant atheists along with the pieties of believers. I am suggesting that "nothing sacred" is a good motto for critics and journalists. It doesn't imply cynicism or nihilism, but rather a purposeful skepticism--a willingness to interrogate our most passionate beliefs and assumptions. Religions exert immense social and political power; how can we abdicate our responsibility to critique them? Religions are collections of ideas about God, and ideas should be subject to hazing.

Unbalanced Unfairness

From Media complicit in making Wright look bad by Kenneth F. Bunting:

Barack Obama's forceful denunciation and disavowal of his former pastor doesn't change the fact that it is an irrelevant distraction entirely created by cable television pundits using out-of-context and skewed sound bites.

Moyers' illuminating interview with Wright didn't fit the narrative that portrays Wright as an unpatriotic hatemonger with outrageous views. Moyers played longer excerpts of the very same sermons of which the seconds-long snippets had been aired over and over.

Wright, responding in the Moyers interview in a conversational style, came across as a reasonable man, hurt by what he felt were unfair portrayals, but not immodest. He and Moyers talked about his scholarly influences and his impressive 36-year ministry at the Chicago church where he met Obama.

At the end of it, I wondered if the pundits who had been so obsessed with Wright and so determined to define him had watched it and how they would treat it. For the next 30 hours I flipped repeatedly between CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

Nothing. It was as if Wright's first extended interview hadn't taken place. Even on networks that had teased the Moyers interview repeatedly, using excerpts from the two-minutes of it that PBS had posted in advance on its Web site, there was no comment, no analysis, no report about what had been said in the interview.

Fair and balanced, indeed.

And the best that Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich can come up with is to call Bill Moyers names. How mature of them. Unlike them, Bill Moyers deserves our respect. He has earned it.

The Media's Flawed Coverage Of Iraq

From The Iraq Follies By Greg Mitchell:

Stephen Colbert's routine at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in April 2006 is remembered for the in-his-face mockery of President Bush—but he also spanked the press, perhaps one reason his mainstream reviews were mixed at best. Addressing the correspondents directly, Colbert said, "Let's review the rules. The president makes decisions; he's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell-check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know—fiction."

On Meet the Press in July 2007, David Brooks declared that 10,000 Iraqis a month would perish if the United States pulled out. Bob Woodward, also on the show, challenged him on this, asking for his source. Brooks admitted, "I just picked that 10,000 out of the air."