February 16th, 2009
“Do you approve or disapprove of the job the Republican leaders in Congress are doing?”
51% disapprove
Pew Research Center Poll. Feb. 4-8, 2009.
N=1,303 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3
Josh Marshall, over at TalkingPointsMemo.com, captures something that I’ve given a couple of thoughts this past week. Understandably, if you watched the coverage over the stimulus bill you probably thought that president Obama was out of sync with Americans and that republicans, somehow, were now representative of public opinion. Of course, you would’ve been utterly and 110% wrong; however, according to the mainstream establishment media, especially cable news, republicans were gaining traction with their message of opposition against the stimulus bill and, thereby, against president Obama.
More importantly, however, than where the media thinks the momentum lies in the back-and-forth of a debate, the arguments or frames that the media decide to present to the public regarding policy do, in fact, influence public opinion. And, by this standard, the establishment media, given the last 25 years of conservative dominance of Washington, D.C., is simply predisposed hardwired to be more accommodating to the republican propaganda arm message machine. Washington, D.C., is a town that remains dominated by a conservative infrastructure composed of think thanks, media consultants, corporate lobbyists that are fundamentally attuned to the conservative ideology, and, therefore, composed of media producers with rolodexes filled with the numbers and contact information of conservative spokespersons ready to provide a quote, or to appear on-camera.
ThinkProgress.org ran the numbers and, as suspected, these illustrate that establishment media is dominated 2-to-1 by republican spokespersons, which is why consumers of establishment media may have thought that republicans were up and that president Obama was down in the court of public opinion:
As Media Matters has documented, during the Bush administration, the media consistently allowed conservatives to dominate their shows, booking them as guests far more often than progressives. The rationale was that Republicans were “in power.”
It appears that old habits die hard. Even though President Obama and his team are in control of the executive branch and Democrats are in the majority in Congress, the cable networks are still turning more often to Republicans and allowing them to set the agenda on major issues, most recently on the debate over the economic recovery package.
[...]
In total, from 6 AM on Monday to 4 PM on Wednesday, the networks have hosted Republican lawmakers 51 times and Democratic lawmakers only 26 times. Surprisingly, Fox News came the closest to offering balance, hosting 8 Republicans and 6 Democrats. CNN had only two Democrats compared to 7 Republicans.
As Josh Marshall points out, there seems to be a big disconnect between the establishment media in Washington, D.C., and the rest of America:
“It’s eerie — I read the news from the Beltway, and there’s this disconnect with the polls from the Midwest that I see all around me.”
That’s from Ann Selzer, the Iowa pollster who’s an expert on public opinion throughout the midwest, as quoted by Ben Smith.
It really is the big story of the first weeks of the Obama administration. In Washington, it was a battle royale between the new president and an emboldened Republican minority. At times they seemed to have him on the ropes. And yet in the country at large, Obama remains super popular. And the GOP is wildly unpopular.
[...]
The city remains wired for the GOP. Not that it’s done them a great deal of good of late. But it remains a key part of understanding every part of what is happening today.
If the dynamic described above is true, and I believe that it is, it may take a while before the mainstream establishment media starts reflecting the shift in the balance of power that has come about in the country, given how unlikely it is that news producers and editors will empty out their trusty rolodexes.
May 28th, 2008
A lot has been written about Scott McClellan’s — the Bush loyalist and former White House spokesperson — tell all book. Of course, conservative apologists and Bush supporters are already gunning for their former colleague. Bush apologists don’t particular like this claim by the former White House spokesperson:
“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.
“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”
Writing in The Corner, a blog from the conservative National Review magazine, Seth Leibsohn takes issue with McClellan’s claim:
The evidence I’ve seen does in fact show that the administration had different justifications for the liberation of Iraq — but we saw them plainly and in the open before as well as after the invasion. The president, the secretary of state, the VP, and many others gave lots of reasons for the invasion of Iraq. There were international legal cases, there were public policy cases, there were national security cases all to be made. And they were. The idea that the press didn’t do its job and was too soft on the president — as McClellan writes — is, frankly, laughable. Raise your hand if you have any evidence that the press was too soft on the administration.
Conservatives have long labored to caricature the press as liberal — which has served conservatives well, as they use this now conventional wisdom as bludgeon against submissive journalists if they don’t parrot conservative memes and talking points. Therefore, conservatives are not about to concede that, if anything, during the run up to the war, the media did as they were expected: they unquestionably parroted the Bush administration’s talking points, and claims about the threat that Iraq posed to our national security.
David Kurtz, over at TPM media, will be taking Seth’s challenge. However, I here offer Judith Miller and the New York Times subsequen apology as exhibits A and B, in response to Seth.
March 21st, 2007
Here’s enough reason for Democrats not to trust Fox News, and to correctly describe it as an extension of the republican party:
Journalists strive to report the news, not to be the news. So Fox News should have been a bit embarrassed to headline a story that ended with the Nevada Democratic Party canceling Fox’s sponsorship of a pre-caucus debate.
Then again, Fox is not a typical news organization. [...] Fox’s prime commitment is to the triumph of conservative politics, not to a well-informed public. From hiring hosts to selecting stories to framing questions for discussion, Fox demonstrates its dedication to advancing the ideological interests of the right.
As former Fox reporter/anchor Jon Du Pre put it in the documentary “Outfoxed,” “We weren’t necessarily, as it was told to us, a newsgathering organization so much as we were a proponent of a point of view … we were there to reinforce a constituency.”
[...]
What evidence, forged or otherwise, did Fox rely on in asserting that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) attended a Muslim madrassah? If CNN could go to the school and give the lie to the report, why couldn’t Fox? What outside panel was empowered to investigate how Fox could have aired such an outrageously inaccurate report? Who was fired for the inflammatory falsehoods?
A study by a University of Maryland center concluded, “Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions” about Iraq. For example, in 2003, 67 percent of those who relied primarily on Fox wrongly believed the U.S. “found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al Qaeda terrorist organization.” Only 40 percent of those who relied on print media harbored this illusion, debunked thoroughly by the 9/11 Commission.
Instead of providing “fair and balanced” reporting, Fox has created an audience ignorant of the facts, but fully supportive of management’s ideology.
An audience that decides for itself, based on “fair and balanced” coverage, ought not to reach monolithic conclusions. Yet, in our 2004 polling with Media Vote, using Nielsen diaries, we found that Fox News viewers supported George Bush over John Kerry by 88 percent to 7 percent. No demographic segment, other than Republicans, was as united in supporting Bush. Conservatives, white evangelical Christians, gun owners, and supporters of the Iraq war all gave Bush fewer votes than did regular Fox News viewers.
March 15th, 2007
Not surprisingly media watchdog groups find that the elite news media continues to favor the conservative view point, often allowing conservative voices to dominate the public airwaves:
OUR KEY FINDINGS:
- Despite previous network claims that a conservative advantage existed on the Sunday shows simply because Republicans controlled Congress and the White House, only one show, ABC’s This Week, has been roughly balanced between both sides overall since the congressional majority switched hands in the 2006 midterm elections.
- Since the 2006 midterm elections, NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’ Face the Nation have provided less balance between Republican and Democratic officials than Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday despite the fact that Fox News Sunday remains the most unbalanced broadcast overall both before and after the election.
- During the 109th Congress (2005 and 2006), Republicans and conservatives held the advantage on every show, in every category measured. All four shows interviewed more Republicans and conservatives than Democrats and progressives overall, interviewed more Republican elected and administration officials than Democratic officials, hosted more conservative journalists than progressive journalists, held more panels that tilted right than tilted left, and gave more solo interviews to Republicans and conservatives.
Now that Congress has switched hands, one would reasonably expect Democrats and progressives to be represented at least as often as Republicans and conservatives on the Sunday shows. Yet our findings for the months since the midterm elections show that the networks have barely changed their practices.
March 15th, 2007
This is an important point at the center of the brouhaha over the republican partisan nature of Faux News:
[T]he money people are noticing the animosity against Fox News, and realizing that the Fox News brand isn’t necessarily something their clients should want to be associated with.
The corporate world is cautious about politics, and they don’t like to get in the middle of political spats. They prefer their politics quiet and out of site. It’s probably just better for them to put their ads on CNN and MSNBC, and leave Fox News for the penis pills and the like.
