Time for media to update rolodexes

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.

General Zinni: Rumsfeld Should Resign

I don’t know how to feel about this… on the one hand here’s a highly decorated, knowledgeable and respected Marine general telling us what many of us that opposed Bush’s war of choice against Iraq knew from the get go, essentially: the Bush Administration lied the country into a strategic blunder in the Persian Gulf. But that’s not what am ambivalent about; instead, what I don’t quite get is, why didn’t the good general come forward before the start of the war? Of course, while I don’t know the exact answer to that question, I can guess at the myriad of reasons as to why general Zinni did not speak out before the start of the war — the conservative noise machine that vilified Bush Administration critics and, too, the Bush Administration itself, which was not shy about going after its critics. Just look at exhibit A: army general Shinseki, whom had the temerity to suggest that a US invasion force would require hundreds of thousands more troops than what the Bush Administration was saying it would need to control post-invasion Iraq. After general Shinseki publicly stated that the invasion force would need to be much larger than what the Bush White House was telling the American people, Bush’s conservative henchmen went after the general:

Hardly any of this the reached public domain until last month when Gen Shinseki told a congressional committee that he thought an occupying force in the hundreds of thousands would be required to police postwar Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld publicly repudiated him, saying he was "far off the mark".

In semi-private, the Pentagon’s civilian leadership was far more scathing. A "senior administration official" told the Village Voice newspaper that Gen Shinseki’s remark was "bullshit from a Clintonite enamoured of using the army for peacekeeping and not winning wars".

Then the general said it again. "It could be as high as several hundred thousand," he told another committee. "We all hope it is something less." Most of the media were too distracted by the build-up to war to notice. Serious analysts, however, were staggered by the insubordination.

This appears to have been round two of another, more immediately relevant, dispute about how many troops are needed to win this war. In this case, the military prevailed over the original civilian notion that fewer than 100,000 could do it. As even more soldiers rush to the Gulf to bring the number closer to 300,000, the original Rumsfeld plan looks in hindsight to be what the army said at the time: a recipe for possible catastrophe.

The full reality on the ground may not become known until Saddam Hussein has fallen, but no one can now seriously believe – as many top Pentagon civilians appear to have done a week ago – that the main problem for an occupying force will be what to do with all the floral gifts.

I’m sure that with the above as backdrop, general Zinni was reluctant to speak out against the march towards war; however, now we see that general Shinseki was prescient in his estimate and has not been fully vindicated; while the Bush White House and its supporters have been proven to be utter fools.

It’s no wonder how now general Zinni can demand Rumsfeld resignation without hesitation — I would go a step further, the entire Bush Administration should resign. Every. Single. Last. One. Of. The. Fools!

Story Behind Bush Memos

Oh man, this is just too easy — now let’s just see if the so-called liberal media exposes the blatant bias of the originating source behind the “forgery” story.

First, a little background on the Republican Noise Machine, here’s how it works:

1. Talk radio is dominated by conservatives, which is where many of these stories originate. Accordingly, they give some buzz to whatever story they want to play up that day.

2. A network of quasi-news organizations (including right-wing blogs) provide some ink, to put some meat on the story and get things boiling.

3. Cable Network talking heads (i.e., Hardball, O’Rielly Factor, Sean Hannity, Scarborough, Miller, et al.) then pick up the story, once there’s enough buzz behind the story.

4. At this point the mainstream media is forced to run the story, since by now the item is “newsworthy.”

Of course, the so-called liberal media are just a bunch of fucking wimps that are just scared shitless of being labeled “liberal,” so they never expose the tactical conservative dominance of our media industry. Anyhow, I seriously doubt that I can convince many of this (as you know what you know, and are not about to change your mind); however, I just wanted to offer this backgrounder before getting into the suspicious facts behind the source of this story.

1. CNSNews.com runs story [ link ]:

2. Matt Drudge posts a link to the story on his site (note that the DrudgeReport.com website is one of the most widely visited websites on the web):

3. I presume that this story has been getting a lot of airtime in the talking heads circuit (I’ve not tuned in to cable news today, but the model is pretty solid, so I assume that the talking heads have had a field day with this story).

4. At this point the mainstream media (a.k.a., the so-called liberal media) has to pick up the story, since it’s “newsworthy.”

Now, here’s some suspicious info on the source behind this story:

1. CNSNews.com is run and operated by the Media Research Center:

[ Who Is link may not work as its session specific. ]

2. The mission statement of the Media Research Center (MRC) reads:

“On October 1, 1987, a group of young determined conservatives set out to not only prove – through sound scientific research – that liberal bias in the media does exist and undermines traditional American values, but also to neutralize its impact on the American political scene. What they launched that fall is the now acclaimed — Media Research Center (MRC).”

And:

“That moved MRC founder and president, L. Brent Bozell III, to take the necessary steps to develop the MRC’s News Tracking System (NTS), a custom-designed computer database and archiving system that today provides the conservative movement’s now-thriving media personalities and the public alike, with the evidence necessary to confront the liberal media. This one-of-a-kind research operation combines analytical savvy with state-of-the-art computer technology, providing the means to scientifically track the short and long-range trends of any issue in the media. From a $339,000 initial annual budget, the MRC has grown to be the nation’s largest and most sophisticated television and monitoring operation, now employing 60 professional staff with a $6 million annual budget.” [ link ]

3. Moreover, the MRC offers the Drudge Report as one of their trusted sources for information [link]:

Now, many will simply say, Yeah, we gotta stick it to the liberal media, and that’s just what MRC is doing. Well, that rationalization may be sufficient for many, but to me it simply proves the validity of the Republican Noise Machine model and how, in fact, the media is dominated by a strong conservative tactical bias.

As David Brock, author of the Republican Noise Machine noted (and I paraphrase), It’s not important that Republicans get the facts right, it’s only important that they throw up enough mud to cloud the truth.

Now, let’s just see if the so-called liberal media covers this part of the story.

Republican Noise Machine at Work

Looks like the Republican Noise Machine is already well at work!

The Matt Drudge Report is running a story that alleges that the memos questioning Bush’s National Guard service are forgeries. The Weekly Standard, a well known Republican tool of misinformation runs a similar story:

“[T]he apostrophes are curlicues of the sort produced by word processors on personal computers, not the straight vertical hashmarks typical of typewriters. Finally, in some references to Bush’s unit–the 111thFighter Interceptor Squadron–the “th” is a superscript in a smaller size than the other type. Again, this is typical (and often done automatically) in modern word processing programs. Although several experts allow that such a rendering might have been theoretically possible in the early 1970s, it would have been highly unlikely. Superscripts produced on typewriters–the numbers preceding footnotes in term papers, for example–were almost always in the same size as the regular type.” [ link to Weekly Standard story ]

As the author of the Republican Noise Machine notes in his book, and I paraphrase, it’s not important that Republicans get the facts right, it’s only important that they throw up enough mud to cloud the truth.