Over at Newsbusters earlier this week, Scott Whitlock, the MRC's "senior news analyst," slammed ABC News' World News Tonight
for having "hid[den] the identity of a global warming activist." The
gripe was that the network had shown a clip of climatologist Heidi
Cullen talking about climate change without noting Cullen's connection
to Climate Central, an advocacy group. Whitlock apparently couldn't be
bothered to actually watch the broadcast he was purportedly
critiquing--in the broadcast that occurred in the real world, the name
of Cullen's group appeared in huge letters beside her face as she spoke.
Zachary Pleat, over at Media Matters, appropriately scolded Whitlock for this embarrassing error and Whitlock subsequently issued a semi-correction.
What no one appears to have noted about the incident (except, of course, this writer, in a comment on Pleat's article) is that, while the MRC
"senior news analyst" was bashing a network for quoting a climatologist
on climate change without noting her "advocacy" on the issue--very
dubious as a sin, even if it actually had happened--he, himself, had
declined to disclose the fact that his own organization has taken
hundreds of thousands of dollars from Big Oil, in an article in which
he's writing about one of Big Oil's pet causes. As I wrote last month, Big Oil finances the climate change denial industry, of which the MRC is a part.
Whitlock's behavior in concealing this isn't aberrant; it's standard
operating procedure at the MRC. The Center's gang of regulars constantly
churn out articles that parrot Big Oil propaganda on issues like climate change, gas prices, and domestic drilling, yet, as far as I've been able to determine, not one of these articles has ever disclosed these contributions.
--j.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
More on Phony Balance, the Phony Crisis & the Phony Study
Yesterday, liberal columnist Paul Krugman returned to his theme of the perils of false "balance" in the press,
particularly in coverage of the current debt "crisis," where, in the
name of "balance," news reports have repeatedly presented both the
Democrats and the Republicans as being at fault for a problem that is, in
fact, entirely the fault of the Republicans:
It seems at least part of this misrepresentation--put more bluntly, a direct and blatant lie--is, like so many others, official policy over at Newsbusters: Krugman's latest remarks on the subject have drawn another retort from one of the Media Research Center's muck-merchants, one that repeats the lie. This time, it's from Scott Whitlock, MRC senior news analyst. In Whitlock's telling Krugman "urges more bias" in the press, and is "complaining about too much fairness."
Like Sheppard, Whitlock tries to refute Krugman's characterization of press coverage of the debt ceiling by referencing a phony MRC "study" on the subject and like Sheppard, he misrepresents that "study":
Even if one accepts it on its own terms, however--and that includes pretending as if it exists--it neither refutes Krugman's analysis of the press coverage nor supports Whitlock's assertions about it. Krugman's complaint is that too many press reports are portraying both sides as "equally intransigent." The "study" merely asserts that press reports are blaming Republicans more than Democrats, adding up attributions of blame within a report and grading who was the target of the most such attributions. That doesn't even address Krugman's point, much less refute it. Whitlock's claim that the "study" shows that "only 20 percent [of press reports] found the Democrats at fault" is a misrepresentation--the actual finding was that only 20% of reports were judged to have blamed Democrats more than Republicans. Whitlock's assertion that the "study" shows that "journalists have not made an effort to be 'centrist'" is, likewise, false: of 202 stories about the debt ceiling mess, 56% were judged, by the authors, as assigning no blame at all to either side (their "conclusions" were based on only 44% of the initial sample). That, alone, is enough to falsify Whitlock's claim on its own terms.
But one can play with the offered numbers in an entertaining way: when that big, discarded sample is included, over 73% of the news stories examined were judged to blame no one, to mostly blame Democrats, or to blame both sides equally--146 out of 202 stories are judged by the authors as not mainly blaming Republicans for a problem that is, as I wrote in that earlier blog, 100% the fault of the Republicans.
And that's if one grants the absurd, subjective judgments of the "study" any merit (and that it hasn't any is rather painfully evident). Not only is the MRC gang unable to manufacture a phony study that convincingly poses as a real one, they can't even properly represent the findings of the one they do cull together. One could almost feel sorry for them, if they weren't such bastards.
--j.
"Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. As you may know, President Obama initially tried to strike a 'Grand Bargain' with Republicans over taxes and spending. To do so, he not only chose not to make an issue of G.O.P. extortion, he offered extraordinary concessions on Democratic priorities: an increase in the age of Medicare eligibility, sharp spending cuts and only small revenue increases. As The [New York] Times’s Nate Silver pointed out, Mr. Obama effectively staked out a position that was not only far to the right of the average voter’s preferences, it was if anything a bit to the right of the average Republican voter’s preferences.Krugman sees the obvious problem with this:
"But Republicans rejected the deal. So what was the headline on an Associated Press analysis of that breakdown in negotiations? 'Obama, Republicans Trapped by Inflexible Rhetoric.' A Democratic president who bends over backward to accommodate the other side--or, if you prefer, who leans so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling over--is treated as being just the same as his utterly intransigent opponents. Balance!"
"...this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault."Krugman had written about this same problem earlier this week and his comments drew a typically stupid retort from Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard, who completely misrepresented them as a condemnation of a balanced press and even as a call to censor conservative views about the debt "crisis."
It seems at least part of this misrepresentation--put more bluntly, a direct and blatant lie--is, like so many others, official policy over at Newsbusters: Krugman's latest remarks on the subject have drawn another retort from one of the Media Research Center's muck-merchants, one that repeats the lie. This time, it's from Scott Whitlock, MRC senior news analyst. In Whitlock's telling Krugman "urges more bias" in the press, and is "complaining about too much fairness."
Like Sheppard, Whitlock tries to refute Krugman's characterization of press coverage of the debt ceiling by referencing a phony MRC "study" on the subject and like Sheppard, he misrepresents that "study":
"In fact, as a July 26 Media Research Center report found, journalists have not made an effort to be 'centrist.' The MRC found that 66 percent of network stories mainly blamed the Republicans for the debt ceiling impasse. Only 20 percent found the Democrats at fault."This writer slashed that "study" into bloody, quivering sausages Wednesday when Sheppard first pulled it out of his hat; in brief, it's a phony bit of ill-conceived propaganda in the worst sense of that word, entirely dependent for its conclusions on wholly subjective judgments that are, to the extent that people are allowed to read them, demonstrably absurd.
Even if one accepts it on its own terms, however--and that includes pretending as if it exists--it neither refutes Krugman's analysis of the press coverage nor supports Whitlock's assertions about it. Krugman's complaint is that too many press reports are portraying both sides as "equally intransigent." The "study" merely asserts that press reports are blaming Republicans more than Democrats, adding up attributions of blame within a report and grading who was the target of the most such attributions. That doesn't even address Krugman's point, much less refute it. Whitlock's claim that the "study" shows that "only 20 percent [of press reports] found the Democrats at fault" is a misrepresentation--the actual finding was that only 20% of reports were judged to have blamed Democrats more than Republicans. Whitlock's assertion that the "study" shows that "journalists have not made an effort to be 'centrist'" is, likewise, false: of 202 stories about the debt ceiling mess, 56% were judged, by the authors, as assigning no blame at all to either side (their "conclusions" were based on only 44% of the initial sample). That, alone, is enough to falsify Whitlock's claim on its own terms.
But one can play with the offered numbers in an entertaining way: when that big, discarded sample is included, over 73% of the news stories examined were judged to blame no one, to mostly blame Democrats, or to blame both sides equally--146 out of 202 stories are judged by the authors as not mainly blaming Republicans for a problem that is, as I wrote in that earlier blog, 100% the fault of the Republicans.
And that's if one grants the absurd, subjective judgments of the "study" any merit (and that it hasn't any is rather painfully evident). Not only is the MRC gang unable to manufacture a phony study that convincingly poses as a real one, they can't even properly represent the findings of the one they do cull together. One could almost feel sorry for them, if they weren't such bastards.
--j.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Phony Balance, A Phony Crisis & A Phony Study
The current debt ceiling "crisis" has thrown a spotlight on a
particularly damnable practice of the corporate press, the elevation of
"balance" over accuracy. Columnist Paul Krugman issued an appropriately impassioned complaint about this yesterday:
Over at Newsbusters, associate editor Noel Sheppard isn't about to touch the merits of that argument. He offers, instead, a fanciful strawman "interpretation" of it as a condemnation by Krugman of "balance and centrism," a call to "censor conservative views about the debt ceiling," an insistence that "the news media... only report the side he [Krugman] agrees with." Sheppard is both a profoundly stupid man and a chronically deceitful one--I leave it to the reader to judge which of these defects are at play here.
Sheppard seeks to refute Krugman by arguing that, actually, the big three network newscasts "have consistently cast the GOP as the villains in this debate" and he has a new study to cite that shows it. Except it turns out to be just another phony "study" by his Media Research Center of the kind the MRC is notorious for grinding out and it neither refutes Krugman nor backs Sheppard's characterization of it.
The MRC's "About" page asserts that the organization aims to prove the liberal bias of the press "through sound scientific research." It mentions science a few times, actually. Makes them sound serious. In practice, the MRC gang treats "sound scientific research" as some sort of liberal trick and steers well clear of it. Their standard game, when it comes to assembling a "study," is to invent some ridiculous, phony, completely subjective standard, one they engineer specifically for the purpose of having the press fall short of it, then collect all the examples of the press falling short of it and report these as "findings." The aim is partisan distortion and obfuscation.
In the present case, there apparently isn't even any actual "study" readers can see and to which I can link. Instead, the MRC analysts' results are recorded in this column by MRC Deputy Research Director Geoffrey Dickens. But even if we humor the conceit that there is some sort of "study" here, the information about it we're given is sufficient to place it in that dismal tradition of MRC 'studies." As Dickens tells it, analysts looked at every story about the debt ceiling from the three networks' morning and evening programs from 1 July 1 to 22 July. He reports their methodology thusly:
And to be crystal clear, when it comes to the matter of the debt ceiling, Republicans are solely and entirely responsible for making it a "crisis" and keeping it one. Not just partially responsible or even mostly responsible. 100% responsible.
Raising the debt ceiling is a routine housekeeping matter for the government.[1] Failure to do so, however, would result in a disastrous default and because of this, Republicans, primarily those in the House of Representatives, have attempted to use it for blackmail, refusing to support any effort to raise the ceiling unless they're granted extraordinary budgetary concessions, concessions they wouldn't be able to get under the normal budget process. In their insistence on linking the current debt ceiling to the future budget process,[2] they assumed full responsibility for the present situation. The "crisis" is their arbitrary creation and they can end it at any moment, merely by passing a single sheet of paper containing a single sentence that alters a single number.
Obama and congressional Democrats chose, very unwisely, to negotiate with the hostage-takers and have offered up to the Republicans deep spending cuts, including cuts in "entitlement" programs, but because Obama's plan also involved some increased revenue from Big Money, Republican House speaker John Boehner abandoned the negotiations (while, in the Bizarro world of the nut right, the far-right press has loudly, repeatedly and falsely asserted the Obama has offered Republicans nothing). Democrats hold the White House and the majority in the Senate and the cuts offered by Obama are absolutely anathema to the Democratic base and to the overwhelming majority of the public as well, yet they were still offered as part of a compromise. As Peter Hart put it over on the FAIR blog yesterday, "by any reasonable standard, the White House and the Democratic leadership have made an array of drastic compromises in order to win favor with Republicans." The only reason there isn't a deal is that Republicans have been unwilling to compromise on anything on their end. They control one part of one house of congress but are demanding a capitulation by everyone else so complete that they've walked away from proposals so heavily stacked in their favor that even offering them could spell political doom for Obama. Again, the Republicans are entirely responsible for the lack of a deal.
So when the MRC gange comes along and does their little "study" and pretends as if a "balanced" report on the matter must equally blame both sides, they're shoveling the same rancid fecal matter they always have.
And there's even more stink on it.
The Dickens article asserts that, of the stories that assigned blame to someone for the current crisis, "the skew was lopsidedly anti-Republican," with 66% of stories "mainly assigning them the blame for the impasse," while 20% suggested Democrats "bore more responsibility" and 14% were "balanced."
Given that Republicans are demonstrably 100% responsible for the current mess, it would, indeed, be a scandal if 34% of press stories either blamed Democrats more or blamed both sides equally but there's no reason to believe these results bear any relationship to reality.
Relevant to Sheppard's attempt to use these results against Krugman is the fact that MRC isn't dividing reports that blame both sides from those that blame only one side. Those who carried out the "study" are, instead, dividing the reports into categories based on their subjective judgment of which side a report blames more than the other. A subjective judgment of a subjective judgment by people who are demonstrably incapable of rendering sound objective judgments.
If the MRC's long history doesn't sufficiently make that last point apparent, the few examples cited by the article as representative of an anti-Republican slant do the trick. Amy Robach and Ann Curry from the Today Show questioned whether Republicans were wasting time or putting on a show for their constituents by insisting on debating proposals everyone acknowledged had no chance of passing. Merely by asking what seem like glaringly obvious questions, they were both judged to be blaming Republicans. CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes was judged as blaming Republicans based on a story in which she reported on Democratic complaints about House majority leader Eric Cantor, even though she asserted in that report that Cantor was being made a "fall guy" by the Democrats. Most hilariously, ABC News' Jake Tapper is said to have "used the words of former Republican Senator Alan Simpson to shame the GOP." Simpson is, of course, a very conservative fellow, a die-hard Republican and a hyper-partisan to the point of rather extreme obnoxiousness but a report was judged as "blaming Republicans" because it included his views. And so on.
If that sort of grasping at straws doesn't do it for you, this next part will be a treat.
The MRC threw out most of its initial sample. About 56% of it. While the "study" encompassed 202 stories, MRC's conclusions are based on only 85--always a huge warning sign. 56% of reports were judged as assigning no blame at all and even if we embarked upon the fool's errand of accepting these demonstrably flawed subjective judgments, this is hardly the mark of a press corps dedicated to blaming Republicans. That number alone is enough to put the lie to Sheppard's claim that the "study" shows the press has "consistently cast the GOP as the villains in this debate." If we accept the "study," the press hasn't consistently cast anyone as the villain.
With what does this leave us? A manufactured political "crisis,"[3] a "media watchdog" that acts as propagandists for those responsible for it and a press corps that does things like this and faces only the complaints of lefty bloggers for it as it threatens to mislead the nation over a cliff.
Joy!
--j.
---
[1] During the Bush Jr. administration, it was raised 7 times.
[2] Raising the debt ceiling doesn't involve new spending; it merely allows the government to cover the spending congress has already authorized, a fact that, notably, is barely mentioned in press coverage.
[3] Albeit one that is a manifestation of a real political crisis--the behavior of the Republican party.
"Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating--offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.Krugman argues that the press and pundits need to "break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault" in this matter because holding to it amounts to affirmatively misleading the public.
"So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent--because news reports always do that."
Over at Newsbusters, associate editor Noel Sheppard isn't about to touch the merits of that argument. He offers, instead, a fanciful strawman "interpretation" of it as a condemnation by Krugman of "balance and centrism," a call to "censor conservative views about the debt ceiling," an insistence that "the news media... only report the side he [Krugman] agrees with." Sheppard is both a profoundly stupid man and a chronically deceitful one--I leave it to the reader to judge which of these defects are at play here.
Sheppard seeks to refute Krugman by arguing that, actually, the big three network newscasts "have consistently cast the GOP as the villains in this debate" and he has a new study to cite that shows it. Except it turns out to be just another phony "study" by his Media Research Center of the kind the MRC is notorious for grinding out and it neither refutes Krugman nor backs Sheppard's characterization of it.
The MRC's "About" page asserts that the organization aims to prove the liberal bias of the press "through sound scientific research." It mentions science a few times, actually. Makes them sound serious. In practice, the MRC gang treats "sound scientific research" as some sort of liberal trick and steers well clear of it. Their standard game, when it comes to assembling a "study," is to invent some ridiculous, phony, completely subjective standard, one they engineer specifically for the purpose of having the press fall short of it, then collect all the examples of the press falling short of it and report these as "findings." The aim is partisan distortion and obfuscation.
In the present case, there apparently isn't even any actual "study" readers can see and to which I can link. Instead, the MRC analysts' results are recorded in this column by MRC Deputy Research Director Geoffrey Dickens. But even if we humor the conceit that there is some sort of "study" here, the information about it we're given is sufficient to place it in that dismal tradition of MRC 'studies." As Dickens tells it, analysts looked at every story about the debt ceiling from the three networks' morning and evening programs from 1 July 1 to 22 July. He reports their methodology thusly:
"Analysts reviewed each story, then tallied all reporter statements and soundbites which clearly assigned responsibility to Republicans or Democrats. If the majority of statements within that story assigned blame to one party or the other, it was scored as 'blaming Republicans' or 'blaming Democrats.' If the story contained a balanced number of statements, it was recorded as 'balanced.'"While Sheppard used the results generated by this methodology to refute Krugman, a glaringly obvious hole in it--more like a gaping chasm--is the very one Krugman identified; the assumption that both sides are to blame for the current situation. If they aren't, then the reports the "study" identifies as "balanced" are, in fact, a complete misrepresentation of reality, not "balanced" at all.
And to be crystal clear, when it comes to the matter of the debt ceiling, Republicans are solely and entirely responsible for making it a "crisis" and keeping it one. Not just partially responsible or even mostly responsible. 100% responsible.
Raising the debt ceiling is a routine housekeeping matter for the government.[1] Failure to do so, however, would result in a disastrous default and because of this, Republicans, primarily those in the House of Representatives, have attempted to use it for blackmail, refusing to support any effort to raise the ceiling unless they're granted extraordinary budgetary concessions, concessions they wouldn't be able to get under the normal budget process. In their insistence on linking the current debt ceiling to the future budget process,[2] they assumed full responsibility for the present situation. The "crisis" is their arbitrary creation and they can end it at any moment, merely by passing a single sheet of paper containing a single sentence that alters a single number.
Obama and congressional Democrats chose, very unwisely, to negotiate with the hostage-takers and have offered up to the Republicans deep spending cuts, including cuts in "entitlement" programs, but because Obama's plan also involved some increased revenue from Big Money, Republican House speaker John Boehner abandoned the negotiations (while, in the Bizarro world of the nut right, the far-right press has loudly, repeatedly and falsely asserted the Obama has offered Republicans nothing). Democrats hold the White House and the majority in the Senate and the cuts offered by Obama are absolutely anathema to the Democratic base and to the overwhelming majority of the public as well, yet they were still offered as part of a compromise. As Peter Hart put it over on the FAIR blog yesterday, "by any reasonable standard, the White House and the Democratic leadership have made an array of drastic compromises in order to win favor with Republicans." The only reason there isn't a deal is that Republicans have been unwilling to compromise on anything on their end. They control one part of one house of congress but are demanding a capitulation by everyone else so complete that they've walked away from proposals so heavily stacked in their favor that even offering them could spell political doom for Obama. Again, the Republicans are entirely responsible for the lack of a deal.
So when the MRC gange comes along and does their little "study" and pretends as if a "balanced" report on the matter must equally blame both sides, they're shoveling the same rancid fecal matter they always have.
And there's even more stink on it.
The Dickens article asserts that, of the stories that assigned blame to someone for the current crisis, "the skew was lopsidedly anti-Republican," with 66% of stories "mainly assigning them the blame for the impasse," while 20% suggested Democrats "bore more responsibility" and 14% were "balanced."
Given that Republicans are demonstrably 100% responsible for the current mess, it would, indeed, be a scandal if 34% of press stories either blamed Democrats more or blamed both sides equally but there's no reason to believe these results bear any relationship to reality.
Relevant to Sheppard's attempt to use these results against Krugman is the fact that MRC isn't dividing reports that blame both sides from those that blame only one side. Those who carried out the "study" are, instead, dividing the reports into categories based on their subjective judgment of which side a report blames more than the other. A subjective judgment of a subjective judgment by people who are demonstrably incapable of rendering sound objective judgments.
If the MRC's long history doesn't sufficiently make that last point apparent, the few examples cited by the article as representative of an anti-Republican slant do the trick. Amy Robach and Ann Curry from the Today Show questioned whether Republicans were wasting time or putting on a show for their constituents by insisting on debating proposals everyone acknowledged had no chance of passing. Merely by asking what seem like glaringly obvious questions, they were both judged to be blaming Republicans. CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes was judged as blaming Republicans based on a story in which she reported on Democratic complaints about House majority leader Eric Cantor, even though she asserted in that report that Cantor was being made a "fall guy" by the Democrats. Most hilariously, ABC News' Jake Tapper is said to have "used the words of former Republican Senator Alan Simpson to shame the GOP." Simpson is, of course, a very conservative fellow, a die-hard Republican and a hyper-partisan to the point of rather extreme obnoxiousness but a report was judged as "blaming Republicans" because it included his views. And so on.
If that sort of grasping at straws doesn't do it for you, this next part will be a treat.
The MRC threw out most of its initial sample. About 56% of it. While the "study" encompassed 202 stories, MRC's conclusions are based on only 85--always a huge warning sign. 56% of reports were judged as assigning no blame at all and even if we embarked upon the fool's errand of accepting these demonstrably flawed subjective judgments, this is hardly the mark of a press corps dedicated to blaming Republicans. That number alone is enough to put the lie to Sheppard's claim that the "study" shows the press has "consistently cast the GOP as the villains in this debate." If we accept the "study," the press hasn't consistently cast anyone as the villain.
With what does this leave us? A manufactured political "crisis,"[3] a "media watchdog" that acts as propagandists for those responsible for it and a press corps that does things like this and faces only the complaints of lefty bloggers for it as it threatens to mislead the nation over a cliff.
Joy!
--j.
---
[1] During the Bush Jr. administration, it was raised 7 times.
[2] Raising the debt ceiling doesn't involve new spending; it merely allows the government to cover the spending congress has already authorized, a fact that, notably, is barely mentioned in press coverage.
[3] Albeit one that is a manifestation of a real political crisis--the behavior of the Republican party.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Newsbusters & Me, Part 3
The Media Research Center describes its mission as being to "prove" a
"strident liberal bias" exists within the national news media--one that
"undermines traditional American values"--and to "neutralize" the impact
of this bias on American politics. In brief,
"The mission of the Media Research Center is to bring balance and responsibility to the news media."
At some point in the recent past, this was somewhat altered. The ranting about "strident liberal bias" and the rest was left in place but the current version of that "in brief" sentence reads:
"As 'America's Media Watchdog,' the MRC seeks to bring balance to the news media."
A wave of the flag, while all talk of "responsibility" is dropped, and it would be impossible not to note the obvious symbolism. It isn't that the MRC has changed from a more to a less noble mission--they never had any sort of noble mission in the first place. It's that, by dropping the pretense of "responsibility" while waving the flag, they're being a little more honest. But just a little.
The way the MRC gang goes about trying to bring "balance" to the news media is to complain about the fact that any views with which they disagree are given any time at all in the news media. The MRC dubs, as "liberal," just about anyone who offers any view that can in any way be interpreted as out-of-sync with the far right (as they define the far right, which they represent as simply "conservatism"). Of the articles that appear on the Center's Newsbusters blog, a large portion are devoted to simply complaining about the fact that someone somewhere offered a "liberal" (as they use the word) point of view, the implication being that this shouldn't happen.[1]
Today, for example, Bob Schieffer, the host of CBS News' Face the Nation, asked a pair of senators why, with the looming matter of the debt ceiling yet unresolved, the Senate is going to waste time debating a balanced budget amendment that everyone, on all sides, knows has no chance of passing. This drew a complaint from Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard. Though Sheppard suggests, in his closing sentence, that Schieffer was somehow poorly informing the public about the measure, he offers nothing to support that. Rather, his objection in the article is simply that Schieffer quite reasonably called into question the wisdom of setting aside a much more pressing matter in order to have a futile debate on a measure that, while apparently beloved by Sheppard, has no chance of passing.
Sheppard offered another example of this today as well. On "The Chris Matthews Show," the host asked a panel of journalists, "of the Republicans running for president, which one offers the best chance of becoming a great president?" None of the panelists picked one. Sheppard didn't like that. Mainstream journalists, operating in a profession that puts a premium on "objectivity," always tend to be non-committal on such questions and three of the four panelists simply dodged it.[2] Sheppard, of course, presents their failure to endorse as potentially great any of the candidates as evidence of the irredeemable liberalism of the press, which is a non-sequitur that both ignores that big, obvious reason they would dodge the question and presumes that no conservative could fail to find at least one of the 2012 Republican candidates to be "great." The latter puts a lot of Republicans in an awkward position--throughout this year, "undecided" or "someone else" has usually polled, among Republicans, ahead of any of the named candidates.[3]
This is what many--maybe most--Newsbusters articles are "about," mere complaints that anyone with a different point of view was given any time at all. That these points of view are so often alleged to be different based on willfully negative, counter-intuitive and even counter-factual and completely irrational "interpretations" bespeaks how little actual substance is available for an org devoted to exposing "liberal bias" in the press to cover.
While preaching "balance" in the press, the MRC gang doesn't practice anything like "balance" in the way they manage their blog. When I tried to sign up for Newsbusters, they took a month to approve me.[4] There were long delays, I was told, because they had so many applications and tried to weed out troublemakers, by which, from the composition of their regulars, they seem to mean "liberals who may offer something other than blind cheerleading for the team." Somehow, I slipped through but I didn't last long.
In my time, there, I would sometimes get pulled into side-arguments with the other posters but for the most part, I tried to offer substantive criticism of Newsbusters' work.
The regular posters there did not appreciate this effort.
The Newsbusters' regulars, it should be said, are some of the absolute worst I've ever encountered in all my years of poking through the right wing of the internet. Virtually every time I wrote anything, I was reflexively met with charges that I was a black-hearted liar, that I was a hypocrite and so on--basically any charge that would in some way discredit me. I was even accused of plagiarism, after I cut-and-pasted some of my own words. This was the response to every substantive criticism. More than half a dozen posters seemed to have nothing better to do than follow me around and append to my every utterance these same sorts of accusations. They couldn't, in even a single instance, substantiate their charges--the charges had no basis in reality--but making any sort of substantive case wasn't the point. I was a "liberal" (though I'm not) and to them, that meant I was, by definition, guilty of all of those things.[5] Their endless barrage of charges amounted to a deployment of the Big Lie technique against me and they seemed too deluded by their own fantasies to even realize it.
Whoever is charged with overseeing quality control at Newsbusters--very concerned about troublemakers, remember--allowed this to go on day in and day out. When, however, I offered a substantive critique of a column by MRC head Brent Bozell (the details of which are recounted here), my Newsbusters account was suspended and the critique deleted from the site. While I've been kicked out, all of those other right-wing posters--the ones who devoted all of their energy to libelous attacks on me and the few other liberals who managed to get through the filtering process; the ones who never offer a single substantive comment on any subject; the ones who act as nothing more than an amen corner for Newsbusters' writers--are still active.
That's "balance" at the MRC, the kind they give every indication they'd apply to the rest of the press.
--j.
---
[1] Even comedians making jokes about conservative political figures end up in Newsbusters' crosshairs (the writers display a particularly intense obsession with Bill Maher and Jon Stewart).
[2] The fourth, Time's Joe Klein, picked Barack Obama, who has, indeed, ruled as a Republican president in all but name. But Klein said he was a great Republican president and "great" simply isn't a word one can justify applying to the Obama.
[3] Two days ago, in the most recent Gallup poll on the subject, 58% of Republicans declined to express a preference for any of the Republican candidates, and of the candidates themselves, only Mitt Romney draws double-digit support (and he only manages 13%).
[4] This is in sharp contrast to the way the MRC's liberal, democracy-friendly counterparts handle such matters. If a reader wants to comment on an item from Media Matters For America or FAIR, it's a simple matter of offering the comment (at the FAIR blog) or taking a few seconds to sign up then make it (at MMFA).
[5] One technique that was constantly employed was a demand for "sources" for even the most incidental parts of anything I'd written, which I quickly learned wasn't a legitimate request for sources but was, instead, just another way of accusing me of lying--insinuating I didn't have any and trying to get me to stop what I was doing and go look up things that those demanding the source could just as easily Google themselves. Any mainstream news source I would provide was then immediately dismissed as "liberal" and thus "bullshit." The high-point--the low-point?--of this part of the saga came when, to prove some rightist figures had said what I'd quoted them as saying, I posted some links to the raw video and audio of them saying it but because this raw audio and video was archived at Media Matters, it too was dismissed as a liberal lie. Rush Limbaugh never made sexist comments at all, right?
"The mission of the Media Research Center is to bring balance and responsibility to the news media."
At some point in the recent past, this was somewhat altered. The ranting about "strident liberal bias" and the rest was left in place but the current version of that "in brief" sentence reads:
"As 'America's Media Watchdog,' the MRC seeks to bring balance to the news media."
A wave of the flag, while all talk of "responsibility" is dropped, and it would be impossible not to note the obvious symbolism. It isn't that the MRC has changed from a more to a less noble mission--they never had any sort of noble mission in the first place. It's that, by dropping the pretense of "responsibility" while waving the flag, they're being a little more honest. But just a little.
The way the MRC gang goes about trying to bring "balance" to the news media is to complain about the fact that any views with which they disagree are given any time at all in the news media. The MRC dubs, as "liberal," just about anyone who offers any view that can in any way be interpreted as out-of-sync with the far right (as they define the far right, which they represent as simply "conservatism"). Of the articles that appear on the Center's Newsbusters blog, a large portion are devoted to simply complaining about the fact that someone somewhere offered a "liberal" (as they use the word) point of view, the implication being that this shouldn't happen.[1]
Today, for example, Bob Schieffer, the host of CBS News' Face the Nation, asked a pair of senators why, with the looming matter of the debt ceiling yet unresolved, the Senate is going to waste time debating a balanced budget amendment that everyone, on all sides, knows has no chance of passing. This drew a complaint from Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard. Though Sheppard suggests, in his closing sentence, that Schieffer was somehow poorly informing the public about the measure, he offers nothing to support that. Rather, his objection in the article is simply that Schieffer quite reasonably called into question the wisdom of setting aside a much more pressing matter in order to have a futile debate on a measure that, while apparently beloved by Sheppard, has no chance of passing.
Sheppard offered another example of this today as well. On "The Chris Matthews Show," the host asked a panel of journalists, "of the Republicans running for president, which one offers the best chance of becoming a great president?" None of the panelists picked one. Sheppard didn't like that. Mainstream journalists, operating in a profession that puts a premium on "objectivity," always tend to be non-committal on such questions and three of the four panelists simply dodged it.[2] Sheppard, of course, presents their failure to endorse as potentially great any of the candidates as evidence of the irredeemable liberalism of the press, which is a non-sequitur that both ignores that big, obvious reason they would dodge the question and presumes that no conservative could fail to find at least one of the 2012 Republican candidates to be "great." The latter puts a lot of Republicans in an awkward position--throughout this year, "undecided" or "someone else" has usually polled, among Republicans, ahead of any of the named candidates.[3]
This is what many--maybe most--Newsbusters articles are "about," mere complaints that anyone with a different point of view was given any time at all. That these points of view are so often alleged to be different based on willfully negative, counter-intuitive and even counter-factual and completely irrational "interpretations" bespeaks how little actual substance is available for an org devoted to exposing "liberal bias" in the press to cover.
While preaching "balance" in the press, the MRC gang doesn't practice anything like "balance" in the way they manage their blog. When I tried to sign up for Newsbusters, they took a month to approve me.[4] There were long delays, I was told, because they had so many applications and tried to weed out troublemakers, by which, from the composition of their regulars, they seem to mean "liberals who may offer something other than blind cheerleading for the team." Somehow, I slipped through but I didn't last long.
In my time, there, I would sometimes get pulled into side-arguments with the other posters but for the most part, I tried to offer substantive criticism of Newsbusters' work.
The regular posters there did not appreciate this effort.
The Newsbusters' regulars, it should be said, are some of the absolute worst I've ever encountered in all my years of poking through the right wing of the internet. Virtually every time I wrote anything, I was reflexively met with charges that I was a black-hearted liar, that I was a hypocrite and so on--basically any charge that would in some way discredit me. I was even accused of plagiarism, after I cut-and-pasted some of my own words. This was the response to every substantive criticism. More than half a dozen posters seemed to have nothing better to do than follow me around and append to my every utterance these same sorts of accusations. They couldn't, in even a single instance, substantiate their charges--the charges had no basis in reality--but making any sort of substantive case wasn't the point. I was a "liberal" (though I'm not) and to them, that meant I was, by definition, guilty of all of those things.[5] Their endless barrage of charges amounted to a deployment of the Big Lie technique against me and they seemed too deluded by their own fantasies to even realize it.
Whoever is charged with overseeing quality control at Newsbusters--very concerned about troublemakers, remember--allowed this to go on day in and day out. When, however, I offered a substantive critique of a column by MRC head Brent Bozell (the details of which are recounted here), my Newsbusters account was suspended and the critique deleted from the site. While I've been kicked out, all of those other right-wing posters--the ones who devoted all of their energy to libelous attacks on me and the few other liberals who managed to get through the filtering process; the ones who never offer a single substantive comment on any subject; the ones who act as nothing more than an amen corner for Newsbusters' writers--are still active.
That's "balance" at the MRC, the kind they give every indication they'd apply to the rest of the press.
--j.
---
[1] Even comedians making jokes about conservative political figures end up in Newsbusters' crosshairs (the writers display a particularly intense obsession with Bill Maher and Jon Stewart).
[2] The fourth, Time's Joe Klein, picked Barack Obama, who has, indeed, ruled as a Republican president in all but name. But Klein said he was a great Republican president and "great" simply isn't a word one can justify applying to the Obama.
[3] Two days ago, in the most recent Gallup poll on the subject, 58% of Republicans declined to express a preference for any of the Republican candidates, and of the candidates themselves, only Mitt Romney draws double-digit support (and he only manages 13%).
[4] This is in sharp contrast to the way the MRC's liberal, democracy-friendly counterparts handle such matters. If a reader wants to comment on an item from Media Matters For America or FAIR, it's a simple matter of offering the comment (at the FAIR blog) or taking a few seconds to sign up then make it (at MMFA).
[5] One technique that was constantly employed was a demand for "sources" for even the most incidental parts of anything I'd written, which I quickly learned wasn't a legitimate request for sources but was, instead, just another way of accusing me of lying--insinuating I didn't have any and trying to get me to stop what I was doing and go look up things that those demanding the source could just as easily Google themselves. Any mainstream news source I would provide was then immediately dismissed as "liberal" and thus "bullshit." The high-point--the low-point?--of this part of the saga came when, to prove some rightist figures had said what I'd quoted them as saying, I posted some links to the raw video and audio of them saying it but because this raw audio and video was archived at Media Matters, it too was dismissed as a liberal lie. Rush Limbaugh never made sexist comments at all, right?
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Newsbusters' Newest Deal: A Depressing Lie About the Great Depression
On this week's edition of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," reactionary
columnist Ann Coulter told the Nation's Chris Hayes that his mother,
because she is a government employee, didn't have a real job and is, in
fact, just "a drain on society." Standard fare from Coulter, a vapid
cretin who has made her fortune peddling ugly, brainless insults to an
ugly, brainless audience. Among that audience is counted Newsbusters'
associate editor Noel Sheppard, an exceedingly stupid and perpetually
dishonest man who, yesterday, felt compelled, by these personal
qualities, to offer Coulter an "attaboy."
An ill-intentioned moron praising a bird of like feather is hardly
news but in the midst of it, Sheppard let fly a Coulterish howler
regarding the Great Depression and the New Deal and I decided I'd jot
down some remarks on it.
On "Real Time," author Amanda Foreman had asserted that "government does not create jobs." Eventually, a surprised Bill Maher asked: "During the Depression, government didn't create jobs?" Recounting this part of the exchange, Sheppard jumps in:
These are facts that dumb liberals and stupid ol' Bill Maher have gotten through their heads. It's likely that Sheppard has gotten them through his head at some point in his life as well and just preferred lying to sharing them with his readers.
--j.
---
[*] Unemployment, during that recession, briefly rose to 19% and in recent years, it has become a common practice, among conservative commentators, to compare unemployment as it stood at the beginning of the New Deal to unemployment as it stood at the trough of that recession and to argue that the New Deal wasn't able to accomplish much. A big lie but nowhere near the scale of the one offered by Sheppard.
On "Real Time," author Amanda Foreman had asserted that "government does not create jobs." Eventually, a surprised Bill Maher asked: "During the Depression, government didn't create jobs?" Recounting this part of the exchange, Sheppard jumps in:
"Once again Maher showed his stupidity. The unemployment rate in 1929 was 3.2 percent. After federal spending tripled from $3 billion to $9 billion, unemployment was 17.2 percent ten years later.The Great Depression only began toward the end of 1929. That 3.2% estimated unemployment rate is from the pre-Depression economy. Pre-New Deal, as well. The New Deal didn't begin until 1933, by which point unemployment was a staggering 24.9%. That's the proper baseline for evaluating the effect of that era's spending on unemployment. There's a good reason Sheppard didn't use it--unemployment was dramatically reduced during the New Deal, and, in fact, never went that high again. By 1937, it had been cut down to 14.3%. A mini-recession hit in 1938 and bumped it up a bit,[*] but the massive government spending that came with World War II finally beat back unemployment, ended the Depression and, in fact, made the U.S. the most powerful economy in the world; the years that followed--years of largescale government intervention in the economy--saw the greatest economic boom the U.S. has ever experienced.
"Liberals just can't get it through their heads that all the money and New Deal programs thrown at the Depression did little to solve it."
These are facts that dumb liberals and stupid ol' Bill Maher have gotten through their heads. It's likely that Sheppard has gotten them through his head at some point in his life as well and just preferred lying to sharing them with his readers.
--j.
---
[*] Unemployment, during that recession, briefly rose to 19% and in recent years, it has become a common practice, among conservative commentators, to compare unemployment as it stood at the beginning of the New Deal to unemployment as it stood at the trough of that recession and to argue that the New Deal wasn't able to accomplish much. A big lie but nowhere near the scale of the one offered by Sheppard.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Newsbusters & Me, Part 2
Yesterday, Terry Krepel over at ConWebWatch wrote
about a comment from Brent Bozell, the head of the Media Research
Center. Bozell was complaining about the criticism of crackpot
Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann by Chris Matthews,
the mouthy dunce who hosts MSNBC's Hardball. "He [Matthews] would never
in a million years wage that kind of insulting attack on Hillary
Clinton," fumed Bozell. Krepel points out that not only has Matthews
"insultingly attacked Hillary Clinton" but at least two of those attacks
have been reported on Bozell's own Newsbusters blog. In the first,
Matthews had suggested that Clinton owed her political career to
sympathy generated by her husband's philandering. In another, Matthews,
in 2008, was complaining about Barack Obama potentially tapping Clinton
to be Secretary of State:
"Why would he pick her? I thought we were done with the Clintons. She's just use it to build her power base. It's Machiavellian. And then we'll have Bill Clinton, too. I thought Obama didn't want drama... She's just a soap opera. If he doesn't pick her, everyone will say she's been dissed again, we'll have to live through that again."
Krepel leaves the matter at these two examples but, in fact, they're not only fairly typical of Matthews' very long-running series of insulting attacks on Hillary Clinton, they're actually rather mild compared to some of the other things he's said. In 2001, he told an MSNBC colleague "I hate her [Clinton]. I hate her. All that she stands for." Indeed, Matthews has hated Hillary Clinton since at least the mid-1990s and it is a hatred that has often seemed obsessive. In 2008, David Brock, the founder of Media Matters For America, put together a list of just some of the things Matthews has said of her; "she-devil", "Nurse Ratched", "witchy", "uppity", "a fraud", "anti-male" and on and on.
In short, Bozell's suggestion was, in fact, a lie of monumental proportions. A thing directly and brutally contrary to reality. Back in March, I wrote about another incident, in which Bozell bizarrely suggested that, at the time of the Iraq war, the press had been very hard on Bush and, by contrast, was allowing Obama a free ride on the Libyan intervention.
Liars lie for a reason and what both of these have in common is that they exemplify the agenda of Bozell and his organization. Purporting to be a "media watchdog," the MRC is, in fact, devoted to preaching to a very dismal choir a very dismal line, the same one preached by nearly all right-wing media outlets. It tells an extremely conservative audience that, though the public is with them, they are persecuted. Those carrying out the persecution are "elites," identified, in this up-is-down-and-black-is-white narrative, as liberal intellectuals, liberal academics, liberal journalists, liberal entertainers, liberal Democratic politicians or just plain liberals.[1] Politics is reduced to a simple contest between good and evil, with liberals filling the "evil" role[2], and "liberal" is the default designation for anyone who isn't identifiably of the far right on every conceivable issue--those so tagged are often, in reality, conservatives whom outlets like the MRC just decided aren't conservative enough or aren't conservative in the right ways.
This manufactures an incredible amount of politically useful resentment in the target audience--no one likes being persecuted--but its most important effect--and, arguably, its intent--is to completely destroy the confidence of that audience in anything that doesn't originate from far right sources; to beat back the very idea that there is an objective fact on which everyone can agree and to make momentary political utility the thing which dictates the audience's perception of reality. In their telling, the MRC gang and other like-minded orgs give it to you straight. Just about everyone else is probably an enemy with a malicious agenda. And they're always enemies--there's rarely any room allowed for any honest disagreement. Chris Matthews, by virtue of his sometimes disagreeing with the far right, is tagged as a "liberal" and from that, it follows that he would never use his privileged position of prominence in the press to attack Democrat Hillary Clinton in the same way he just attacked reactionary Rep. Michelle Bachmann (Cretin-MN). Similarly, the corporate press is irredeemably liberal and it follows that it must have been very hard on Bush over the Iraq war and, in stark contrast, easy on Obama over the Libyan intervention. It's all about telling a tale that is politically useful at the moment. Reality doesn't even enter into the equation.
The article that, a few weeks ago, prompted me to join Newsbusters was an Alex Fitzsimmons piece from 28 April that seemed a perfect example of how far-right media groups like the MRC generate their own little self-contained world and carefully keep out real-world considerations that could burst this bubble. Fitzsimmons was upset that MSNBC's Chuck Todd, in an interview with Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), declined to blame the Obama administration for rising gas prices.
Next, the idea that further domestic oil drilling won't significantly reduce the price of gas at the pump isn't, as Fitzsimmons would have it, a concoction of "liberal experts." It's an uncontroversial conclusion that is broadly shared by experts of all political stripes, including the Bush Energy Department only a few years ago. In 2010, PolitiFact subjected the question to a fairly detailed examination and came to the same conclusion. It's pretty basic math.[3]
Upon whom, on the other hand, is Fitzsimmons relying for his assertion that Obama policies are to blame for high gas prices? His three "experts" are from the Heritage Foundation, an organization that has received millions from Big Oil interests who would directly benefit--and benefit big time--from greater and easier domestic drilling. The total investment of Big Oil in Heritage is unknown, as Heritage is secretive about its donors, but it has received over $4.1 million from Koch family foundations alone--as in, Koch Industries, the largest privately-held oil concern in the world--and one of the "experts" cited by Fitzsimmons (Nicolas Loris) actually worked for the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation before moving to Heritage.
Fitzsimmons approvingly quotes all of those senators who are beating up on Obama. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the one Todd was interviewing, has, in his political career, received $456,810 from oil and gas interests. Though Wicker claimed to have 28 senators behind his resolution, the link provided by Newsbusters lists only nine, but they're enough to make an important point. Wicker is one of them. Here are the rest:
Sens. Mark Begich (D-Alaska): $140,605
Thad Cochran (R-Miss.): $228,485
Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.): $293,300
Richard Shelby (R-Ala.): $353,200
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska): $523,689
Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana): $807,844
John Cornyn (R-Texas): $1,734,950
Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas): $2,141,025
The numbers beside their names are how much the oil and gas industry has spent on purchasing them over the years (all numbers courtesy of the Center For Responsive Politics).
To summarize, Fitzsimmons is advancing an extraordinarily improbable proposition but it's one that, if believed, would benefit a particular--and particularly conservative--industry, and while he completely misrepresents as "liberals" those who reject it (which is, in Newsbusters Land, a dismissal of their views), every one of his own sources has ties to that industry.
Of course, the fact that they're paid shills doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong but to put it as kindly as possible, it does make a strong case that anything they say on this matter is to be viewed by any reasonable person with extreme skepticism. Fitzsimmons merely reproduces their views, presents them as entirely credible and doesn't disclose any of the info I've just recorded here, while completely ignoring obvious drivers of high gas prices such as insane speculation and oil-company profiteering.
Is Fitzsimmons merely incompetent? Probably not. Certainly unethical as hell but he's hardly alone in that. In context, his article was just one of many. The MRC had, for a long time, been pimping the notion that Obama's alleged--and mostly imaginary--resistance to further domestic drilling was driving up the price of gas. Part of this has to do with politics. The oil industry is very kind to the Republican candidates favored by the MRC and this is the line the industry wants pimped. The public is very angry about high gas prices and has largely been blaming the industry (and speculators) for them, so there is a strategic motive for wanting to try to divert anger away from it and toward the Obama administration. The big reason the MRC is pimping this line, though, is probably the same reason all those others are; the same reason the MRC doesn't disclose that those others are; the same reason the MRC pimps climate-change denial: the organization has received a fortune from the oil industry. Since 1998, the MRC has received $412,500 from ExxonMobil. Fitzsimmons didn't disclose this, either. Neither has anyone else at the MRC who has written about this subject or any other touching on Big Oil.[5] All while they work to destroy their audience's confidence in everything except orgs like their own.
That's how things work at the MRC, where political fantasy stands in for "reality," those who pay the piper call the tune and those who dance to it never know the difference and probably wouldn't care if they did.
--j.
---
[1] This "elite" is never defined as corporate CEOs, business associations, investment bankers, the super-rich that have such a disproportionate share of wealth, their sycophantish mouthpieces in the press or their purchased lackeys in government or any of the other interests that, in the real world, actually run the U.S. A lower-middle-class workaday journalist is, by this narrative, part of an "elite"--the head of ExxonMobil is not.
[2] When I offered this analysis in my first "Newsbusters & Me" post, conservative reader Mark81150 objected: "No dude, I don't think the American left is pure evil, just knee jerk reactionary, authoritarian to it's core, savagely hostile to opposing views, and utterly unable to process irony or the hypocrisies of it's own positions." And, he added, it is "intellectually thuggish." A distinction without a difference, to be sure, but one Mark was tellingly unable to perceive.
[3] And even the microscopic effect further domestic drilling would have wouldn't take place for years, as it takes years to establish a drilling operation.
[4] Since 2004, the MRC has also taken in $15,005 from Koch family foundations. Not exactly a princely sum, but worth a mention.
[5] Climate change denialism was invented by Big Oil and has been a major project of the industry for decades; the MRC--what a surprise--pimps hardcore denialism, and no one who writes any of its constant articles on this discloses its financial relationship with the industry.
"Why would he pick her? I thought we were done with the Clintons. She's just use it to build her power base. It's Machiavellian. And then we'll have Bill Clinton, too. I thought Obama didn't want drama... She's just a soap opera. If he doesn't pick her, everyone will say she's been dissed again, we'll have to live through that again."
Krepel leaves the matter at these two examples but, in fact, they're not only fairly typical of Matthews' very long-running series of insulting attacks on Hillary Clinton, they're actually rather mild compared to some of the other things he's said. In 2001, he told an MSNBC colleague "I hate her [Clinton]. I hate her. All that she stands for." Indeed, Matthews has hated Hillary Clinton since at least the mid-1990s and it is a hatred that has often seemed obsessive. In 2008, David Brock, the founder of Media Matters For America, put together a list of just some of the things Matthews has said of her; "she-devil", "Nurse Ratched", "witchy", "uppity", "a fraud", "anti-male" and on and on.
In short, Bozell's suggestion was, in fact, a lie of monumental proportions. A thing directly and brutally contrary to reality. Back in March, I wrote about another incident, in which Bozell bizarrely suggested that, at the time of the Iraq war, the press had been very hard on Bush and, by contrast, was allowing Obama a free ride on the Libyan intervention.
Liars lie for a reason and what both of these have in common is that they exemplify the agenda of Bozell and his organization. Purporting to be a "media watchdog," the MRC is, in fact, devoted to preaching to a very dismal choir a very dismal line, the same one preached by nearly all right-wing media outlets. It tells an extremely conservative audience that, though the public is with them, they are persecuted. Those carrying out the persecution are "elites," identified, in this up-is-down-and-black-is-white narrative, as liberal intellectuals, liberal academics, liberal journalists, liberal entertainers, liberal Democratic politicians or just plain liberals.[1] Politics is reduced to a simple contest between good and evil, with liberals filling the "evil" role[2], and "liberal" is the default designation for anyone who isn't identifiably of the far right on every conceivable issue--those so tagged are often, in reality, conservatives whom outlets like the MRC just decided aren't conservative enough or aren't conservative in the right ways.
This manufactures an incredible amount of politically useful resentment in the target audience--no one likes being persecuted--but its most important effect--and, arguably, its intent--is to completely destroy the confidence of that audience in anything that doesn't originate from far right sources; to beat back the very idea that there is an objective fact on which everyone can agree and to make momentary political utility the thing which dictates the audience's perception of reality. In their telling, the MRC gang and other like-minded orgs give it to you straight. Just about everyone else is probably an enemy with a malicious agenda. And they're always enemies--there's rarely any room allowed for any honest disagreement. Chris Matthews, by virtue of his sometimes disagreeing with the far right, is tagged as a "liberal" and from that, it follows that he would never use his privileged position of prominence in the press to attack Democrat Hillary Clinton in the same way he just attacked reactionary Rep. Michelle Bachmann (Cretin-MN). Similarly, the corporate press is irredeemably liberal and it follows that it must have been very hard on Bush over the Iraq war and, in stark contrast, easy on Obama over the Libyan intervention. It's all about telling a tale that is politically useful at the moment. Reality doesn't even enter into the equation.
The article that, a few weeks ago, prompted me to join Newsbusters was an Alex Fitzsimmons piece from 28 April that seemed a perfect example of how far-right media groups like the MRC generate their own little self-contained world and carefully keep out real-world considerations that could burst this bubble. Fitzsimmons was upset that MSNBC's Chuck Todd, in an interview with Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), declined to blame the Obama administration for rising gas prices.
"After making excuses for the Democratic president, Todd boldly asserted that 'there doesn't seem to be any expert that believes' Obama could have done anything to prevent the price of gasoline from eclipsing $4 per gallon.Fitzsimmons quotes three "experts" from Heritage. They recommend battling high gas prices by cutting back barriers to further domestic oil drilling. Further, "Wicker noted that he and 28 senators recently introduced a resolution to 'send a message to the president' in support of streamlining the review process for oil permit applications." Fitzsimmons adds:
"Perhaps the morning anchor meant to say there doesn't seem to be any liberal experts who are criticizing Obama for not doing more to curtail rising gas prices: the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, offered the president some policy advice on this precise issue." [italics in original]
"And just so NBC's political director knows, Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.) and Mark Begich (Alaska) joined the chorus of congressional opposition to Obama's squelching of offshore oil drilling."Taking this a step at a time, there's a basic logical problem in trying to heap blame on Obama policies for $4+/gallon gas: gas actually went over $4/gallon during the Bush administration, well before Obama had even been elected and as high as it has been under Obama since Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives, it has never risen as high as it was under Bush.
Next, the idea that further domestic oil drilling won't significantly reduce the price of gas at the pump isn't, as Fitzsimmons would have it, a concoction of "liberal experts." It's an uncontroversial conclusion that is broadly shared by experts of all political stripes, including the Bush Energy Department only a few years ago. In 2010, PolitiFact subjected the question to a fairly detailed examination and came to the same conclusion. It's pretty basic math.[3]
Upon whom, on the other hand, is Fitzsimmons relying for his assertion that Obama policies are to blame for high gas prices? His three "experts" are from the Heritage Foundation, an organization that has received millions from Big Oil interests who would directly benefit--and benefit big time--from greater and easier domestic drilling. The total investment of Big Oil in Heritage is unknown, as Heritage is secretive about its donors, but it has received over $4.1 million from Koch family foundations alone--as in, Koch Industries, the largest privately-held oil concern in the world--and one of the "experts" cited by Fitzsimmons (Nicolas Loris) actually worked for the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation before moving to Heritage.
Fitzsimmons approvingly quotes all of those senators who are beating up on Obama. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the one Todd was interviewing, has, in his political career, received $456,810 from oil and gas interests. Though Wicker claimed to have 28 senators behind his resolution, the link provided by Newsbusters lists only nine, but they're enough to make an important point. Wicker is one of them. Here are the rest:
Sens. Mark Begich (D-Alaska): $140,605
Thad Cochran (R-Miss.): $228,485
Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.): $293,300
Richard Shelby (R-Ala.): $353,200
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska): $523,689
Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana): $807,844
John Cornyn (R-Texas): $1,734,950
Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas): $2,141,025
The numbers beside their names are how much the oil and gas industry has spent on purchasing them over the years (all numbers courtesy of the Center For Responsive Politics).
To summarize, Fitzsimmons is advancing an extraordinarily improbable proposition but it's one that, if believed, would benefit a particular--and particularly conservative--industry, and while he completely misrepresents as "liberals" those who reject it (which is, in Newsbusters Land, a dismissal of their views), every one of his own sources has ties to that industry.
Of course, the fact that they're paid shills doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong but to put it as kindly as possible, it does make a strong case that anything they say on this matter is to be viewed by any reasonable person with extreme skepticism. Fitzsimmons merely reproduces their views, presents them as entirely credible and doesn't disclose any of the info I've just recorded here, while completely ignoring obvious drivers of high gas prices such as insane speculation and oil-company profiteering.
Is Fitzsimmons merely incompetent? Probably not. Certainly unethical as hell but he's hardly alone in that. In context, his article was just one of many. The MRC had, for a long time, been pimping the notion that Obama's alleged--and mostly imaginary--resistance to further domestic drilling was driving up the price of gas. Part of this has to do with politics. The oil industry is very kind to the Republican candidates favored by the MRC and this is the line the industry wants pimped. The public is very angry about high gas prices and has largely been blaming the industry (and speculators) for them, so there is a strategic motive for wanting to try to divert anger away from it and toward the Obama administration. The big reason the MRC is pimping this line, though, is probably the same reason all those others are; the same reason the MRC doesn't disclose that those others are; the same reason the MRC pimps climate-change denial: the organization has received a fortune from the oil industry. Since 1998, the MRC has received $412,500 from ExxonMobil. Fitzsimmons didn't disclose this, either. Neither has anyone else at the MRC who has written about this subject or any other touching on Big Oil.[5] All while they work to destroy their audience's confidence in everything except orgs like their own.
That's how things work at the MRC, where political fantasy stands in for "reality," those who pay the piper call the tune and those who dance to it never know the difference and probably wouldn't care if they did.
--j.
---
[1] This "elite" is never defined as corporate CEOs, business associations, investment bankers, the super-rich that have such a disproportionate share of wealth, their sycophantish mouthpieces in the press or their purchased lackeys in government or any of the other interests that, in the real world, actually run the U.S. A lower-middle-class workaday journalist is, by this narrative, part of an "elite"--the head of ExxonMobil is not.
[2] When I offered this analysis in my first "Newsbusters & Me" post, conservative reader Mark81150 objected: "No dude, I don't think the American left is pure evil, just knee jerk reactionary, authoritarian to it's core, savagely hostile to opposing views, and utterly unable to process irony or the hypocrisies of it's own positions." And, he added, it is "intellectually thuggish." A distinction without a difference, to be sure, but one Mark was tellingly unable to perceive.
[3] And even the microscopic effect further domestic drilling would have wouldn't take place for years, as it takes years to establish a drilling operation.
[4] Since 2004, the MRC has also taken in $15,005 from Koch family foundations. Not exactly a princely sum, but worth a mention.
[5] Climate change denialism was invented by Big Oil and has been a major project of the industry for decades; the MRC--what a surprise--pimps hardcore denialism, and no one who writes any of its constant articles on this discloses its financial relationship with the industry.
Friday, July 1, 2011
A Reply To Mark81150
My first "Newsbusters & Me" post on Wednesday drew a pair of responses from a conservative fellow who goes by the handle "Mark81150." My reply:
In my original post, I'd written that "much of the American rightist elite has, for years, waged open war on the notion that there is any such thing as an objective set of facts about anything" You take issues with this and write:
"What we wage war on, is that leftwing OPINION can be presented as 'objective fact' a slight [sic] of hand the left has used for decades."
But you offer, as your only example of this, the matter of global climate change, which, you write, "is routinely used by the left to say the right isn't dealing in reality." You characterize this conclusion as "a very hyper partisan slant at best, an outrageous lie in truth." You are unequivocal on it:
"...when a leftists states global climate change is catastrophic and man caused.. that's an opinion based on some junk science.. not a 'fact'"
To state the obvious, Mark, you're not a scientist working in the fields related to the study of climate change. Neither am I. Neither are most people. For our info on this, we either have to extensively study the matter ourselves or rely on experts who have. Someone over at Wikipedia has helpfully assembled an article, loaded with links, documenting the world scientific consensus on global climate change. That consensus, stated in brief, is that climate change is happening and it is caused by human activity. The article notes an important fact:
"No scientific body of national or international standing has maintained a dissenting opinion; the last was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which in 2007 updated its 1999 statement rejecting the likelihood of human influence on recent climate with its current non-committal position."
Whether or not the world's scientists are right about it, that consensus is a fact, not "left-wing opinion," and people--even "leftists"--who reference that consensus--that fact--aren't offering "an opinion based on some junk science." They're referencing what the experts on this subject have overwhelmingly concluded about it, based on mountains of science that have been tested, re-tested, and re-re-tested from every conceivable angle and that get higher and higher with every passing year.
The near-uniformity of the experts on this doesn't mean those experts are right, of course. Science is never closed to challenge--that's one of its basic tenets. It does, however, place, on deniers what any objective observer would be forced to conclude is a staggering burden of proof. To support your own position, you, the non-scientist, would not only have to demonstrate those ever-growing mountains of science are incorrect; you would also have to believe that either the entire global scientific community is made up of a bunch of dummies who have, for years, been taken in by "some junk science" (that you're brilliant enough to see through), or that, without any apparent motive at all, they have undertaken a conspiracy to lie about it that is global in scale and that stretches back decades. Instead, all you offer is the claim that "there are a large number of climate change skeptics in the world of science" and a link to a Business Insider article listing 10 prominent climate-change "skeptics." Just ten. And even of those, some aren't outright deniers, not a one of them has ever published their "theories" about global warming in a peer-reviewed journal and some aren't scientists at all.
More significantly, several of them (Plimer, Ebell, Michaels, Happer) are de facto mouthpieces for business interests--big business interests--that would be negatively affected by any legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. In fact, the auto industry, utility companies, Big Coal, and most especially Big Oil invented the climate denial industry in the late '80s and have kept it going ever since. You complain that deniers are branded as heretics by "people who have a financial vest [sic] interest" in so labeling them, and trash Al Gore for making money from warning about climate change while you parrot an insanely improbable line that was invented and is wholly sustained by industries that have a direct and massive financial interest--their sole interest with regard to the topic--in having you swallow that line.
In short, this is actually a perfect example of how "the right isn't dealing in reality." Or at least of how you aren't.
It's also a perfect illustration of my own point, the one you were trying to refute.
Who is really kidding himself?
--j.
In my original post, I'd written that "much of the American rightist elite has, for years, waged open war on the notion that there is any such thing as an objective set of facts about anything" You take issues with this and write:
"What we wage war on, is that leftwing OPINION can be presented as 'objective fact' a slight [sic] of hand the left has used for decades."
But you offer, as your only example of this, the matter of global climate change, which, you write, "is routinely used by the left to say the right isn't dealing in reality." You characterize this conclusion as "a very hyper partisan slant at best, an outrageous lie in truth." You are unequivocal on it:
"...when a leftists states global climate change is catastrophic and man caused.. that's an opinion based on some junk science.. not a 'fact'"
To state the obvious, Mark, you're not a scientist working in the fields related to the study of climate change. Neither am I. Neither are most people. For our info on this, we either have to extensively study the matter ourselves or rely on experts who have. Someone over at Wikipedia has helpfully assembled an article, loaded with links, documenting the world scientific consensus on global climate change. That consensus, stated in brief, is that climate change is happening and it is caused by human activity. The article notes an important fact:
"No scientific body of national or international standing has maintained a dissenting opinion; the last was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which in 2007 updated its 1999 statement rejecting the likelihood of human influence on recent climate with its current non-committal position."
Whether or not the world's scientists are right about it, that consensus is a fact, not "left-wing opinion," and people--even "leftists"--who reference that consensus--that fact--aren't offering "an opinion based on some junk science." They're referencing what the experts on this subject have overwhelmingly concluded about it, based on mountains of science that have been tested, re-tested, and re-re-tested from every conceivable angle and that get higher and higher with every passing year.
The near-uniformity of the experts on this doesn't mean those experts are right, of course. Science is never closed to challenge--that's one of its basic tenets. It does, however, place, on deniers what any objective observer would be forced to conclude is a staggering burden of proof. To support your own position, you, the non-scientist, would not only have to demonstrate those ever-growing mountains of science are incorrect; you would also have to believe that either the entire global scientific community is made up of a bunch of dummies who have, for years, been taken in by "some junk science" (that you're brilliant enough to see through), or that, without any apparent motive at all, they have undertaken a conspiracy to lie about it that is global in scale and that stretches back decades. Instead, all you offer is the claim that "there are a large number of climate change skeptics in the world of science" and a link to a Business Insider article listing 10 prominent climate-change "skeptics." Just ten. And even of those, some aren't outright deniers, not a one of them has ever published their "theories" about global warming in a peer-reviewed journal and some aren't scientists at all.
More significantly, several of them (Plimer, Ebell, Michaels, Happer) are de facto mouthpieces for business interests--big business interests--that would be negatively affected by any legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. In fact, the auto industry, utility companies, Big Coal, and most especially Big Oil invented the climate denial industry in the late '80s and have kept it going ever since. You complain that deniers are branded as heretics by "people who have a financial vest [sic] interest" in so labeling them, and trash Al Gore for making money from warning about climate change while you parrot an insanely improbable line that was invented and is wholly sustained by industries that have a direct and massive financial interest--their sole interest with regard to the topic--in having you swallow that line.
In short, this is actually a perfect example of how "the right isn't dealing in reality." Or at least of how you aren't.
It's also a perfect illustration of my own point, the one you were trying to refute.
Who is really kidding himself?
--j.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Newsbusters & Me, Part 1
For the last few weeks, I've been spending some time over at Newsbusters,
the big blog of the Media Research Center (MRC), reading the work and posting in the comments section. The MRC has always
portrayed itself as a media watchdog with a conservative bent but it
would be a big mistake to put it in the same pound as liberal media
watchdogs like Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), and Media Matters For America
(MMFA) and not just because the MRC is extremely conservative. The MRC
isn't just a different breed of watchdog. It's an entirely different
species from its liberal counterparts.
Media Matters For America lists as its mission "comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Part of the mission of FAIR can be found in its name--the "A" stands for "Accuracy," Fairness & Accuracy In Media. These groups are centrally concerned with, among other things, correcting misinformation. Keeping the record straight. The MRC has a very different mission. The legend of Newsbusters reads "Exposing & Combating Liberal Media Bias." Their more detailed "About" page tells the same story. They're about "bias," not accuracy.
It shows in their work. An incredible amount of misinformation flows forth from Newsbusters, just as it has always flowed forth from the MRC. Newsbusters is afflicted with a depressingly common ailment of the American right, one about which I've written a great deal over the years; they see politics as a simple contest between good and evil--themselves being good, the "liberals" being evil--and embrace the idea that reality itself can be subservient to and defined by their own momentary political passions. Much of the American rightist elite has, for years, waged open war on the notion that there is any such thing as an objective set of facts about anything. If there are no universally agreed-upon yardsticks, there's nothing against which to measure rightists, nothing that can be used to judge them unambiguously wrong. The elite indoctrinates its followers in the idea that what they, themselves, believe and want and do is, by definition, that which is true and proper and right and that the reverse is true of their enemies. The reason accuracy isn't listed as a concern of Newsbusters is because, for the conservatives and reactionaries who toil away at it and (most especially) for those who uncritically groove on its work, "liberal" equals, by definition, "misinformation." After years of providing their audience with this conditioning, the Newsbusters don't have to prove something is false; they just have to make some case that it comes from a liberal or aids liberalism (often just defined as anything that disagrees with or could hinder the right) and in their world, that means it's wrong, misleading, inaccurate and/or an outright lie. The Newsbusters will sometimes make a show of trying to actually prove something is genuinely inaccurate and they sometimes find genuine examples but for the most part, their efforts in this vein are laughably superficial.
A perfect case-in-point is the newest Brent Bozell column. Bozell is the head of the MRC and, like a lot of emperors, apparently doesn't like it when someone comes along and points out his lack of clothing. I've been pointing it out for a long time though, and last night when, shortly after Bozell posted that column, I did it again in the comments section, my Newsbusters account was suspended and the reply I'd written was consigned to a Memory Hole as if it had never even existed.
Bozell was writing about an appearance by comedian Jon Stewart on "Fox News Sunday" wherein Stewart was interviewed by Chris Wallace. The interview happened over two weeks ago but a whole lot of conservative commentators just keep bringing it up. It has become one of their temporary obsessions because Stewart said some things about Fox News that righties like Bozell find extremely inconvenient. That, for example, Fox News is very different from legitimate news organizations because it's really just a massive propaganda project for the Republican party, its content and tone tightly dictated by the committed partisans who run it. Stewart admitted his own bias but said his show's focus wasn't on conveying it--it was on making people laugh. Whereas news orgs are centrally concerned with offering news and information, Fox is centrally concerned with spreading propaganda, in the most negative sense of the word. The thing that assured Stewart would get plenty of attention from conservatives though, is that he said, "And in polls, who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? The most consistently misinformed? Fox. Fox viewers. Consistently. Every poll."
Like a lot of the righties who have written about the Stewart interview, Bozell was particularly unhappy about those remarks:
"In the real world--outside Stewart’s smug bubble--this is garbage."
By way of demonstrating its status as merit-free refuse, Bozell immediately begins extolling a 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center, one that asked respondents to name the Secretary of State, the prime minister of Britain and to identify which party controls congress. Viewers of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes show "were better informed than Stewart’s 'Daily Show' gigglers" on these points. But, of course, Stewart hadn't said Fox viewers were uninformed; he said they were misinformed. Neither Stewart nor anyone else has ever even alleged that Fox News misleads its viewers about things like the identity of the British prime minister. In short, Bozell is "refuting" a claim Stewart never even made rather than dealing with the one he had made.
He gets a bit closer to the mark when he writes about the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), which, in 2010, conducted a survey that showed Fox News viewers were significantly more likely to be misinformed about a wide range of subjects.
Bozell labels the PIPA gang "liberal pranksters masquerading as pollsters"--when liberal = misinformation, it's important to get that label in place up front, even if, as is the case here, there's absolutely no real reason for applying it--and he challenges the premise of two of their examples of misinformation held by Fox viewers. The first was that Fox viewers, in high numbers, thought most economists had concluded the health care law would increase the deficit; the second was that they thought most economists had concluded the Obama stimulus caused job losses. Whether it's fair to judge people harshly based on their impression of the opinion of most economists on a given issue is a matter that could be legitimately debated but Bozell isn't interested in that sort of debate. He writes that the idea that Obamacare will reduce deficits is "a patently ridiculous claim that doesn’t acknowledge the real world" and asserts that "Fox News viewers are tagged as the 'misinformed' dummies, because their opinions are grounded in logic."
Notice the sleight-of-hand? The survey, on that question, wasn't asking respondents their opinion of the effect of the health care law; it was asking respondents to offer their impression of the opinion of most economists who have studied the matter. The two are not the same nor were respondents likely to confuse the two because, before this question, they were first asked to offer their own impressions of the effect of the law. Bozell, of course, declines to share this fact with his readers when he's doing his little dance.
In limiting his remarks to these two questions, Bozell grossly misrepresents the overall survey. Most of the items on which Fox News viewers was shown to be misinformed were not subject to being "interpreted" away as nebulous abstractions. They were straightforward factual matters, ones about which Fox viewers were radically wrong. In huge numbers, Fox viewers believed the Obama administration had initiated the auto bailout (it hadn't), that most congressional Republicans had voted against TARP (most voted in favor of it), that the Obama stimulus contained no tax cuts (about 40% of it was tax cuts), that their own income taxes had gone up during the Obama administration (they hadn't) and so on.[1]
Bozell also fails to address or even acknowledge the existence of other surveys touching on Stewart's claim, which leaves his readers with the misimpression that the claim is based on a single poll, the one Bozell falsely suggested was fatally flawed. In reality, multiple surveys going back nearly a decade have concluded that Fox News viewers are among the most misinformed news consumers. PIPA had reached that conclusion in a poll from 2003 that tested respondents' knowledge of issues related to the Iraq war and War On Terror [tm]. Media Matters cited four other polls from recent years that show the same thing. If a single poll has ever reached a contrary conclusion, neither I nor any of the conservative commentators who have written about this in the last few weeks have been able to find it. Bozell, like everyone else who has labored to refute Stewart, was forced to rely on--and to misrepresent--that Pew survey, the one that doesn't even address the question.
This was the game PolitiFact played when it entered into the fray; using Pew surveys that measured whether news consumers were uninformed rather than misinformed to muddy the water then use the mud to rule Stewart's claim "false" while ignoring the existence of most of the surveys that did touch on--and that unanimously supported--Stewart's claim. Many of PolitiFact's readers nailed PolitiFact on this but though the PolitiFact gang acknowledged this criticism, they have so far declined to withdraw their bogus "false" rating of Stewart's claim and it continues to be used by conservatives as a club against Stewart.
That club was used to bash Stewart into offering a response, in which he said "I defer to (PolitiFact's) judgment and apologize for my mistake. To not do so would be irresponsible," at which point he broke into a litany of claims made on Fox News that PolitiFact itself had rated as "false"--so many items that the texts of them literally blotted out the screen. Bozell referenced this in wrapping up his column:
"Jon Stewart did the right thing and conceded he was the one misinforming people on Fox News."
Of course, if Bozell thinks that's what Stewart actually did, he's just as clueless as he's always seemed[2] and if he thought such a concession was "the right thing" to do, he's probably among those who think the Obama administration initiated the auto bailout, included no tax cuts in the stimulus, and raised his income taxes.
As is usually the case with Bozell, his new column consists of accusing people of being "liberals" and offering a superficial analysis built on misinformation that completely collapses under even cursory scrutiny. It's aimed at stoking the prejudices of those already predisposed to dismiss as useless anything from "liberals" and is woefully short on much anyone else would find particularly convincing. Last night, I wrote up a more compact version of the criticism of it I've offered here and it led to my being banned by Newsbusters, a place where substantive criticism, like serious thought itself, is most definitely not welcome.
--j.
---
[1] Bozell does offer one potentially legitimate criticism of the 2010 PIPA survey; that its sample of Fox viewers is too small to render a definitive judgment on all Fox viewers. The PIPA pollsters were looking for consumers of a broad range of news sources, not just Fox viewers, and their judgment of Fox viewers is based on about 145 people. While the relatively small sample size is a legitimate criticism, it really doesn't touch on the issue of Stewart's claim, which was that polls show Fox viewers to be the most misinformed. The 2010 PIPA poll--like all the others--did show that to be the case.
[2] PolitiFact showed itself to be equally clueless about what Stewart had actually done and wrote that the comic had "accepted our False verdict and apologized." Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard didn't get it, either and whined that "this is how a child admits a mistake, not a grown man..." No, Noel, it's the way a comedian makes an important point.
Media Matters For America lists as its mission "comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Part of the mission of FAIR can be found in its name--the "A" stands for "Accuracy," Fairness & Accuracy In Media. These groups are centrally concerned with, among other things, correcting misinformation. Keeping the record straight. The MRC has a very different mission. The legend of Newsbusters reads "Exposing & Combating Liberal Media Bias." Their more detailed "About" page tells the same story. They're about "bias," not accuracy.
It shows in their work. An incredible amount of misinformation flows forth from Newsbusters, just as it has always flowed forth from the MRC. Newsbusters is afflicted with a depressingly common ailment of the American right, one about which I've written a great deal over the years; they see politics as a simple contest between good and evil--themselves being good, the "liberals" being evil--and embrace the idea that reality itself can be subservient to and defined by their own momentary political passions. Much of the American rightist elite has, for years, waged open war on the notion that there is any such thing as an objective set of facts about anything. If there are no universally agreed-upon yardsticks, there's nothing against which to measure rightists, nothing that can be used to judge them unambiguously wrong. The elite indoctrinates its followers in the idea that what they, themselves, believe and want and do is, by definition, that which is true and proper and right and that the reverse is true of their enemies. The reason accuracy isn't listed as a concern of Newsbusters is because, for the conservatives and reactionaries who toil away at it and (most especially) for those who uncritically groove on its work, "liberal" equals, by definition, "misinformation." After years of providing their audience with this conditioning, the Newsbusters don't have to prove something is false; they just have to make some case that it comes from a liberal or aids liberalism (often just defined as anything that disagrees with or could hinder the right) and in their world, that means it's wrong, misleading, inaccurate and/or an outright lie. The Newsbusters will sometimes make a show of trying to actually prove something is genuinely inaccurate and they sometimes find genuine examples but for the most part, their efforts in this vein are laughably superficial.
A perfect case-in-point is the newest Brent Bozell column. Bozell is the head of the MRC and, like a lot of emperors, apparently doesn't like it when someone comes along and points out his lack of clothing. I've been pointing it out for a long time though, and last night when, shortly after Bozell posted that column, I did it again in the comments section, my Newsbusters account was suspended and the reply I'd written was consigned to a Memory Hole as if it had never even existed.
Bozell was writing about an appearance by comedian Jon Stewart on "Fox News Sunday" wherein Stewart was interviewed by Chris Wallace. The interview happened over two weeks ago but a whole lot of conservative commentators just keep bringing it up. It has become one of their temporary obsessions because Stewart said some things about Fox News that righties like Bozell find extremely inconvenient. That, for example, Fox News is very different from legitimate news organizations because it's really just a massive propaganda project for the Republican party, its content and tone tightly dictated by the committed partisans who run it. Stewart admitted his own bias but said his show's focus wasn't on conveying it--it was on making people laugh. Whereas news orgs are centrally concerned with offering news and information, Fox is centrally concerned with spreading propaganda, in the most negative sense of the word. The thing that assured Stewart would get plenty of attention from conservatives though, is that he said, "And in polls, who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? The most consistently misinformed? Fox. Fox viewers. Consistently. Every poll."
Like a lot of the righties who have written about the Stewart interview, Bozell was particularly unhappy about those remarks:
"In the real world--outside Stewart’s smug bubble--this is garbage."
By way of demonstrating its status as merit-free refuse, Bozell immediately begins extolling a 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center, one that asked respondents to name the Secretary of State, the prime minister of Britain and to identify which party controls congress. Viewers of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes show "were better informed than Stewart’s 'Daily Show' gigglers" on these points. But, of course, Stewart hadn't said Fox viewers were uninformed; he said they were misinformed. Neither Stewart nor anyone else has ever even alleged that Fox News misleads its viewers about things like the identity of the British prime minister. In short, Bozell is "refuting" a claim Stewart never even made rather than dealing with the one he had made.
He gets a bit closer to the mark when he writes about the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), which, in 2010, conducted a survey that showed Fox News viewers were significantly more likely to be misinformed about a wide range of subjects.
Bozell labels the PIPA gang "liberal pranksters masquerading as pollsters"--when liberal = misinformation, it's important to get that label in place up front, even if, as is the case here, there's absolutely no real reason for applying it--and he challenges the premise of two of their examples of misinformation held by Fox viewers. The first was that Fox viewers, in high numbers, thought most economists had concluded the health care law would increase the deficit; the second was that they thought most economists had concluded the Obama stimulus caused job losses. Whether it's fair to judge people harshly based on their impression of the opinion of most economists on a given issue is a matter that could be legitimately debated but Bozell isn't interested in that sort of debate. He writes that the idea that Obamacare will reduce deficits is "a patently ridiculous claim that doesn’t acknowledge the real world" and asserts that "Fox News viewers are tagged as the 'misinformed' dummies, because their opinions are grounded in logic."
Notice the sleight-of-hand? The survey, on that question, wasn't asking respondents their opinion of the effect of the health care law; it was asking respondents to offer their impression of the opinion of most economists who have studied the matter. The two are not the same nor were respondents likely to confuse the two because, before this question, they were first asked to offer their own impressions of the effect of the law. Bozell, of course, declines to share this fact with his readers when he's doing his little dance.
In limiting his remarks to these two questions, Bozell grossly misrepresents the overall survey. Most of the items on which Fox News viewers was shown to be misinformed were not subject to being "interpreted" away as nebulous abstractions. They were straightforward factual matters, ones about which Fox viewers were radically wrong. In huge numbers, Fox viewers believed the Obama administration had initiated the auto bailout (it hadn't), that most congressional Republicans had voted against TARP (most voted in favor of it), that the Obama stimulus contained no tax cuts (about 40% of it was tax cuts), that their own income taxes had gone up during the Obama administration (they hadn't) and so on.[1]
Bozell also fails to address or even acknowledge the existence of other surveys touching on Stewart's claim, which leaves his readers with the misimpression that the claim is based on a single poll, the one Bozell falsely suggested was fatally flawed. In reality, multiple surveys going back nearly a decade have concluded that Fox News viewers are among the most misinformed news consumers. PIPA had reached that conclusion in a poll from 2003 that tested respondents' knowledge of issues related to the Iraq war and War On Terror [tm]. Media Matters cited four other polls from recent years that show the same thing. If a single poll has ever reached a contrary conclusion, neither I nor any of the conservative commentators who have written about this in the last few weeks have been able to find it. Bozell, like everyone else who has labored to refute Stewart, was forced to rely on--and to misrepresent--that Pew survey, the one that doesn't even address the question.
This was the game PolitiFact played when it entered into the fray; using Pew surveys that measured whether news consumers were uninformed rather than misinformed to muddy the water then use the mud to rule Stewart's claim "false" while ignoring the existence of most of the surveys that did touch on--and that unanimously supported--Stewart's claim. Many of PolitiFact's readers nailed PolitiFact on this but though the PolitiFact gang acknowledged this criticism, they have so far declined to withdraw their bogus "false" rating of Stewart's claim and it continues to be used by conservatives as a club against Stewart.
That club was used to bash Stewart into offering a response, in which he said "I defer to (PolitiFact's) judgment and apologize for my mistake. To not do so would be irresponsible," at which point he broke into a litany of claims made on Fox News that PolitiFact itself had rated as "false"--so many items that the texts of them literally blotted out the screen. Bozell referenced this in wrapping up his column:
"Jon Stewart did the right thing and conceded he was the one misinforming people on Fox News."
Of course, if Bozell thinks that's what Stewart actually did, he's just as clueless as he's always seemed[2] and if he thought such a concession was "the right thing" to do, he's probably among those who think the Obama administration initiated the auto bailout, included no tax cuts in the stimulus, and raised his income taxes.
As is usually the case with Bozell, his new column consists of accusing people of being "liberals" and offering a superficial analysis built on misinformation that completely collapses under even cursory scrutiny. It's aimed at stoking the prejudices of those already predisposed to dismiss as useless anything from "liberals" and is woefully short on much anyone else would find particularly convincing. Last night, I wrote up a more compact version of the criticism of it I've offered here and it led to my being banned by Newsbusters, a place where substantive criticism, like serious thought itself, is most definitely not welcome.
--j.
---
[1] Bozell does offer one potentially legitimate criticism of the 2010 PIPA survey; that its sample of Fox viewers is too small to render a definitive judgment on all Fox viewers. The PIPA pollsters were looking for consumers of a broad range of news sources, not just Fox viewers, and their judgment of Fox viewers is based on about 145 people. While the relatively small sample size is a legitimate criticism, it really doesn't touch on the issue of Stewart's claim, which was that polls show Fox viewers to be the most misinformed. The 2010 PIPA poll--like all the others--did show that to be the case.
[2] PolitiFact showed itself to be equally clueless about what Stewart had actually done and wrote that the comic had "accepted our False verdict and apologized." Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard didn't get it, either and whined that "this is how a child admits a mistake, not a grown man..." No, Noel, it's the way a comedian makes an important point.
Friday, March 25, 2011
A Bozell in the Bush is Worth A Press in Iraq?
Right-wing "media critic" L. Brent Bozell III, the unfortunate fellow who runs the
Media Research Center, just popped up on "Fox & Friends" to assert
that, while Obama "seems to be getting a free pass from most media
outlets" with regard to his decision to involve the U.S. in the Libyan
crisis, George Bush Jr. got "anything but a free pass" from the press
while dragging the U.S. into the invasion of Iraq.
Julie Millican & Adam Shah have issued a corrective to this jaw-dropper over at Media Matters, writing that this "shows that Fox News may actually inhabit Bizarro World." In the real world, of course, the corporate press was--and, for the most part, has remained--a virtual co-conspirator with the Bush administration over the matter of Iraq. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, Millican and Shah note, the media
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, which, unlike Bozell, conducts real media criticism, undertook a survey of Iraq coverage by the three major U.S. news networks and PBS' Newshour. FAIR broke down every news story on Iraq in a two-week period during the critical lead-up to the conflict (30 Jan., 2003 to 12 Feb., 2003). In that time, there were 393 on-camera sources on the evening newscasts. Out of that, only 17% "represented skeptical or critical positions on the U.S.'s war policy." Among U.S. sources, 75% were "official sources"--current or former government or military officials--and, of these, only one expressed any skepticism of the Bush policy. Only 6% of total U.S. sources were skeptics and, "of all 393 sources, only three (less than 1 percent) were identified with organized protests or anti-war groups."
The same week in March 2003 when FAIR reported that study, Brent Bozell was using his column to smear the anti-war movement and, more to the point, to bitterly rage against the failure of the press to sufficiently do the same--the press that was barely even mentioning said movement. While anti-war voices were entirely locked out of most coverage, Bozell's headline that week--no kidding--was "Only Anti-War Citizens Are News." Bozell wrote four columns in the timeframe covered by that first FAIR survey. The first (31 Jan.) was a rant about violence on tv; the second a complaint about "gay left politics in print"; the third about Michael Jackson; and the fourth a furious rant against CNN for having the audacity to put Bill Clinton on "Larry King Live" on Ronald Reagan's birthday. Not one of them was devoted to Iraq coverage, which suggests "media critic"--and fanatical Iraq invasion-supporter--Bozell wasn't finding much about which to complain in that critical period.
When the war began, FAIR followed up with another survey, beginning the day Bush launched the war and continuing for three weeks. This one cast an even wider net--it examined the Iraq coverage of the three networks, the Newshour, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports, and Fox’s Special Report with Brit Hume. In this period, there were 1,617 sources appearing but the results were even worse than before:
Bozell is a fanatic who pretends to find "liberal bias" in everything. If Barack Obama was to step outside and say "the sky certainly is blue today," Bozell would find bias in any reporter who may have nodded his head in agreement. He could probably produce some "scholar" from the Heritage Foundation to dispute the notion then trash the rest of the press for failing to debunk Obama's "the sky is blue" lie. Reading through these Iraq columns though, you'll find angry ranting, pro-Bush nonsense, a plethora of lies and misrepresentations, an often obsessive focus on the utterly trivial. What you won't find is any contemporaneous support for Bozell's later assertion that Bush was being given a hard time by the press. And there's a reason for that.
--j.
Julie Millican & Adam Shah have issued a corrective to this jaw-dropper over at Media Matters, writing that this "shows that Fox News may actually inhabit Bizarro World." In the real world, of course, the corporate press was--and, for the most part, has remained--a virtual co-conspirator with the Bush administration over the matter of Iraq. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, Millican and Shah note, the media
"acted as Bush's lapdogs, eagerly parroting every dubious claim the Bush administration made about Iraq and shouting down the few who dared to disagree. So bad was the media's coverage of Iraq, many major media outlets have since issued apologies for their complete and total failure to investigate any of the claims made by the Bush administration."They quote several examples of this, and their article isn't bad. Its shortcoming is that the authors, having made their overarching claim about Bush-friendly coverage, failed to make use of readily-available hard data that more ably made this point.
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, which, unlike Bozell, conducts real media criticism, undertook a survey of Iraq coverage by the three major U.S. news networks and PBS' Newshour. FAIR broke down every news story on Iraq in a two-week period during the critical lead-up to the conflict (30 Jan., 2003 to 12 Feb., 2003). In that time, there were 393 on-camera sources on the evening newscasts. Out of that, only 17% "represented skeptical or critical positions on the U.S.'s war policy." Among U.S. sources, 75% were "official sources"--current or former government or military officials--and, of these, only one expressed any skepticism of the Bush policy. Only 6% of total U.S. sources were skeptics and, "of all 393 sources, only three (less than 1 percent) were identified with organized protests or anti-war groups."
The same week in March 2003 when FAIR reported that study, Brent Bozell was using his column to smear the anti-war movement and, more to the point, to bitterly rage against the failure of the press to sufficiently do the same--the press that was barely even mentioning said movement. While anti-war voices were entirely locked out of most coverage, Bozell's headline that week--no kidding--was "Only Anti-War Citizens Are News." Bozell wrote four columns in the timeframe covered by that first FAIR survey. The first (31 Jan.) was a rant about violence on tv; the second a complaint about "gay left politics in print"; the third about Michael Jackson; and the fourth a furious rant against CNN for having the audacity to put Bill Clinton on "Larry King Live" on Ronald Reagan's birthday. Not one of them was devoted to Iraq coverage, which suggests "media critic"--and fanatical Iraq invasion-supporter--Bozell wasn't finding much about which to complain in that critical period.
When the war began, FAIR followed up with another survey, beginning the day Bush launched the war and continuing for three weeks. This one cast an even wider net--it examined the Iraq coverage of the three networks, the Newshour, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports, and Fox’s Special Report with Brit Hume. In this period, there were 1,617 sources appearing but the results were even worse than before:
"Nearly two thirds of all sources, 64 percent, were pro-war, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war. Anti-war voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources and 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1... While the percentage of Americans opposing the war was about 10 times higher in the real world as they were on the nightly news (27 percent versus 3 percent), their proportion of the guestlist may still overstate the degree to which they were able to present their views on U.S. television. Guests with anti-war viewpoints were almost universally allowed one-sentence soundbites taken from interviews conducted on the street. Not a single show in the study conducted a sit-down interview with a person identified as being against the war."And Bozell? In such an environment, pickings were mighty slim for a right-wing "media critic" whose paycheck is dependent upon perpetuating the myth of a "liberal media." Two of the six columns he wrote in this period had nothing at all to do with Iraq. The day after the war began, he was off writing about alleged "Anti-Catholic 'entertainment'." Later, deep in the midst of war, he penned a rant against the Oscar Awards. Though the other four pieces reference Iraq, all were about minor, peripheral matters. One was a complaint that the press had failed to sufficiently smear then-Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle for a remark critical of Bush; one was devoted to smearing journalist Peter Arnett; one attacked that noted newswoman Madonna for what may have been in a new video she declined to release to the public. Again, not joking. The last one though, was the keeper. An anti-war demonstration had just picketed CNN over its Iraq coverage. How is a right-wing "media critic" to explain such a thing to his credulous audience? About the protesters, Bozell writes:
"First the Democrats wouldn't carry their anti-war water. Now the media won't do their job and undermine the war effort? So the Loudmouth Left is doing what it does best: moan and scream, this time outside cable news studios... The war is going well, too well, and the coverage apparently is too positive. So the Loudmouth Leftists are crowding the streets and demeaning CNN with Nazi epithets."The best he does as he goes along is to suggest the protesters are radicals whose claim to a legitimate complaint in this matter is dubious. Re-read the FAIR numbers quoted above when evaluating Bozell's claim in this same column that the protesters' complaints about coverage boiled down to the lack of sufficient live gore and death on television.
Bozell is a fanatic who pretends to find "liberal bias" in everything. If Barack Obama was to step outside and say "the sky certainly is blue today," Bozell would find bias in any reporter who may have nodded his head in agreement. He could probably produce some "scholar" from the Heritage Foundation to dispute the notion then trash the rest of the press for failing to debunk Obama's "the sky is blue" lie. Reading through these Iraq columns though, you'll find angry ranting, pro-Bush nonsense, a plethora of lies and misrepresentations, an often obsessive focus on the utterly trivial. What you won't find is any contemporaneous support for Bozell's later assertion that Bush was being given a hard time by the press. And there's a reason for that.
--j.
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