MRC Watch Dept. - How badly does the Newsbusters gang hate Hillary Clinton? The org is built on peddling the myth of a "liberal media" to rightists eager to believe it--confirmation bias as commerce--and the far-right politics of its writers make democratic socialist Bernie Sanders absolutely anathema to them but when it comes to covering the coverage of the ongoing presidential campaign, it seems hatred of Clinton entirely overrides these considerations.
Week after week, Newsbusters has been featuring stories that roast press outlets for exactly the same sort of misbehavior this author regularly denounces over on "News Reviews"; journalistic malpractice in support of the Clinton campaign.
--When Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard resigned from the shamelessly Clinton-backing DNC to endorse Sanders, Tom Blumer raked the Associated Press over the coals for burying the story.
--When CNN's Alisyn Camerota "badgered" Gabbard over her endorsement of Sanders--"Why endorse Bernie Sanders now when, frankly, it feels as though the momentum, after South Carolina, has shifted away from him and towards Hillary Clinton?"--Matthew Balan was there to call out Camerota.
--When elements of the press went along with some phony "outrage" ginned up by the Clinton camp over some things Sanders said in a debate, Mark Finkelstein offered an huzzah to Mark Helperin and John Heilemann for condemning this.
--When NBC's Today and ABC's Good Morning America focused their debate coverage on the color of suit Sanders had worn, Kyle Drennen called foul (consistent with his own politics, Drennen wanted more coverage of the questioning of Clinton on the Benghazi non-issue but one can substitute any substantive issue discussed in that particular debate--the news people are arguing over what color suit Sanders wore).
--Incredibly, when Clinton falsely claimed Sanders "stood with the Minutemen vigilantes in their ridiculous, absurd efforts to quote, 'hunt down immigrants'," several press "fact-checkers" partially sided with Clinton; Tim Graham objected.
--After Sanders completely destroyed Clinton in a series of contests last week, Tom Blumer noted the Associated Press and USA Today had failed to mention Sanders' margin of victory and wrote that the New York Times had downplayed the wins.
--This morning, David Muir interviewed Sanders on Good Morning America and, in the words of Scott Whitlock, "spouted Clinton talking points" and "attempted to turn Clinton screaming at someone [a questioner from Greenpeace] into a positive."
--On CBS This Morning, John Dickerson described that same Clinton outburst as an example of her "authenticity" and questioned Sanders about Clinton's assertion that he was "lying" about her. Kyle Drennen objected to this one. Drennen notes that Dana Jacobson asks Sanders if he would back Clinton if he lost the nomination. Contrary to Drennen's suggestion, the questioning about Clinton's charge of "lying" isn't at all inappropriate--rather, failing to ask about that one would have been--but the rest of the behavior he spotlights is certainly inappropriate.
And so on--just a few of the recent examples. Most of Newsbusters' prominent writers have chimed in with articles of this nature.[1] If they're aware that the press behavior they're spotlighting works directly against their own central premise and their employers' reason for existing--because every one of these is an example of a conservative press working on behalf of the more conservative candidate and against the lefty in the race--their long-ingrained hatred of Clinton overwhelms any pause this realization may inspire.
--j.
---
[1] And to be fair, they also run articles--though far fewer lately--in which their dislike of Sanders' politics is readily evident.
[This article was written for MRC Watch, where we disapprove of "objective" journalists acting as campaign agents for candidates.]
Friday, April 1, 2016
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Super Misrepresentation of Superdelegates by UnSuper Press [Updated Below]
Much ink has been spilled in this presidential election cycle about the Democratic "superdelegates," party leaders and elected officials who make up about 20% of the Democratic party's delegates to its nominating convention. These delegates are conferred their super status by virtue of their position in the party and don't represent any actual voters in the primary and caucus process. At the end of the 1960s, party bosses and their smoke-filled back rooms had been cut out of the nominating process. The superdelegate system, adopted in the early '80s, was an effort to again allow these bosses to wield some influence over the party's nominations after Democrats had suffered some crushing defeats. It is, in this day and age, an anti-democratic anachronism.
In 2008, Hillary Clinton continued her primary fight against Barack Obama for four months beyond the point she was statistically likely to win the nomination in the hopes of convincing the superdelegates to pull a Bush at the convention--to throw out the actual election results and anoint her the candidate. This season, Clinton--still neck-deep in the party Establishment and challenged by outsider Bernie Sanders--has racked up a large number of superdelegates who have expressed a preference for her and she and her surrogates have made a regular practice of including the supers in their accounting of where the race currently stands, part of Clinton's larger strategy of portraying her own nomination as inevitable. More significantly for our purposes here, the corporate press, acting as de facto Clinton surrogates, has largely done the same.
Including the supers in the running delegate count is extremely problematic in a number of ways. The most obvious is that it deliberately misleads news consumers about the state of the race, making it appear as if Clinton has earned those delegates and, worse, making it appear as if her lead is much larger than it actually is. No superdelegate has voted yet nor will any until the Democratic convention in the Summer. Between now and then, the supers are free to change their minds at any time and, historically speaking, have done so. Regardless of their initial preferences, the supers have always come to back the candidate who wins the primary process and, indeed, practically speaking, they simply have no other choice; if voters chose one candidate and the supers chose instead to make the loser the nominee, the party would implode. There is absolutely no rationale for press outlets including the supers in their day-to-day running tally other than the desire to intentionally ply the public with misleading propaganda aimed at aiding the Clinton campaign by suppressing Sanders' vote while artificially inflating--by Bandwagon Effect-ing--Clinton's.
Yet day after day, that's exactly how the state of the race is being reported. After Super Tuesday on March 1, Clinton had earned 611 delegates to Sanders' 410, yet this is the graphic on the state of the race offered by NBC News the next day[1]:
Moving forward, Clinton has, as of Wednesday, taken 12 states to Sanders 9, winning 770 delegates to Sanders' 551. Hardly an insurmountable lead, particularly with 29 states yet to vote, but in reporting the state of the race, CBS This Morning offered this graphic:
CBS notes its totals "include super delegates" but the uninitiated would have no idea what that actually meant.
On Monday, ABC's World News Tonight, which has been so deeply in the tank for Clinton as to be an unintentional parody, tried to bury Sanders with this report,[2] which asserted that "to win the nomination, he'd need to win every remaining state by 10 points!" [Emphasis in the original]. The accompanying graphic:
The curious "math" by which this entirely false conclusion[3] was reached involved, among other things, inclusion of those superdelegates, a fact correspondent David Wright declined to share with his viewers.
That ABC News "report" is an example of a depressingly common practice by press outlets of using the early superdelegate pledges to treat the Democratic race as all but over. The New York Times' Patrick Healy, to note another example, wrote, back on Feb. 21, that Sanders was "slipping significantly behind Hillary Clinton in the race for the nomination," and "the odds of his overtaking her [are] growing increasingly remote." But at the time, Sanders and Clinton were dead-even in actual delegates, at 51 each.
Earlier in the race, Sanders buried Clinton in New Hampshire, pulling off a 22-point win, one of the largest in the history of that primary. The next day, NPR reported:
This sort of thing hasn't gone entirely unremarked upon. Appearing on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show on 20 Feb., even so staunch a Clintonite as Democratic National Committee chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz noted that this sort of representation of the state of the race is "incorrect." A few days later, Jim Naureckas over at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting noted the New York Times' inclusion of the superdelegates in its summation of the race and, more importantly, the fact that this is a new practice, something the Times didn't do during the last contested Democratic race in 2008. On Monday, Kevin Gosztola of Shadowland Press notes that the Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, MSNBC and Google are playing the same game of including the superdelegates. The Times, to its belated credit, was shamed into ending this practice but this particular breed of pro-Clinton propaganda--it isn't at all inaccurate to describe it as a voter suppression effort--continues throughout the corporate press.
--j.
---
[1] The graphic not only inflated Clinton's delegates but, for whatever reason, shorted Sanders, not only failing to include his own supers but also leaving out some of his earned delegates.
[2] Correspondent David Wright deserves a few kudos for actually talking to Bernie Sanders, something that simply isn't done in these reports on ABC but the entire tenor of it was the usual pro-Clinton spin; attack-dog Clinton is shown looking forward to when she has the nomination and she hopes for a Sanders endorsement, Sanders' assertion that he can win the race is countered with the squishy "math" and false conclusion described above, and so on.
[3] All Democratic delegates are awarded on a proportional basis. A few healthy-margin wins in some of the bigger states would be sufficient to entirely erase Clinton's lead. Wright's claim was an absolutely outrageous lie that was offered for no other purpose than to demoralize Sanders supporters and make his candidacy seem hopeless.
___
UPDATE (22 March, 2016) - Two weeks and several contests later, the corporate press continues to publish and work from these fake delegate counts. As the race currently stands (prior to the conclusion of today's contests), Clinton has 1,163 delegates vs. Sanders' 844. Not an enormous lead, but today, Politico offers this:
Yesterday, Politico ran a noxious piece entitled, "Democrats to Sanders: Time to wind it down,' which references a series of Clinton-supporting Democratic politicians saying Sanders needs to stop criticizing Hillary Clinton:
UPDATE (28 March, 2016) - ABC News has been embarrassingly pro-Clinton throughout the primary season. After Sanders utterly destroyed Clinton in three states on the 26th--winning over 70% in each--Good Morning America uncharacteristically ran a mostly straight report on the matter by Cecilia Vega, a correspondent whose work on the Democratic primary has been perpetually marked by ludicrously one-sided presentations. Even as she was reporting Sanders' victories though, she couldn't resist trying to pour cold water on them. The Clinton campaign declined to officially comment on these wins and noting that should have been the end of Vega's inclusion of its point of view but instead, she dug up unnamed "Clinton aides" who reportedly said--shockingly--these wins don't change anything. Vega then asserted "Sanders would need to win 73% of the remaining delegates to clinch the nomination," and included this graphic:
Yet again, the "math" used to reach this conclusion includes the superdelegates in the count, without, in this case, even disclosing this fact to the viewers. Using this to frame the clip of Sanders that follows makes the candidate look utterly delusional when he asserts his campaign has a "path to victory" but in fact, the current delegate count stands as 1,243 for Clinton, 975 for Sanders, a difference of only 268. To put that in perspective, of the states that remain, California alone has 548 delegates.
In 2008, Hillary Clinton continued her primary fight against Barack Obama for four months beyond the point she was statistically likely to win the nomination in the hopes of convincing the superdelegates to pull a Bush at the convention--to throw out the actual election results and anoint her the candidate. This season, Clinton--still neck-deep in the party Establishment and challenged by outsider Bernie Sanders--has racked up a large number of superdelegates who have expressed a preference for her and she and her surrogates have made a regular practice of including the supers in their accounting of where the race currently stands, part of Clinton's larger strategy of portraying her own nomination as inevitable. More significantly for our purposes here, the corporate press, acting as de facto Clinton surrogates, has largely done the same.
Including the supers in the running delegate count is extremely problematic in a number of ways. The most obvious is that it deliberately misleads news consumers about the state of the race, making it appear as if Clinton has earned those delegates and, worse, making it appear as if her lead is much larger than it actually is. No superdelegate has voted yet nor will any until the Democratic convention in the Summer. Between now and then, the supers are free to change their minds at any time and, historically speaking, have done so. Regardless of their initial preferences, the supers have always come to back the candidate who wins the primary process and, indeed, practically speaking, they simply have no other choice; if voters chose one candidate and the supers chose instead to make the loser the nominee, the party would implode. There is absolutely no rationale for press outlets including the supers in their day-to-day running tally other than the desire to intentionally ply the public with misleading propaganda aimed at aiding the Clinton campaign by suppressing Sanders' vote while artificially inflating--by Bandwagon Effect-ing--Clinton's.
Yet day after day, that's exactly how the state of the race is being reported. After Super Tuesday on March 1, Clinton had earned 611 delegates to Sanders' 410, yet this is the graphic on the state of the race offered by NBC News the next day[1]:
Moving forward, Clinton has, as of Wednesday, taken 12 states to Sanders 9, winning 770 delegates to Sanders' 551. Hardly an insurmountable lead, particularly with 29 states yet to vote, but in reporting the state of the race, CBS This Morning offered this graphic:
CBS notes its totals "include super delegates" but the uninitiated would have no idea what that actually meant.
On Monday, ABC's World News Tonight, which has been so deeply in the tank for Clinton as to be an unintentional parody, tried to bury Sanders with this report,[2] which asserted that "to win the nomination, he'd need to win every remaining state by 10 points!" [Emphasis in the original]. The accompanying graphic:
The curious "math" by which this entirely false conclusion[3] was reached involved, among other things, inclusion of those superdelegates, a fact correspondent David Wright declined to share with his viewers.
That ABC News "report" is an example of a depressingly common practice by press outlets of using the early superdelegate pledges to treat the Democratic race as all but over. The New York Times' Patrick Healy, to note another example, wrote, back on Feb. 21, that Sanders was "slipping significantly behind Hillary Clinton in the race for the nomination," and "the odds of his overtaking her [are] growing increasingly remote." But at the time, Sanders and Clinton were dead-even in actual delegates, at 51 each.
Earlier in the race, Sanders buried Clinton in New Hampshire, pulling off a 22-point win, one of the largest in the history of that primary. The next day, NPR reported:
"There were 24 delegates to be allocated out of the New Hampshire Democratic primary, based on the vote statewide and by congressional district. Sanders, obviously, won more of those, 15 to her 9.This was reported across the press, which certainly hasn't treated it as a headline-worthy scandal indicating a fundamentally corrupt process. The implied message in those stories, absent that scandal framing, is the same as the in-your-face message in accounts of the race that use superdelegate pledges: if you're a Sanders supporter, don't even bother to vote.
"And yet...
"Add in the "superdelegates" who have already committed to a candidate, and Clinton moves into the delegate lead. Six of the state's eight superdelegates have publicly said they will vote for Clinton at the Democratic National Convention in July. (Two are uncommitted.)
"That brings the delegate total out of Tuesday night to a 15 to 15 tie."
This sort of thing hasn't gone entirely unremarked upon. Appearing on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show on 20 Feb., even so staunch a Clintonite as Democratic National Committee chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz noted that this sort of representation of the state of the race is "incorrect." A few days later, Jim Naureckas over at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting noted the New York Times' inclusion of the superdelegates in its summation of the race and, more importantly, the fact that this is a new practice, something the Times didn't do during the last contested Democratic race in 2008. On Monday, Kevin Gosztola of Shadowland Press notes that the Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, MSNBC and Google are playing the same game of including the superdelegates. The Times, to its belated credit, was shamed into ending this practice but this particular breed of pro-Clinton propaganda--it isn't at all inaccurate to describe it as a voter suppression effort--continues throughout the corporate press.
--j.
---
[1] The graphic not only inflated Clinton's delegates but, for whatever reason, shorted Sanders, not only failing to include his own supers but also leaving out some of his earned delegates.
[2] Correspondent David Wright deserves a few kudos for actually talking to Bernie Sanders, something that simply isn't done in these reports on ABC but the entire tenor of it was the usual pro-Clinton spin; attack-dog Clinton is shown looking forward to when she has the nomination and she hopes for a Sanders endorsement, Sanders' assertion that he can win the race is countered with the squishy "math" and false conclusion described above, and so on.
[3] All Democratic delegates are awarded on a proportional basis. A few healthy-margin wins in some of the bigger states would be sufficient to entirely erase Clinton's lead. Wright's claim was an absolutely outrageous lie that was offered for no other purpose than to demoralize Sanders supporters and make his candidacy seem hopeless.
___
UPDATE (22 March, 2016) - Two weeks and several contests later, the corporate press continues to publish and work from these fake delegate counts. As the race currently stands (prior to the conclusion of today's contests), Clinton has 1,163 delegates vs. Sanders' 844. Not an enormous lead, but today, Politico offers this:
Yesterday, Politico ran a noxious piece entitled, "Democrats to Sanders: Time to wind it down,' which references a series of Clinton-supporting Democratic politicians saying Sanders needs to stop criticizing Hillary Clinton:
"The subtext of these comments is the general view among Democrats that Sanders has no path to win. Clinton has nearly double the number of delegates that Sanders has, and she swept the Vermont independent in three distinct regions of the country last week."Ben Adler, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review today, takes on this very bad press habit.
UPDATE (28 March, 2016) - ABC News has been embarrassingly pro-Clinton throughout the primary season. After Sanders utterly destroyed Clinton in three states on the 26th--winning over 70% in each--Good Morning America uncharacteristically ran a mostly straight report on the matter by Cecilia Vega, a correspondent whose work on the Democratic primary has been perpetually marked by ludicrously one-sided presentations. Even as she was reporting Sanders' victories though, she couldn't resist trying to pour cold water on them. The Clinton campaign declined to officially comment on these wins and noting that should have been the end of Vega's inclusion of its point of view but instead, she dug up unnamed "Clinton aides" who reportedly said--shockingly--these wins don't change anything. Vega then asserted "Sanders would need to win 73% of the remaining delegates to clinch the nomination," and included this graphic:
Yet again, the "math" used to reach this conclusion includes the superdelegates in the count, without, in this case, even disclosing this fact to the viewers. Using this to frame the clip of Sanders that follows makes the candidate look utterly delusional when he asserts his campaign has a "path to victory" but in fact, the current delegate count stands as 1,243 for Clinton, 975 for Sanders, a difference of only 268. To put that in perspective, of the states that remain, California alone has 548 delegates.
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
PolitiFudge
"'I would love to run against Donald Trump, and I’ll tell you why,' said Bernie Sanders. 'For a start, … not all, but almost every poll has shown that Sanders vs. Trump does a lot better than Clinton vs. Trump. … And, that’s true nationally.'"
PolitiFact examined Sanders' characterization of the polling data--the only factual assertion on the table--and verified that it was entirely accurate, then ranked his comment as only "mostly true," manufacturing a completely ridiculous rationale for denying Sanders a "true" rating. "[P]olling experts say such results should be taken with a grain of salt, since polls taken well before the start of the general-election contest have historically not been very accurate predictors of the November results." So what Sanders said--in a comment aimed at expressing his desire to run against Trump, not at sizing up the ins and outs of polling--is less than entirely true based on something Sanders never said.
Politifact's writers make a regular habit of this sort of thing. If, as with Sanders, they can't find anything inaccurate about a statement, they'll often just throw it out, invent a straw man claim in its place, then rate the straw man, a back door for inappropriately inserting editorial content into what's supposed to be a straightforward checking of checkable facts. As that Sanders example indicates, its analysts aren't always particularly scrupulous when it comes to sticking to that "checkable facts" part either. What's the point in conducting an investigation of a politician's assertion that he'd like to run against another politician? That Sanders wants to run against Trump definitely isn't checkable absent telepathic powers. Sanders--who does, in fact, poll significantly better against Trump than does Clinton--made a substantive case for his own candidacy and it looks as if Politifact just didn't want to let that go without, in some way, downplaying or dismissing it.
Over the years, I've written about some of the shortcomings of Politifact's work. What I'm going to outline here isn't, by any means, a comprehensive survey. Just some notes I and other critics have made on some of the things Politifact has done.
Back in 2011, I wrote a few things in various forums on behalf of Jon Stewart when he was straight-up mugged by Politifact. In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Stewart had spoken about Fox viewers being misinformed. "Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll." The Politifact gang claimed this was "false." To "prove" it, they cited surveys that gauged how well-informed were consumers of various news outlets about various basic facts, surveys in which Fox viewers weren't the most uninformed. But Stewart didn't say "uninformed"; he said "misinformed." Every one of the surveys Politifact was citing to refute him asked respondents about general public affairs knowledge. Could they name the vice president? Could they name the president of Russia? And so on. Neither Stewart nor anyone else has ever claimed Fox lies to its viewers about things like that. Meanwhile, there had been survey after survey examining misinformation among news consumers, and regular Fox viewers had proven the most misinformed in every one of them, no exceptions. In short, Politifact had gotten this flat-out, nowhere-to-run-or-hide completely wrong, but faced with a barrage of criticism, PF refused to back down or even deal with the issue.
And that's not unusual. Any press outlet is sometimes going to make mistakes--it comes with the territory. When PF's analysts get things wrong though, they routinely refuse to correct the error or only offer a half-assed correction or, perhaps more often than both, just dig in their heels and double down on the original error. It's the worst habit in the world for a "fact-checker."
(Stewart, btw, decided to "apologize" for his error--his reply, burying Politifact with its own work, proved why he's destined to be remembered as a comedy legend.)
In his Jan. 2012 State of the Union Address, Barack Obama had said, "In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005." Politifact acknowledged that both statements were entirely factual but gave Obama only a "half true" rating because the checker said the president was insinuating his administration was responsible for this, something Obama had never said in the speech. The PF gang "refuted" this straw man they'd set up by referencing economists who noted that no presidential administration is entirely responsible for job growth in the economy. Another flurry of criticism followed and in a rare move, they did sort of back away--they changed their rating to "mostly true." For a statement they, themselves, had documented was entirely true in every particular.
They pulled this nonsense that same month with an Obama ad that said, "For the first time in 13 years, our dependence on foreign oil is below 50 percent." PF certified that this was entirely correct then rated the claim "half true" because, yet again, the analyst had read Obama's mind and asserted he'd taken credit for it but didn't deserve the full credit for it.
In February 2012, Politifact examined Sen. Marco Rubio's extravagant claim that "the majority of Americans are conservatives." This drew my attention at the time because it was a subject I'd repeatedly covered in the past. PF cited Gallup's most recent (at that time) self-identification poll which showed that 40% of Americans identified as "conservative" vs. 35% as "moderate" and 21% as "liberal." In short, by their own chosen source, 60% of Americans do not identify themselves as "conservative." Their rating of Rubio's claim? "Mostly true." I've written about the uselessness of such self-identification polls, perpetually subject to, among other things, how respondents interpret the well-traveled (and much-abused) words. When one looks at the absurdly extensive polling data available, one is hard-pressed to find any major issue on which Americans don't, by overwhelming margins, hold a progressive view. When their Rubio ruling was criticized, PF analysts changed their rating but not to "false," only to "half true." PF's readers are presumably left to conclude its analysts have access to some special math by which 40% equals a "majority."
When, in 2012, Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid claimed he'd been informed by someone in the know that then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney hadn't paid any taxes in at least a decade, it could be seen as a low blow, rumor-mongering, a dick move, political bullshit, or, alternately, some mischief Romney had earned via his refusal to publicly release his past tax returns (in the name of ethical transparency, presidential candidates traditionally release such returns). PF's Louis Jacobson, however, ranked Reid's comment as a "pants on fire" lie. Jacobson asked some tax experts whether it was possible Romney had paid no taxes in a period of a decade and they offered the opinion that this was "unlikely," which certainly doesn't rule out the possibility. In the real world, of course, there are only three grounds for that "pants on fire" rating: Jacobson had been given access to Romney's tax returns over an extended period, he'd had Reid under tight surveillance for an extended period or he had telepathic powers and could peer into Reid's mind. Jacobson doesn't even claim any of the three and absent them, there's absolutely no basis for PF's rating in the matter or, indeed, for any rating at all. Someone really could have said this to Reid. That "pants on fire" is strictly an editorial expression of disapproval of Reid's comments--again, not something an outlet that bills itself as a non-partisan fact-checker should be doing.
Perhaps the most infamous example of Politifact nonsense--because it provoked the biggest uproar--occurred in 2011 when Democrats had been noting that the Paul Ryan budget embraced by Republicans in the House of Representatives would end Medicare as we know it and PF decided that because the voucher program with which Ryan would replace Medicare would still be called "Medicare," this was false. On nine different occasions throughout 2011, PF rated iterations on it as either "false" or "Pants On Fire" lies, at a time when several proponents of the Ryan budget were publicly bragging it would end Medicare as we know it. PF analysts went on to compound this idiocy by choosing it as Politifact's "Lie of the Year" and when this provoked a wave of criticism, PF editor Bill Adair offered a follow-up in which he refused to address the facts and chose, instead, to take snotty ad hominem swipes at PF's critics, painting them as merely partisans living in an echo-chamber who didn't like independent fact-checkers.
That incident points to one of Politifact's editorial biases: it doesn't like "entitlement" programs. PF has, over the years, repeatedly embraced conservative mythology about such programs and has run interference for those attacking them.
The business about the Ryan budget was a sustained, long-running example of the latter. Another example of it: One PF article examined Indiana Rep. Todd Young's assertion that "nearly 70 percent of all federal spending will go towards Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid" in the coming year (this was offered in 2013). PF documented that this was a false statement--those programs amount to only 45% of spending--and correctly rated it as "false." So far, so good. But then, the PF analyst spent over half the article trying to rationalize Young's comment, asserting that, if you add in all entitlement programs plus--utterly randomly--the full annual interest paid on the national debt, you get to 68% of spending--close to 70%. A more egregious example: In July, 2013, the Virginia Democratic party began running an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli which asserted that in his new book, Cuccinelli "questions whether Medicare and Social Security should exist." Politifact's Sean Gorman examined this one and his "analysis" boggles the mind. Turning to the book in question, he quotes Cuccinelli:
"'Sometimes bad politicians set out to grow government in order to increase their own power and influence,' Cuccinelli wrote. 'This phenomenon doesn’t just happen in Washington; it happens at all levels of government. The amazing thing is that they often grow government without protest from citizens, and sometimes they even get buy-in from citizens -- at least from the ones getting the goodies.'That seems a pretty open-and-shut case. Virginia Democrats earn a "true" rating, right? Nope. Gorman instead turns to an entirely different part of the book 175 pages later wherein:
"Cuccinelli then cites specific entitlements.
"'One of their favorite ways to increase their power is by creating programs that dispense subsidized government benefits, such as Medicare, Social Security and outright welfare (Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing and the like). These programs make people dependent on government. And once people are dependent, they feel they can’t afford to have the programs taken away, no matter how inefficient, poorly run or costly to the rest of society.'"
"Cuccinelli wrote that government spends little on investments that result in economic growth, noting that Social Security, Medicare and defense spending amounted to more than half of the federal budget in 2011.Well, that settles that. Cuccinelli suggested that Medicare and Social Security were inefficient, poorly run, costly programs and flat-out said these were programs created by bad pols looking only to increase their own power but because he says, in an entirely different passage 175 pages later, that, in the context of that later passage, he isn't questioning their existence, he never questioned their existence at all and Politifact gives the Virginia Democrats' claim a rating of "mostly false."[1]
"'There is no monetary return on these investments in any traditional business sense (that is, one invests money with a goal of getting a return in the form of interest, income or appreciation in value), although there are obviously other reasons America spends money on these programs,' Cuccinelli wrote. 'I'm not questioning here the existence of these programs nor the wisdom of how much money is spent on them. What I’m trying to illustrate is that most dollars that government spends do not create economic growth, but instead take money out of the hands of the people who do create economic growth.'"
Again, Cuccinelli wrote, 'I’m not questioning here the existence of these programs, nor how much money is spent on them.'"
For years, Politifact has embraced false conservative claims that Social Security contributes to the federal budget deficit. In Sept. 2014, PF examined Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley's assertion that SS "has never contributed one cent to the deficit. Not one cent." Though Merkley was correct, PF rated his statement as only "half true." This prompted a vigorous challenge from Jeff Hiltzik; writing in the Los Angeles Times, Hiltzik systematically dismantled PF's case, exposing a factual inaccuracy at the core of it and illustrating that PF was misrepresenting not only the SS program itself but even its own chosen source. PF analyst Dana Tims' response was to double down, misrepresent Hiltzik's criticism, refuse to address the previous factual inaccuracies and add more errors to the pile. Hiltzik wasn't impressed. Politifact has clung to this same myth for years, despite having been corrected over and over again. In a way, the rating of "half true" given to Merkley could be seen as progress--in all of those previous iterations, PF analysts had ranked the same assertion as "mostly false."
In 2012, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow had started waging a recurring on-air battle against Politifact, routinely noting the kind of nonsense I've been outlining here. She has cited, for example, PF's attack on former tennis champ Martina Navratilova's accurate assertion that "in 29 states in this country you can still get fired for not just being gay but if your employer thinks you are gay... We don't have equal rights." Politifact's analyst Louis Jacobson had documented the fact that "if you frame this statement in the context of blanket protections by states, she’s correct," then argued that, within the states that allow for such discrimination, there are some localities that don't, some employers that voluntarily pledge not to fire workers on such grounds and some government employees who enjoy protection against discrimination and while all of the above encompasses a microscopic fraction of the total workforce in those states--a fact PF's analyst left on the cutting-room floor--Jacobson decided they collectively conspire to reduce Navratilova's below "true," below "mostly true" and down to only "half true." Maddow roasted PF for it.
The Navratilova affair is classic Politifact. The org that makes so many appeals to "context" as rationale for a barrage of bad rulings takes a broadly true comment and attempts to make it hold the weight of the world in order to punch holes in it. What do the ludicrous extremes to which PF went to try to find some way to downgrade the truth of Navratilova's comment really say, other than that PF editorially disliked the fact that someone had pointed out homosexuals' lack of protection from discrimination in most states?
When it comes to dealing with an avowed critic like Maddow, all that hypertechnical concern for "context" goes right out the window. Back in late August, Politifact went after Maddow over something she'd said in mid-July. At the time, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker had just entered the presidential race and Maddow sized up his candidacy. At one point, she focused on Walker's unfortunate economic record. This is how Politifact presented this:
"'Under his [Walker's] leadership as governor, Wisconsin has had a really bad time of it when it comes to jobs and the economy,' Maddow said on her MSNBC program on July 13, 2015, the day Walker announced his run for the Republican presidential nomination.PF's Kevin Crowe and Tom Ketscher confirmed this statement was, in fact, true, using Maddow's own source, but they noted Maddow was using data that covered a 13-year period, including many years before Walker was governor. So they looked at middle-class shrinkage rates comparing one pre-Walker year to two Walker years and found that Wisconsin only ranked a still-pretty-awful 24th in the rate of decline in the middle-class during those Walker years. Any of the economists PF always makes a show of referencing could have (and would have, if any had been asked) told these analysts that unless there's some sort of dramatic, short-term change, a comparison of only three years of data is absolutely meaningless when it comes to measuring such a thing. The source Maddow cited was correct to examine it as a long-term trend. One can argue this makes it inappropriate for Maddow to cite this as emblematic of Walker's economic record and that criticism would certainly be valid. Maddow was given a rating of "false."
"She added:
"'The Wisconsin middle class is shrinking at a faster rate than any other state in the country.'"
But PF, always that stickler for "context," isn't being honest here. While PF's presentation would lead an unwary reader to believe this factoid of questionable utility was the basis for Maddow's claim that, under Walker, Wisconsin has economically suffered and that PF had thus debunked that claim, that business about middle-class shrinkage was only part of a much longer monologue on the subject:
"Under his leadership as governor, Wisconsin has had a really bad time of it when it comes to jobs and the economy. Private sector job growth in his state is one of the worst in the nation. Wisconsin, the Wisconsin middle class is shrinking at a faster rate than any other state in the country. Over the course of his time in office, Wisconsin has steadily fallen in terms of job-creation numbers when ranked against other states. In 2011, they were 35th in the country, the next year they were 36th, the year after that, they were 38th. Last year, I should say, they held steady at 38th in the nation in terms of job growth. And under Scott Walker, Wisconsin's economy has done terrible vis-a-vis the rest of the country, vis-a-vis the region. It's done terrible compared with states of a similar size and a similar economic profile. If he does well in this giant Republican field, that economic record will probably be the thing that Democrats focus on when it comes to Scott Walker, his really bad economic record in Wisconsin."PF's analysts didn't transcribe that and their silence on the rest of it--failing, in fact, to disclose there even was any "rest of it"--can probably be taken as a sign they didn't find anything else inaccurate in it and were reduced to ripping from context and nitpicking that single line, which, when left in place, is really of little consequence. Maddow's point was that Walker's economic record sucks and for a fact-checker, the story here is that she got this almost entirely right. What PF did has the appearance of a silly vendetta wherein the fact-checkers eschew their own stated principles in order to conduct a petty get-back at a critic.
(See what I did there?)
Today's nonsense isn't the first time PF's analysts have issued bad rulings when it comes to Bernie Sanders. A much more egregious example happened back in August when right-wing columnist George Will, writing about the death of Robert Conquest, decided to throw in a slam at Sanders:
"Conquest lived to see a current U.S. presidential candidate, a senator, who had chosen, surely as an ideological gesture, to spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988. Gulags still functioned, probably including some of the 'cold Auschwitzes' in Siberia, described in Conquest’s 'Kolyma.' The honeymooner did not mind that in 1988 political prisoners were--as may still be the case--being tortured in psychiatric 'hospitals.' Thanks to the unblinking honesty of people like Conquest, the Soviet Union now is such a receding memory that Bernie Sanders’s moral obtuseness--the obverse of Conquest’s character--is considered an amusing eccentricity."The facts: Burlington and the Soviet city of Yaroslavl were to become "sister cities" under the old sister-city program established by Dwight Eisenhower to facilitate cultural exchanges between peoples around the world. Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, was to lead a mayoral delegation that was to travel to Yaroslavl, meet its mayor and make this official. Shortly before departing, he and his longtime girlfriend Jane O'Meara were married and she joined him as part of the Burlington delegation. PF's Will Cabaniss notes that this "'honeymoon' was dotted with meetings, interviews and diplomatic functions"--only a "honeymoon" in the sarcastic way the Sanders have referred to it over the years. He notes that the trip happened when the Gorbachev reforms were underway. He writes that while "Will made it sound as if Sanders was visiting to condone Soviet torture practices,.. the Burlington trip was more of a dialogue-building exchange program." Unmentioned by Cabaniss is that Sanders has never condoned torture or gulags. Did Sanders choose to honeymoon in the Soviet Union, as Will suggests, as an "ideological gesture"? Cabaniss deflates that one as well:
"When reached for comment, Sanders' campaign said that the dates for the trip had already been set, and the couple 'set their wedding date to coincide with that trip because they didn't want to take more time off.'"So Will's comment was a lie in every particular, PF documented this and the rating for Will's claim--his libel of Sanders? "Mostly True." To get that, Cabaniss simply rated Will's comment about Sanders having, in fact, honeymooned in the Soviet Union and entirely ignored everything else, even after covering it.[2] As a final joke, Cabaniss wrote that "Will’s claim is accurate but is missing context..."
Politifact's work is often useful and the bulk of it may even hold up to scrutiny--I've certainly used it in the past--but it's riddled with this sort of nonsense and given the way so much of that nonsense breaks, one can't help but suspect a great deal of it is simply politically motivated--ideology and ideological politics constantly trumping any commitment to objective fact-checking. It's a remarkable--though unremarked upon--phenomenon that mainstream journalism has gone in such a direction that fact-checking is considered some sort of specialized art to be handled by specialized, segregated units and is no longer even assumed to be an integral part of the job of regular journalists. What it says isn't, in this writer's view, complimentary of the profession. One must, to be sure, exercise care in challenging an org that is endowed with this particular mission, especially in an atmosphere wherein the political right has waged such a long and relentless crusade against the very concept of an objective fact. The right-wing Rage Machine in the U.S. has instilled in its followers the belief that reality itself is subservient to their temporary political passions, that "liberal" means, in itself, "false" and down that road lies madness. At the same time, healthy, informed skepticism is, as always, a must. That such orgs make a show of dealing in facts makes it all the more important that they take great care to get it right when it comes to the controversies they're called to address. At this, Politifact has repeatedly failed. It's a fact-checker that needs a fact-checker. Take from it that which is of value and leave the rest.
--j.
---
[1] Two months after this absurd ruling, Politifact offered Cuccinelli another gift. His Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe had created an ad noting that, if implemented, Cuccinelli's effort to roll back the state's no-fault divorce law would mean "a mom trying to get out of a bad marriage over her husband's objections could only get divorced if she could prove adultery or physical abuse or her spouse had abandoned her or was sentenced to jail." Cuccinelli's proposed bill had been part of a larger effort by right-wing "father's rights" groups to disadvantage women in such proceedings, an agenda Cuccinelli had embraced, but Politifact's Nancy Madsen ranked the ad "mostly false" on the absolutely absurd grounds that "in portraying the bill as an attack on women, McAuliffe ignores that the legislation would have made it equally more difficult for dads to get divorces." Both the Washington Post's Fact Checker and Slate offered detailed rebuttals of this absurd ruling.
[2] While only rating that one thin item, Cabaniss reproduced the entire Will libel against Sanders.
Monday, March 7, 2016
ABC News Plays Up Cruz Wins, Disappears Sanders Victories
This weekend, both Republicans and Democrats competed in presidential primaries and caucuses in Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska and Maine, with the Republicans additionally competing in Kentucky and Puerto Rico. On Sunday night, Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders participated in a debate in Michigan.
When it came time to report these developments on Monday's Good Morning America, well, it's ABC--what can one say? Correspondent Tom Llamas opened by reporting that Sanders won Sunday's Maine caucus then immediately downplays this by adding, "but Clinton [is] still way ahead when it comes to delegates." There are clips from the Democratic debate--the coverage here is absent any real analysis and light on substance, as usual, but at least includes clips of the candidates hacking on one another and a funny Sanders line, which is a change of pace from the usual Clinton-centric selections. When Llamas turns to the Republican race, he describes the results as "a seismic weekend for the Republican field, Sen. Ted Cruz having a super Saturday, winning two states and taking the most delegates."
Here's the thing: in the weekend's Democratic contests, Bernie Sanders won the same two states as Cruz (Maine and Kansas). He won them by much larger margins than Cruz.[1] He also won Nebraska by a healthy 57.1%. Clinton beat Sanders pretty brutally in Louisiana--71.1% to Sanders' 23.2%--but Sanders took three of the weekend's four Democratic contests by huge margins and walked away with more delegates--67 to Clinton's 64. For ABC News, only the much less impressive Cruz results--winning 2 out of 5 contests--constitute a "seismic weekend," a "super Saturday." Other than the Maine results, which the report pooh-poohs, the Democratic contests--and Sanders wins--don't merit any mention, as if they never happened at all.
When it came time to report these developments on Monday's Good Morning America, well, it's ABC--what can one say? Correspondent Tom Llamas opened by reporting that Sanders won Sunday's Maine caucus then immediately downplays this by adding, "but Clinton [is] still way ahead when it comes to delegates." There are clips from the Democratic debate--the coverage here is absent any real analysis and light on substance, as usual, but at least includes clips of the candidates hacking on one another and a funny Sanders line, which is a change of pace from the usual Clinton-centric selections. When Llamas turns to the Republican race, he describes the results as "a seismic weekend for the Republican field, Sen. Ted Cruz having a super Saturday, winning two states and taking the most delegates."
Here's the thing: in the weekend's Democratic contests, Bernie Sanders won the same two states as Cruz (Maine and Kansas). He won them by much larger margins than Cruz.[1] He also won Nebraska by a healthy 57.1%. Clinton beat Sanders pretty brutally in Louisiana--71.1% to Sanders' 23.2%--but Sanders took three of the weekend's four Democratic contests by huge margins and walked away with more delegates--67 to Clinton's 64. For ABC News, only the much less impressive Cruz results--winning 2 out of 5 contests--constitute a "seismic weekend," a "super Saturday." Other than the Maine results, which the report pooh-poohs, the Democratic contests--and Sanders wins--don't merit any mention, as if they never happened at all.
--j.
---
[1] Cruz took Maine with 45.9% of the vote, Sanders won there with 62.3%; Cruz took Kansas by 48.2%, Sanders by 67.7%.
Monday, February 29, 2016
Handicapping Hillary
A few days ago on the Young Turks, Cenk Uygur offered the proposition that Hillary Clinton was a weak general-election candidate for the Democrats. His analysis mirrors one I've been offering for months in various internet venues. Cenk, it seems, has run into some resistance to this; Saturday, he and the rest of the TYT gang contemplated the question of whether they'd been too hard on Hillary. They haven't. If anything, they've been going far too easy on her on the question of her electability. I've gotten often ferocious feedback from both Hillary backers and from Democrats who are anxious about tearing down the candidate they think will eventually win the nomination and have to face the Republicans. But every day seems to bring more information that further buttresses my conclusion. Though it is, strictly speaking, outside the central focus of this blog, I thought I'd spend some time here outlining that conclusion and the facts, inferences and perceptions that led me to it.
Two Obama terms hang heavily over the present election. An 8-year presidency--particularly of the kinds of uninspiring, downer presidencies we have now--tends to be a significant drag on the candidate of the incumbent party. After so long, people just get tired of an administration. In the modern era, George Bush Sr. managed to succeed an 8-year Reagan in 1988 then one must go all the way back to Harry Truman, who barely squeaked by Thomas Dewey in 1948, to find the next-most-recent example of three sequential administrations of the same party.
The evidence for the drag being exerted by the Obama administration is all around us. In the 2014 midterm congressional elections, Democrats stayed home in droves, resulting in the lowest voter turnout since 1942 (and Republicans recapturing the U.S. Senate). In the current cycle, the Democratic debates have consistently underperformed the Republican debates, usually by significant margins (a trend no doubt made much worse by the fact that the broadly-disliked Clinton has been the frontrunner, and the DNC crafted a debate schedule deliberately aimed at drawing lower ratings in order to try to protect her). The highest-rated GOP debate (from August) drew an astonishing 24 million viewers while the highest-rated Democratic debate (in Oct.) only managed 15.3 million. The lowest-rated Republican debate (14 Jan.) still drew 11.1 million. The debate at the bottom of the Democratic pile (from 4 Feb.) had only 4.5 million viewers.[1] Participation in the Democratic primaries and caucuses to date has been down across the board, by huge margins everywhere except New Hampshire (where it was only down 13% from 2008). At the same time, Republican participation has been up by huge margins in every contest so far.[2]
Electing a candidate of a modern two-term incumbent party is like pushing a very large rock up a very steep hill. Hillary Clinton, the candidate many Democrats seem poised to anoint their 2016 standard-bearer, comes already laden with so much baggage she'd have a hard time just getting all of it up that hill without the rock. And as the campaign continues on, she just keeps adding more and more to it.
Some observations from ringside: Clinton is like the absolute worst breed of politician. Cynical and manipulative, she'll say just about anything to win the moment without regard for how it squares with what she said the day before, without any concern for whether it even remotely approximates reality and with no thought as to the larger or longer-term implications of what she's saying, meaning she is both undisciplined and, let's just put the matter bluntly, a political imbecile. But while so many of her peers on the national stage have managed to hone the politician's favorite pastime (lying) into a fine art, Clinton absolutely oozes insincerity. Everything that comes out of her positively reeks of phoniness and fakery. And, of course, much of what comes out of her is, which only makes this impression worse. Among other things, this renders her entirely incapable of effectively selling all her cynical flipping and flopping about. In her quest for power, she regularly--and easily--sheds old personas in favor of new ones based strictly on temporary need. She's against gay marriage then she's for it; she's for the Iraq war then she's against it; she's for the Keystone XL pipeline then she's against it; she's for harsh mandatory minimum sentences (and in 2008 slammed candidate Obama for calling for reducing or eliminating them) then she's against them. Back in April, Domenico Montanaro did an excellent breakdown of Clinton's "evolution" on the matter of right-wing "free trade" deals over the years; she always says she's against them whenever an election looms then "evolves" into supporting them when in office.
Though specifically focused on those "free trade" deals, that article is a perfect microcosm of Clinton's entire political career. It also points to another unsavory and damaging trait: To the extent that Clinton holds to any principles at all, they're ones that are anathema to the base of her own party. Clinton is a rightist on most issues of significant import. She's a war-monger who, in real time, never met an intervention she didn't like, a National Security Statist, who voted for the USA PATRIOT Act over and over again,[3] a Tough On Crime-er who pimped the right's garbage "superpredator" meme in the '90s while supporting policies that helped turn the U.S. into the major jailer on Earth. She aggressively prostitutes herself and her potential future administration to every entrenched Big Money interest who will drop a few million quarters in her collection box.
In close quarters, Clinton is easily frustrated and when challenged to any real extent, she tends to collapse into a desperate morass of transparent deceptions and diversions. When, in a November debate, the question of her Wall Street backers came up--an entirely predictable question, given her opponent, and one for which the candidate should be prepared--she responded by saying most of the donors to her campaign are women and then invoking 9/11 as an excuse for aiding Wall Street. Utterly unresponsive non sequiturs aimed solely at getting her past the moment by drawing cheap applause from her followers. In a debate earlier this month, it was noted that Clinton had far more support from Democratic elected officials than her opponent, to which Sanders replied, "She has the entire Establishment or almost the entire Establishment behind her. That's a fact. I don't deny it." Clinton didn't like being associated with the "E" word and shot back with, "honestly, Sen. Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the Establishment." And so on. This sort of thing may allow her to get by a moment with Sanders, a fellow who has, to his own disadvantage, bent over backwards not to attack her, but a Trump, a Cruz, a Rubio certainly won't show that kind of restraint and such non-responses won't fly with a general-election viewership either.
In a race that has been loaded with an inordinately high number of presidential hopefuls, Clinton has proven the second-most disliked candidate. Only Republican Donald Trump scores worse. A quick trip to Huffpost Pollster shows Clinton averaging a favorability rating of only 40%. Except for a handful of anomalous polls, Clinton's favorables have been declining since Sept. 2010, below 50% since July 2014 and underwater--more people disliking her than liking her--since March 2015, the month before she entered the race. Trump's favorability rating has been below 50% in every poll in the Huffpost archive, which has Trump polls going back to May. At present, Trump is averaging a 36.3% favorability rating, 57.7% unfavorable.
Conventional wisdom holds that a candidate whose approval is consistently below 50% is a dead duck in a two-way general. The upcoming election holds the potential for an unusual challenge to that, a clash between two such wildly unpopular candidates. It's a recipe for a low-turnout election, which, of course, favors Republicans, among whom Clinton has been a focus of sustained hate since she first burst on the national scene in 1992.[4] Some of them may not like Trump but they outright despise Clinton and the prospect of her in the White House will have them showing up in droves to vote against her (that's also part of why she'd make an utterly ineffective president). On the other side, eight years of Obama is already repressing turnout to an alarming degree. In any election falling at the end of a two-term presidency, the opposition party tries to tie the candidate of the incumbent party as closely as possible to the fading incumbent president, presenting that candidate as merely a third term for that president. It usually works. In this cycle, the basic connection is obvious--Clinton was an Obama employee for years--but Republicans won't even have to try to tie her to the president; she's done it for them. Instead of trying to steer her own course, Clinton has spent weeks trying to portray herself as Obama's twin, praising him and his administration, standing up for his "legacy," promising to perpetuate it. In the context of the larger election, this is suicidal. No one is energized by the prospect of yet another Obama term starring a Faux-bama. Clinton did it because she wanted to win the South Carolina primary and needed the vote of the state's black population, among whom Obama is still extremely popular. It worked. She inflicted potentially quite serious harm on her own national prospects by tying herself to a lame duck with which the public has grown weary merely so she could win a big victory in a safely red state that won't vote for her or any other Democrat in the general anyway--one of the many examples of how Clinton authors her own eventual destruction.
A Quinnipiac poll released a few days ago matched Clinton and Sanders against the major Republican contenders. Clinton was in a statistical tie with Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, the latter of whom dropped out of the race right after that poll went to press, but she was defeated by Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich. A full 58% of respondents said they held an unfavorable view of Clinton. Sanders, meanwhile, defeated every Republican and 51%, including even 22% of Republicans, said they had a favorable view of the candidate (in his House and Senate races in Vermont, Sanders always manages to draw a significant Republican crossover vote). Sanders attracted a much higher percentage of independents and even a slightly higher Republican crossover in these match-ups.
Head-to-head polling at this early date isn't going to tell one with any certainty who will win in November but it can give one a picture of where things stand and, over time, where they're heading. Early in the campaign, Clinton led all of the Republicans by healthy margins but her standing in this polling has progressively disintegrated, matching the even longer-term disintegration of her favorability ratings. Both have been on their way down over an extended period and though she's already fallen behind the Republicans in the head-to-head, she hasn't, with over 8 months still to go, even hit any sort of bottom yet. Sanders' favorability ratings, by contrast, started in the basement, as few knew who he was when he entered the race, and has gone up, up, up; it's currently averaging 50% with only 38.9% unfavorable and hasn't plateau'd yet. Unfortunately, there's less head-to-head polling for him--one of the ways the corporate press has treated Clinton as inevitable was by rarely ever bothering to commission head-to-head polls featuring Sanders. What does exist is spotty compared to that available for Clinton but it does show Sanders performing substantially better than Clinton against potential opponents.
While the Obama presidency casts a long shadow over the coming election,
another element undoubtedly exerting a considerable drag on the
Democratic vote is a less-prominent nugget found in the guts of various
polls over the last few months: over 70% of Democratic respondents tell pollsters
that regardless of who they, themselves, support, they believe Clinton
will be the eventual nominee. The notion of Clinton's inevitability, a
phantom which Clinton, her surrogates and the corporate press have worked so hard to instill, can't help but be demoralizing to those who don't like Clinton. In
her short-sighted effort to defeat Sanders, Clinton has been offering a sort of "No,
We Can't" campaign. She has reinvented herself as a candidate pimping ineffectual, watered-down-to-nothing variants on Sanders' policies, then inveighing against the Sanders versions, which are extraordinarily popular, as politically unrealistic while presenting hers as more "doable." Peddling diminished expectations. She has very aggressively argued that Democrats shouldn't even try to pass single-payer
healthcare because it would lead to a contentious debate--the ultimate conservative argument that, if accepted, would preclude ever accomplishing much of anything for simple lack of trying. This "No We Can't" talk is, to note the obvious, defeatist--about as uninspiring a campaign slogan as one could invent--and can't help but alienate huge swathes of potential Democratic voters Clinton would need to win a general.
At the moment, Clinton continues to benefit from the widespread belief--another Clinton-generated phantom--that she would have the best chance of winning the general. For example, Quinnipiac asked, "Would you say that Hillary Clinton would have a good chance of defeating the Republican nominee in the general election for President or not?" 85% of Democrats said yes. Asked the same question of Sanders, only 69% said yes. Something that makes this particularly interesting is that this is the same poll that shows Clinton losing to those Republicans while Sanders beats them all. What's more, Sanders, in those match-ups with Republicans, drew a larger percentage of the Democratic vote than Clinton. 61% of respondents said they thought Sanders "cares about the needs and problems" of people like themselves vs. only 42% for Clinton; asked if the candidates shared the respondents' values, 50% said Sanders did,[5] while only 39% said this of Clinton; 68% said Sanders was "honest and trustworthy" vs. only 30% who would say that of Clinton (among Democrats, 87% said this of Sanders vs. 65% for Clinton). Matching a pattern that has appeared in polling on this campaign, the very polls in which Democrats assert a belief that Clinton is more electable than Sanders are the ones debunking that notion.
How does all this add up?
While Clinton has gleefully put the other side's Obama noose around her own neck, Sanders isn't as subject to that dynamic. He's always been to the left of Obama--as Clinton is stupidly fond of noting, he thought Obama should face a primary challenge from the left in 2012--and he's an outsider, a maverick, an independent who very visibly has the entire Democratic Establishment against him. Anyone who accused him of just being the third Obama term would most likely be greeted with laughter. There's no way to entirely escape the drag exerted by a two-term presidency, to be sure, but Sanders would definitely be the least affected by it.
Sanders is also an energizing candidate all his own. People are excited by him. He's an inspiring figure who attracts larger audiences than any other candidate, has brought into the political process lots of people who wouldn't ordinarily participate and has managed to field a serious presidential campaign against a Big Money-backed candidate on small campaign contributions from ordinary people--an incredible accomplishment. He has a broadly popular program that allows him to draw plenty of independents and Republicans to his cause, which is reflected in both his past electoral successes in Vermont and his polling. He's a candidate people want to vote for, rather than just another they don't really like but end up backing because they think the other side is even worse. He's hope. And because Clinton represents the very corruption Sanders is battling, a Clinton win would itself prove quite demoralizing. It would be read--and not unfairly either--as a corrupt Democratic Establishment in league with a corrupt press helping a corrupt candidate with a bottomless bank account[6] provided by corrupt Big Money interests breaking Excalibur. Breaking hope.
When it comes to Clinton, she's an energizing candidate too--remarkably energizing, in fact. It's just that those she energizes are on the other side, while she demoralizes her own and goes out of her way to alienate Sanders supporters. Anyone tired of Obama--and that's most people--certainly won't find anything to support in her effort to convince everyone she'll be the third Obama term. For those who prefer the right-wing side of her and pine for more warfare, more prisons, more government surveillance, more "free trade" to hasten the deindustrialization of the U.S. in the service of corporate profits, why support her when the full-strength version is available over in the GOP? At the same time, Clinton has reinvented herself this season as an attenuated copy of Sanders but if one finds those policies appealing, why choose the watered-down version from a candidate who doesn't really believe in them anyway and would discard them as soon as there was no election in front of her when the real thing is available? If one just wants to win, why choose a candidate whose numbers have already sank beneath her Republican rivals and are still falling, one who is off-putting to everyone outside the party yellow dogs while energizing the opposition in a year in which it's already going to be difficult to organize a successful campaign? It isn't just that Sanders would have a much easier time in the general; it's the fact that, even if one manages to "win" with Clinton--a very long shot--one hasn't really won anything.
Clinton's profile is that of a loser candidate. In a general election, she wouldn't stand a chance against any remotely credible alternative. Many think that's quite a significant caveat given the Crazy Train that is the 2016 GOP but before being too dismissive of their chances, it would be prudent to consider for a moment what people have accepted as "credible" in the past. None of this means Clinton definitely would lose but she is a very weak general election candidate in a year in which a much stronger one is available.
That's my take on it.
--j.
---
[1] Democratic debate ratings:
13 Oct. 2015 - 15.3 million viewers
14 Nov., 2015 - 8.5 million viewers
19 Dec., 2015 - 7.8 million viewers
17 Jan., 2016 - 10.2 million viewers
4 Feb., 2016 - 4.5 million viewers
11 Feb., 2016 - 8.03 million viewers
Republican debates:
6 Aug., 2015 - 24 million viewers
16 Sept., 2015 - 23 million viewers
28 Oct., 2015 - 14 million viewers
10 Nov., 2015 - 13.5 million viewers
15 Dec., 2015 - 18.2 million viewers
14 Jan., 2016 - 11.1 million viewers
28 Jan., 2016 - 12.5 million viewers
6 Feb., 2016 - 13.2 million viewers
13 Feb., 2016 - 11.62 million viewers
25 Feb., 2016 - 14.5 million viewers
[2] Turnout in Democratic Primaries:
Iowa caucus - 240,000 caucusgoers in 2008 vs. 171,000 this year
New Hampshire - 288,672 voters in 2008 vs. 250,983 this year
Nevada - 120,000 caucusgoers in 2008 vs. 80,000 this year
South Carolina - 532,000 voters in 2008 vs. 367,000 this year
Turnout in Republican Primaries:
Iowa - 122,000 in 2012 vs. 186,000 this year
New Hampshire - 248,475 in 2012 vs. 284,120 this year
South Carolina - 603,000 in 2012 vs. 737,000 this year
Nevada - 33,000 in 2012 vs. 75,000 this year
[3] And at a debate in October said she didn't regret doing so, calling the measure "necessary."
[4] Back then, Bill Clinton was the Democratic presidential candidate but multiple speakers took to the podium at the Republican National Convention to denounce Hillary Clinton. As going after a candidate's wife in this systematic manner really had no precedent in presidential politics, it raised a lot of questions and provoked a great deal of discussion.
[5] And, in fact, Sanders' views reflect those of the broad center of America. That his number here isn't even higher looks an awful lot like a major failure of media.
[6] All that money from all those Big Money interests is the one advantage in a general Clinton has over Sanders. It definitely isn't one about which to brag.
Two Obama terms hang heavily over the present election. An 8-year presidency--particularly of the kinds of uninspiring, downer presidencies we have now--tends to be a significant drag on the candidate of the incumbent party. After so long, people just get tired of an administration. In the modern era, George Bush Sr. managed to succeed an 8-year Reagan in 1988 then one must go all the way back to Harry Truman, who barely squeaked by Thomas Dewey in 1948, to find the next-most-recent example of three sequential administrations of the same party.
The evidence for the drag being exerted by the Obama administration is all around us. In the 2014 midterm congressional elections, Democrats stayed home in droves, resulting in the lowest voter turnout since 1942 (and Republicans recapturing the U.S. Senate). In the current cycle, the Democratic debates have consistently underperformed the Republican debates, usually by significant margins (a trend no doubt made much worse by the fact that the broadly-disliked Clinton has been the frontrunner, and the DNC crafted a debate schedule deliberately aimed at drawing lower ratings in order to try to protect her). The highest-rated GOP debate (from August) drew an astonishing 24 million viewers while the highest-rated Democratic debate (in Oct.) only managed 15.3 million. The lowest-rated Republican debate (14 Jan.) still drew 11.1 million. The debate at the bottom of the Democratic pile (from 4 Feb.) had only 4.5 million viewers.[1] Participation in the Democratic primaries and caucuses to date has been down across the board, by huge margins everywhere except New Hampshire (where it was only down 13% from 2008). At the same time, Republican participation has been up by huge margins in every contest so far.[2]
Electing a candidate of a modern two-term incumbent party is like pushing a very large rock up a very steep hill. Hillary Clinton, the candidate many Democrats seem poised to anoint their 2016 standard-bearer, comes already laden with so much baggage she'd have a hard time just getting all of it up that hill without the rock. And as the campaign continues on, she just keeps adding more and more to it.
Some observations from ringside: Clinton is like the absolute worst breed of politician. Cynical and manipulative, she'll say just about anything to win the moment without regard for how it squares with what she said the day before, without any concern for whether it even remotely approximates reality and with no thought as to the larger or longer-term implications of what she's saying, meaning she is both undisciplined and, let's just put the matter bluntly, a political imbecile. But while so many of her peers on the national stage have managed to hone the politician's favorite pastime (lying) into a fine art, Clinton absolutely oozes insincerity. Everything that comes out of her positively reeks of phoniness and fakery. And, of course, much of what comes out of her is, which only makes this impression worse. Among other things, this renders her entirely incapable of effectively selling all her cynical flipping and flopping about. In her quest for power, she regularly--and easily--sheds old personas in favor of new ones based strictly on temporary need. She's against gay marriage then she's for it; she's for the Iraq war then she's against it; she's for the Keystone XL pipeline then she's against it; she's for harsh mandatory minimum sentences (and in 2008 slammed candidate Obama for calling for reducing or eliminating them) then she's against them. Back in April, Domenico Montanaro did an excellent breakdown of Clinton's "evolution" on the matter of right-wing "free trade" deals over the years; she always says she's against them whenever an election looms then "evolves" into supporting them when in office.
Though specifically focused on those "free trade" deals, that article is a perfect microcosm of Clinton's entire political career. It also points to another unsavory and damaging trait: To the extent that Clinton holds to any principles at all, they're ones that are anathema to the base of her own party. Clinton is a rightist on most issues of significant import. She's a war-monger who, in real time, never met an intervention she didn't like, a National Security Statist, who voted for the USA PATRIOT Act over and over again,[3] a Tough On Crime-er who pimped the right's garbage "superpredator" meme in the '90s while supporting policies that helped turn the U.S. into the major jailer on Earth. She aggressively prostitutes herself and her potential future administration to every entrenched Big Money interest who will drop a few million quarters in her collection box.
In close quarters, Clinton is easily frustrated and when challenged to any real extent, she tends to collapse into a desperate morass of transparent deceptions and diversions. When, in a November debate, the question of her Wall Street backers came up--an entirely predictable question, given her opponent, and one for which the candidate should be prepared--she responded by saying most of the donors to her campaign are women and then invoking 9/11 as an excuse for aiding Wall Street. Utterly unresponsive non sequiturs aimed solely at getting her past the moment by drawing cheap applause from her followers. In a debate earlier this month, it was noted that Clinton had far more support from Democratic elected officials than her opponent, to which Sanders replied, "She has the entire Establishment or almost the entire Establishment behind her. That's a fact. I don't deny it." Clinton didn't like being associated with the "E" word and shot back with, "honestly, Sen. Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the Establishment." And so on. This sort of thing may allow her to get by a moment with Sanders, a fellow who has, to his own disadvantage, bent over backwards not to attack her, but a Trump, a Cruz, a Rubio certainly won't show that kind of restraint and such non-responses won't fly with a general-election viewership either.
In a race that has been loaded with an inordinately high number of presidential hopefuls, Clinton has proven the second-most disliked candidate. Only Republican Donald Trump scores worse. A quick trip to Huffpost Pollster shows Clinton averaging a favorability rating of only 40%. Except for a handful of anomalous polls, Clinton's favorables have been declining since Sept. 2010, below 50% since July 2014 and underwater--more people disliking her than liking her--since March 2015, the month before she entered the race. Trump's favorability rating has been below 50% in every poll in the Huffpost archive, which has Trump polls going back to May. At present, Trump is averaging a 36.3% favorability rating, 57.7% unfavorable.
Conventional wisdom holds that a candidate whose approval is consistently below 50% is a dead duck in a two-way general. The upcoming election holds the potential for an unusual challenge to that, a clash between two such wildly unpopular candidates. It's a recipe for a low-turnout election, which, of course, favors Republicans, among whom Clinton has been a focus of sustained hate since she first burst on the national scene in 1992.[4] Some of them may not like Trump but they outright despise Clinton and the prospect of her in the White House will have them showing up in droves to vote against her (that's also part of why she'd make an utterly ineffective president). On the other side, eight years of Obama is already repressing turnout to an alarming degree. In any election falling at the end of a two-term presidency, the opposition party tries to tie the candidate of the incumbent party as closely as possible to the fading incumbent president, presenting that candidate as merely a third term for that president. It usually works. In this cycle, the basic connection is obvious--Clinton was an Obama employee for years--but Republicans won't even have to try to tie her to the president; she's done it for them. Instead of trying to steer her own course, Clinton has spent weeks trying to portray herself as Obama's twin, praising him and his administration, standing up for his "legacy," promising to perpetuate it. In the context of the larger election, this is suicidal. No one is energized by the prospect of yet another Obama term starring a Faux-bama. Clinton did it because she wanted to win the South Carolina primary and needed the vote of the state's black population, among whom Obama is still extremely popular. It worked. She inflicted potentially quite serious harm on her own national prospects by tying herself to a lame duck with which the public has grown weary merely so she could win a big victory in a safely red state that won't vote for her or any other Democrat in the general anyway--one of the many examples of how Clinton authors her own eventual destruction.
A Quinnipiac poll released a few days ago matched Clinton and Sanders against the major Republican contenders. Clinton was in a statistical tie with Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, the latter of whom dropped out of the race right after that poll went to press, but she was defeated by Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich. A full 58% of respondents said they held an unfavorable view of Clinton. Sanders, meanwhile, defeated every Republican and 51%, including even 22% of Republicans, said they had a favorable view of the candidate (in his House and Senate races in Vermont, Sanders always manages to draw a significant Republican crossover vote). Sanders attracted a much higher percentage of independents and even a slightly higher Republican crossover in these match-ups.
Head-to-head polling at this early date isn't going to tell one with any certainty who will win in November but it can give one a picture of where things stand and, over time, where they're heading. Early in the campaign, Clinton led all of the Republicans by healthy margins but her standing in this polling has progressively disintegrated, matching the even longer-term disintegration of her favorability ratings. Both have been on their way down over an extended period and though she's already fallen behind the Republicans in the head-to-head, she hasn't, with over 8 months still to go, even hit any sort of bottom yet. Sanders' favorability ratings, by contrast, started in the basement, as few knew who he was when he entered the race, and has gone up, up, up; it's currently averaging 50% with only 38.9% unfavorable and hasn't plateau'd yet. Unfortunately, there's less head-to-head polling for him--one of the ways the corporate press has treated Clinton as inevitable was by rarely ever bothering to commission head-to-head polls featuring Sanders. What does exist is spotty compared to that available for Clinton but it does show Sanders performing substantially better than Clinton against potential opponents.
At the moment, Clinton continues to benefit from the widespread belief--another Clinton-generated phantom--that she would have the best chance of winning the general. For example, Quinnipiac asked, "Would you say that Hillary Clinton would have a good chance of defeating the Republican nominee in the general election for President or not?" 85% of Democrats said yes. Asked the same question of Sanders, only 69% said yes. Something that makes this particularly interesting is that this is the same poll that shows Clinton losing to those Republicans while Sanders beats them all. What's more, Sanders, in those match-ups with Republicans, drew a larger percentage of the Democratic vote than Clinton. 61% of respondents said they thought Sanders "cares about the needs and problems" of people like themselves vs. only 42% for Clinton; asked if the candidates shared the respondents' values, 50% said Sanders did,[5] while only 39% said this of Clinton; 68% said Sanders was "honest and trustworthy" vs. only 30% who would say that of Clinton (among Democrats, 87% said this of Sanders vs. 65% for Clinton). Matching a pattern that has appeared in polling on this campaign, the very polls in which Democrats assert a belief that Clinton is more electable than Sanders are the ones debunking that notion.
How does all this add up?
While Clinton has gleefully put the other side's Obama noose around her own neck, Sanders isn't as subject to that dynamic. He's always been to the left of Obama--as Clinton is stupidly fond of noting, he thought Obama should face a primary challenge from the left in 2012--and he's an outsider, a maverick, an independent who very visibly has the entire Democratic Establishment against him. Anyone who accused him of just being the third Obama term would most likely be greeted with laughter. There's no way to entirely escape the drag exerted by a two-term presidency, to be sure, but Sanders would definitely be the least affected by it.
Sanders is also an energizing candidate all his own. People are excited by him. He's an inspiring figure who attracts larger audiences than any other candidate, has brought into the political process lots of people who wouldn't ordinarily participate and has managed to field a serious presidential campaign against a Big Money-backed candidate on small campaign contributions from ordinary people--an incredible accomplishment. He has a broadly popular program that allows him to draw plenty of independents and Republicans to his cause, which is reflected in both his past electoral successes in Vermont and his polling. He's a candidate people want to vote for, rather than just another they don't really like but end up backing because they think the other side is even worse. He's hope. And because Clinton represents the very corruption Sanders is battling, a Clinton win would itself prove quite demoralizing. It would be read--and not unfairly either--as a corrupt Democratic Establishment in league with a corrupt press helping a corrupt candidate with a bottomless bank account[6] provided by corrupt Big Money interests breaking Excalibur. Breaking hope.
When it comes to Clinton, she's an energizing candidate too--remarkably energizing, in fact. It's just that those she energizes are on the other side, while she demoralizes her own and goes out of her way to alienate Sanders supporters. Anyone tired of Obama--and that's most people--certainly won't find anything to support in her effort to convince everyone she'll be the third Obama term. For those who prefer the right-wing side of her and pine for more warfare, more prisons, more government surveillance, more "free trade" to hasten the deindustrialization of the U.S. in the service of corporate profits, why support her when the full-strength version is available over in the GOP? At the same time, Clinton has reinvented herself this season as an attenuated copy of Sanders but if one finds those policies appealing, why choose the watered-down version from a candidate who doesn't really believe in them anyway and would discard them as soon as there was no election in front of her when the real thing is available? If one just wants to win, why choose a candidate whose numbers have already sank beneath her Republican rivals and are still falling, one who is off-putting to everyone outside the party yellow dogs while energizing the opposition in a year in which it's already going to be difficult to organize a successful campaign? It isn't just that Sanders would have a much easier time in the general; it's the fact that, even if one manages to "win" with Clinton--a very long shot--one hasn't really won anything.
Clinton's profile is that of a loser candidate. In a general election, she wouldn't stand a chance against any remotely credible alternative. Many think that's quite a significant caveat given the Crazy Train that is the 2016 GOP but before being too dismissive of their chances, it would be prudent to consider for a moment what people have accepted as "credible" in the past. None of this means Clinton definitely would lose but she is a very weak general election candidate in a year in which a much stronger one is available.
That's my take on it.
--j.
---
[1] Democratic debate ratings:
13 Oct. 2015 - 15.3 million viewers
14 Nov., 2015 - 8.5 million viewers
19 Dec., 2015 - 7.8 million viewers
17 Jan., 2016 - 10.2 million viewers
4 Feb., 2016 - 4.5 million viewers
11 Feb., 2016 - 8.03 million viewers
Republican debates:
6 Aug., 2015 - 24 million viewers
16 Sept., 2015 - 23 million viewers
28 Oct., 2015 - 14 million viewers
10 Nov., 2015 - 13.5 million viewers
15 Dec., 2015 - 18.2 million viewers
14 Jan., 2016 - 11.1 million viewers
28 Jan., 2016 - 12.5 million viewers
6 Feb., 2016 - 13.2 million viewers
13 Feb., 2016 - 11.62 million viewers
25 Feb., 2016 - 14.5 million viewers
[2] Turnout in Democratic Primaries:
Iowa caucus - 240,000 caucusgoers in 2008 vs. 171,000 this year
New Hampshire - 288,672 voters in 2008 vs. 250,983 this year
Nevada - 120,000 caucusgoers in 2008 vs. 80,000 this year
South Carolina - 532,000 voters in 2008 vs. 367,000 this year
Turnout in Republican Primaries:
Iowa - 122,000 in 2012 vs. 186,000 this year
New Hampshire - 248,475 in 2012 vs. 284,120 this year
South Carolina - 603,000 in 2012 vs. 737,000 this year
Nevada - 33,000 in 2012 vs. 75,000 this year
[3] And at a debate in October said she didn't regret doing so, calling the measure "necessary."
[4] Back then, Bill Clinton was the Democratic presidential candidate but multiple speakers took to the podium at the Republican National Convention to denounce Hillary Clinton. As going after a candidate's wife in this systematic manner really had no precedent in presidential politics, it raised a lot of questions and provoked a great deal of discussion.
[5] And, in fact, Sanders' views reflect those of the broad center of America. That his number here isn't even higher looks an awful lot like a major failure of media.
[6] All that money from all those Big Money interests is the one advantage in a general Clinton has over Sanders. It definitely isn't one about which to brag.
Friday, February 26, 2016
ABClinton
ABC News has a serious Clinton problem. Hillary Clinton is currently locked in an ever-tightening race against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. The public may hold to the quaint notion that it's the job of the press to cover this, not to try to decide it, but those in the corporate press apparently have a very different idea about their role in the campaign. Most big news outlets have adopted a two-pronged strategy for how to approach the matter. The first is what Sanders supporters have called the "Bernie Blackout." Sanders is simply ignored. The second, closely related, is that Sanders, when he is mentioned, is marginalized, treated as a fringe, unelectable crank, his presence in the race analyzed solely in terms of how it affects Clinton, as if Clinton is inevitable and he's just some annoyance. The Tyndall Report gives a good overview of how the evening newscasts of the Big Three networks have handled this. In 2015, these programs devoted 121 minutes to coverage of the Clinton campaign while the Sanders campaign received only 20 minutes. All three programs have done a wretched job but ABC's World News Tonight was the worst offender. When Sanders officially entered the race in April, WNT devoted less than 20 seconds to this development, with even part of that devoted to recording Hillary Clinton's reaction. News from or about the Sanders campaign then disappeared from the newscast through December.[1]
On paper, Sanders is a great news story. When he jumped into the race, he was over 50 points behind Clinton in most polls, a bare blip of whom few had ever heard. Since then, he's managed to float a campaign funded by small donations from his supporters until he's within a few points of his Big Money-financed, universally name-recognized, long-established Establishment rival and not only beat her in one contest but destroyed her. As of this writing, the two are tied in the delegate count. On paper, it's like a ROCKY movie, a tale of an underdog making it to the top. Something Americans love.
Except Sanders is a candidate of the left. His policies may represent the broad American political center but they make him absolutely unacceptable to the media gatekeepers of American "democracy." A big part of Sanders' Rocky story is that he overcame the resistance of nearly the whole of the American corporate press and that's not a story that press is willing to tell any more than he's a candidate with whom that press is going to do anything except ignore and marginalize.[2]
ABC News has been a leader in this effort.[3] On weekdays, ABC's coverage of the Democratic primaries is handled by Cecilia Vega. Vega is senior national correspondent and an anchor of the weekend WNT newscast. She isn't a stringer narrowly assigned to covering just the Clinton campaign--not officially anyway--but day after day, that's what she mostly does. She certainly isn't in the pay of Hillary Clinton but far too often, her "news" reports on the Democratic race are virtual Clinton campaign ads.
By every available metric for judging such things, viewers of the first Democratic debate, held in Las Vegas in October, seem to have concluded Bernie Sanders won the evening but in a phenomenon much remarked-upon by media critics and liberal writers, the mainstream press overwhelmingly presented Hillary Clinton as the winner. In her WNT report on the event, Vega opened by showing a smiling Clinton being cheered on by supporters while, in Vega's words," taking a "post-debate victory lap" and asserted "Clinton gets high marks for her center-stage performance." Vega's entire report is, in fact, built around Clinton. How Clinton intends to respond to the email controversy from her time as Secretary of State, how Clinton is "setting the stage" for her appearance before the House Benghazi committee, how Clinton is "trying to show a likable side." Vega plays a clip of Clinton's rehearsed responses about wanting to get past the email issue and "talk... about what the American people want from the next President of the United States" and an extended clip of Clinton jabbing at her enemies. There had been four other Democratic candidates on the stage that evening, all with programs of their own, and they'd engaged in a spirited debate on a wide range of issues but viewers of WNT would have no way of knowing that. The others were barely even mentioned, the only clips shown of them being those that bolstered Clinton--Lincoln Chafee briefly challenging Clinton on the email matter followed by Clinton's dismissive, applause-line reply and Sanders defending Clinton on the same question. In the post-report discussion, anchor David Muir also opted to focus on Sanders' defense of Clinton and while Vega notes the Sanders campaign had raised more than a million dollars after the debate--itself a record and a pretty significant story that went unmentioned in the report itself--she ends by saying "Hillary Clinton's team is calling yesterday's debate the best day of the campaign so far." If the Clinton campaign had released a summary of the debate, it would have looked exactly like this report. And other than a later segment in which, in part, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump was asked to critique Clinton's performance, this was the only coverage of the event offered by WNT.
Vega's work on the campaign is persistently plagued by this same Clinton-centric approach. She spend most of her time on Clinton, tends to analyze every development from Clinton's perspective and frequently extends to Clinton or Clinton surrogates a platform from which to offer their perspectives themselves, a courtesy not extended to Sanders. She positions Clinton as something akin to the heroine of a reality show and rather than treating Sanders as a candidate for President of the United States, Vega reduces him to some mysterious outside force the heroine must overcome.
Clinton and Sanders went into the final leg of the Iowa competition in a statistical tie but the final WNT report before the caucus was again mostly focused on Clinton. "To the Democratic side tonight and Hillary Clinton," opens David Muir, setting the tone for what follows. Cecilia Vega's report shows Clinton at a campaign stop waving her fist and preaching to her followers with great vigor while Vega helpfully notes "Clinton is fired up." We get images of Bill and Chelsea Clinton smiling, waving and speaking on Clinton's behalf. "Tonight, Clinton feeling the love" from Iowa "and packing in the crowds" and we get a shot of a long line waiting to see the heroine. "Look at how far back it stretches."[4] Vega gives us Clinton's campaign mileage then turns to Sanders, asserting the Clinton rival was "still on the attack, accusing Clinton of smearing him" on the matter of healthcare and showing a brief clip of Sanders on the stump. Clinton was smearing Sanders with her assertion that he wanted to dismantle reform and leave people with nothing while he tries to institute an all-new and difficult-to-pass program. The matter is unexamined by the report; Clinton is all smiles, family and confidence, Sanders is the bitter guy "accusing Clinton of smearing him." Vega spends a whopping 30 seconds on Sanders, part of it showing musicians singing "This Land is Your Land" at a Sanders event (!!!), then quickly gets back to Clinton, devoting the rest of the report to Clinton's suggestion that a recent story about emails containing "top secret" information being found on her private server from her time as Sec. of State was, as Vega, puts it, "a dirty trick." The post-report discussion is focused on Clinton's last-minute get-out-the-vote efforts in the state, with a few words about Sanders volunteers knocking on doors.
The New Hampshire primary presented a much more one-sided contest--going into it, Sanders led by double digits--but while Sanders fared somewhat better than usual in the final WNT report before the primary, "somewhat better" still meant the Clinton campaign got most of the time and all of the love. Vega is on the case again. There's a smiling Clinton meeting with supporters then Bill Clinton hitting the stump on his wife's behalf, confidently joking he expects to be the next president's spouse and charging that Sanders supporters on the internet make grossly inappropriate comments to female Clinton supporters. This remarkably ugly effort to play the Sexism Card has been repeatedly floated by the Clinton camp and its surrogates but though its substance has been repeatedly debunked, Vega doesn't challenge it. Worse, when she briefly speaks to Bill Clinton herself, she instead prompts him to continue the attack, asking, "Do you think the Sanders campaign is playing dirty?" Bill, to his credit, declined. Next, there's former Sec. of State Madeleine Albright on the stump with Hillary: "Just remember, there's a special case in hell for women who don't help each other!" Big applause. Finally, Vega gets to Sanders, noting that he's "feeling confident" then showing half a sentence from Sanders on the stump and a brief segment from Sanders' appearance over the weekend in a comedy sketch on Saturday Night Live. Following her usual pattern, Vega doesn't speak with anyone from the Sanders campaign, not for a reply to Bill's charges, not for anything.[5]
The Nevada caucus presented another case in which polls were showing an extremely tight contest. In the lead-up to it, Vega turned in the worst report I've ever seen from her insofar as the present subject is concerned. She introduces her report by, as always, analyzing the developments in the election from the perspective of how it affects Clinton. As the report opens, Clinton is shown smiling and posing for pictures with supporters. Vega says Clinton is "putting her best face forward," while a Vogue headline--"Will Hillary Clinton make history?"--floats across the screen. In Vega's telling, Clinton, in an interview with the magazine, was "revealing one weakness with the campaign: herself." She quotes Clinton as saying "I'm great at advocating for other people... But I'm not so good at really promoting myself. I just find it hard to do." That Clinton is really something, eh? So humble she sees her humility as so great as to be a disadvantage but she persevered anyway. Vega notes that both Clinton and Sanders "are trying to promote themselves to minority voters ahead of Nevada and South Carolina" then decides to give Clinton a hand at it, showing a clip from a Clinton ad of Clinton comforting an Hispanic child! Then Clinton at a campaign stop with "the tearful mother of Sandra Bland," a black motorist picked up on a minor traffic violation who then ended up dead in her jail-cell under mysterious circumstances, sparking outrage. A clip of Bland's mother: "I'm one of those mothers who met with her [Hillary Clinton] and was able to make it through." While standing behind a Clinton campaign logo that says "Fighting for us." Vega continues: "With Clinton and Sanders now in a virtual tie, we went to her Brooklyn headquarters to ask her campaign manager about those polls." Vega asks said campaign manager, "What is Bernie Sanders doing in Nevada that you're not? He's ahead right now." It would seem to make a lot more sense to ask someone from the Sanders campaign such a question, the thing Vega never manages to do in her reporting and doesn't do here either. Clinton's campaign manager even says so: "You'd have to ask him what he's doing." Vega closes her report by asking the fellow his prediction on the Nevada caucus; he unsurprisingly says "we're gonna' pull it off."
Again, this is allegedly a news report on an American presidential caucus in which two candidates are competing but an update on the status of the campaign produced by the Clinton camp itself couldn't be any more favorable than this sorry spectacle. As a news report, it's so one-sided as to veer into unintentional parody.
And this is what's going out every day and night on ABC's major news programs. I've mostly kicked around Cecilia Vega here but the problems I've identified run throughout ABC's coverage of the campaign and of course the news division's higher-ups are who put all of it on the air. Much of it is also chronically superficial horse-race reporting, light on substance, stupid and with many partial sentences and quick, quick, quick cuts to hold the no-attention-span viewers among the audience--a slice of the ongoing conversion of mass-media journalism to reality tv. Anyone depending on this for actual information on a race to decide the next President of the United States is being terribly ill-served, while those who believe American democracy is a fundamental fraud will find nothing but confirmation in it.
--j.
---
[1] In his count, Andrew Tyndall includes items either from or about the campaign. When candidates are merely mentioned in another story about something else or some other candidate, this isn't included in his total.
[2] Even big press outlets that outright despise Hillary Clinton (like, for example, the New York Times) will choose her over any left candidate (like, for example, the New York Times).
[3] Last year, elements of the fringe right got their panties all in a bunch over the fact that ABC's George Stephanopoulous had made a donation to a charity established by the Clintons but hadn't disclosed it on the air when he interviewed an author who had published a smear-book tarring that charity. The manufactured outrage spilled over until the head of the Republican National Committee announced that he wouldn't allow Stephanopoulous to MC any Republican debate (something that wasn't going to happen anyway). Entirely absent for the furor was the genuine conflict of interest involved in Stephanopoulous, a longtime Clinton loyalist and former Bill Clinton employee, working on the Democratic primary in his capacity as a newsman and, if Clinton is the Democratic candidate, covering the general election. I don't cover any specific infractions by Stephanopoulous in this piece but his position as ABC's chief anchor and chief political correspondent, doesn't look good in light of what I do cover.
[4] The moment can't help but bring a chuckle to political junkies who have noted the enormous, often record-setting crowds Bernie Sanders has drawn--far larger crowds than any other candidate of either party and often in very conservative localities--only to see the phenomenon almost entirely ignored or downplayed by the corporate press. Some candidates' crowds, it seems, are more equal than others.
[5] For months, observers have complained about and picked apart journalists' lazy habit of drawing transparently false equivalence between the campaigns of Sanders and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. Sanders completely destroyed Clinton in New Hampshire. The next morning on Good Morning America, Vega's recap of the primary covered both the Republican and Democratic races and she deployed that same trope. "The consensus here this morning: voters are fed up with the Establishment. And the message they want to send: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump need to be taken seriously." Though Sanders had just won by the second-biggest margin in a contested Democratic primary in New Hampshire history, Vega actually gives him less time than any of the other candidates covered! While Trump drew a little over 100,000 voters, Sanders drew over 151,000 yet the report devotes 23 seconds to Trump and only 17 to Sanders. Even 2nd-place Republican finisher John Kasich was given more time (18 seconds). And guess who got more time than anyone? Hillary Clinton may have been flattened at the polls but she won the battle of the coverage. She was given 30 seconds--14 in the report proper and 16 in Vega's post-report comments, wherein Vega, as usual, insisted on analyzing the results solely from the perspective of how they affect the Clinton campaign. Sanders, in the report, remains a mysterious figure--while the report includes brief clips of post-primary interviews from both Trump and Kasich, the big winner of the evening is only shown in some brief moments from his victory speech.
On paper, Sanders is a great news story. When he jumped into the race, he was over 50 points behind Clinton in most polls, a bare blip of whom few had ever heard. Since then, he's managed to float a campaign funded by small donations from his supporters until he's within a few points of his Big Money-financed, universally name-recognized, long-established Establishment rival and not only beat her in one contest but destroyed her. As of this writing, the two are tied in the delegate count. On paper, it's like a ROCKY movie, a tale of an underdog making it to the top. Something Americans love.
Except Sanders is a candidate of the left. His policies may represent the broad American political center but they make him absolutely unacceptable to the media gatekeepers of American "democracy." A big part of Sanders' Rocky story is that he overcame the resistance of nearly the whole of the American corporate press and that's not a story that press is willing to tell any more than he's a candidate with whom that press is going to do anything except ignore and marginalize.[2]
ABC News has been a leader in this effort.[3] On weekdays, ABC's coverage of the Democratic primaries is handled by Cecilia Vega. Vega is senior national correspondent and an anchor of the weekend WNT newscast. She isn't a stringer narrowly assigned to covering just the Clinton campaign--not officially anyway--but day after day, that's what she mostly does. She certainly isn't in the pay of Hillary Clinton but far too often, her "news" reports on the Democratic race are virtual Clinton campaign ads.
By every available metric for judging such things, viewers of the first Democratic debate, held in Las Vegas in October, seem to have concluded Bernie Sanders won the evening but in a phenomenon much remarked-upon by media critics and liberal writers, the mainstream press overwhelmingly presented Hillary Clinton as the winner. In her WNT report on the event, Vega opened by showing a smiling Clinton being cheered on by supporters while, in Vega's words," taking a "post-debate victory lap" and asserted "Clinton gets high marks for her center-stage performance." Vega's entire report is, in fact, built around Clinton. How Clinton intends to respond to the email controversy from her time as Secretary of State, how Clinton is "setting the stage" for her appearance before the House Benghazi committee, how Clinton is "trying to show a likable side." Vega plays a clip of Clinton's rehearsed responses about wanting to get past the email issue and "talk... about what the American people want from the next President of the United States" and an extended clip of Clinton jabbing at her enemies. There had been four other Democratic candidates on the stage that evening, all with programs of their own, and they'd engaged in a spirited debate on a wide range of issues but viewers of WNT would have no way of knowing that. The others were barely even mentioned, the only clips shown of them being those that bolstered Clinton--Lincoln Chafee briefly challenging Clinton on the email matter followed by Clinton's dismissive, applause-line reply and Sanders defending Clinton on the same question. In the post-report discussion, anchor David Muir also opted to focus on Sanders' defense of Clinton and while Vega notes the Sanders campaign had raised more than a million dollars after the debate--itself a record and a pretty significant story that went unmentioned in the report itself--she ends by saying "Hillary Clinton's team is calling yesterday's debate the best day of the campaign so far." If the Clinton campaign had released a summary of the debate, it would have looked exactly like this report. And other than a later segment in which, in part, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump was asked to critique Clinton's performance, this was the only coverage of the event offered by WNT.
Vega's work on the campaign is persistently plagued by this same Clinton-centric approach. She spend most of her time on Clinton, tends to analyze every development from Clinton's perspective and frequently extends to Clinton or Clinton surrogates a platform from which to offer their perspectives themselves, a courtesy not extended to Sanders. She positions Clinton as something akin to the heroine of a reality show and rather than treating Sanders as a candidate for President of the United States, Vega reduces him to some mysterious outside force the heroine must overcome.
Clinton and Sanders went into the final leg of the Iowa competition in a statistical tie but the final WNT report before the caucus was again mostly focused on Clinton. "To the Democratic side tonight and Hillary Clinton," opens David Muir, setting the tone for what follows. Cecilia Vega's report shows Clinton at a campaign stop waving her fist and preaching to her followers with great vigor while Vega helpfully notes "Clinton is fired up." We get images of Bill and Chelsea Clinton smiling, waving and speaking on Clinton's behalf. "Tonight, Clinton feeling the love" from Iowa "and packing in the crowds" and we get a shot of a long line waiting to see the heroine. "Look at how far back it stretches."[4] Vega gives us Clinton's campaign mileage then turns to Sanders, asserting the Clinton rival was "still on the attack, accusing Clinton of smearing him" on the matter of healthcare and showing a brief clip of Sanders on the stump. Clinton was smearing Sanders with her assertion that he wanted to dismantle reform and leave people with nothing while he tries to institute an all-new and difficult-to-pass program. The matter is unexamined by the report; Clinton is all smiles, family and confidence, Sanders is the bitter guy "accusing Clinton of smearing him." Vega spends a whopping 30 seconds on Sanders, part of it showing musicians singing "This Land is Your Land" at a Sanders event (!!!), then quickly gets back to Clinton, devoting the rest of the report to Clinton's suggestion that a recent story about emails containing "top secret" information being found on her private server from her time as Sec. of State was, as Vega, puts it, "a dirty trick." The post-report discussion is focused on Clinton's last-minute get-out-the-vote efforts in the state, with a few words about Sanders volunteers knocking on doors.
The New Hampshire primary presented a much more one-sided contest--going into it, Sanders led by double digits--but while Sanders fared somewhat better than usual in the final WNT report before the primary, "somewhat better" still meant the Clinton campaign got most of the time and all of the love. Vega is on the case again. There's a smiling Clinton meeting with supporters then Bill Clinton hitting the stump on his wife's behalf, confidently joking he expects to be the next president's spouse and charging that Sanders supporters on the internet make grossly inappropriate comments to female Clinton supporters. This remarkably ugly effort to play the Sexism Card has been repeatedly floated by the Clinton camp and its surrogates but though its substance has been repeatedly debunked, Vega doesn't challenge it. Worse, when she briefly speaks to Bill Clinton herself, she instead prompts him to continue the attack, asking, "Do you think the Sanders campaign is playing dirty?" Bill, to his credit, declined. Next, there's former Sec. of State Madeleine Albright on the stump with Hillary: "Just remember, there's a special case in hell for women who don't help each other!" Big applause. Finally, Vega gets to Sanders, noting that he's "feeling confident" then showing half a sentence from Sanders on the stump and a brief segment from Sanders' appearance over the weekend in a comedy sketch on Saturday Night Live. Following her usual pattern, Vega doesn't speak with anyone from the Sanders campaign, not for a reply to Bill's charges, not for anything.[5]
Again, this is allegedly a news report on an American presidential caucus in which two candidates are competing but an update on the status of the campaign produced by the Clinton camp itself couldn't be any more favorable than this sorry spectacle. As a news report, it's so one-sided as to veer into unintentional parody.
And this is what's going out every day and night on ABC's major news programs. I've mostly kicked around Cecilia Vega here but the problems I've identified run throughout ABC's coverage of the campaign and of course the news division's higher-ups are who put all of it on the air. Much of it is also chronically superficial horse-race reporting, light on substance, stupid and with many partial sentences and quick, quick, quick cuts to hold the no-attention-span viewers among the audience--a slice of the ongoing conversion of mass-media journalism to reality tv. Anyone depending on this for actual information on a race to decide the next President of the United States is being terribly ill-served, while those who believe American democracy is a fundamental fraud will find nothing but confirmation in it.
--j.
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[1] In his count, Andrew Tyndall includes items either from or about the campaign. When candidates are merely mentioned in another story about something else or some other candidate, this isn't included in his total.
[2] Even big press outlets that outright despise Hillary Clinton (like, for example, the New York Times) will choose her over any left candidate (like, for example, the New York Times).
[3] Last year, elements of the fringe right got their panties all in a bunch over the fact that ABC's George Stephanopoulous had made a donation to a charity established by the Clintons but hadn't disclosed it on the air when he interviewed an author who had published a smear-book tarring that charity. The manufactured outrage spilled over until the head of the Republican National Committee announced that he wouldn't allow Stephanopoulous to MC any Republican debate (something that wasn't going to happen anyway). Entirely absent for the furor was the genuine conflict of interest involved in Stephanopoulous, a longtime Clinton loyalist and former Bill Clinton employee, working on the Democratic primary in his capacity as a newsman and, if Clinton is the Democratic candidate, covering the general election. I don't cover any specific infractions by Stephanopoulous in this piece but his position as ABC's chief anchor and chief political correspondent, doesn't look good in light of what I do cover.
[4] The moment can't help but bring a chuckle to political junkies who have noted the enormous, often record-setting crowds Bernie Sanders has drawn--far larger crowds than any other candidate of either party and often in very conservative localities--only to see the phenomenon almost entirely ignored or downplayed by the corporate press. Some candidates' crowds, it seems, are more equal than others.
[5] For months, observers have complained about and picked apart journalists' lazy habit of drawing transparently false equivalence between the campaigns of Sanders and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. Sanders completely destroyed Clinton in New Hampshire. The next morning on Good Morning America, Vega's recap of the primary covered both the Republican and Democratic races and she deployed that same trope. "The consensus here this morning: voters are fed up with the Establishment. And the message they want to send: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump need to be taken seriously." Though Sanders had just won by the second-biggest margin in a contested Democratic primary in New Hampshire history, Vega actually gives him less time than any of the other candidates covered! While Trump drew a little over 100,000 voters, Sanders drew over 151,000 yet the report devotes 23 seconds to Trump and only 17 to Sanders. Even 2nd-place Republican finisher John Kasich was given more time (18 seconds). And guess who got more time than anyone? Hillary Clinton may have been flattened at the polls but she won the battle of the coverage. She was given 30 seconds--14 in the report proper and 16 in Vega's post-report comments, wherein Vega, as usual, insisted on analyzing the results solely from the perspective of how they affect the Clinton campaign. Sanders, in the report, remains a mysterious figure--while the report includes brief clips of post-primary interviews from both Trump and Kasich, the big winner of the evening is only shown in some brief moments from his victory speech.
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