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Republican hand-wringing about "one-party rule" in Washington is absurd enough even before you consider the childlike gullibility of celebrity pundits, such as those paid large salaries by "The Most Trusted Name In News" to cast GOP pearls before us swine. HuffingtonPost gives us a video in which Keith Olbermann (MSNBC) dutifully points out to the audience and unnamed CNN news personalities that it was in fact George W. Bush, not Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, who most recently enjoyed the perks of one-party rule in DC. Does CNN truly not remember Denny Hastert and Bill Frist?
As an aside, on election night I noticed that CNN continually ran a screen graphic that stated Democrats need 60 Senate seats for a "majority." The corporate media bias in favor of Republicans runs, as The Boxtops sang, soul deep: the GOP rules the world from City Hall until Democrats can break Republican legislative filibusters. The trouble is that people absorb TV as reality. This past week alone, I've unexpectedly ended up in two short heated discussions when I suggested to people that TV news and commentary are not literally reality or even necessarily a close approximation of it. Even educated people seem preconditioned to sop up TV swill like tainted Chinese baby formula just because people with suave voices and professional makeup tell it to through an electric box perched in the the living room.
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i wonder if the president or congressional leaders have the power to simply tell productions like fox news that, until they are actually reporting news they will be unwelcome at press conferences and for receiving releases from the administration. Just cut the MFs off-- not that they ever needed actual news to report something, but that once the public learns that, it will know they are either plagiarizing or inventing their stories.
ReplyDeleteBO: the White House has press credentialing standards that could be applied as they do to reject media pass requests from the likes of, say, Larry Flynt Publications, Cosmopolitan, etc. However, denying Fox News credentials would immediately become a sensational First Amendment issue (regardless of the merits), and Murdoch and Ailes would lick their ghastly, greasy lips while the "liberal media" beat up mercilessly on Obama, much to his detriment. Myself, I'd go more for an asymmetric strategy. One I'd call the "bark collar," which would be triggered by any deliberate statement by reporters or commentators that would be considered slanderous or illegally defamatory if they were made about a private citizen. When the network "barks", they'll get a "shock" like an unruly dog. The shock would be designed for application to various social graces, courtesy, or optional access, the denial of which would send a message that would be hard for the recipient to miss but also hard for the network to complain about publicly. An allied strategy might be to hold annual onsite communication workshops for high-visibility administration officials to teach them how and when to push back against media people who serve up double-bind questions or Republican talking points. I saw Biden do it against the pipsqueak TV anchor in Florida, but the Bark Collar Strategy would see this pushback deployed against first-tier stars like Matthews or Blitzer whenever they deserve it. Give 'em some brown teeth to suck on.
ReplyDeletedoes not giving ABC that big Obama commercial on Oct 29 fall into this category? Seems like they yanked it from that network after their odious interview with Biden. Kind of a costly "shock" to Disneyland.
ReplyDeleteBO: Yes, that kind of thing. What the internationalists call "soft power." However, I really would like to hear President Obama tell Roger Ailes to kiss his black ass during the State of the Union Address.
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