“The Business Of TV Media And Politics”: GOP And The Media…”Each Holding The Other Up, While Bringing The Other Down”
After the last GOP presidential debate, the Fox Business Network is determined to gloat about how much more accommodating they were to the candidates than CNBC. But there is a much deeper story about the relationship between television media and political campaigns than that kind of one-up-manship reveals. Michael Wolff captured that pretty well with a story titled: GOP Candidates are Hollywood’s Unlikely New Divas.
At some point, politics crossed over from being a civic obligation of television news to television news’ central business. The dutiful and high-minded became incredibly profitable, complicating the responsibilities and attitudes of journalists (and their managers), most recently in NBC’s exclusion from the Republican debate cycle over complaints about CNBC’s “gotcha”-style questioning.
News was once the loss leader of TV, and politics was the loss leader of news, the slog you waded through before crime, disaster, human interest, weather and sports. Two things changed that status.
The first thing Wolff points to that changed things is the flood of television advertising money from political campaigns – which is estimated to be as much as $5 billion in 2016 – “making politics the single biggest local television advertising category.” If not for revenue from political campaigns (and major sporting events), the entire television industry might be collapsing in this age of new media.
The second factor that Wolff identified captures where the Fox Business Network failed to produce.
While news organizations see themselves as information seekers and reasonable moderators, their additional, and financially advantageous, role is to be disruptors. That media-led upheaval arguably has helped (or given hope to) every candidate save for Jeb Bush. But it also is a convenient bete noire by which nearly every candidate can gain an additional edge. It’s the double advantage of disruption: to benefit from it, and benefit from criticizing it — causing a further disruption…
It is almost impossible not to see everybody as a pawn in a larger game — or in someone else’s game. For TV news, this campaign is an unimaginable gift, one that, if conflict is maintained, will keep giving. For GOP candidates, the more volatile the season, the more everyone, save for the person at the top, benefits. For politicians, a no-argument issue that resonates with everybody, and that also produces more media attention, is to blame the media for, well, anything and everything.
For weeks after the CNBC debate, both the GOP candidates and media outlets were able to exploit the “disruption” caused by the complaints that were generated. Right now, everyone is busy patting each other on the back over how well they did…boring!
If Republican voters wanted an adult conversation about the issues, Donald Trump’s candidacy would have been toast a long time ago. And, of course, it was his inflammatory statements that fueled the biggest audience for presidential debates we’ve ever seen. Similarly, the recent reports about Ben Carson’s lack of truthfulness have produced eye-catching stories for the media. While Carson embraces the role of victim in all that, he also brags about how the conflict has sharply increased donations to his campaign. Disruption is what sells – for both the media and the candidates.
That’s why Wolff ends his article by saying that this campaign may be the first to highlight the co-dependence between these GOP candidates and the media…”each holding the other up, while bringing the other down.”
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, November 13, 2015
“All The Rage In Parts Of Southern Virginia”: Inside Virginia’s Church-Burning Werewolf White Supremacist Cult
Viking-inspired white supremacists trying to terrorize black Christians in the South: not as rare as you think.
News broke yesterday that the FBI arrested two young men under the suspicion that they were planning to start a race war by bombing black churches in their home state of Virginia. The men, Robert Doyle and Ronald Chaney, allegedly ascribe to an Icelandic pagan faith called Asatru that has a disturbingly large following among white supremacists.
The faith itself doesn’t seek to endorse or promulgate racist or anti-Semitic views. But you could be forgiven for thinking it does, given its strange appeal to Nazis and other sundry bigots.
Asatru is a pagan religion that draws on Norse mythology. It is related to Odinism, according the Southern Poverty Law Center, and some use the terms interchangeably. Its defenders say the religion itself isn’t inherently bigoted. But many white supremacists find it appealing because, unlike Christianity, it isn’t influenced by Judaism. If you think the KKK is soft on the Jews because it’s Christian-friendly, Asatru might be for you.
The SPLC notes that Odinism, which has ties to Asatru, played an important role in some corners of Nazism.
“Its Nordic/Teutonic mythology was a bedrock belief for key Third Reich leaders,” the group noted in a 1998 write-up, “and it was an integral part of the initiation rites and cosmology of the elite Schutzstaffel, which supervised Adolf Hitler’s network of death camps.” Asatru apologists seem to recognize that it has a bit of a PR problem.
Nazi affection for Asatru wasn’t a fluke. David Lane, a white supremacist terrorist who died in prison, promoted the religion while incarcerated. And it has gained significant traction in the prison population; the Anti-Defamation League wrote in a 2002 report that it was one of the faiths that incarcerated white supremacists found most often. The men arrested for allegedly trying to start a race war “may have met in prison, where all were designated by prison officials as white supremacists while in custody,” the ADL notes.
“According to the FBI, the suspects were adherents of a white supremacist variety of Asatruism,” the group added.
And they aren’t the only young white men to target black churches in Virginia.
In 2012, Maurice Thompson Michaely pleaded guilty to arson—specifically, to charges of Unlawfully Entering Property of Another with the Intent to Damage and Maliciously Destroying or Defacing Church Property, according to the Bristow Beat. Michaely tried to burn down a historic black church, the 135-year-old Mount Pleasant Baptist Church. The fire didn’t injure anyone since the building wasn’t occupied when he attempted to burn it down. However, the fire caused about $1 million of damage, according to ABC affiliate WJLA and he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.
According to social media screenshots on the Fools of Vinland blog, Michaely goes by the name Hjalti and is part of a group based outside Lynchburg, Va., called Wolves of Vinland.
When The Daily Beast reached out to the group via Facebook message, the person who runs the account replied, “It doesn’t matter who we are, what matters is our plan.”
Matthias Waggener, one prominent member of the group, described it as an “Odinic Wolfcult.”
He also said the group practices animal sacrifice.
“It is a tool that can heighten the function of the human mind to a state where it can open doors that appear closed or non existent to the normal state of observation,” he said, according to Hunter Yoder’s book 9 Worlds of Hex Magic. “In this type of ritual you are ’sacrificing’ the life of the animal to achieve this state in order to gain the wisdom beyond those doors. With this wisdom we increase the effectiveness and potential of our actions that will in turn bring glory to ourselves and our Gods. This reconciles the practice back to one of Odinic sacrifice of Blood, and life for the attainment of knowledge to increase the life of those sacrificing.”
Waggener’s brother, Paul Waggener, visited Hjalti while he was incarcerated. And at least one prominent white supremacist, Jack Donovan, is affiliated with their group. Donovan, who recently spoke at the white supremacist National Policy Institute’s event in Washington, D.C., instagrammed a picture of a dead sheep, tagged #wolvesofvinland.
“Wolves and prospects preparing to butcher the sheep we sacrificed this afternoon at moot,” he wrote.
Animal sacrifice, Norse mythology, wolf-themed weekends—it all sounds like something out of a heavy metal music video or a Live Action Role Play convention. But as yesterday’s arrests evince, viking-inspired white supremacy is alive and well and weird in Southern Virginia.
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, November 11, 2015
“Poppy Speaks Out At Last — Too Little, Too Late”: The American People Are Still Paying The Price
If only “Poppy” had quit in 1992, after one White House term, then the 41st president’s fruit would not be so bitter. George Herbert Walker Bush would have dined out on German reunification and the multinational coalition in the first Gulf War — a desert cakewalk. Through no fault of his own, the Soviet Union and the Cold War ended on his watch, and that should be enough for any man pushing 70.
“I didn’t finish the job,” Bush I said. He’s now 91.
Out on the stump, the monumentally ambitious president found he could not connect to the American people. A jolly good fellow who wrote a ton of thank-you notes, he went as far as China and Langley for the blue-chip resume, always a team player who never had “the vision thing.”
Earlier, in 1988, he won as Ronald Reagan’s chosen understudy. But like many men of his Ivy League WASP war hero mold, he could not speak straight to the heart of people at home. Not to save his political life. His speech often sounded strangled.
A new biography, an elegant volume composed by author and presidential historian Jon Meacham, is titled Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. It’s based on the former president’s diaries and revealing chats, often at the family compound on the Maine coast.
The result of that sharing is the most generous portrait that the former president, nicknamed “Poppy” since prep school, could hope for. Meacham’s work is written in a gentlemanly spirit, just as his American Lion book on the gruff general and president, Andrew Jackson, glowed. For that he won the Pulitzer Prize. (Meacham once deftly edited a magazine piece of mine.) Meacham excuses Bush’s mean moments in political combat as untrue to his code. (The 1988 campaign was not pretty.) Nor does he pass judgment on Bush’s loyal service to President Richard M. Nixon.
Bush realized late there was no way to win against the young Bill Clinton, who could coax the stars out of the sky. The generational contrast was stark. We learn that Bush confided to his diary that he felt the war-high in his approval rating was thin ice. The future won; the past lost. Bush had been schooled and worked in exclusively male institutions; Clinton was educated in co-ed settings and married another Yale Law School graduate. (Barbara Pierce Bush dropped out of Smith College to marry Poppy.)
Now it turns out, tragically, Poppy’s speech troubles extended to his own firstborn son George W. Bush as wily Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney — who pushed the nation down the path of war in Iraq. More than most, the Bushes have played their family dramas out in public, at our expense. The American people are still paying the bill — and so are Iraq, Syria and other countries bathed in blood. The show was not even fun to watch.
The Bushes are not just genteel from a long New England line. Their manners mask a cutthroat bunch — jocks who don’t crack books much — when they aren’t writing adoring notes to fellow Bushes. Winning and loyalty are cherished, whether it’s horseshoes or the Florida presidential contest in 2000. They have their men, like lifelong friend James Baker, always there to help in a pinch. In Florida, with brother Jeb Bush as governor, the cliffhanger was almost a cosmic family thank-you note to opponent Al Gore, Clinton’s vice president — whom Poppy had once referred to as a pair of “bozos.” (Now he and Clinton are tight.)
Cheney’s war-mongering as his son’s vice president offended Poppy; building up his own power base was the last thing he would have done as Reagan’s No. 2. Bush, ever the good team player, found Cheney’s aggression a terrible influence. Yet Poppy had hired Cheney to be his secretary of defense and so — well, it was all in the tribe. As a seasoned foreign policy hand, Poppy knew the “axis of evil” language used by his son was trouble. But he never spoke “mano a mano” to his son, as columnist Maureen Dowd noted.
So why not say something at the time to us, the American people? It’s clear: We’re not their kind, dear.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 13, 2015
“Why Is Trump Still Talking?”: The Mad Men Throwback, Treating Women As Nothing More Than A Distraction
When the Republican presidential debate began Tuesday evening in Milwaukee, I was still in my car heading home, so I listened to the first part on satellite radio.
As Richard Nixon learned after his 1960 televised debate with Jack Kennedy, listening to a debate without the distraction of participants’ facial expressions changes how we hear them. We tend to focus more on substance. For Nixon, this was a good thing. For Donald Trump, not so much.
A quick aside for political junkies: In 2006, Meet the Press host Tim Russert walked into the show’s greenroom and told my husband and me why Nixon had become such a wet mop of a mess in that same studio during that debate. Bobby Kennedy, knowing of Nixon’s propensity for sweating, arrived early to the studio to turn up the thermostat. Nixon didn’t stand a chance. Remember that story the next time someone goes on and on about how debates were always such an honorable tradition before this circus came to town.
Driving along the streets of Cleveland, I heard Trump without seeing the usual pouty expressions and ubiquitous shrugging of his shoulders. Whenever he spouted in his meandering know-it-all voice, I thought, “Whom does he remind me of?”
I didn’t have the answer until after I walked through the door and made it to the TV in time to catch Trump complaining about Carly Fiorina. She had interjected her opinion about Ronald Reagan and Reykjavik before Rand Paul had finished talking. Her repeated behavior of stepping on the comments of others was no different from that of her male colleagues on the stage. Trump singled her out anyway.
“Why does she keep interrupting everybody?” he said, waving his left arm in her direction. “Boy, terrible.”
A smattering of laughter and applause preceded loud booing from the audience, and for a fleeting moment, I identified with Fiorina. That feeling quickly passed, but I had finally figured out whom — or, more accurately, what — Trump represents to a lot of his fans. He’s that other Donald, albeit a less classy and certainly less sophisticated version of him. He’s the Mad Men throwback, a Donald Draper wannabe.
Even if you’ve never seen an episode of the AMC show, if you are over 50 or wish we still lived in the ’50s, you know the type I mean. He’s the guy who thinks women are either a prop or a problem, and he is incapable of hiding his contempt for women who think otherwise.
His comments about Rosie O’Donnell in the first debate were such an egregious example of misogyny that it was easy for some to dismiss him as a dinosaur. His public display of disgust for fellow presidential candidate Fiorina, however, revealed a more sinister side. Not only does he think it’s ridiculous that he has to compete with this, this woman but also he assumes plenty of others agree with him.
If this were Trump in a vacuum, we could dismiss him as the summer replacement for the prime-time show returning this fall. But he continues to poll as one of the top two presidential candidates for Republican voters, which means a lot of people are, at the very least, getting a kick out of him. They either share or don’t care about Trump’s attitudes toward women.
This doesn’t surprise a lot of women in my generation, who long ago lost count of how many times we’ve been told to pipe down. Certainly, it’s no news to my daughters’ generation, either. The stories they tell.
Our youngest daughter is weeks away from giving birth. She has started sharing with me comments from male strangers and men she barely knows. They point to her belly and let her know she’s pregnant and feel free to tell her she should be napping, not working at her job. They feel free to ask her whether she’s going to nurse, too, as if her pregnancy has given them permission to discuss her breasts.
These men are old enough to know better and way too young to claim an elderly generation’s habits. This is all part and parcel of the same thing. They are Trump, multiplied, and to them, he is a godsend. He’s rich and powerful, and he’s made it popular again to say it out loud — to treat women as nothing more than a distraction and an invitation to misbehave. In that way, we women are no different to Trump from the 11 million Mexicans he wants to march right out of here.
As we lean in to the 2016 campaign, I leave you with this, from Don Draper: “Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”
From your lips, mad man.
By: Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist; The National Memo, November 12, 2015
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