“The Only Interesting Thing About Meet The Press”: So Many Journalists Think It’s Interesting To Anyone Other Than Journalists
Kevin Drum’s piece altered me to the fact that Jon Stewart was considered to be the next host of Meet the Press. I googled on “Meet the Press Jon Stewart” and found that Kevin’s was one of a tidal wave of pieces weighing in on this earthshattering revelation. The New York Times, Washington Post and US News and World Report were just a small set of the outlets that analyzed this Cuban Missile Crisis-Level near miss that might have destroyed our country forever. The Stewartgate coverage of course followed a good twelve months of virtually every political journalist in the country writing about how then-MTP host David Gregory was in trouble, and who would replace him, and would this person plunge the nation into peril or redeem its lost greatness (Lest you think that the recent spate of Meet the Press-related coverage was just because of Jon Stewart’s media profile, check out the non-Stewart-related MTP coverage at, to name only a few, New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post and FoxNews). God, the suspense of having our species’ future hinging on who — Dear Lord tell us, who? — would take the throne as Meet the Press host and thereby do something apparently quite important.
Or not. Seeing all these articles actually made me throw up a little in my mouth because I cannot take another round of journalists treating anything and everything that happens on MTP as more than remotely newsworthy. There are contests to name the most undercovered stories of the year in journalism. The goings-on at Meet the Press deserve the prize for the most overcovered story for several years running.
In the days when Lawrence Spivak walked the earth, Meet the Press developed an innovative concept in television: Have political journalists talk to each other and to politicians about the political events of the day. Since that time, this format has been copied to the point that one could literally watch such shows 24 hours a day every day if one were that masochistic. By Sunday everything momentous and everything trivial in the week’s politics has been chewed over 100 times already, and seeing the soggy orts remasticated on MTP et al. is the television version of experiencing “harsh interrogation methods”.
And alert to journalists: Almost no one other than you watches Meet the Press anymore. The many stories making a big deal about which of the Sunday morning shows is ranked first are analogous to making a big deal over who has the best batting average in Professional Baseball’s Double AA minor league system. Hit shows in the United States draw 10-20 million viewers per broadcast; you can be first among the not-so-vaunted Sunday morning talk show competition with less than 3 million viewers tuning in, counting all the people who are dozing off in the nursing home’s common room.
The only thing interesting about Meet the Press is that so many smart journalists think it’s interesting to anyone other than journalists. Please folks, find something more important to write about, like the war, the economy or what you did on your summer vacation.
By: Kevin Humphreys, Ten Miles Square, Washington Monthly Political Animal, Octoer 10, 2014
“An Odd Set Of Unspoken Rules”: How The Media Has Helped Normalize GOP Crazy
The victim of this morning’s pile-on is Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, who was asked in an editorial board meeting whether she had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Grimes hemmed and hawed a bit, obviously scared to say Yes. That isn’t too surprising — when you run as a Democrat in a red state (just as when you run as a Republican in a blue state), you spend a lot of your time explaining why you aren’t like the national party and its leaders. But some people are outraged, including Chuck Todd, who said on Morning Joe (with a look of profound disgust): “Is she ever going to answer a tough question on anything?…I think she disqualified herself. I really do, I think she disqualified herself.”
No question, Grimes botched this badly, and she should be able to answer a question as simple as this one. But this affair gets at the odd set of unspoken rules that dictate what gets designated a “gaffe” or a serious mistake, and what doesn’t.
The problem isn’t that one party gets treated more harshly than the other does. There are plenty of Republican candidates who have gotten pummeled for their “gaffes.” Rather, the problem is the standard that reporters use, probably unconsciously, to decide which gaffes are worthy of extended discussion and which ones merit only a passing mention, a standard that often lets GOP candidates get away with some appalling stuff.
For instance, when Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst flirted with the “Agenda 21″ conspiracy theory — a favorite of Glenn Beck, in which the U.S. government and the United Nations are supposedly conspiring to force rural people in Iowa and elsewhere to leave their homes and be relocated to urban centers — national pundits didn’t see it as disqualifying. Nor did they when it was revealed that Ernst believes not only that states can “nullify” federal laws they don’t like (they can’t); and, even crazier, that local sheriffs ought to arrest federal officials implementing the Affordable Care Act, which is quite literally a call for insurrection against the federal government. I guess those are just colorful ideas.
National observers also didn’t find it disqualifying when Tom Cotton, who is favored to become the next U.S. senator from Arkansas, expressed his belief that ISIS is now working with Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate America over our southern border.
Why do candidates like Cotton and Ernst get away with stuff like that, while Grimes gets raked over the coals for not wanting to reveal her vote and someone like Todd Akin can lose a race over his ruminations on “legitimate rape”? It’s because the standard being employed isn’t “Does this statement reveal something genuinely disturbing about this candidate?” but rather, “Is this going to be politically damaging?” Grimes’ chief area of political vulnerability is that she’s a Democrat in Kentucky, where Barack Obama’s approval ratings are low, so whenever the question of Obama comes up, reporters are watching closely to see how deftly she handles it; if she stumbles, they pounce. Akin got hammered for “legitimate rape” not so much because of how bogus and vile the idea is, but because reporters knew it could have serious consequences among women voters, given both the GOP’s constant struggles with women and the fact that Akin’s opponent was a woman.
Of course, these judgments by reporters end up being self-fulfilling prophecies: if they decide that a “gaffe” is going to have serious political effects, they give it lots of attention, which creates serious political effects.
And in the last few years, there’s a baseline of crazy from the right that the press has simply come to expect and accept, so the latest conspiracy theorizing or far-out idea from a candidate no longer strikes them as exceptional. Sure, there are exceptions: For instance, Republicans Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell both saw their candidacies derailed by their crazy or outsized statements. But their utterances were truly, deeply bizarre or comical, so they broke through.
But during this cycle, Republican crazy just hasn’t broken through at all. It’s almost as if the national press has just come to accept as normal the degree to which the GOP has moved dramatically to the right. At this point so many prominent Republicans have said insane things that after a while they go by with barely a notice. This is an era when a prominent Republican governor who wants to be president can muse about the possibility that his state might secede from the union, when the most popular radio host in the country suggests that liberals like Barack Obama want Ebola to come to America to punish us for slavery, and when the President of the United States had to show his birth certificate to prove that he isn’t a foreigner.
So ideological extremism and insane conspiracy theories from the right have been normalized. Which means that when another Republican candidate says something deranged, as long as it doesn’t offend a key swing constituency, reporters don’t think it’s disqualifying. And so it isn’t.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 10, 2014
“When Revenge Rules Foreign Policy”: Intense Rage At Violations Of Our National Honor Creating Self-Defeating Responses
In my earlier post on the IS “crisis” I suggested it’s irrational for American foreign policy to turn itself inside out over the barbaric murder of two (or in the future, perhaps more) U.S. journalists, horrible as it is. Peter Beinart has a very persuasive column at The Atlantic today arguing it’s important we understand the public reaction to the beheadings is entirely irrational, but reflects the enduring “Jacksonian” strain of U.S. foreign policy whereby intense rage at violations of our national honor justify completely disproportionate and sometimes even self-defeating responses:
Last September, when YouGov.com asked Americans whether they supported air strikes “against Syria,” only 20 percent said yes. Last week, by contrast, when it asked whether Americans supported strikes “against ISIS militants in Syria,” 63 percent said yes.
In narrow policy terms, the arguments for military intervention have not improved over the last two weeks. It’s still not clear if Iraq’s government is inclusive enough to take advantage of American attacks and wean Sunnis from ISIS. It’s even less clear if the U.S. can bomb ISIS in Syria without either empowering Assad or other Sunni jihadist rebel groups.
But politically, that doesn’t matter. What’s causing this Jacksonian eruption is the sight of two terrified Americans, on their knees, about to be beheaded by masked fanatics. Few images could more powerfully stoke Jacksonian rage. The politicians denouncing Obama for lacking a “strategy” against ISIS may not have one either, but they have a gut-level revulsion that they can leverage for political gain. “Bomb the hell out of them!” exclaimed Illinois Senator Mark Kirk on Tuesday. “We ought to bomb them back to the Stone Age,” added Texas Senator Ted Cruz. These aren’t policy prescriptions. They are cries for revenge.
Well, they could represent something a lot worse than that. If you look back at how we got into the Iraq War, the simple political dynamics were that the Bush administration exploited a national desire for revenge (“Let’s Roll”) to launch not one but two wars, on the highly cynical but accurate assumption that many Americans held Arabs or maybe even Muslims collectively responsible, and that the absence of a second 9/11 retroactively justified the “revenge.” Many of the Republican pols now howling for revenge have recently howled for violence against Iraq, against North Korea, against Syria, against Russia and (perpetually) against Palestinians. Who can tell how many agendas will eventually be lashed to the project of making IS pay for its barbarism?
More immediately, as Beinart points out, Obama is especially unlucky in encountering (potentially) the same combination of developments that undid a certain predecessor:
All of a sudden, the domestic politics of foreign policy bear a vague resemblance to the late Carter years. The Iran hostage crisis did not lend itself to a simple policy response either. But to many Americans, it represented a primal humiliation, broadcast on screens across the world. And the hostage crisis primed Americans to see the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that same year as yet another example of Jimmy Carter failing to prevent America from being disrespected around the world. The danger for Obama is that the ISIS beheadings color the public’s view of his Russia policy in the same way.
Having spent a good part of the 2012 presidential cycle trying to convince Americans that they were actually reliving 1980 and needed to get that wimpy Democrat out of the White House, Republicans can be expected to resume making this connection directly. But even without the potent Russia/hostage combo, the politics of restraining the Jacksonian impulse could be as difficult for Obama as for Carter.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 4, 2014
“Non-Journalistic Instincts”: Joe Scarborough, Mike Allen Form Journalistic Axis of Evil
One of the more fascinating sidelights of the crisis in Ferguson is the way it has revealed the complacent, obedient, and fundamentally non-journalistic instincts of certain leading centrist establishmentarian journalists. The precipitating event was the arrest of Wesley Lowery, a young Washington Post reporter who was illegally ordered to leave a McDonalds near the demonstrations and, correctly, refused, leading to his arrest.
This angered Joe Scarborough. And by “angered,” we should be clear, we mean angered at the presumption of Lowery for refusing. The avuncular host of Morning Joe instructed him, “Next time a police officer tells you that you’ve got to move along because you’ve got riots outside, well, you probably should move along.” (Because nothing says “journalism” like following orders from authorities, however questionable, self-interested, or illegal they may be.) Scarborough attributed Lowery’s refusal not to any commitment to continue doing his job but to his desire to “get on TV and have people talk about me the next day,” because the desire to get on television in any way possible is the only motivation that makes sense to Joe Scarborough.
Lowery replied sharply. Riding to Scarborough’s side today, forming a kind of journalistic Axis of Evil, is Mike Allen. In Allen’s world, which is defined by overlapping and possibly coterminous circles of sources, friends, and paid advertisers, the sort of effrontery displayed by Lowery first toward the police and then toward an esteemed television commentator was thoroughly intolerable. Sniffs Allen, in today’s Playbook:
YA CAN’T MAKE IT UP – Wesley Lowrey, 23-year-old Congress/politics reporter for the WashPost, responding on CNN to suggestions that he should have obeyed police amid a riot: “[L]et me be clear about this: I have LITTLE PATIENCE for talking heads.”
FYI, his name is spelled Lowery, and his age is 24. But if Lowery wants more favorable coverage from Allen, maybe he should think about sponsoring some ads in Playbook.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencier, New York Magazine, August 15, 2014
“We’re All Journalists Now”: No, Glenn Greenwald Cannot Be The One Who Decides What Stays Secret
This Sunday, The New York Times Book Review will finally print Michael Kinsley’s review of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide, two and a half weeks after the review was published online and provoked a polarizing debate involving Greenwald, the Times‘ Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, Kinsley again, and countless commentators who promptly took sides in the dispute about government secrecy and freedom of the press.
Some readers, including Sullivan, objected to Kinsley’s smart-alecky tone and psychological sketches of Greenwald, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange, which these critics saw as bordering on ad hominem attacks. But there were also more substantive criticisms levied by Sullivan and many others, most of them boiling down to the claim that it was simply outrageous of Kinsley to deny journalists an absolute right to print classified material passed on to them by leakers.
Here is the most controversial passage from the review:
It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government. No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay. But ultimately you can’t square this circle. Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald. [The New York Times]
Some objected to this passage because they thought it contradicted another line of the review in which Kinsley called the Snowden leaks a “legitimate scoop.” But for most critics, the issue was far more fundamental: How dare anyone suggest, and in the pages of America’s newspaper of record no less, that the government, and not an intrepid journalist like Glenn Greenwald, should get to decide, while wielding threats of prosecution and imprisonment, what information is secret and what is not?
Clearly, the critics implied, Kinsley was expressing a deep-seated sympathy for authoritarianism that no self-respecting American citizen, let alone a journalist professionally and existentially devoted to the press freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment, could possibly endorse.
There’s just one problem with this objection: Kinsley was almost certainly correct.
In the ensuing debate about the review, The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf made the strongest and most concise case against Kinsley’s position. When we look at the competing track records of the government and journalists in deciding what should be kept secret and what should be made public, Friedersdorf argued, it is clear that journalists have done a far better job. For that reason, journalists, and not the government, should get to decide.
Friedersdorf also made a point of stipulating that this does not imply blanket permission for leakers to divulge to journalists any information they wish. In Friedersdorf’s words, “The least-bad system is one where leakers can be charged and punished for giving classified secrets to journalists (which isn’t to say that they always should be), but where journalism based on classified information is not criminalized.”
That sounds like a perfectly reasonable compromise — at least until you think it through.
Permitting journalists to publish anything and everything that gets leaked to them, under no possible threat of prosecution, would make it nearly impossible to prosecute a leaker, since the harmlessness of the leak would automatically be demonstrated the moment a journalist makes the decision to publish the classified information. After all, in Friedersdorf’s least-bad system, it’s journalists who decide what can and can’t be made public, based in part on their assessment of the likely public harm. This means that as soon as classified information gets published by a journalist, the leaker would instantly be exonerated.
To which many will no doubt respond: So what? That’s exactly how it should work!
Except for one additional consideration, which Kinsley raised in his original review. In the age of blogs, portable audio and video recording, instant messaging, and social media platforms, “it is impossible to distinguish between a professional journalist and anyone else who wants to publish his or her thoughts.”
We’re all journalists now.
In such a world, Friedersdorf’s rules produce a situation in which any leaker who leaks any information to anyone willing to publicize it is automatically absolved of any crime.
In such a world — a world completely lacking in disincentives to leak classified information — government secrecy would be rendered impossible.
“But no,” I imagine Friedersdorf objecting. “I mean real journalists, working for established, recognized media companies. Only they should be given the power to decide what to publish.”
To which the proper reply is to repeat Kinsley’s line that making such a call — deciding who is and who is not a “real” journalist — is impossible. Sure, we can agree that a journalist employed by The New York Times or The Atlantic is an authentic journalist entitled to make the hard calls on secrecy. But what about a reporter working for BuzzFeed? Or a reporter working for BuzzFeed six years ago, when it had little politics coverage and was known primarily for its cat-photo click-throughs?
And what about self-employed blogger Andrew Sullivan? Is he a journalist? If someone leaked classified information to him, should he have blanket authorization to decide whether to publish it?
What about someone who runs a blog with a tenth of Sullivan’s traffic and journalistic experience? A hundredth? A thousandth?
We seem to have a problem. Either anyone or everyone gets to make the call, rendering state secrets impossible, or we need some independent authority to decide who is and who is not empowered to make the call. Government licensing of journalists? That’s where Friedersdorf’s “least-bad system” leads us, I’m afraid.
Which means that Friedersdorf leads us right back to Kinsley: “Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald.”
Pace Friedersdorf, the least-bad system is the one we have right now: Government (elected officials, appointees, and judges) deciding what gets and stays classified. In that system, both leaking and publishing classified information are treated as crimes, albeit crimes for which leakers and journalists are rarely punished, with the benefit of the doubt usually swinging in their favor.
This system isn’t perfect. Free speech absolutists don’t like it, and understandably so, because it makes government secrecy the legal principle and press freedom an exception dependent on the prudential judgment of prosecutors and judges.
But in a world where secrets are necessary, this may be the best that a democracy can do.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, June 6, 2014
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