“Appealing Fiction For The Press”: How The Media Marketed Chris Christie’s Straight Shooter Charade
“Chris Christie is someone who is magical in the way politicians can be magical.” — Time’s Mark Halperin appearing on Meet The Press, November 10 2013.
A political bombshell detonated in my home state of New Jersey yesterday when published emails and text messages revealed that Gov. Chris Christie’s deputy chief of staff conspired with a Christie transportation appointee to create a four-day traffic jam last September, allegedly to punish a local Democratic mayor who refused to endorse the governor’s re-election. The unfolding drama not only raises doubts about Christie’s political future but also about the way the mainstream press has presented him over the years.
The widening dirty tricks scandal features patronage and political retribution wrapped in an unseemly culture of intimidation. In sharp contrast, the national political press has spent the last four years presenting, and even marketing, Christie as an above-the-fray politician who thrives on competence.
He’s been relentlessly and adoringly depicted as some sort of Straight Shooter. He’s an authentic and bipartisan Every Man, a master communicator, and that rare politician who cuts through the stagecraft and delivers hard truths. Christie’s coverage has been a long-running, and rather extreme, case of personality trumping substance.
But now the bridge bombshell casts all of that flattering coverage into question. How could the supposedly astute Beltway press corps spend four years selling Christie as a Straight Shooter when his close aides did things like orchestrate a massive traffic jam apparently to punish the governor’s political foes? When an appointee joked in texts about school buses being trapped in the political traffic backup? How could Christie be a Straight Shooter when he’s been caught peddling lies about the unfolding scandal and now claims he was misled about what people close to him were up to?
The truth is Christie was never the Straight Shooter that political reporters and pundits made him out to be. Not even close, as I’ll detail below. Instead, the Straight Shooter story represented appealing fiction for the press. They tagged him as “authentic” and loved it when he got into yelling matches with voters.
Media Matters recently rounded up some of media’s Christie sweet talk, which is particularly enlightening to review in the wake of the Trenton scandal developments:
In the last month alone, TIME magazine has declared that Christie governed with “kind of bipartisan dealmaking that no one seems to do anymore.” MSNBC’s Morning Joe called the governor “different,” “fresh,” and “sort of a change from public people that you see coming out of Washington.” In a GQ profile, Christie was deemed “that most unlikely of pols: a happy warrior,” while National Journal described him as “the Republican governor with a can-do attitude” who “made it through 2013 largely unscathed. No scandals, no embarrassments or gaffes.” ABC’s Barbara Walters crowned Christie as one of her 10 Most Fascinating People, casting him as a “passionate and compassionate” politician who cannot lie.
Note that when Christie last year easily won re-election against a weak Democratic opponent (via record low voter turnout), the Beltway press treated the win as some sort of national coronation (“Chris Christie is a rock star” announced CNN’s Carol Costello), with endless cable coverage and a round of softball interviews on the Sunday political talk circuit.
Here’s Time from last November’s celebration: “He’s a workhorse with a temper and a tongue, the guy who loves his mother and gets it done.” That, of course, is indistinguishable from a Christie office press release. But it’s been that way for years.
I detailed some of that absurdly fawning coverage in 2010 and 2011, but then I largely stopped writing about the phenomena simply because it became clear that the press was entirely and unapologetically committed to peddling Christie press clippings. They liked the GOP story and it was one they wanted to tell, just like they had been wed to the John-McCain-is-a-Maverick story. So they told it (selectively) over and over and over and over, regardless of the larger context about Christie’s actual behavior and his record as governor. (At one point under Christie in 2012, New Jersey’s unemployment hit a two year high that ranked among the highest in the U.S.)
But again, the dreamt-up Straight Shooter storyline never reflected reality. Here are several examples drawn from just a 10-month stretch during Christie’s first term:
*In August of 2010, the state was shocked to discover it had narrowly missed out on $400 million worth of desperately needed education aid from the federal government because New Jersey’s application for the grant was flawed. Christie initially tried to blame the Obama administration but that claim was shown to be false.
Christie’s own Education Commissioner then publicly blamed Christie for the failure to land the money. He insisted the governor, who famously feuds with the state’s teacher unions, had placed that political battle and his right-wing credentials ahead of securing the federal funds and that Christie had told him the “money was not worth it” to the state if it meant he had to cooperate with teachers.
*In November 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice inspector general found that while serving as U.S. attorney, Christie routinely billed taxpayers for luxury hotels on trips and failed to follow federal travel regulations.
*That December, Christie chose to leave New Jersey for a family vacation in Disney World even though forecasters had warned a blizzard was barreling towards the state, and even though Christie’s No. 2 was already out of the state visiting her ailing father. Worse, in the wake of the epic storm, Christie refused to return home early to help the state deal with the historic blizzard that left portions of the state buried under 30 inches of snow and paralyzed for days. (The storm was so severe the Garden State had to appeal to FEMA for $53 million in disaster aid.)
When Christie did return, he held a press conference and blamed state officials who didn’t escape to the Sunshine State for doing such a poor job managing the state’s emergency response. Bottom line: Christie said he wouldn’t have changed a thing because “I had a great five days with my children.”
*In May of 2011, Christie flew in a brand new, $12 million state-owned helicopter to watch his son play a high school baseball game. After landing on a nearby football field, Christie was driven 300 feet in a black car with tinted windows to the baseball diamond. When he was done watching five innings, Christie boarded the helicopter and flew home. The trip cost $2,500 and Christie initially refused to reimburse the state for the expenses.
Keep in mind, these are all Christie tales that reporters and pundits almost pathologically omitted from their glowing profiles in recent years. Why? None of them fit within the narrow confines of the established narrative, so they were simply ignored.
Now with Christie’s political career reeling thanks to a shockingly vindictive and partisan scandal, it’s time for the press to drop the Straight Shooter charade.
By: Eric Boehlert, Senior Fellow, Media Matters for America; The Huffington Post, January 9, 2014
“Learning Lessons From The Umbrage Police”: The Media’s Morality Play And Melissa Harris-Perry
Here’s a can’t-miss prediction for 2014: Some time this year, a media figure will say something offensive about someone who does not share their political ideology. There will be a chorus of feigned outrage. Apologies will be demanded, then grudgingly offered. Those insincerely expressing their displeasure at the original statement will criticize the apology for its insufficient sincerity.
In fact, this little routine will happen multiple times this year (and next year, and the year after that). It will happen with both media figures and politicians. That’s just how we do it in America. There’s so much umbrage taken in politics that it practically constitutes its own industry.
Last week we saw one more of these cases, but it was different from most, in that the eventual apology not only contained what an actual apology should, it was obviously earnest as well. That’s so rare because the insult-apology morality play, in politics at least, is always enacted against a background of partisan contestation that discourages everyone from acting honestly.
To summarize briefly, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry had a segment on her show with a roundtable of comedians in which she put up photos and asked them to come up with amusing captions. One photo was the Romney family Christmas card, with Mitt and Ann posing amongst their hundreds of grandchildren, including a new addition to the brood, an African-American baby adopted not long ago by one of the Romney sons. One of the comedians on the panel sang, “One of these things is not like the other…” and Harris-Perry joked that it would be amusing if one day the child grew up to marry Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s baby, so Kanye and Mitt could be in-laws.
As far as these kinds of sins go, the brief exchange was pretty mild. It wasn’t as if Harris-Perry or her guest said something particularly cruel about the child; the joke was in the anomaly of a black child in the midst of a family as famously white as the Romneys (dressed on the card in matching pastel-and-khaki outfits, no less). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t problematic, just that we should be able to distinguish between the ill-considered quip and the truly hateful remark.
That broader context is something the rest of us can consider, but Harris-Perry chose not address it when she offered an on-air apology profoundly different from those we usually hear. She didn’t say “I apologize if someone was offended,” as people so often do (which actually means, “I get that you were offended, but I don’t think you should have been”). She didn’t try to minimize it; if anything, she might have made the offending segment sound more offensive than it was. She said it was wrong and took responsibility for it. And most importantly, she said this: “I am genuinely appreciative of everyone who offered serious criticisms of last Sunday’s program, and I am reminded that our fiercest critics can sometimes be our best teachers.”
There were many liberals on social media who expressed the opinion that Harris-Perry shouldn’t have apologized, mainly because it would only deliver succor to the enemies of liberalism, who are a dastardly bunch. But Harris-Perry’s words and evident sincerity made it clear that the apology wasn’t about conservatives, it was about her. She chose to do the right thing, to commit a morally righteous act even if people she doesn’t like would enjoy it.
In other words, she removed herself from the political calculation that asks of everything, “Which side is this good for?” That isn’t easy for someone involved in politics to do, because so many forces push you to see every controversy primarily from that perspective. Had Harris-Perry been focused on not giving her critics any satisfaction, or simply keeping up the fight, she might have given one of those familiar non-apology apologies. She might have said: Listen, imagining Mitt and Kanye at Thanksgiving together isn’t exactly like, say, that time during the Clinton presidency when John McCain asked the crowd at a Republican fundraiser, “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father.” That was truly despicable; what I did was a misdemeanor at best.
But she didn’t say those things; instead, she acted the way a good person would, the way most of us hope we’d act in an analogous situation in our own lives. She overcame the natural instinct to be defensive that we all share and to say that our good intentions should absolve us of blame. It’s ironic that we don’t expect that of those in public life, even though in general, the light of attention tends to encourage people to show their best selves. A slew of psychological studies have shown that when we know others are watching us, we’re more likely to act cooperatively, help people in need, and even to pick up after ourselves. When we’re in public we start seeing ourselves through others’ eyes and want to project an admirable persona. That’s why it’s sometimes said that character is what you do when no one’s watching.
For politicians and media figures, someone is always watching, and there’s a legion of people waiting to expose and punish you for the things you say. When you’re being taken to task by people who most assuredly do not have your best interests at heart, it’s awfully hard to ask yourself honestly whether, just this once, they might have a point.
As I’ve often said in comparing ordinary people to presidential candidates, if somebody followed you around recording everything you said for a year—heck, even for a day—there would undoubtedly be some things that passed your lips that would make somebody angry. Now that we have social media, it isn’t necessary to have your own TV show in order to risk a rain of criticism for the ugliness of your momentary thoughts. We all have to be accountable for what we say, but we can pass or fail the test that comes after you say something you shouldn’t have.
The web is full of “The Worst Apologies of 2013” lists (Paula Deen figures heavily), but to my mind, the best one came from Grist‘s David Roberts, who not only apologized for something insulting he said about someone on Twitter, but wrote a long and thoughtful post unpacking the whole episode. “As for the ‘political correctness police,’ well, I’m happy they got me,” he wrote. “That kind of social censure reinforces norms that badly need reinforcement in social media … If I’m briefly being made an example of, that’s as it should be—learn from the example!”
Learning from episodes like this one can be the hardest part, since the prevailing question is usually “Who won?” But maybe next time the umbrage machine fires up, we can ask what was revealed about everyone’s character, not just in what they initially said, but in how they responded to their critics.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 6, 2014
“Giving Republicans A Pass”: Media Mantra, It’s Congress That’s Historically Unproductive, Not The GOP
As the calendar races towards 2014, and Congressional members log their final few days in session while facing daunting deadlines for a long list of pressing and unfinished initiatives, the press has been busy chronicling the futility, assigning collective blame, and giving the president permanent failing marks.
According to historians, 2013 is on track to become the least productive single legislative year in modern American history. And it’s not even close. In 1995, 88 laws were passed, setting the previous low-water mark. This year, it’s doubtful 70 will make it to the president’s desk. (And lots of the bills that have passed are ceremonial or rather trivial in nature.) The press is not happy about the trend.
“The paltry number of bills Congress has passed into law this year paints a vivid picture of just how bad the gridlock has been for lawmakers,” announced NBC. The Wall Street Journal noted this year’s session has been “long on partisanship, indecision and brinkmanship.” USA Today bemoaned the inability “to find common ground.” And the Los Angeles Times pointed to “partisan dysfunction” as the main Congressional culprit.
See? “Congress” remains in the grips of “gridlock” and “brinkmanship.” Congress just can’t find “common ground” and suffers from serious “dysfunction.”
So that’s why immigration reform, the farm bill, a budget deal, unemployment benefit extensions, workplace discrimination legislation, and the defense spending bill haven’t been passed or dealt with yet? And that’s why the government was shutdown for 16 days in October?
Bipartisan gridlock!
Wrong. The current Congress obliterated all previous records for diminished output because the Republican Party, and especially those in the Republican-run House, purposefully bottled up as many initiatives as possible and unleashed “procedural sabotage.” (They even obstructed disaster relief aid for victim of Hurricane Sandy.)
Yet eager to maintain a political symmetry in which both sides are equally responsible for so little getting accomplished, the press gives Republicans a pass for their purposeful dysfunction.
By the way, are you also experiencing media flashbacks to the government shutdown, which the Republican Party proudly engineered by reneging on a budget deal they had agreed to with the last-minute demand that Obama essentially repeal his signature legislative accomplishment of his first term, the Affordable Care Act? Back then, the one-sided shutdown maneuver was nearly universally portrayed as bipartisan “Washington dysfunction at its absolute worst” (ABC News), a “partisan logjam” (Wall Street Journal), and a “fiscal stalemate” (The Hill).
Yet today, even as some Republican members brag about how little they’ve allowed Congress to accomplish, even as a plurality of voters says the GOP’s top priority is to cause trouble for the president, while a majority blame Republicans for the lack of productivity in Washington, the press still prefers to portray the Capitol Hill standstill as bipartisan “gridlock.”
Because, of course, both sides are always to blame.
But they’re not. Look at the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. In a rare example of fleeting bipartisanship, the bill to prohibit most employers from discriminating based on sexual orientation was approved by the Senate 64-32 last month. In the House, there are more than enough votes from both parties to pass ENDA into law, but Speaker of the House John Boehner will not allow a vote.
The same goes for immigration reform. It passed by an even larger margin in the Senate (68-32), and likely enjoys even more bipartisan support in the House. But again, Boehner won’t allow members to vote on the bill. He won’t even allow the House to enter into negotiations with the Senate to try to hammer out a final bill.
So how is it “gridlock” when a bipartisan, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a clear bipartisan majority in the House support a bill but aren’t allowed to vote on its final passage?
Politically, the sabotage strategy works for Republicans. At least in the short term. Note that Obama’s standing among Hispanic voters has dropped precipitously this year. Analysts assume that’s because Obama hasn’t delivered on his promise to pass immigration reform. That may also be because so little of the news coverage stresses the poignant fact that the bipartisan votes are there to pass immigration reform, it’s just that Republican leaders in the House won’t allow the “yes” vote to take place. They won’t allow Obama to take credit for passing a popular law.
And yes, it really did become a scorched-earth situation this year; a nearly across-the-board effort to sabotage Obama’s every move. Republicans aren’t just denying the president the ability to sign meaningful bills into law. The unprecedented minority strategy includes hardcore attempts to block his cabinet picks, executive branch appointments, and judicial nominees. And specifically, blocking judicial nominees who Republicans agree are completely qualified to sit on the federal bench.
But still unsure what to call the Republican brand of anarchy, the press continues to play dumb about the magnitude of the planned interference. For instance, amidst the sabotage, the New York Times reported that while judicial nominations remain an issue of deep contention, “Among senators of both parties, there is agreement that a president should be granted deference in picking members of his cabinet and top executive branch positions.”
False.
Last November, Republicans launched an unprecedented, preemptive campaign to make sure Susan Rice was not picked as Obama’s next Secretary of State. Then they engineered an unprecedented campaign to try to stop Republican Chuck Hagel from becoming Secretary of Defense. And as late as July, two of Obama’s nominated cabinet picks still hadn’t received votes in the Senate, thanks to determined obstruction.
So no, contrary to the Times reporting there is no widespread agreement that presidents should be able to pick their cabinet members and top executive branch positions. There used to be. Then Republicans ripped up that pact. The Times and others just won’t say so as they blame both sides for a do-nothing Congress.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, December 9, 2013
“Beltway Hyperventilators”: Those Media Hysterics Who Said Obama’s Presidency Was Dead Were Wrong, Again
It’s been a pretty good week for the Obama administration. The bungled healthcare.gov Web site emerged vastly improved following an intensive fix-it push, allowing some 25,000 to sign up per day, as many as signed up in all of October. Paul Ryan and Patty Murray inched toward a modest budget agreement. This morning came a remarkably solid jobs report, showing 203,000 new positions created in November, the unemployment rate falling to 7 percent for the first time in five years, and the labor force participation rate ticking back upward. Meanwhile, the administration’s push for a historic nuclear settlement with Iran continued apace.
All of these developments are tenuous. The Web site’s back-end troubles could still pose big problems (though word is they are rapidly improving, too) and the delay in getting the site up working leaves little time to meet enrollment goals. Job growth could easily stutter out again. The Iran deal could founder amid resistance from Congress or our allies.
Still, it seems safe to say that the Obama presidency is not, in fact, over and done with. What, you say, was there any question of that? Well, yes, there was – less than a month ago. On November 14, the New York Times raised the “K” word in a front-page headline:
President Obama is now threatened by a similar toxic mix. The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.
A day later, Dana Milbank gave an even blunter declaration of doom in the Washington Post:
There may well be enough time to salvage Obamacare.
But on the broader question of whether Obama can rebuild an effective presidency after this debacle, it’s starting to look as if it may be game over.
And Ron Fournier, the same week, explained in National Journal that things were so grim for Obama because his presidency had reached a kind of metaphysical breaking point:
Americans told President Obama in 2012, “If you like your popularity, you can keep it.”
We lied.
Well, at least we didn’t tell him the whole truth. What we meant to say was that Obama could keep the support of a majority of Americans unless he broke our trust. Throughout his first term, even as his job-approval rating cycled up and down, one thing remained constant: Polls showed that most Americans trusted Obama.
As they say in Washington, that is no longer operable.
Granted, finding overwrought punditry in Washington is about as difficult as hunting for game at one of Dick Cheney’s favorite preserves. Making grand declarations based on the vibrations of the moment is part of the pundit’s job description, and every political writer with any gumption is going to find himself or herself out on the wrong limb every once in a while. That said, this has been an especially inglorious stretch for Beltway hyperventilators. First came the government shutdown and the ensuing declamations about the crack-up of the Republican Party. Then, with whiplash force, came the obituaries for the Obama presidency. The Washington press corps has been reduced to the state of the tennis-watching kittens in this video, with the generic congressional ballot surveys playing the part of the ball flitting back and forth.
What explains for this even-worse-than-usual excitability? Much of it has to do with the age-old who’s-up-who’s down, permanent-campaign tendencies of the political media, exacerbated by a profusion of polling, daily tipsheets and Twitter. Overlaid on this is our obsession with the presidency, which leads us both to inflate the aura of the office and to view periods of tribulation as some sort of existential collapse. Add in the tendencies of even more serious reporters to get into a chew-toy mode with tales of scandal or policy dysfunction, as happened with the healthcare.gov debacle – the media has been so busy hyping every last aspect of the rollout’s woes that it did indeed start to seem inconceivable that things might get better soon.
But things did get better, as one should have been able to anticipate, given the resources and pressure that were belatedly brought to bear on the challenge. The fiasco took a real toll on the law and on the liberal project, for which Barack Obama bears real responsibility. But the end of a presidency? Take a deep breath, folks.
The sad thing about this spectacle isn’t even the predictable display of presentism. It’s the evident ignorance of the constitution and the basics of American politics. For the next three years, Obama will occupy the presidency, a position that comes with remarkable legal powers, especially now that he’s been partly liberated from the filibuster’s constraints. Washington columnists—the folks who presumably get paid to disseminate this kind of wisdom to the rubes beyond the Beltway—ought to know this better than anyone else, yet even as they fixate so much on the office’s aura, they are awfully quick to declare an administration defunct. News happens, and in the Oval Office, or the House majority, you always have the ability to influence it, even when you don’t deserve it. Kind of like certain well-known writers I could name.
By: Alec MacGillis, The New Republic, December 6, 2013
“Unsatisfying To The Media And Republicans”: Surprise, Obamacare Now Projected To Cost Hundreds Of Billions Less Than Expected
Amidst the dark skies of the Healthcare.gov launch, some daylight may finally be emerging with respect to one of the critical goals of the Affordable Care Act—bending the cost curve of America’s expensive healthcare system.
According to a New York Times report out Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office has quietly removed hundreds of billions of dollars from the projected costs of Obamacare, primarily the result of an anticipated decrease in the federal government’s contribution to the Medicaid expansion program along with the projected cost of the subsidy payments to those buying private insurance policies on the healthcare exchanges.
Why the good news?
The more favorable projections are the direct result of the slowing trend in the growth of healthcare spending over the past five years leading to a slowdown in rising costs. While, ten years ago, per-capita spending on healthcare had been growing by an average annual rate of 5 percent, that number was dramatically cut to 1.8 percent during the 2007-2010 period and reduced even further to 1.3 percent in the years following 2010.
Do we have Obamacare to thank for this highly successful “bending” of the cost curve?
Naturally, the answer depends upon who you ask as there simply is no definitive way of knowing—yet.
While most economist believe that the lion’s share of the reduction is due to the sluggish economy—making Americans far more careful when it comes to making decisions regarding when or if to spend money on medical care—others believe that some of the plans built into the ACA designed to get people to spend less may actually be working.
Among Obamacare inventions that do appear to be paying off in lower healthcare costs is the government’s refusal to pay hospitals more when patients are re-admitted within 30 days of their initial discharge. Additionally, new plan designs engineered to reward providers for quality of care rather than for quantity of care may well be paying off in terms of lowering the overall cost of care.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation—widely regarded as an honest, non-partisan broker when it comes to healthcare issues and analysis—the declining increases in the cost of healthcare is 75 percent the result of economic factors and 25 percent a benefit of the cost cutting measures in the ACA that do, in fact, appear to be working.
Of course, the big question is whether or not these cost lowering provisions of Obamacare will continue to do the job once the economy regains its more typical trajectory.
There are reasons to be hopeful that healthcare spending can be held down once the economy kicks into higher gear.
For starters, while many Americans shopping for new health insurance policies may be decrying the higher deductibles they are discovering in the new offerings, higher deductibles should have a meaningful impact on the decisions people make when determining whether or not a visit to the doctor or agreeing to a given procedure is really necessary. While a $250 deductible will likely not cause a patient to ask how much a suggested CT Scan is going to cost, a $3,000-$5,000 deductible is far more likely to cause the patient to ask a few more questions and make more focused decisions when payment for the test is coming out-of-pocket.
Not surprisingly, there are no shortage of economists and pundits who believe that the ACA will prove inadequate to the task of controlling costs once the economy is in better shape.
Others are more hopeful, believing that the slowdown in costs are very much a result of hospitals and insurance companies understanding that something had to change given the unsustainable trends in rising costs. As a result of a desire to derail out-of-control costs before the costs derailed them, insurers and hospitals became involved in substantial systemic revisions designed to lower healthcare spending even before the government required them to do so.
Discussing whether the current decreases can last when previous periods of cost-curve bending did not, Annie Lowrey writes in her New York Times piece—
“This time may be more durable. Insurance and hospital executives in Massachusetts, Illinois and California, among other places where reforms have gone the furthest, report a consensus that spending growth had become unsustainable, and that expectations that Washington would force changes to the system spurred them to make changes themselves.”
If this is true—and I believe the evidence reveals that it is—these self-imposed changes, in tandem with the changes brought about by elements of Obamacare that don’t receive nearly as much attention as the more hot button issues, may prove to provide lasting changes to the system; changes that will point our cost trajectory in the right direction.
Like most elements of the Affordable Care Act, these issues and results only go to prove that far more time is required before we can even begin to measure the real benefits or detriments of Obamacare.
While this reality may prove unsatisfying to the media, politicians and those in the public who are so emotionally committed to the failure and ultimate death of Obamacare—whether for political purposes or only so that the opponents can experience the satisfaction of having been right—anyone interested in realistic measurement of this dramatic change in our system better settle in for the long run.
It’s going to be awhile until we know how this story ends.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, December 4, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 