“If It’s Sunday, It’s Meet My Friends”: NBC’s David Gregory To Headline Conference For Major Republican Advocacy Group
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which calls itself “the voice of small business,” is one of the Republican party’s strongest allies. The group spent over $1 million on outside ads in the 2010 campaign — all of it backing Republican House and Senate candidates (and, Bloomberg News reported last month, “another $1.5 million that it kept hidden and said was exempt” from disclosure requirements). The group is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Obamacare law and bankrolled state governments’ challenges to the law. The NFIB has also taken stances against allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, opposing regulations on businesses, and supporting curtailing union rights.
Given the group’s obvious Republican alliance, it comes as little surprise that the NFIB’s three-day 2012 Small Business Summit, which begins Monday, will feature headliners Karl Rove and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).
But the first name and photo on the invitation for the $150-per-person event — Tuesday’s “keynote address” speaker — is NBC’s Meet the Press host David Gregory. He is marketed by NBC as an anchor and “trusted journalist.”
The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics states:
Journalists should:
— Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
Regardless of whether Gregory is being paid for this event and of what he says in his keynote, allowing the NFIB to raise money for its political mission using his name, reputation, and celebrity appears to be at odds with journalistic ethics.
Gregory did not to respond to a ThinkProgress request for comment.
By: Josh Israel, Think Progress, May 12, 2012
“Meet The Republicans”: If It’s Sunday, It’s John McCain
Not long ago, I stopped watching the network Sunday shows. After all, who needs to spend an hour or two of valuable weekend time listening to elected officials and party hacks regurgitating the same tired talking points you’ve been hearing all week? But there’s no denying that Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation, and to a lesser extent Fox News Sunday are enormously influential. They confer status on the people who appear, they define the limits of official debate, and they help set the agenda for the rest of the media. So while they are often tiresome to sit through, they can’t be completely ignored. That’s why I couldn’t stay silent after seeing this celebratory tweet from Betsy Fischer, the longtime executive producer of Meet the Press:
Yay!
If you watch the Sunday shows, the only thing you’ll be surprised about is that McCain hadn’t passed Dole (or anyone else) already. In fact, I wrote a column three whole years ago asking why the hell anyone still cares what John McCain thinks, and the question has become even more relevant in the time since. He’s a member of the minority party in the Senate who is not part of the leadership and has virtually no influence over his fellow senators. In 29 years in Congress, he has managed to produce exactly one significant piece of legislation (the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law), which got gutted by the Supreme Court. His knowledge of and ideas about policy are notoriously shallow and self-indulgent, running more toward phony moralism about tiny earmarks than the search for actual solutions to thorny problems. In his supposed area of expertise, national security, he can be relied on to offer the most simple-minded and uninformed opinions possible (Of course we should use military force! Which country were we talking about again?). So the public needs to hear his sage words in about the same measure as they need to hear those of other presidential losers. Why isn’t Michael Dukakis getting on Meet the Press? I’ll bet he’d be a more interesting guest than McCain.
Yet all the Sunday shows call McCain, again, and again, and again. Why? There are a few reasons, but what they all come down to is that people in the DC media just love, love, love them some John McCain (God help me, I wrote a whole book about it). He spent a couple of decades massaging their egos and convincing them that he was their best buddy, an investment that paid off splendidly. They love his alleged mavericky maverickness (don’t get me started on what a crock the whole “maverick” thing is). On the Sunday shows, McCain is what passes for “unpredictable.” So they’ll keep inviting him on. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day Betsy Fischer tweets, “Congratulations to John McCain on his 100th appearance on Meet the Press!”
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 18. 2012
“We Deceive, You Believe”: Is Fox News Too Balanced?
It’s not easy being Fox News in today’s highly politicized media environment. When it says it’s “fair and balanced,” the mainstream media sneer disbelief. When the cable news ratings leader reveals figures proving its coverage is balanced on a specific hot-button issue, it gets slapped for pandering to conservative dogma.
That’s a conclusion one might reach from a first-of-its-kind study in the authoritative International Journal of Press/Politics of how Fox, CNN, and MSNBC cover the issue of global warming. The bottom line: Being balanced and providing supportive and critical views of global warming is actually biased because it gives critics a louder voice. Worse: Fox covers global warming about twice as much as CNN and MSNBC combined, meaning those critics get much more airtime, another sign of bias.
“Although Fox discussed climate change most often, the tone of its coverage was disproportionately dismissive,” says the study by four professors, two from George Mason University, the others from Yale and American University. They wrote, “Fox broadcasts were more likely to include statements that challenged the scientific agreement on climate change, undermined the reality of climate change, and questioned its human causes.”
The new study looked at global warming stories on the three networks in 2007-08, the peak of coverage of the issue. Of 269 stories, 182 were on Fox, 66 on CNN, and 21 on MSNBC. About 60 percent of the Fox stories had a “dismissive” tone, while less than 20 percent were “accepting” of global warming. Over 70 percent of those on CNN and MSNBC accepted the global warming argument, which the study authors also endorse. There were no “dismissive” stories on MSNBC, and just 7 percent on CNN, a proper balance, the study suggests.
The authors also looked at the opinions of guests. Here Fox again out-balanced the competition. Of Fox’s 149 guests, 59 believed in global warming, 69 didn’t, with the rest someplace in the middle. Of CNN’s 53 story guests, 41 were “climate change believers” and nine were “doubters.” On MSNBC, 11 of 20 guests were believers.
The study acknowledges that Fox was the most balanced from the numbers perspective, but the network still gets an F. The reason, it says, is because viewers are influenced by what they see, and seeing more critics of global warming makes more viewers critics. “The more often people watched Fox News, the less accepting they were of global warming. Conversely, frequent CNN and MSNBC viewing was associated with greater acceptance of global warming,” the study concludes.
By: Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 6, 2012
How The Media Made Ron Paul
Ask just about any candidate’s hardcore supporters whether the media is giving their guy a fair shake and chances are you’ll be greeted with an emphatic “No!” and all sorts of supposedly egregious examples to prove the point.
But this sentiment is particularly pronounced among Ron Paul’s backers, who have flooded message boards, comments sections and journalist inboxes all year with claims that the press is essentially conspiring to ignore the Texas congressman and his libertarian message — and that the only thing separating him from front-runner status in the GOP presidential race is a level of coverage commensurate with the other major candidates.
The Paul-ites haven’t been entirely wrong. It’s now clear that Paul has significantly expanded his support from four years ago, could win Iowa (and maybe even New Hampshire), and is positioned to gobble up a significant chunk of delegates and perhaps give his party’s establishment the scare of a lifetime. But even though the warning signs have been there for months, the press didn’t seem to notice until very recently. What Paul’s loyalists haven’t appreciated, though, is how helpful — vital even — the media’s lack of interest has been to their candidate’s rise.
Just consider the current uproar over the racist political newsletters that were sent out under Paul’s name (and used to fund his political activities) in the early 1990s. The story is hardly new, but to many voters it feels new because — like Paul himself — it’s been ignored by the press all year.
This is a perk of being dismissed by the press as a fringe figure. In 1996, when he made his comeback bid for a House seat in Texas, Paul briefly had to confront the newsletters, but once he was elected and became an entrenched incumbent, the issue was largely dropped by the local press (old news) and ignored by the national media, who saw him as just a gadfly backbencher. And when he ran for president in 2008, it didn’t come up until very late in the cycle, when some staggering fundraising numbers briefly compelled the political world to notice him. But almost as soon as it exploded back then, the story went away, with the media regarding Paul’s relatively weak early primary showings as proof that his base of support was very loud and very narrow and that he wasn’t worth taking seriously.
And that, more or less, was how the media treated Paul’s current campaign until the past few weeks.
In a way, this was understandably infuriating to Paul and his supporters. Over the summer, for instance, he nearly won the Iowa straw poll, netting the third most votes in the event’s history — evidence, in hindsight, that he really had grown his Iowa support since ’08. But reporters and commentators (present company included) were largely dismissive of the accomplishment, seeing it mainly as further, unneeded proof of the devotion of Paul’s army and not a sign that something might be stirring.
But the virtual press blackout also meant that the newsletters weren’t being mentioned, and that Paul wasn’t facing the intense day-to-day scrutiny that took a toll on other GOP candidates when they enjoyed breakthrough moments this year. It allowed him to present himself to audiences on his own terms and helped him become something of a sympathetic figure. In effect, Paul was able to take advantage of the many nontraditional means of communicating with voters that now exist without those voters being subjected to screaming mainstream press headlines about Paul controversies and gaffes. How many of the new supporters Paul gained these past few years didn’t know anything about the newsletters until this month?
Paul has argued that major media outlets have ignored him because they are “frightened” by his unconventional views, particularly his foreign policy noninterventionism. This is not a baseless assertion, but it’s probably overstated. Certainly, a compelling case can be made that the most important media entity in Republican politics, Fox News, has gone out of its way to treat Paul as a nobody because of his rejection of the GOP’s “war on terror” orthodoxy.
But for most of the political press, the explanation is simpler: Paul’s noninterventionism (and the blatant hostility toward him from key GOP voices like Fox) imposes a unique ceiling on his intraparty support and makes it very easy to dismiss him as a serious contender for the nomination. The experience of 2008, when Paul briefly succeeded in making the press second-guess itself only to wind up an asterisk in the primary season, reinforced this impression. To his credit, Paul once again forced media second-guessing this time around, with his rise to first place in Iowa polling this month — a development that almost immediately prompted Fox News to change gears and shower attention on him and his newsletters and for the rest of the political media to pursue the newsletter story as well, with disastrous results for Paul.
This saga could cost Paul much of the new support he’s won since ’08, will make expanding his base much further all but impossible (even if he does win Iowa next week), and will probably cement his status as a fringe figure. The fallout will be more permanent than it was in 2008 or in 1996 because this time the whole political world is watching. And the reason the whole political world is watching is because Paul managed to reach polling heights that no one believed were possible. And he only reached those polling heights because from January 2008 until December 2011 the media pretty much ignored him.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, December 27, 2011
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