“Brewed For Misogynists”: How Not To Defend Yourself Against The “Chauvinism” Charge, Starring Joe Scarborough
As best as I can tell, here is what happened on “Morning Joe” this morning. Wacky jokester morning show host and respected American political figure Joe Scarborough mocked and belittled his co-host, Mika Brzezinski, until she became genuinely upset with him, then he angrily yelled at her for being upset with him until, finally, he got her to apologize to him for calling him on his bullshit.
Brzezinski was defending Obama from complaints that his Cabinet is too male. Scarborough was responding to her comments with snide jokes, including one about the Lily Ledbetter Act. Brzezinski told Scarborough that he was “being chauvinistic right now,” and Scarborough responded with outrage. Soon he was — for real — snapping his fingers to get her to shut up and listen to him berate her.
“Knowing me and seeing me work around here for five years, you want to call me a chauvinist on television?” Scarborough asked Brzezinski. The answer to that question, as anyone who’s watched Scarborough and Brzezinski work together on television for five years could tell you, is an unequivocal “yes.” One of the running jokes on “Morning Joe” is that “Morning Joe” constantly talks over and generally disrespects his co-host, who also happens to make half his salary.
Eventually, Brzezinski apologized for being mean to poor Joe.
My only question is, is Joe Scarborough actually different from Greg Gutfeld? They both do the smirky frat-misogynist who is Allowed To Say That Because He Is “Just Kidding Around” thing for a living. I guess there is the fact that Gutfeld seems to be aware of the fact that he’s an unpleasant character, while Scarborough imagines himself a serious and important person. Also Gutfeld’s show gets much better ratings. (His 5 p.m. show, not his 3 a.m. show.) Other than that, though, they seem like a couple of guys who’d really get along well.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 10, 2013
“Conservatives Get Glum”: Republican Are Very Worried About Whether They Can Break Out Of Its Fox Bubble
A look around the web today makes clear that the crisis of American conservatism in general, and conservatives’ relationship to the media in particular, is clearly our topic. First, none other than William Kristol, the very axis about whom the Republican establishment spins, is extremely worried about what has become of his movement:
And the conservative movement—a bulwark of American strength for the last several decades—is in deep disarray. Reading about some conservative organizations and Republican campaigns these days, one is reminded of Eric Hoffer’s remark, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” It may be that major parts of American conservatism have become such a racket that a kind of refounding of the movement as a cause is necessary. A reinvigoration of the Republican party also seems desirable, based on a new generation of leaders, perhaps coming—as did Ike and Reagan—from outside the normal channels.
There are elements of that racket on both sides of the aisle, but conservatives are particularly adept at fleecing their own people. Part of the problem the conservative movement faces now is that they’ve given so much power to media figures like Rush Limbaugh and the crew at Fox News, but those people’s primary interest is in making money, not in helping the GOP. Which is why Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins finds a bunch of Republican operatives who are very worried about whether their party can break out of its Fox bubble, both as a psychological and practical matter. Here’s my favorite part:
One Republican official recalled working earlier this year to get a potentially damaging story about a Democratic candidate into The New York Times — only to have an impatient colleague leak the scoop to a conservative website. The story shot through the online right, but failed to gain mainstream traction.
“I was like, great, we made the people who were already voting for us even angrier,” the official snarked to BuzzFeed. “Mission accomplished.”
Obviously, the politicians can start speaking more through non-conservative media outlets on their own initiative; John Boehner can just decide that he’ll do Meet the Press and Face the Nation, not just Fox News Sunday (and the idea that he’d get impossibly difficult questions on the first two is laughable). But might the conservative media themselves ask whether they can do anything to broaden their audience’s perspective so they don’t create such a reality-denying bubble? Harold Pollack, hoping against hope that there are people on the right as reasonable and fair-minded as he is, urges them to come up with their own version of MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes, a program that would feature lengthy, substantive, interesting discussions between people who actually know things, as opposed to just “strategists” trading talking points:
What strikes me is the dearth of conservative-leaning shows built on the same model. Most FOX discussion shows are virtually unwatchable—not because they’re conservative, but because they offer so little intellectual nutrition to their core audience. Sticking to our home topic of health policy, legitimate conservative experts such as James Capretta and Tevi Troy are drowned out by less honest or reputable figures such as Betsy McCaughey and Dick Morris. The typical conservative FOX viewer is thus fed Pravda-style misleading information about what the Affordable Care Act really entails. The typical non-conservative FOX viewer—to the extent non-conservatives tune in at all—have no way of knowing what reputable Republican or conservative policy analysts are really thinking, or, indeed, who these experts really are.
The first thing you’d need for such a program to be created is an audience that would watch it. After all, MSNBC doesn’t air Hayes’ show as a public service. The people who produce the show are trying to create the best program they can, but the network’s bottom line is its bottom line. If it wasn’t making money, it would get cancelled (the show’s ratings are pretty good if not spectacular).
That doesn’t mean, however, that every potentially lucrative market niche is exploited. There might well be an audience waiting for more intelligent conservative programming, but as long as Fox is still the number-one cable news network (which they are) and is making money hand over fist (ditto), there’s little reason for them to go looking to change what is for them an extremely successful formula. And don’t forget that a Democratic president is great for their business; it gives them an endless supply of things to get mad about, which means more viewers.
Since the conservative media is unlikely to change, maybe there’s little people on the right can do but wait around, as Kristol says, for a new generation of leadership to come along and change things.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 11, 2012
“Unbridled Hypocisy”: Laura Ingraham Has the World’s Worst Imagination
Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham is outraged — outraaaged! — that President Obama met with some MSNBC anchors at the White House on Tuesday, according to her daily newsletter:
“Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Ed Schultz all stopped by the White House to discuss the President’s fiscal cliff proposal. Can anyone even imagine how the press would have reacted if Fox News hosts and conservative personalities had stopped by the Bush White House to discuss policy? They would have been rightly outraged.”
Yes, let’s all put on our imagination hats and try as hard as we can to imagine what that meeting would look like. George W. Bush would be seated in an Oval Office chair, doing jazz hands in front of a bust of Winston Churchill. On his left, Fox News host Sean Hannity would be pensively smelling his hand on a couch with conservative personality Michael Medved. On his right, conservative personalities Neil Boortz and Mike Gallagher would be sharing another couch. And, just for imagination’s sake, let’s put conservative personality Laura Ingraham in there, too, right next to the president. Now, obviously, such a scene never actually transpired, but — wait, what? Oh. It did.
After Media Matters revealed Ingraham’s hypocrisy to the world, a producer responded with the classic “Ingraham didn’t actually write the newsletter, and also, the two things are totally different because I said so” defense.
During Laura’s brief radio hiatus, the Daily Fix is written by staff. Although I didn’t know Laura had visited the Bush White House with other conservative radio hosts, the circumstances of her meeting the president were quite different. Laura did not go to the White House to advise the president, but was simply briefed on policy for perhaps an hour.
For what it’s worth, the MSNBC hosts didn’t “advise” Obama. They were, uh, briefed on policy:
“This afternoon at the White House, the President met with influential progressives to talk about the importance of preventing a tax increase on middle class families, strengthening our economy and adopting a balanced approach to deficit reduction,” Earnest said in a statement Tuesday.
As embarrassing as this whole episode is for Team Ingraham, they’re not the only ones who should have done a little research before going into full fauxtrage mode about the MSNBC meeting. Take the hosts of Fox & Friends (please!), for example, who overreacted in typical fashion. “I’m shocked by that,” Brian Kilmeade said. “To invite five talk show hosts in, all from the same channel? That’s outrageous.” Mike Huckabee, who has a show on Fox News, claimed yesterday that the sit-down with Obama destroyed any “illusion whatsoever that there’s objectivity going on at MSNBC.”
By: Dan Amira, Daily Intel, December 6, 2012
“Liberals Need To Get A Grip”: While Others Push Opinions To Extremes, Feel Free To Stop Rending Your Garments
As a liberal who writes about politics for a living, I’ve spent the last few days talking to increasingly panicked Democrats, who have begun to overreact to the fact that President Obama had a poor debate performance, which then produced a movement in some polls toward Mitt Romney. I think David Weigel put it well yesterday: “The first presidential debate has come to remind me of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Democrats walked out of the theater/turned off the TV saying ‘huh, well, I wanted it to be better.’ After a few days of talking to friends, it changes from a disappointment into the worst piece of crap in human history.” Andrew Sullivan kind of went nuclear after seeing the Pew poll I discussed yesterday, writing a post titled, “Did Obama Just Throw the Entire Election Away?” I can answer that: No.
For many years, psychologists and sociologists have known that in small groups, a uniformity of opinion can push opinion to the extremes. For instance, if you get a group of liberals together and tell them to talk about military spending, by the time the discussion is over, each individual will end up favoring spending cuts even deeper than they favored before the discussion began. There’s an analogous movement in the opinions liberals have undergone since last Wednesday, but here conservatives and the mainstream media play a role as well. There’s no question that reporters, eager for a new storyline and an invigorated race, have seized on the idea that the debate changed everything. And as Kevin Drum explains, conservatives benefit from their large stable of hacks:
Here’s how things would have gone if liberals had their fair share of hacks. Obviously Obama wasn’t at his best on Wednesday. But when the debate was over that wouldn’t have mattered. Conservatives would have started crowing about how well Romney did. Liberals would have acknowledged that Obama should have confronted Romney’s deceptions more forcefully, but otherwise would have insisted that Obama was more collected and presidential sounding than the hyperactive Romney and clearly mopped the floor with him on a substantive basis. News reporters would then have simply reported the debate normally: Romney said X, Obama said Y, and both sides thought their guy did great. By the next day it would barely be a continuing topic of conversation, and by Friday the new jobs numbers would have buried it completely.
Instead, liberals went batshit crazy. I didn’t watch any commentary immediately after the debate because I wanted to write down my own reactions first, and my initial sense was that Obama did a little bit worse than Romney. But after I hit the Publish button and turned on the TV, I learned differently. As near as I could tell, the entire MSNBC crew was ready to commit ritual suicide right there on live TV, Howard Beale style. Ditto for all their guests, including grizzled pols like Ed Rendell who should have known better. It wasn’t just that Obama did poorly, he had delivered the worst debate performance since Clarence Darrow left William Jennings Bryan a smoking husk at the end of Inherit the Wind. And it wasn’t even just that. It was a personal affront, a betrayal of everything they thought was great about Obama. And, needless to say, it put Obama’s entire second term in jeopardy and made Romney the instant front runner.
Kevin is absolutely right about this, and it shows not only that there’s a difference between the conservative and liberal media worlds, but between MSNBC and Fox specifically. While MSNBC made a decision a while back that it would go ahead and become the liberal cable network, particularly in prime time, the individuals who appear on those shows have limits to how hackish they’re willing to be. On Fox, there really are no limits. It’s not as if Steve Doocy and the rest of the crew at “Fox and Friends” are going to say, “Wait, we’re supposed to say the jobs numbers are manipulated by a White House conspiracy? I really don’t think that’s supported by the facts.” I guarantee you that even if Obama performs spectacularly in the second debate and Romney stumbles terribly, Sean Hannity will still get on the air immediately afterward and tell everyone watching that Romney was fantastic and Obama was terrible. This will not only help buck up conservatives, it will encourage reporters to discuss the debate in the way Kevin describes.
Some people have said that Obama’s performance was the worst in history, but that’s just ridiculous. George W. Bush was much worse in all his debates in 2004, Bob Dole was terrible in 1996, George H.W. Bush was awful in 1992, and the worst debate performance was without question Ronald Reagan’s in his first debate in 1984, where he was barely coherent and, in retrospect, probably showing some initial signs of Alzheimer’s. You’ll note that two of the people I just mentioned ended up winning. Obama didn’t do particularly well last Wednesday, it’s true. But he’s a very competitive guy, and I’m sure he’s going to show up next week with plenty more focus and vigor. There are a lot of other factors—a recovering economy, the fact that it now looks like he’ll have more money, a superior ground operation—that continue to make him the favorite. So liberals can feel free to stop rending their garments.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 9, 2012
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