“Letting Romney Off Easy”: Proud Enablers, Media Trades Ethics For Access
In the wake of last month’s New York Times dispatch about reporters letting powerful politicians edit quotes before publication, various establishment media outlets angrily denounced the practice. Seeking to distance themselves from the ugly image of journalists serving as de facto spokespeople for the politicians they are supposed to be scrutinizing, these outlets made such a public spectacle in order to reassure their audiences that they would never trade ethics for access.
But, of course, anyone working in journalism in recent years knows such trades have long been standard practice. Today’s reporters are expected to acquiesce to demands by politicians, and most often, they do just that. And while their feigned public umbrage at the Times’ quote approval story shows that news outlets are at least smart enough to be embarrassed by their unscrupulous behavior, it doesn’t mean the behavior has stopped. On the contrary, as last week’s headline-grabbing interchange between a local Colorado reporter and the Romney campaign shows, that behavior persists, with the establishment media serving as a proud enabler.
Here’s what happened: According to CBS 4′s Shaun Boyd, she was asked by Mitt Romney’s campaign to do a satellite interview with the Republican presidential nominee, who wanted to get a carefully scripted message out to this swing state’s voters. Boyd agreed to do the interview — not surprising, because it could be (and was) billed as a major scoop for her local news station. This was no ordinary Q&A, though. Fearing a repeat of Boyd’s laudably hard-hitting interview of Romney back in May, Romney’s campaign demanded that Boyd not ask the candidate about abortion or the Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin controversy. Incredibly, Boyd agreed.
When the interview occurred, Boyd (unfortunately) held up her end of the sordid deal, not asking Romney about what has become one of the defining issues of the entire election. However, she did tell viewers about the no-abortion-question condition, which consequently became a story unto itself.
Democrats and news organizations pounced on Romney’s interview conditions, correctly citing them as proof that he doesn’t want to answer tough questions. Meanwhile, Boyd basked in the reflected glow, garnering national and local media attention that portrayed her as a supposed star fighting the good fight on behalf of journalistic integrity. For instance, the Washington Post featured her in a “wide-ranging interview” and touted her for giving “serious consideration to the handling of the staffer’s extreme conditions” (and yet then submitting to them). Likewise, in the local media market, Denver Post editorial page editor Curtis Hubbard gushed on Twitter about Boyd, while the Post’s Alicia Caldwell took to the paper’s website to congratulate Boyd for “push(ing) back against the Romney camp’s conditions.”
Amid the celebration, though, these same voices of supposed journalistic integrity forgot to mention that Boyd didn’t simply reject Romney’s interview request and then do a story about the demands — a move that would have been genuinely praiseworthy. Instead, she publicly complained about the conditions, but nonetheless acquiesced to them. Sure, she was absolutely correct to acknowledge the conditions on the air before airing the Romney-censored interview — and, certainly, she should be given some modicum of credit for disclosure. But that disclosure shouldn’t be portrayed as some hugely courageous act. On the contrary, being honest with viewers and disclosing such conditions is the absolute least any reporter should do when acceding to such preposterous demands. Indeed, the fact that Boyd’s disclosure was so venerated implies that it is now all but unheard of in newsrooms to even respect that minimum standard of transparency.
What’s so especially damning about this episode is that Boyd likely had leverage in this situation. After all, as she said, Romney’s campaign came to her asking for an interview, not the other way around. Put another way, Romney’s campaign wanted something from CBS 4, giving CBS 4 more power to dictate the terms. Boyd or her bosses could have made the “beggars can’t be choosers” argument, telling Romney he could have the valuable airtime he desired, but not with such preposterous conditions — and if he didn’t like it, they could have told him no deal. Instead, for the sake of access, Boyd folded, conducting the interview on Romney’s terms and promoting it on CBS 4′s website. Just as troubling, she was subsequently portrayed as a great hero by the same establishment media that publicly pretends to be offended by trading ethics for access.
This is the kind of thing that is no doubt happening every day on the campaign trail — and it has profound long-term effects. As KDVR Fox 31′s chief political correspondent Eli Stokols told me on Friday, whether it is a reporter like Boyd accepting such conditions or other media outlets condoning such compromises, campaign reporting is now actively — and knowingly — contributing to the degradation of both journalism and America’s democratic process. He said:
“We in the media all see how campaigns try hard to limit information, restrict access and force their limited engagements with the press to take place on their own terms. It’s depressing that elections, at least from the campaign side, are no longer about getting information to voters so they can make informed decisions, only about getting voters to make the decision the campaigns want them to make. But when we accept a campaign’s terms of certain questions being off limits or allowing staffers approval on quotes, we are both accepting and enabling the smallness of our politics; and we’re diminishing ourselves and our profession in the process.
“It’s a sad state of affairs when journalists are so desperate for anything resembling a scoop that they willingly acquiesce to ridiculous stipulations and conditions because scrubbed quotes and contrived interviews still make us feel good as long as we can call it ‘an exclusive’.”
While voters may not know exactly how the reporter-politician relationship works, their vague sense of what Stokols describes is almost certainly one of the reasons they have lost faith in the press corps. Until more rank-and-file reporters, editors and news producers renegotiate the terms of those relationships on more ethical grounds, that faith will continue to diminish — as it should.
By: David Sirota, Salon, August 24, 2012
“The Romney-Ryan Emperors Have No Clothes”: The Republican Party Deserves The Todd Akin Mess
I am going to get in trouble for this.
For years many of my Republican friends have admitted to me that they couldn’t give a damn about social issues—abortion, gay marriage, or the Ten Commandments being posted on schools and public buildings. They are contemptuous of the religious right and find many of them “wackos.” In short, the religious right has driven them crazy for years.
But these are political people and they know they need the religious right to activate the Republican base. Ever since the late 1970s and the rise of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, Republicans have made sure they were inside the tent. They were not Ronald Reagan’s cup of tea but he brought them in, as did the Bushes.
But, more and more, the Michele Bachmanns, Paul Ryans, Todd Akins are the Republican Party and some political pros have begun to worry. In fact, a leading voice of the anti-tax conservative movement, Grover Norquist, is known to have contempt for the right wing social activists. He has admitted when his guard was down that he thinks the issues are “nuts.” But he has also said that it is so easy just to push these hot button social issues and boy, off they go, in full gallop!
The problem now—as illustrated by Rep. Todd Akin, a sincere and true believer in these issues, his church, and a strict religious moral code—is the “regular Republicans” who have used these religious activists now want to jettison them or at least keep them quiet. I debated Todd Akin at Harvard a number of years ago—we disagreed heartily but I found him to be a very committed and consistent social conservative. He was not a cynic; he was not going through the motions. He was a believer and he lived his values.
Now, the Republican Party operatives find themselves so wedded to this faction after exploiting it for nearly 30 years that they don’t know what to do when the mechanisms of the party have been taken over by the far right. The Republican Party platform for the last three cycles, including this year, makes no exception for terminating a pregnancy caused by rape and incest. It does not even allow for the life of the mother. Women (and men) are not supposed to notice? The party embraces “personhood” amendments and refuses to support the morning-after pill, again even if a rape is involved. “De-fund Planned Parenthood” is their battle cry.
And no one at this Tampa convention has the guts to speak up. All they do is condemn Todd Akin—because, really, he presents a “political problem.” But they are as quiet as church mice when it comes to amending the Akin anti-abortion platform plank.
Some of these religious conservatives should be hopping mad. They are being played. They are being used by presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. No one in his Boston headquarters wants the public to know that his VP pick Rep. Paul Ryan has been locked at the hip with Todd Akin. Their views are exactly the same on these issues, one slip of the tongue on rape not withstanding. They want the religious right’s money, they want them to work on their campaign, they want them to turn out at the polls, but they want them quiet, behind the curtain. They have no intention of overturning Roe v. Wade, they know that the train has left the station on gay and lesbian rights, they know that tolerance and diversity will rule the day, but they won’t change their party platform because the far right that they used over the past three decades has taken over their party. They do not want the public to know where they stand on these issues, because they know their deficit with women could be 20 points. They could lose the suburban vote, they could further anger young voters, they could be unmasked as the right wing, extremist party that their 2012 platform says they are.
In short, they want Todd Akin and others to leave the limelight right now because that light shows what we all know—the Republican emperors of Romney-Ryan have no clothes. (And we’re not talking about skinny-dipping in the Sea of Galilee!)
By: Peter Fenn, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, August 23, 2012
“The Akin Plank”: Talking About The Party’s Platform Is The GOP’s New Fireable Offense
At the rate prominent Republicans are turning on Todd Akin this week, you’d think he actually said something to offend them.
When Akin told an interviewer that rape victims don’t need abortion rights because victims of “legitimate rape” don’t get pregnant, he wasn’t going rogue. Instead, he was simply repeating the GOP’s official position on reproductive rights in a really, really tasteless way. If Akin’s example is any guide, straying from right-wing orthodoxy in today’s Republican party is less of a crime than simply calling attention to it.
It’s true that Akin’s bizarre belief that rape victims have ways to “shut that whole thing down” is common only among the fringe of the fringe Right. But the anti-abortion orthodoxy that is now part of the official Republican platform is a direct result of that sort of magical thinking. It helps, when denying reproductive choice to all women, to imagine it only benefits a certain type of abortion-craving bogey-woman who brought this on herself. Sometimes that requires some helpful mythology and weird science to smooth over the reality of women’s lives.
It’s the reality of real people that Republican leaders are desperately trying to avoid. As soon as Akin’s comments hit the national news, prominent Republicans starting calling for him to step out of the Senate race in Missouri. Par for the course, once it became clear that that was the thing to do, Mitt Romney eventually joined the onslaught.
What’s puzzling is that Romney and the others aren’t criticizing the substance of Akin’s remarks. They’re just really angry that he’s making them look bad.
It’s strange, but you almost have to admire the right-wingers who are standing up for Akin. At least they’re being honest about what their real position is. Akin’s fellow unhinged congressman Steve King of Iowa backed up his friend’s comments, saying he had never “heard of” someone getting pregnant through statutory rape or incest. Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh said Akin was “wrong” but that he couldn’t understand why his fellow Republicans were in a “rush to pile on.”
Here is what Romney and his fellow Republicans need to do if they want to actually convince Americans that they respect women: stop catering to the wishes of anti-choice extremists and start listening to women.
But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Two days into this controversy the GOP platform committee approved the “Akin plank” codifying the no-exception policy that Republicans up for election were trying to sweep under the rug. Two weeks after the Akin plank is officially endorsed by the party, vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, an unflinching supporter of the policy, will speak at the Values Voter Summit, an annual confab supported by some of the most extreme anti-choice groups out there. Two of those groups, the American Family Association and the Family Research Council, were among the first to defend Akin. AFA spokesman Bryan Fischer even went as far as to compare Akin himself to a victim of rape.
Romney and his party are trying to run from Akin while holding on to everything he stands for. It’s a tough trick to pull off. So far, they aren’t getting away with it.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post Blog, August 23, 2012
“Pandering To The Stupid”: Why The GOP Breeds Politicians Like Todd Akin
The embarrassing fall of Todd Akin should induce Republicans to confront their own responsibility for the low quality of politicians they are inflicting on us (and themselves). Having developed an extremist culture that encourages figures such as Akin to seek legislative office, GOP leaders should hardly be surprised when idiotic and reprehensible remarks spill from the mouths of their candidates. (Candidates who insist, by the way, that English should be our official language when their own diction is often incomprehensible.)
Yet those same leaders insist they were shocked – yes, shocked and appalled – by Akin’s “legitimate rape” utterance, as if other Republican figures don’t blurt bizarre, nonsensical, and dumb comments as regularly as cows pass gas. Memories dim from cycle to cycle, but how can they forget Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party queen whose defeat of an intelligent moderate Republican legislator sparked celebrations among “conservatives” across the country?
She had accused “American scientific companies” of cross-breeding animals with humans to produce “mice with fully functioning human brains,” and warned that co-educational colleges would lead to “orgy rooms.” Regarding evolution, she said the scientific theory is “a myth,” asking “Why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?” But her shaky grip on reality didn’t matter because she eagerly adopted the party line on economic and social issues.
O’Donnell was colorful but hardly unique. Across the country in Nevada, Sharron Angle became the party’s standard-bearer against Senator Harry Reid, proceeding to disqualify herself with calls for armed insurrection and ugly, racially charged remarks to Hispanic students. In Kentucky, Rand Paul easily won a Senate seat, whereupon he let the nation know that the Supreme Court doesn’t decide the constitutionality of laws in this country. Evidently he thinks that he does.
Cretinism of the same caliber can be found in news archives under the names of candidates failed and elected, from Carl Paladino in New York and Ken Buck in Colorado to Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and — topping any such list – Michele Bachmann in Minnesota, who once suggested that Democratic presidencies coincided with swine flu outbreaks because they had occurred under Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. (Actually, the 1976 epidemic occurred under Gerald Ford, a Republican, but Bachmann is almost always confused about dates, places, and history.)
Dim politicians of all stripes have always been with us as an unfortunate byproduct of democracy. In that vein, it must be noted that there are plenty of bright conservatives and some not-so-bright liberals, too. But have there ever been so many nominated nimrods, so concentrated within a single major party, and so enthusiastically encouraged in their ambition by powerful people who should know better?
The most famous and damning example, of course, is Sarah Palin, the blindingly ignorant vice-presidential nominee in 2008, brought to the brink of executive power by neoconservative leader William Kristol and the seasoned campaign veterans advising John McCain, notably Steve Schmidt.
We are meant to assume that the Palin episode was a freakish accident, but the irresponsibility of Ivy-educated right-wing intellectuals like Kristol and sophisticated operatives like Schmidt in promoting her was symptomatic of a broader ailment. Major financial and media powers, including the Club for Growth, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, Rush Limbaugh, the National Review and a host of other forces within the GOP have aggressively supported candidates whose extremist views only emphasize their feeble intellect and lack of basic knowledge. For the party of the right, no standards need be imposed on those who are supposed to write laws, negotiate budgets, and oversee executive and judicial authorities. Like in the old Soviet Union, anybody who parrots the party line will do.
Don’t expect the Akin incident – or last year’s gong-show presidential primary — to provoke introspection among the top operatives and financiers of the right. Their style of politics is a daily insult to their country, but they will continue to believe that pandering to stupid is the shortest path to power.
By: The National Memo, August 23, 2012
“Celebrity Avenging Hero”: Todd Akin, The Embodiment Of The Christian Right
So the big question in Politicsland this afternoon is how and why Todd Akin was able to convince himself to defy the entire GOP establishment of his state, the GOP presidential nominee, the major national campaign funders, and nearly the entire Right-Wing commentariat, and stay on the ballot in Missouri. Is he crazy? Is he bluffing?
I can’t answer those questions, but I can see how Akin might be strongly tempted in this direction. Very few if any of the people calling for him to step down supported his very recent primary candidacy; most either backed someone else or hoped he’d lose as the weakest of the potential Republican candidates. He represents a very self-conscious hard-core Christian Right segment of the GOP “base” in his state that undoubtedly feels underrepresented, undervalued, and perhaps even dissed. His candidacy is now indelibly connected with a debate over an issue—legalized abortion, and more generally, the need to rebuild America as a “Christian Nation”—about which he feels very passionately; it may very well be what made him run for office in the first place.
And thanks to the scorn and mockery he has now attracted, this relatively obscure congressman whom I’d bet half the pundits discussing his fate today had barely heard of before his primary win, is a National Superstar, the very embodiment of the Christian Right’s all-too-often abandoned determination to stand up to GOP pols who forever pay them lip service but rarely deliver the goods.
Is he worried about money? Maybe not. Recent political history is littered with relatively minor pols (Michele Bachmann and Allen West on the Right; Alan Grayson on the Left) who have built vast national small-donor fundraising networks on the heels of national notoriety and perceived victimization.
Is he worried about losing? Well, practically the first words out of his mouth before announcing he’d stay in the race on Mike Huckabee’s radio show today were to boast of a snap poll from PPP showing him still ahead of Claire McCaskill.
His family is reportedly running his campaign, so he didn’t have to worry about his staff quitting in disgust or fear of professional consequences. It’s too late for him to reassume his House seat. What does he have to lose, other than the opportunistic support of people who don’t know or like him and would probably have taken credit for his victory had he won without this latest incident?
And if he does win, he will enter the Senate next year not as some random wingnut dude from Missouri who was swept into office on a conservative wave in Missouri, but as Todd Akin, celebrity and Avenging Hero, who owes nothing to anyone other than his God, his family, and his loyal base.
Makes sense, when you look at it from his very unusual point of view.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 21, 2012
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