Fall Saturdays in South Carolina are known for big hits and rough play. But not in January. January is more genteel. Except for yesterday. Yesterday, as the votes were counted in the Presidential primary, all the sporting analogies came out.
John O’Connor at The State got in on the action with a racing allusion.
Barack Obama left the Democratic field in his red clay dust Saturday, easily winning South Carolina’s first-in-the-South Democratic presidential primary.
Second place finisher, Hillary Clinton jetted off to Nashville, wanting to put South Carolina behind her, quick like. Despite his third place finish in the state he won four years ago, John Edwards pledged to continue to fight for those with no health insurance, the poor and those worried about their jobs.
“Your voice will be heard in America and it will be heard in this campaign,†Edwards said.
Obama supporters, such as former Gov. Jim Hodges, said the margin of victory bodes well for later states. Obama’s win, he said, cannot be written off as Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 S.C. caucus victories were. Sadly, for Bill Clinton, he did suggest just that yesterday afternoon, mid-route.
“It was a first round knockout,†Hodges said. “(Jackson) didn’t win like this. Nobody’s won like this.â€
A political reporter showed up for work yesterday. His name is Glen Johnson and he works for Associated Press. While covering the Mitt Romney for President campaign, Johnson tripped up the candidate, not with a line of questioning, but with a direct challenge as to the truth in a Romney claim.
Romney said he didn’t have any Washington lobbyists running his campaign (the presumption being that others do). Johnson begged to differ. “That is not true. Ron Kaufman is a lobbyist,” said Johnson. The fact that he did so publicly inside a Staples store in Columbia, South Carolina with cameras rolling, confounded the man who would be President. And it angered his travelling press secretary, Eric Ferhnstrom, who scolded Johnson repeatedly, saying, “Don’t get argumentative with the candidate.”
Ferhnstrom’s response is maddening and outrageous. What would Mencken say?
How about, don’t lie to the press unless you want everyone to know about it.
Media critic Norman Solomon’s book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death has been made into a movie by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp. It’s narrated by Sean Penn.
Guided by Solomon’s meticulous research and tough-minded analysis, the film presents disturbing examples of propaganda and media complicity from the present alongside rare footage of political leaders and leading journalists from the past, including Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, dissident Senator Wayne Morse, and news correspondents Walter Cronkite and Morley Safer.
Jim Hightower suggests the book, which came out in 2005, is a must read:
If you want to help prevent another war (Iran? Syria?), read War Made Easy now. This is a stop-the-presses book filled with mind-blowing facts about Washington’s warmongers who keep the Pentagon budget rising. It would be funny if people weren’t dying. War Made Easy exposes the grisly game and offers the information we need to stop it.
If you believe an informed citizenry is the key to a healthy democracy, this following bit of news from The New York Times is more than a little alarming.
According to a report released last week the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, only 16 percent of young adults aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and only 9 percent of teenagers said that they did.
Furthermore, despite the popular belief that young people are flocking to the Internet, the survey found that teenagers and young adults were twice as likely to get daily news from television than from the Web.
[UPDATE] A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that Americans, on average, are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989.
According to the review in the The New York Times, his book is “a shrewdly argued jeremiad against the digerati effort to dethrone cultural and political gatekeepers and replace experts with the wisdom of the crowd.”
Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.†In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.†This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.â€
This reaction to the democratization of media is to be expected. I’m surprised there aren’t more such critics lurking about. Grassroots structures scare so called experts. This particular expert is also quite the name caller. The San Francisco Chronicle invited him to guest blog, and he used the opportunity to say:
I fully admit to being an elitist. I believe in a strictly meritocratic society of experts, one is which creative ability is rewarded. I think that most people have little talent and shouldn’t be encouraged to think of themselves as writers or musicians or porn stars. I want to be educated and entertained by the opinion of Habermas, Zizek, Lucy Kellaway or Maureen Dowd, rather than the ranting of some half-educated blogger.
This guy has the whiff of Ann Coulter about him. In other words, the more outrageous his babble the more press he gets.
If you believe Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson–the bowtie-wearing preppie who poses as a TV newsman–the word “empathy” has no place in the nation’s political dialogue.
In a recent speech in Iowa, Senator Obama said, “Somehow we have lost the capacity to recognize ourselves in each other. You know, people talk a lot about the federal deficit, but one of the things I always talk about is an empathy deficit.”
Carlson’s snooty retort: “How high is this guy? It’s like, what is he — he always talks between bong hits? I mean, what is that? What does that mean, an ’empathy deficit’?”
In the first presidential election, only 4 percent of the population was eligible to vote, because you couldn’t vote if you were a woman, couldn’t vote if you were slave or African American, couldn’t vote it you were Native American, couldn’t vote it you did not own property. So that left nearly everybody out. It’s not that they established democracy; they established the possibility of democracy, and that possibility is, I think, what people look back to.
Every step along the way, every bit of democracy we have has required great sacrifice, blood, death and financial ruin on the part of the people who did that extension of democracy. It’s always been the establishment that has opposed it. The establishment doesn’t bring us progress. Progress comes from the grassroots.
Hightower on excessive corporate power and the outsourcing of American jobs:
Well, that’s what the Boston Tea Party was about. It wasn’t about a tea tax; it was about the East India Company being allowed to monopolize the tea trade in this country and in England…So it was a rebellion against a global corporation. They engaged in what would be considered corporate terrorism today by going aboard the East India Company’s ships and dumping the tea overboard.
The founding fathers would have definitely been opposed to oil giants or any kind of giants. They hated corporations. They feared corporations. Again, the East India Company was a large part of what the rebellion was about. They didn’t believe corporations should have any more unique standing in society than the corporate charter itself. They put very strict terms on allowing a corporate charter to be issued. Today you go down and file a piece of paper. You don’t even have to go anywhere. You just e-mail it in. But in those days you had to have a clear public purpose.
BBC News reports on Amnesty International’s efforts to keep censorship from the interwebs.
“The Chinese model of an internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers,” said Tim Hancock, Amnesty’s campaign director.
“Unless we act on this issue, the internet could change beyond all recognition in the years to come.
More and more governments are realising the utility of controlling what people see online and major internet companies, in an attempt to expand their markets, are colluding in these attempts,” he said.
According to the latest Open Net Initiative report on internet filtering, at least 25 countries now apply state-mandated net filtering including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.
Award-winning journalist Nancy Cleeland ended her employment at the Los Angeles Times last month, along with 56 newsroom colleagues who also accepted the latest round of boyout offers from the Tribune company which owns the the paper.
Cleeland is troubled by the move. She explains why on Huffington Post.
The Los Angeles region is defined by gaping income disparities and an enormous pool of low-wage immigrant workers, many of whom are pulled north by lousy, unstable jobs. It’s also home to one of the most active and creative labor federations in the country. But you wouldn’t know any of that from reading a typical issue of the L.A. Times, in print or online. Increasingly anti-union in its editorial policy, and celebrity — and crime-focused in its news coverage, it ignores the economic discontent that is clearly reflected in ethnic publications such as La Opinion.
Of course, I realize that revenues are plummeting and newsroom staffs are being cut across the country. But even in these tough financial times, it’s possible to shift priorities to make Southern California’s largest newspaper more relevant to the bulk of people who live here. Here’s one idea: Instead of hiring a “celebrity justice reporter,” now being sought for the Times website, why not develop a beat on economic justice? It might interest some of the millions of workers who draw hourly wages and are being squeezed by soaring rents, health care costs and debt loads.
With the Los Angeles Economic Roundtable, Cleeland is exploring the development of a nonprofit online site to chronicle the regional economy from a full range of perspectives.
The newspaper business has been buzzing ever since learning of Rupert Murdoch’s five billion dollar bid to purchase The Wall Street Journal. So it’s not surprising that Richard Silkos of The New York Times managed to schedule some quality time with the media mogul recently. He turned up some interesting facts on the enigmatic Aussie in the process.
When Mr. Murdoch bought the struggling 20th Century Fox studio in 1985, Hollywood viewed him as just the latest arriviste, doomed to be suckered by the industry’s vagaries. Wrong. Murdoch restored the studio and used Fox as a springboard to start his Fox television network and a passel of cable channels and other ventures around the globe.
News Corp’s 175 newspapers contributed just 15 percent of the company’s $21.3 billion in revenue in the nine months ended March 31, 2007.
Mr. Murdoch, who clearly sees himself as a populist, says he is most energized when he is taking on “the elites†— words he practically sneers when he says them — in what he perceives as a career-long battle to offer consumers more media choices.
Murdoch regularly dines on a lunch of whitefish and spinach at the Fox commissary.
Murdoch socializes with (and seeks the counsel of) Mark Zuckerberg, the 22-year-old founder of Facebook and Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Murdoch and his third wife Wendi Deng, 38-years his junior, are planning to move into a $44 million penthouse on Fifth Avenue next year. It is the most expensive apartment in New York and was once owned by Laurence Rockefeller.
While it’s easy to admire Murdoch’s ability to build a business, and easy to recognize that he’s an interesting, perhaps even complicated, man, it remains difficult to get around the right wing propaganda thing. Sure, there’s a market for it, but that doesn’t make it right.
