David Carr at the NYT opines on the cancellationof the Washington Post salon fiasco. He comments that the upstart beltway Politico has caught

the paper on a fundamental lapse in the wall between church and state.

As if there was really any question that our mainstream media wasn't composed entirely of whores--although a whore might be insulted by the comparison, let there be no remaining doubts:

The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few": Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and — at first — even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."

With the newsroom in an uproar after POLITICO reported the solicitation, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said this morning that he was "appalled" by the plan and said the newsroom will not participate.

"It suggests that access to Washington Post journalists was available for purchase," Brauchli told The Post’s media reporter, Howard Kurtz. The proposal "promises we would suspend our usual skeptical questioning because it appears to offer, in exchange for sponsorships, the good name of The Washington Post."

I'm speechless.

I must bring your attention to the profound musings of one Glenn Beck.

I think this is the problem. First they came for the banks. I wasn't a banker, I didn't really care. I didn't stand up and say anything. Then they came for the AIG executives. Then they came for the car companies. Until it gets down to you. Most people don't see -- they are coming for you at some point! You're on the list! Everybody's on the list. You may not be rich -- as currently defined.

Beck, Cavuto promote militia-movement 'constitutionalist' theories on Fox

News publishers easily could block Google's spiders with a simple text file. But then their stories would not appear on Google News or in its search engine. You don't hear news publishers talk about this because that's the last thing they want.

Circulation is falling -- more than 10% between 2004 and 2008 alone

1910, there were 2,600 daily newspapers in the United States, the vast majority independently owned and operated. By 1990, there were 1,600 papers nationwide, largely under corporate control and overseen by 15 chief executive officers.

For years, papers cleared 40% margins

Charles Blow, New York Times:

Lately I’ve been consuming as much conservative media as possible (interspersed with shots of Pepto-Bismol) to get a better sense of the mind and mood of the right. My read: They’re apocalyptic. They feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged. And some of their “leaders” seem to be trying to mold them into militias.

At first, it was entertaining — just harmless, hotheaded expostulation. Of course, there were the garbled facts, twisted logic and veiled hate speech. But what did I expect, fair and balanced? It was like walking through an ideological house of mirrors. The distortions can be mildly amusing at first, but if I stay too long it makes me sick.

Seattle | March 17

AP - The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has chronicled the news of the city since logs slid down its steep streets to the harbor and miners caroused in its bars before heading north to Alaska's gold fields, will print its final edition Tuesday.

Seattle becomes the second major city to lose a newspaper this year, following Denver, as many U.S. dailies face uncertain futures, battered by quickly declining ad revenue in the age of the Internet and a teetering economy.

"Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know 'If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?' To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke."

Clay Shirky offers a provocative analysis of the end of newspapers in
"Newspapers and Thinking About the Unthinkable"

Hat tip to Clif Figallo for this one.

It turns out that there may be more to the story then originally met the eye, according to (yes, really) Playboy magazine.

Excerpt:

“How did a minor-league TV figure, whose contract with CNBC is due this summer, get so quickly launched into a nationwide rightwing blog sensation? Why were there so many sites and organizations online and live within minutes or hours after his rant, leading to a nationwide protest just a week after his rant?

"What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that’s because it was.

Reuters

- TV executives in Europe and the United States are following a bizarre kind of logic: the more inter-connected the world becomes, the less foreign coverage we have beamed into our sitting rooms.

The Tyndall Report, which monitors nightly newscasts of the three American broadcast television networks ABC, CBS and NBC, says their 2008 news coverage of foreign stories was the lowest in 21 years - and that takes into account their sports coverage from the Beijing Olympics, which got by far the most airtime.

Last week's dramatic survival story of the US Airways flight that crash landed on the Hudson River was the third most covered story of the past 18 months on US television - aside from presidential election coverage - according to Tyndall.

It got a lot more coverage than Gaza, where Israeli shells hit a U.N. compound that same day, setting light to a warehouse storing vital food and medicines.

You could argue that for just one day a national "good news" story in which 155 people's lives were saved by the heroic pilot's skill will make it ahead of an ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza.

But the total coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2008 was just 41 minutes, plus 8 minutes on U.S. government policy on the issue.

Here we go with the Times again. Seriously, where in the world does this assertion come from:

To Christopher Cox, the Republican chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the need for action was obvious in the spring of 2006.

I mean, come on! Cox is one of the worst offenders in this whole deal and now the Times is writing that as early as 2006 he saw it coming? Cox, or his surrogates, might be saying it, but that doesn't make it true. And what's worse is the Times doesn't even give a quote for this, nothing to support it at all. It's just a bald assertion, another repetition of the party line.

Good grief.

Richard Pérez-Peña | San Diego | November 17

NYT - Over the last two years, some of this city’s darkest secrets have been dragged into the light — city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, misleading crime statistics.

Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego’s television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown’s glass towers — a site that did not exist four years ago.

As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.

Ed Howker | Nov 6

The Independent - Why are we asking this now?

Communities Minister Hazel Blears made a speech to the Hansard Society yesterday in which she criticised political bloggers in the UK. "Political blogs are written by people with disdain for the political system and politicians, who see their function as unearthing scandals, conspiracies and perceived hypocrisy," she said. Conservative grandee Lord Baker has described the comments as "extraordinary". He said: "She needs to tune into the modern world. People have a right to say what they think and if she doesn't like it she can blog back". However, Blears maintains that: "Until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair."

interesting points are raised, that also apply to US bloggers and press

Other than this one bullshit sentence: "Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit does this for the right-of-center; Duncan Black at Eschaton does it for the left," I pretty much liked this article on blogging by Andrew Sullivan. He was, after all, one of the original bloggers. It's interesting, in post-modern, lit-crit kind of way.

Today's LA Times is running a story on the revolution in Iran. Here's the headline:

U.S. policies may have contributed to Iran revolution, study says

I realize for most Americans the headline may come as a shock, but for those of us here who know a little something about Iran, it's got to be the most obtuse headline ever. My first reaction upon reading it was, "ya think?" Still, credit to the LA Times for running a story counter to the CW. Those don't come around so often.

It is a measure of the catastrophe unfolding right now that the pretty-people on CNBC are having really heated and serious discussions. Tempers were actually flaring a few moments ago as I watched. There's actually serious debate as to what in the world the Federal government is doing and how it got us into this mess. For example, words like lax enforcement of regulations on the books; the understaffing, actually the gutting of the SEC; the greed and corruption of the 'shadow banking system'. I could go on. I'm just pleased that finally the talking heads are sitting up and actually taking notice that they have a role to play. Maybe, for once in the last twenty years they might actually rise to the occasion. Optimistic, I know. But what else do we have to cling to?

Update: Interesting discussions still ongoing. And surprise of surprises, someone actually chimed in and raised my question about Paulson and Goldman and shorts and conflict of interest! I guess CNBC is now reading The Agonist.

I'm watching CNBC right now. It sure is entertaining.

The big rumor this morning is AIG. Will it fail or not? I'll leave it to others to comment on that possibility. Although I'll preface it with a reminder that many said the monoliners wouldn't fail, that they were too important. But they did.

One lesson of this crisis: there is nowhere to hide.

Something else I heard on a Bloomberg podcast today while walking home from work was that Paulson and Bernanke did some front running with the Fannie/Freddie deal because they knew Lehman was going to fail. Kind of makes sense to me.

But as a general rule, anytime an anchor says, "this is going to be an historic morning," pretty much means the day will be very underwhelming.

Maybe, maybe not. We'll see.

Anyway, use this as an open thread and/or open post for the editors to post news stories or make comments on developments as the day progresses and the markets churn while I sleep and awake to either nothing, or absolute carnage.

I'll not be surprised to see either.

Now when the losses from the big bets on the oil bubble come in, then it will get amusing.

Next year, when the credit system is cross wired like a Christmas tree and the bill for the bail out comes due... we could see a climax to this bear market -
Stirling Newberry

** Bush: Economy Strong Enough to Handle Turmoil
** Wall Street crisis: Is this the death knell for derivatives?
** World stocks dive as Lehman collapses, oil slumps to $93bbl
** Wilbur Ross sees about 1,000 bank closures: report

In the last five years, the media has become the stomping ground for corporate mouthpieces that not only own most of the media outlets, but also control the advertising revenues that keep these television, radio and newspapers afloat. This is a direct result of the “fairness doctrine” being scrapped by the FCC and also the placement of Michael Powell (the son of Colin Powell) to head the agency. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 also added fuel to the fire. According to Network:

The Telecommunications Act of 1996. Under the 1934 Communications Act, everything was clear and precise - there was NO option but to regulate - and the Commission did what the Act instructed it to do. The 1996 Act, however, introduced the so-called forbearance doctrine, where the Commission could, on its own initiative, refrain from regulating an industry segment. That's when things began to collapse. In its haste to create local exchange competition, the FCC went either too far or not far enough in the early days. Three methods of local competition were introduced: (1) Local resale, but the discounts were not deep enough and so hardly anyone chose that option; (2) Unbundled Network Elements (UNEs), where discounts were probably too deep, so everyone jumped in; and (3) Facilities based competition, which has not taken off because of the UNE discounts. Chairman Powell, who strongly favors facilities-based competition decided to "fix" the problem by moving too far too fast in the opposite direction by essentially deregulating UNE price regulation for the Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers. The result: Policy disarray and chaos!

New York | September 1

Editor &Publisher - Longtime Associated Press political writer, and now AP Washington bureau chief, Ron Fournier, has been targeted by liberal groups and blogs lately for what they perceive as biased AP reporting against Barack Obama and Joe Biden. This was pushed along by a recent report at Politico.com that Fournier had been approached about working for John McCain in 2006.

AP has denied any slant and today Politico writer Michael Calderone posted on their site what AP calls "talking points" sent to AP editors by Ellen Hale, AP's vice president for corporate communications. Full story at Politico.com.

It's about time Fournier was targeted for his obvious biases. spk

An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.

Wikipedia: Troll [Internet]

Since hiring on Rove trained "communications advisers," the McCain has campaign has distinguished itself for it political ads that make many wonder whether John McCain as lost his marbles. However, anyone familiar with blog comments senses something familiar about the McCain ads.

Such ads are immediately recognizable as a form of trolling — introducing specious, irrelevant, and often outrageous "bait" in order to hijack discussion and distract attention from real issues. They need to be called out specifically on this loud and clear.

In this article I am going to make an attempt to clarify my views on this presidential race, U.S. foreign policy, the economy and what we are experiencing in this new era as far as our civil liberties, the constant threats (real and perceived) to our “security” and the increasing gap between the rich and the not so rich in this country. One could write a book about each of these subjects, putting everything in one article is a daunting task. I’m not an expert nor am I an economist, diplomat or a military genius. What I am attempting to do is separate fact from fiction as I see it. I’m sure that many will take exception to what I have to say and that’s understandable, we all can’t be mirror images of each other. I ask your indulgence beforehand.

Those words…so haunting, seemingly harmless and benign, I love my country whether it’s right or wrong. That’s what the phrase means, right? To some it may mean that, but to me, it means something entirely different.

“My country right or wrong”, that part is entirely correct. The Egyptians, the Spartans, the Romans, the Spanish and the English all supported their nations, whether they were right or wrong. What most people don’t realize is that the last two words of that phrase changes the meaning so completely; “my country”.

The truth is that it is your country whether your country is right or wrong. It’s still your country. That makes you part and parcel of what is done in your name. “My Country” is the damning part of that phrase. Yes, it’s your country, and what your country does reflects on you. The truth may be that you have no real power to move your country in a different direction, but that doesn’t take away the fact that you are complicit. What your country does, what it stands for, or doesn’t stand for, is certainly part of your responsibility. You may only be one voice in the wilderness, but you still have that voice.

There is another category of offenses, described by the French poet André Chenier as "les crimes puissants qui font trembler les lois," crimes so great that they make the laws themselves tremble. We know what to do with someone caught misappropriating funds, but when confronted with evidence of a systematic attempt to undermine the political system itself, we recoil in a general failure of imagination and nerve.

-- Gary Sick, October Surprise (p 226)

******

I have never understood why "normal" people are supposed to believe that the Iranians let the hostages go during Reagan's inauguration because he intimidated them, but then Reagan quickly pivoted to sell them all those weapons in the 1982-1986 period traditionally known as "Iran Contra". [Crossposted @ hongpong.com]

Recently here at the Agonist we've had a few lively discussions about recent false media narratives created around both Barack and Michelle Obama. See for example Forgiven's, Machiavellian And The War of Words and my Presto, Uppity Angry Black Woman!

I know not everyone was convinced of our arguments. Fine. Let me make clear however that my purpose is not to provide partisan defense for Obama but to criticize the media and shed light on what I regard as deeply rooted racist, misogynistic and certainly anti-progressive and anti-democratic undercurrents in American culture.

On that note, for some historical perspective which compares the New Yorker cover to Bret F. Harte’s 1870 “Plain Language from Truthful James” poem see Rune Christensen's “The Heathen Obama”? The limits to satire in American politics.

rikyrah of Jack and Jill Politics has a terrific article which addresses the image as well as some of the deeper contexts to Michelle's unenviable position. As part of the guest series at Open Left see Update: Michelle Obama as Racial Rorschach Test

Michael Shaw provides an excellent deconstruction of the image here,The "What" Of What's Wrong With The Barack Osama New Yorker Cover. Shaw's analysis is important as he looks beyond the obvious surface communication and finds discourses which communicate some of the false narratives we've been discussing here.

So let me know what YOU think. And just to leave this post on a high note, THIS is satire.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


click to enlarge

I have been wondering of late where it is on the political spectrum that I would feel comfortable? There was a time when I considered myself to be a Democrat. This wasn’t because I believed in the party’s platform; it was because I disagreed with the Republican point of view. The last seven years have reinforced my view of Republicans, but at the same time my fondness for the Democrats has also waned. The truth is that frankly, I don’t see much of a difference between the two; both the Republicans and the Democrats are financed by the same entities.

Who are the people behind the curtain, so to speak? Well, they are basically the same people and organizations that have always ruled in this country (with periodic breaks from time to time). These are the captains of industry and the bankers that back them, and lately, religious groups (that pop-up occasionally). The government claim that the people are behind the government and they are responsible for electing their government is patently untrue. The only thing that the people are responsible for is rubber-stamping the candidates that are selected for us. The two political parties, the Republicans and Democrats, seem to be the only game in town, so to speak. While it is true that this nation has other political parties, in national elections, there are basically only two parties that matter.