Brad DeLong Interviews John Harris. “It didn’t go very well,” he writes….
Got lots to do, and anyway I don’t want to say anything more about Dan’s current 15 minutes, lest someone think (wrongly, I assure you) that I’m acting as his mouthpiece. But I’m reading it all with great interest and not a little glee.
So here’s some of the more recent choice commentary elsewhere on the ‘new Post’ / ‘old Post’ kerfuffle.
Don’t miss: Jeff Jarvis, Splitting newsrooms and hairs and the twofer (content & linkfest) in Jay Rosen, Press Think John Harris and Jim Brady Get Into It About “White House Briefing.” Dan Froomkin Replies. Almost all the links are really good.
Bonus tracks: Brad DeLong, The Future of the Washington Post and Marty Kaplan, Journalism’s Slo-Mo Suicide.
And, despite the great attraction of the readers’ suggestion that Dan’s column be re-named “Dan Froomkin’s ‘Cooking with Walnuts’,” it seems that White House Briefing is here to stay.
The predictable news story has hit the cycle: TalkLeft: Bush Didn’t Ask Miers About Abortion Views. I could swear I read the same article about Roberts just a few weeks ago.
And just like last time, my first reaction is that the press is being snookered: ordinarily asking questions like that is Cheney’s job. And much as I looked, I never saw any news reports — or Senatorial questioning — about what Cheney asked Roberts in their long meetings.
I suppose in this case, though, it’s possible that, knowing Miers so well, they didn’t even have to ask. And in fairness, it’s possible that had someone asked Miers wouldn’t have answered, as Eric Alterman Jeralyn Merritt subbing at Altercation quotes her as saying such questions are improper. Then again, that also means she won’t be saying much to the Senate, doesn’t it.
Writing about the first foreign tour by US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen P. Hughes (dubbed US Minister for Propaganda by no less an authority than the Financial Times), New York Times reporter Steven R. Weisman breaks from the party line about the wonderful free press in the US, and the benighted press in the third world:
On Mideast ‘Listening Tour,’ the Question Is Who’s Hearing: She [Hughes] addressed several policies, but in concise sound bites rather than sustained arguments. In American campaigns, such messages repeated over and over can have an effect because a presidential candidate dominates the news with every statement he makes, and if that fails to work, money can be poured into saturation advertising.
By contrast, in the lively and percussive environment of this region, Ms. Hughes came nowhere near the commanding heights of the media.
Got that? In the US, during elections — the time it matters most — government propaganda is parroted reflexively by the media, and if for some reason they don’t toe the line, say a young white woman is missing, people with enough money can nonetheless drum it into the public by endless repetition on TV.
Strangely, that doesn’t work in Egypt, in Turkey, in Qatar, or even in … Saudi Arabia.
Update: Could be because they don’t have real elections there?
Bark Bark Woof Woof catches Rush Limbaugh sliming Cindy Sheehan on Monday, and denying he said it on Wednesday.
I would imagine that the vast majority of the people who listen to Limbaugh’s stuff are never exposed to any of the evidence of the litany of lies and fabrications (cf. Media Matters). To my mind, the ability of cable TV stations to sustain a hermetic envelope of alternate reality is the fourth leg of the big box structural impediments to restoring our democracy.
(The others are gerrymandering, campaign finance, and the manipulation of the mechanics of voting [voting on Tuesday, complex registration/ballot access rules/butterfly ballots, insecure voting machines].)
This query at Nicholas Weaver's Random Thoughts is the sort of thing you see first at the edges, on smaller blogs, and then, sometimes, a few days later you see it everywhere.
Except that I just spent a chunk of Monday morning in the car repair waiting room, which was playing one of the local TV stations, I think the NBC affiliate.
In the hour and a half I was there, the news covered the following topics (that I can recall):
There were probably other stories, but I can't remember them. I can, however, assure you that the following topics were never mentioned at any time:
Which is why some of this edgy thinking stays at the edge….
1 Update: I forgot one: the war did get mentioned during a segment on four singing grannies who were interviewed wearing their silly costumes. The grannies write and sing anti-Bush protest songs, and they called the war illegal and immoral. The segment didn't actually make fun of them, although one had the sense the interviewer was struggling between a desire to mock and a desire to respect the aged.
Jotwell Blenderlaw