Tag Archives: Barack Obama

ABC’s Jake Tapper takes on The Newsroom

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Actually, he took it on over a month ago, but I somehow missed it until just now. In the pages of The New Republic, Tapper took Sorkin to task:

There’s much to criticize in the media—and TV news in particular. But though “The Newsroom” intends to lecture its viewers on the higher virtues of capital-J journalism, Professor Sorkin soon reveals he isn’t much of an expert on the subject.

So far, so good. But what bothers me about Tapper’s critique is that he dislikes The Newsroom for all the wrong reasons. Here’s the crux of the problem with the show for Tapper:

McAvoy sanctimoniously laments the deterioration of public discourse and the news media’s complicity in it. But if that is the problem, his subsequent actions reveal a commitment to a uniformly partisan solution. McAvoy—and, by extension, Sorkin—preach political selflessness, but they practice pure partisanship; they extol the Fourth Estate’s democratic duty, but they believe that responsibility consists mostly of criticizing Republicans.

See, this is the crux of my problem with Tapper. I have a whole laundry list of complaints about The Newsroom — from the excessively preachy tone of all the dialogue to the half-baked and subpar romantic suplots to the improbably lucky connections the newsroom stuff was able to milk for details following the Gulf oil spill, and a million other things besides.

But if there’s one thing Sorkin doesn’t get wrong, it’s also the one thing that rubs Jake Tapper the wrong way. This is unfortunate, because — as someone who, admittedly, is not as familiar with Tapper’s journalism as I should be — I nevertheless have some unexplained fondness for the guy. But it appears something about Sorkin’s critique struck a little too close to home.

But before I get into that, Tapper’s not finished:

And when McAvoy goes after a National Rifle Association campaign to portray Obama as anti-gun, he insists on depicting it as a moral crusade in defense of the public good. But he never feels the need to question whether—in the midst of crises in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the international economy—it’s really so noble after all to devote one’s limited resources to fact-checking relatively unimportant political attacks. As such, it’s hard not to judge the resulting segment as falling short of McAvoy’s newly idealistic raison d’être—though Sorkin clearly seems to think otherwise.

Tapper goes on to say that McAvoy, much like other cable news stars, is blind to his own ideology. There may be a crumb of truth in that. But aside from the anchor’s comically atrocious disdain for the common people (“we are the media elite,” McAvoy declares on-air, without a smidgen of irony), it seems that the NewsNight anchor’s worst crime in Tapper’s eyes is assigning the truth any relevance at all. There are wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he says, and an economy in crisis. Why not discuss that?

But to those of us who would like to see something more from the news than a mere dash-to-the-bottom for the juiciest new storyline (another suicide bombing in Baghdad! stocks fall 2% in an afternoon!), it really does matter whether the NRA lied about Obama’s alleged anti-gun record. And it really does matter that Michele Bachmann falsely claimed the Obamas’ trip to India cost American taxpayers $200 million per day. (It would appear that even Tapper would agree with this last assessment: he filed a short report about the White House’s rebuttal of Bachmann’s claims.)

Tapper treats the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as completely separate entities from the “relatively unimportant political attacks” to which Sorkin’s Will McAvoy devotes so much of his time. But the aggregate effect of lie after lie being spouted by many vocal Republicans at the time, without any fear of being held accountable by the media, helped to fuel the popular discontent that has rendered Obama a much less effective president on both domestic and foreign policy issues. Political capital is a very real thing.

But that’s not actually the biggest mistake Tapper makes. Indeed, he believes some stories are irrelevant, and yet he and his organization, ABC News, continue to cover them indiscriminately. But the one thing they’ve forgotten to do right — and practically the only thing Aaron Sorkin actually got right — was to nail the coffin definitively on the constant stream of baseless attacks emanating daily from right-wing circles. (Tapper’s tepid report on the India misinformation story, especially given the update he tacked on at the end, leaves the impression this was just another political squabble between perpetually lying politicians. It wasn’t: one side was lying. The other side wasn’t. This matters.)

This isn’t about being ideological. It’s about doing the very thing Jake Tapper thinks he’s doing by focusing on the “moderates and liberals wielding [power]:” holding our elected officials accountable. This is not to say that liberals or Democrats or Obama himself shouldn’t be held to account either. But to simply assume that pointing out one side’s deliberate falsehoods is somehow partisan — without even bothering to evaluate whether the other side is actually guilty of the same crimes and to the same extent — is actually taking sides. It’s taking the side of those who choose to distort and disguise and deny the truth, at the expense of those whose attachment to facts is at least somewhat stronger. (These are all politicians, so we can safely assume no one’s that sentimental about honesty.)

Jake Tapper may be a good reporter, but his attack on Sorkin’s “moral crusade” smacks of New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane’s prejudicial term “truth vigilante.” Sorkin is a lot of things: preachy is one of them, for instance. But being evenhanded — as in a real balance based on facts, not the faux balance based on the terror of appearing partisan advocated by Tapper — is not something Sorkin got wrong. It’s something Tapper didn’t get right.

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Censoring the news: this only happens in tyrannies and American presidential campaigns

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The New York Times nonchalantly (and unknowingly) begins writing its own obituary as a serious journalistic enterprise:

The push and pull over what is on the record is one of journalism’s perennial battles. But those negotiations typically took place case by case, free from the red pens of press minders. Now, with a millisecond Twitter news cycle and an unforgiving, gaffe-obsessed media culture, politicians and their advisers are routinely demanding that reporters allow them final editing power over any published quotations.

Image representing New York Times as depicted ...Quote approval is standard practice for the Obama campaign, used by many top strategists and almost all midlevel aides in Chicago and at the White House — almost anyone other than spokesmen who are paid to be quoted. (And sometimes it applies even to them.) It is also commonplace throughout Washington and on the campaign trail.

The Romney campaign insists that journalists interviewing any of Mitt Romney’s five sons agree to use only quotations that are approved by the press office. And Romney advisers almost always require that reporters ask them for the green light on anything from a conversation that they would like to include in an article.

From Capitol Hill to the Treasury Department, interviews granted only with quote approval have become the default position. Those officials who dare to speak out of school, but fearful of making the slightest off-message remark, shroud even the most innocuous and anodyne quotations in anonymity by insisting they be referred to as a “top Democrat” or a “Republican strategist.”

It is a double-edged sword for journalists, who are getting the on-the-record quotes they have long asked for, but losing much of the spontaneity and authenticity in their interviews.

Good thing the Times isn’t the most influential paper in the world or anything…because acquiescing to this absurd self-censorship would really be embarrassing if that were the case.

Perhaps this is a good entry point for the new public editor. Good riddance, Brisbane.

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Mitt Romney, Bain Capital, and 1999: Should I stay or should I go now?

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At first glance, this ongoing saga seems an awful lot like one of those perfectly constructed and completely irrelevant bits of campaign “scoops” that have no effect whatsoever on a candidate’s ability to govern. And from the Obama campaign’s strategic standpoint, that’s basically what it was, and a masterful job at that. But the problem goes beyond the overarching campaign themes — outsourcing of American jobs, profits accruing to the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, etc. — because it now involves directly contradictory statements made by Romney in SEC filings and public comments. It will be interesting to see if this story has staying power or if the press moves on to more exciting things, like what Kim Kardashian is doing with her summer.

In any case, it is a definitive example of the Obama campaign’s strategic mastery. The overall fight over outsourcing is, in many ways, pretty frivolous, since the exchange of labor in the U.S. for cheaper labor abroad is a fairly well-known and — more importantly — unavoidable long-term impact of globalization. But it sure riles up some of Obama’s key constituencies, so there we go. Meanwhile, Romney has a scandal on his hands because he fell for the trap of being too cautious: he didn’t want to appear remotely involved with outsourcing, so he said he wasn’t in charge of Bain Capital after 1999. Maybe he should have just owned it right from the start.

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Standing up for ObamaCare

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From the Washington Post:

Americans split evenly on the Supreme Court’s recent 5 to 4 decision upholding Obama’s health-care law, with 42 percent approving of the decision and 44 percent opposing it. But in a significant change, the legislation is now viewed less negatively than it was before the ruling. In the new survey, 47 percent support the law and 47 percent oppose it. In April, 39 percent backed it and 53 percent opposed it.

House Republicans will vote again this week on a measure to repeal the health-care law. In the poll, just one-third of all Americans favor repealing the legislationin its entirety or in part. At the same time, Thirty-eight percent of Americans consider Romney’s support for repeal a major reason to vote for him, compared with 29 percent who say it is a major reason to vote against him.

I say this time and time and time again, but I feel compelled to say it again now anyway: Americans don’t care about policy; they care about comportment. If you look like you know what you’re doing, as long as it’s not something completely crazy, they’ll support it — no matter who the party in charge is. Hell, most Americans don’t even understand policy. I don’t think one could even find 30% of the population that’s capable of answering two or three basic questions about the health care law.

But look what happens when the Supreme Court rules in its favor: suddenly the law isn’t so bad anymore. Same with gay marriage among African-Americans: everyone was freaking out about what Obama’s declaration of support might do to his black constituency, and within days of his announcement, black support for gay marriage skyrocketed (by around 10% in some places, I believe).

This is why the Democrats are such a pathetic party: they still haven’t learned this lesson. They enacted healthcare in 2010, the Republicans screamed “death panel,” and the Democrats retreated. So of course voters hate the law: Democrats looked like they didn’t know what they were doing, and Republicans looked like they did. It was never about actual policy.

For an example of real leadership, even if the policies themselves weren’t necessarily good, Scott Walker ran for office promising to balance budgets, decided to bust the unions, withstood massive public discontent and a recall election, and held his ground and won. That’s balls. But the ballsiest Democrat is still a bigger coward than the weakest Republican (with the exception of Mitt Romney). When will this sad excuse for a party learn to actually vouch for its own ideas? It’s pathetic.

(Rant over.)

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David Brooks discovers inequality, recoils in horror

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English: David Brooks

From yesterday’s New York Times column:

Equal opportunity, once core to the nation’s identity, is now a tertiary concern. If America really wants to change that, if the country wants to take advantage of all its human capital rather than just the most privileged two-thirds of it, then people are going to have to make some pretty uncomfortable decisions.

So far, so good…right? Granted, Brooks is a little like the guy who shows up drunk to a party at 4 AM just as everyone’s sobering up enough to drive home. But at least he made it there, right?

Well, not exactly:

Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before childrearing and be morally tough about it. Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.

Political candidates will have to spend less time trying to exploit class divisions and more time trying to remedy them — less time calling their opponents out of touch elitists, and more time coming up with agendas that comprehensively address the problem. It’s politically tough to do that, but the alternative is national suicide.

And there we go again with the false equivalencies. What does marriage have to do with inequality? Brooks prefers to look at cultural explanations, because cultural-religious rifts are his specialty. (“There are two types of people in America: let’s call them Big-Government Jack and Libertarian Jill,” would be a fairly representative rhetorical style of his.) But even though one huge reason for the current trend towards banana republic-ism is staring us right in the face — tax policy — Brooks prefers to look at something — marriage norms — that might influence something that might influence something that might influence something that might influence inequality. Ever heard of Occam’s Razor, boy?

What makes it so infuriating is that Brooks has a pulpit at the Times, and he consistently uses it to chide Obama for being too enthralled with the idea of government, too ambitious with his proposals, too far left for the nation. But then one day Brooks wakes up to discover inequality, and…yup, turns out marriage norms are the problem.

Time to wake up and start agitating for the policies Obama’s been proposing: sensible, reasonable (by any historical standard) tax proposals that attempt to reverse income inequality and restore some semblance of a little thing we call upward mobility. Call a spade a spade, David Brooks, or risk becoming another Tom Friedman. And the world doesn’t need another Tom Friedman.

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Obama 2012, brought to you by the New York Times

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The paper of record is really hitting its stride in its not-so-subtle Obama reelection campaigning. The latest:

“As a photographer, you know when you have a unique moment. But I didn’t realize the extent to which this one would take on a life of its own,” Mr. Souza said. “That one became an instant favorite of the staff. I think people are struck by the fact that the president of the United States was willing to bend down and let a little boy feel his head.”

David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s longtime adviser, has a copy framed in his Chicago office. He said of Jacob, “Really, what he was saying is, ‘Gee, you’re just like me.’ And it doesn’t take a big leap to think that child could be thinking, ‘Maybe I could be here someday.’ This can be such a cynical business, and then there are moments like that that just remind you that it’s worth it.”

A copy of the photo hangs in the Philadelphia family’s living room with several others taken that day. Mr. Philadelphia, now in Afghanistan for the State Department, said: “It’s important for black children to see a black man as president. You can believe that any position is possible to achieve if you see a black person in it.”

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Obama pivots to newer faces in foreign policy

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From Politico:

Goodbye David Brooks, hello Peter Beinart.

Shortly after announcing his newfound support for the legalization of gay marriage yesterday, President Barack Obama walked into an off-the-record foreign policy meeting with nine editors and columnists to discuss Afghanistan, Israel, NATO and the forthcoming G8 Summit at Camp David, sources present at the meeting tell me.

The nine: The New Yorker’s David Remnick and Jane Mayer, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein, Newsweek’s Peter Beinart, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, The New York Times’s Carla Robbins, The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib, The Los Angeles Times’s Doyle McManus, and David Ignatius of the Washington Post.

While some of these writers — most notably Ignatius, one of the most respected and influential columnists in Washington’s foreign policy circles today — are familiar faces at the White House, the group as a whole marks a notable shift away from the Tom Friedmans and the David Brooks toward younger voices and fresh perspectives.

Notable here are the number of people who’ve faced pretty severe criticism of their own critical statements on Israel: Remnick, Beinart, and Klein, for example. This meeting probably doesn’t signal anything overly substantive, but the inclusion of Beinart is especially intriguing in light of the firestorm his excellent book, The Crisis of Zionism (which I just finished reading several weeks ago), spawned in the media.

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