Justin's Political Corner

(cross-posted from Daily Kos)

CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson is reportedly ”in talks to leave CBS ahead” of her contract in the midst of disagreements with executives over her “wading dangerously close to advocacy” on Benghazi. Attkisson, who has a history of producing shoddy reporting, is getting support from Fox News personalities, with one calling for the conservative network to hire her as an investigative reporter.

The Washington Post noted this week that Attkisson, like Fox News, has been a “persistent voice of news-media skepticism about the government’s story” on Benghazi. ThePost added:

Conservatives see a crusader and truth-teller. Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center calls Attkisson “an outlier” among TV reporters — a hard-nosed investigator of “how our public officials behave and misbehave.” Liberals see a partisan tool. “I think Attkisson has completely given herself over to the right and is very happy to be their champion,” says Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at the liberal Media Matters for America organization.

Politico reported that CBS News “has grown increasingly frustrated with Attkisson’s Benghazi campaign” and executives “see Attkisson wading dangerously close to advocacy on the issue, network sources have told POLITICO. Attkisson can’t get some of her stories on the air, and is thus left feeling marginalized and underutilized. That, in part, is why Attkisson is in talks to leave CBS ahead of contract.” (The Post wrote of the contract situation: “Despite reports of internal conflicts with her superiors, Attkisson says she has no immediate plans to leave CBS. ‘I am currently under contract,’ she says flatly, declining to say when her agreement lapses or what might follow.”)

If Attkisson does land at Fox News, she’d join several other on-air figures who conservatives believed were mistreated by the media. In recent years, Fox News has hired reporter Doug McKelway, Lou Dobbs, Don Imus, and Judy Miller. 

h/t: MMFA

Piggybacking on Irin Carmon’s excellent piece dismantling the myth that the media has intentionally ignored the case of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortion doctor now on trail for allegedly committing horrific crimes against his patients, it’s worth noting that some conservatives attacking the media now didn’t seem particularly interested in the case until a few days ago.

As Dave Weigel points out in his response to Carmon, one reason Gosnell didn’t get more attention was because the judge issued a gag order preventing lawyers from speaking publicly about it, but another may be that pro-life politicians never nationalized Gosnell’s crimes and made them into an issue that would attract more discussion.

What about the conservative media? A search of TVEyes finds that Fox News mentioned the case just a handful of times. Special Report With Bret Baier included brief updates on the trail in its roundup of the day’s news on several nights over the past month, while Mike Huckabee aired a taped segment followed by a panel discussion on his weekend show late last month, but it’s hardly been leading news. The “Obama phone” got far more coverage.

h/t: Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon

The best description I can think of for CNN’s coverage of the verdict in the Steubenville rape trial: freakishly distorted and reprehensible.

The thing is, I don’t believe these reporters actually are sympathizing with the rapists over their victim; I think it’s more cynical and base than that. Dramatic displays of emotion are what CNN is after, because they’re good for CNN’s bottom line. In their marketing calculations, emotional outbursts draw viewers and sell advertisements. They seek out these kinds of scenes — and in this case, since the victim’s identity is kept secret, the only emotional outbursts they could show were the rapists’. So they exploited those moments to the best of their ability.

And in the process, caused great harm to their reputation. CNN continued with this bullshit even after a storm erupted on social media, condemning their coverage. The sheer contempt they showed for their audience, and for the victim of this terrible crime, was breathtaking.

And one more point: the sentences these two kids got were absurdly, offensively light in view of their crime.

h/t: Little Green Footballs

Perpetually fuming about President Obama, Sean Hannity widened his rant Wednesday night on Fox News and condemned the “lapdog, kiss ass media” that allegedly lets Obama have his way. Echoing the same attack, Karl Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week that ”Mr. Obama is a once-in-a-generation demagogue with a compliant press corps,” while the anti-Obama Daily Caller pushed the headline,  ”Lapdog Media Seeking Lap To Lie In.”

Complaining about the “liberal media,” has been a running, four-decade story for conservative activists. But what we’re hearing more of lately is the specific allegation that the press has purposefully laid down for the Democratic president, and that it’s all part of a master media plan to help Democrats foil Republicans.

The rolling accusation caught my attention since I wrote a book called Lapdogs, which documented the Beltway media’s chronic timidity during the previous Republican administration, and particularly with regards to the Iraq War. I found it curious that Hannity and friends are now trying to turn the rhetorical tables with a Democrat in the White House, and I was interested in what proof they had to lodge that accusation against today’s press.

It turns out the evidence is quite thin. For instance, onenever-ending partisan cry has been the press has “ignored” the terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last year; that they’re protecting Obama. Yet theNew York Times and Washington Post have published nearly 800 articles and columns mentioning Benghazi since last September, according to Nexis.  

What the lapdog allegation really seems to revolve around is the fact that conservatives are angry that Obama remains popular with the public. Rather than acknowledge that reality, partisans increasingly blame the press and insist if only reporters and pundits would tell ‘the truth’ about Obama, then voters would truly understand how he’s out to destroy liberty and freedom and capitalism.

Sorry, but that’s not what constitutes a lapdog press corps. And to confuse chronic partisan whining with authentic media criticism is a mistake. The Hannity-led claim also isn’t accurate. Studies have shown that during long stretches of his first term, Obama was  hammered with “unrelentingly negative” press coverage.

By contrast, the lapdog era of the Bush years represented nothing short of an institutional collapse of the American newsroom. And it was one that, given the media’s integral role in helping to sell the Iraq War, did grave damage to our democracy.

Looking back at his tenure as Washington Post ombudsman, Michael Getler wrote in 2005 that the mainstream media’s performance in 2002 and 2003 likely represented the industry’s worst failing in nearly half a century. “How did a country on the leading edge of the information age get this so wrong and express so little skepticism and challenge?” Getler asked.

Meanwhile, given its current primetime lineup, sometimes it’s hard to recall that in 2003 MSNBC was so nervous about employing a liberal host who opposed Bush’s ordered invasion that it fired Phil Donahue preemptively, just weeks before war began. An internal memo warned that Donahue presented “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” (He was MSNBC’s highest rated host at the time of his firing.)

Months worth of chronic timidity and newsroom bowing-down to the White House’s war culture clearly helped pave the way to war.  

Laying out the reasons for an unprecedented invasion during his final, pre-war invasion press conference on March 6, 2003, Bush mentioned al-Qaida and the terrorist attacks of September 11 thirteen times in less than an hour. Not a single journalist that night challenged the presumed connection Bush was making between al-Qaida and Iraq, despite the fact that intelligence sources had publicly questioned any such association.

The egregious, look-the-other-way coverage continued long after the invasion. The U.S. media’s collective disinterest in Britain’s Downing Street Memo represented a perfect example of dogged lapdog behavior.

Dr. Benjamin Carson is the latest in a long line of black conservatives — from Clarence Thomas to Herman Cain — relentlessly promoted and propped up by right-wing voices in the media. After Carson used a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in front of President Obama to trumpet conservative arguments about economics and health care, News Corp. properties rushed to anoint him as the newest political “star.” Fox News and Fox Business hosted Carson eight times in the days following his speech, and he has been praised by Fox personalities as a courageous leader who is “saving America” and by the Wall Street Journal in an editorial headlined, “Ben Carson For President.” 

At The National Prayer Breakfast, Carson Called For Flat Tax, Conservative Health Care Policy. In his keynote address at the February 7 National Prayer Breakfast — delivered steps from President Obama, who was seated at the head table — Carson made conservative arguments about health care, tax policy, and the national debt. The Atlantic’s David A. Graham wrote:

Carson delivered an opening shot against “political correctness,” and then - after namechecking Tocqueville, recapping his own inspirational life story, and calling for a better education system — voiced concern about the national debt and argued the case for a flat tax, using the Bible’s injunction to tithe a set percentage, and for health-savings accounts, a medical option that hasgained currency among conservatives. Crucially, he delivered this speech from a podium just feet from President Obama, who of course oversaw the passage of a very different health-care plan and has been a major proponent of progressive taxation. Obama, as he often does, remained somewhere between impassive and bored-looking. It’s fair to say he didn’t seem to be enjoying himself. [TheAtlantic.com, 2/19/13] 

Carson Is A Successful Surgeon With A History Of Promoting Conservative Ideas And Supporting Republicans.  Carson was named director of pediatric neurosurgery at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital at age 33, the youngest to ever lead a major division. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bush in 2008. A longtime critic of President Obama’s health care law and an avowed creationist, Carson was approached to be the Republican candidate for Maryland lieutenant governor in 2010 and donated $1,000 to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012. [Baltimore Sun, 2/18/13; TheAtlantic.com, 2/19/13; OpenSecrets.org, accessed 2/20/13]

TheAtlantic.com’s Graham: “It’s Impossible To Pretend There’s No Racial Dimension Involved In A Successful Black Conservative Castigating The Liberal Black President.” Graham wrote of the conservative movement’s response to the speech:

Though many commentaries have tried tiptoe around it, it’s impossible to pretend there’s no racial dimension involved in a successful black conservative castigating the liberal black president. Black conservatives remain fascinating to Americans of all political persuasions and ethnicities; look no further than Herman Cain’s presidential campaign. And in the age of Obama — when many on the right feel that any criticism of the president is liable to draw undeserved claims of racism — a champion for the cause who can sidestep that retort is sure to be welcomed. Jonah Goldberg came closest to addressing this question, likening Carson to Booker T. Washington. [TheAtlantic.com, 2/19/13]

TheGrio.com’s Joy Reid: “If You Want To Be Ben Carson” Or Any Minority “Willing To Say Conservative Stuff, This Is Your Moment.” In an interview on MSNBC, Reid said that “there is big career advancement” for minorities in being conservative, explaining that they “can make a lot of money, get a lot of attention, get a lot of love from the right, because they really do need brown and black faces to start saying this script.” From the February 13 edition of MSNBC’s The Ed Show:

REID: This is the complication of being a minority conservative.

Right now, first of all, there is a huge boom in it there is a big career advancement in it. If you want to be Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, any brown or black person who is willing to say conservative stuff, this is your moment. You can make a lot of money, get a lot of attention, get a lot of love from the right, because they really do need brown and black faces to start saying this script.

But the problem is in order to fit in as a minority conservative, you really almost have to be even further to the right than typical conservatives. You have to mouth verbatim all of the party`s beliefs, because if you stray one bit, you are held in suspicion. So Rubio is caught in that matrix. [MSNBC’s The Ed Show, 2/13/13, via Nexis]

Wall Street Journal Kicked Off News Corp.’s Cheerleading: ”Ben Carson For President”

The Day After Carson’s Speech, WSJ Urged Readers To ”Make Time To Watch The Video Of Dr. Ben Carson.” The Wall Street Journal published a February 8 editorial headlined, “Ben Carson for President.” The piece encouraged readers “to watch the video of Dr. Ben Carson speaking to the White House prayer breakfast” and highlighted Carson’s ideas on the flat tax and health care. [Wall Street Journal, 2/8/13]

h/t: MMFA

National security journalist Tom Ricks appeared on Fox News to blast the network’s incessant coverage of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. After saying that “Benghazi was hyped, by this network especially,” Ricks went on to say that “the emphasis on Benghazi has been extremely political, partly because Fox was operating as a wing of the Republican Party.”

Indeed, Fox has relentlessly hyped the Benghazi attack — and repeatedly pushed distortions of the events that happened before, during, and after the attack.

For example, Fox claimed that the Obama administration’s statements that an anti-Islam video played a role in the attack were indicative of an administration “cover-up”; in fact, reports confirm that some of the attackers say they were motivated by the video. Fox has also attacked Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., for linking the video to the attacks in a series of Sunday show appearances, even though Rice was accurately conveying the consensus of the intelligence community at the time. Fox even suggested that the Obama administration abandoned Americans to die in Benghazi, despite the fact that reinforcements were sent to Benghazi from Tripoli on the night of the attack.

JON SCOTT (co-host): Pressure mounting on the Obama administration over its response to the deadly attack on our consulate in Benghazi, as [Fox News correspondent] Catherine Herridge reported just minutes ago. Several top GOP lawmakers are backing off their criticism of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, instead focusing on the White House. Two senators even expressing concerns about a possible White House cover-up. Let’s talk about it with Tom Ricks. He is author of The Generals. He has spent decades covering our military. He joins us now.

Senator John McCain said in the past he would block any attempt to nominate Susan Rice to become U.N. — I’m sorry, secretary of state. She’s currently the U.N. ambassador. He seems to be backing away from that. What do you make of it? 

RICKS: I think that Benghazi generally was hyped, by this network especially, and that now that the campaign is over,  I think he’s backing off a little bit. They’re not going to stop Susan Rice from being secretary of state.

SCOTT: When you have four people dead, including the first dead U.N. ambassador — U.S. ambassador in more than 30 years, how do you call that hype?

RICKS: How many security contractors died in Iraq, do you know?

SCOTT: I don’t. 

RICKS: No. Nobody does, because nobody cared. We know that several hundred died, but there was never an official count done of security contractors dead in Iraq. So when I see this focus on what was essentially a small firefight, I think, number one, I’ve covered a lot of firefights. It’s impossible to figure out what happens in them sometimes. And second, I think that the emphasis on Benghazi has been extremely political, partly because Fox was operating as a wing of Republican Party.

SCOTT: All right. Tom Ricks, thanks very much for joining us today.

RICKS: You’re welcome. 

h/t: MMFA

News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch criticized the “Jewish owned press” for its coverage of the conflict in Gaza in a November 17 tweet:

The Anti-Defamation League writes of the “anti-Semitic lie” that “Jews control the banks, the media, and the government”:

This myth originates with The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a proven forgery. The forgery continues to promote the stereotype that Jews own the banks and control the media. The reality is, in societies, like the United States, individuals who identify as Jews have succeeded. But in almost every other country where Jews have lived, they have been a small minority and experienced centuries of persecution.

The Daily Beast’s Peter Beinert writes that Murdoch’s comment is offensive to journalists as well as to Jewish people and suggests that Murdoch believes reporters for his publications should conform their reporting to his political views:

It’s offensive to journalists because it implies that institutions of the “press” should reflect the ideological biases of their owners. Reading Murdoch’s tweet, it would be logical to conclude that he believes that any newspaper he owns should reflect his right-wing views, even in its news coverage. The FCC might want to consider that when evaluating Murdoch’s reported bid to buy the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.

h/t: MMFA

For years, conservatives have claimed that “liberals seek to criminalize Christianity and conservative opinions through imaginary hate speech laws.” But today, WorldNetDaily columnist Erik Rush writes that the government should prosecute liberals and members of the press… in order to defend freedom, of course. He accuses journalists of “treasonous collusion” with the Obama administration and said the Founders would have wanted journalists to be “found guilty of high crimes.” “Trials for treason and the requisite sentences would apply,” Rush says, “and I would have no qualms about seeing such sentences executed, no matter how severe.” He claims that progressives’ “seditious, anti-American” speech is “excepted from protection under the First Amendment,” hoping that “the political disenfranchisement of liberals, progressives, socialists and Marxists can begin in earnest, and in the open.”

h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW

Question: If the snap polls, along with the pundit consensus, had indicated Mitt Romney had won Tuesday’s debate, would anyone on Fox News have cared what moderator Candy Crowley said while the two candidates discussed last month’s terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya?

It’s doubtful.

The hysterical, and at times deeply disturbing, reaction to Crowley’s moderator role only erupted as way to explain away Romney’s poor showing. Angry that Romney’s weak performance might hurt his November chances, conservatives lashed out at the nearest target, Crowley. (“Shut your big fat mouth, Candy.”)

But conservatives didn’t simply condemn Crowley’s performance as a journalist. (“Disgraceful”!) They spent the week turning her into a mythical figure of liberal destruction; a potentially violent agent (a “suicide bomber”) sent by Obama to dismantle the Republican campaign for the presidency. In doing so, unglued commentators attached Crowley to a sweeping campaign conspiracy.

Is criticizing a debate moderator out of bounds? Of course not. Media Matters found fault with Jim Lehrer’s performance at the first presidential debate this year. Is it completely insane to denounce a moderator by likening him or her to a political killer? 

It is.

From Rush Limbaugh [emphasis added]:

“She committed an act of journalistic terror or malpractice last night. If there were any journalist standards, what she did last night would have been the equivalent of blowing up her career like a suicide bomber.

She committed an act of journalistic terror or malpractice last night. 

Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson (recently described by the Daily Beast as a “thoughtful conservative”)compared Crowley’s Benghazi fact-checking to John Wilkes Booth assassinating Abraham Lincoln.

And at the American Spectator, a very angry Jeffrey Lord likened Crowley’s fact-check to the North Vietnamese’s Tet Offensive, a bloody military surge in 1968.

Obviously no rational person would draw a connection between an allegedly overzealous journalist and the carnage wrought by traitorous assassins, violent terrorists, or communist armies. But for right-wing zealots, Crowley wasn’t simply a journalist asking questions. She’s a solider in Obama’s army. She’s a soldier who’s trying to re-elect an illegitimate president.

In the eyes of Crowley’s critics, the Obama who was elected president is not real Obama. He’s an ineligible, secretly foreign, un-American terrorist sympathizer.

So in the confused eyes of right-wing commentators, Crowley wasn’t simply being sloppy or unprofessional at the debate, she was guilty of trying to help steal the election for Obama, just like ACORN in 2008 was accused of illegally pushing Obama across the finish line. And just like pollsters (until very recently) were accused by conservatives of being part of a massive, White House-run conspiracy to suppress the Republican vote, journalists like Crowley are now portrayed as being knowing agents working with the Obama “regime.”

h/t: Eric Boehlert at MMFA

Along with Bill O’Reilly’s narcissism, his hypocrisy knows no bounds. While he feels free to attack any and all who disagree with his “traditionalist” world view, he gets just a wee bit thin skinned when it comes to any criticisms of Bill O’Reilly. While he had no problem accusing an abortion provider of  illegally “killing babies,” he’s rather annoyed about an editorial, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which dared to mention his name in an article titled “Screaming at Each Other, Won’t Improve Our Democracy.” The theme of the article was about how people are losing trust in the media due to the tone of the discourse. Their mortal sin is a bit of mild snark about how both MSNBC and Fox talkers, like Bill O’Reilly, can increase one’s blood pressure.  For mentioning his name, they have earned the rebuke of the great and powerful Bill O’Reilly who, while not issuing a boycott, is ordering his minions to stop reading this “dumb & corrupt” newspaper which accurately discussed the type of toxic talk that Bill O’Reilly specializes in!

After citing a poll shows that 60% of Americans don’t trust the media because it’s “inaccurate and slanted,” he launched into his attack on the “left wing” St. Louis Post-Dispatch because this newspaper used its First Amendment rights to gently critique Fox News which, as we know, is a paragon of accuracy and fairness.

Fact Check: In May of this year, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that its average weekday circulation declined 4.2%. Where is O’Reilly getting his number from? They also note that their average weekday digital circulation grew 61.6%. The bankruptcy filed by Lee Enterprises was part of a debt refinancing plan negotiated with creditors. They state that this “will have no impact on its business and that its papers will continue to publish.” Additionally, ”employees, suppliers and customers will not be affected, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Monday.”

Bill then ordered his “folks” not to read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Underneath all that bronzer, Bill O’Reilly has some mighty thin skin which the St. Louis Post-Dispatch got under. And if “the folks” don’t trust the media, they should just stick to Fox News where it’s all, as clearly demonstrated on “The Factor,” “fair & balanced.” (Not)

H/T: Priscilla at Newshounds