It is a strange entry on the Sunday opinion page of The Miami Herald: "Palin news is balanced; opinion line up isn't". The right wing spin machine has been hard at work on the mainstream media, trying to drown the outpouring of complaint against McCain's selection of Palin as vice presidential candidate.
Herald ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos reponds to Palin's supporters who are charging in defense, that they are wrong about slanted coverage in the Herald but that they "are right, however, about the paper's opinion columns, where there is a glaring need for a conservative local columnist to balance the many more liberal ones."
I don't think The Miami Herald has anything like a "glaring need" for a conservative columnist. So much of what conservatives have yammered for in the political and economic spheres, has turned out to be false and tinny.
The balance that Herald editorial writers reflect is a return to common sense after a decade of disinformation, lies, and outsized influence in the press of fear-mongerers, charlatans, and liars in the public realm.
Shumacher-Matos' piece is apparently responding to "a large--and alientated" part of the Herald readership. Let that readership go to Rush Limbaugh or to Bill O'Reilly for its news: it already does.
Over the past decade, the conservative right has been organized and aggressive about the matter of challenging the mainstream media-- with coordinated outreach when news articles and opinions are printed that don't match the talking points of their candidates or their ideology.
Shumacher-Matos writes: "Conservative Republican voices overwhelmingly dominate powerful talk radio and may be more adept than liberals at using the blogsphere and viral marketing to spread messages both true and false via the Internet. Cable television is evenly divided between righ and left, the broadcast networks and many large newspapers are cowed, and small-town newspapers are conservative." More adept, scarcely describes how the media folded in behind conservative right in the aftermath of 9/11; helping to sell the war in Iraq as a necessary measure to stop Iraq from using weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be non-existent.
Shumacher-Matos is right that "the McCain-Palin campaign made a strategic decision to run against the "media" as much as running against Democrats, hoping to tap into popular disillusionment with the media." Its campaign, after all, is run by acolytes from the former White House office of Karl Rove-- who proved that it was possible to persuade the American people of a lie if it is repeated often enough as a truth.
As proof, in addition to the grounds for war in Iraq, there is the fraud behind the "ownership society"-- you don't hear very much about that now, do you--, and the various mantras in favor of deregulation of financial debt for Wall Street.
Yes: the media, and The Herald, are "cowed" by advertisers. What Shumacher-Matos doesn't explain, is that they are intimidated in proportion to the diversity of their revenue base and the willingness of publishers and executives to be influenced; breaching the so-called iron curtain between advertising and journalism.
That the wall is regularly breached is a main reason the media missed the once in a hundred year economic meltdown we are in the midst of, today. (An appropriate subject for the Herald ombudsman to investigate.)
Miami Herald opinion writers are not biased: if anything, they reflect the popular revulsion against the spell cast by politicians and their spin machines about "values"; while Americans went on blathering about protecting their cultural values, the value of fiscal prudence was being picked clean and the US economy to run off the rails.
Along those lines, there is a better place for Shumacher-Matos to train his ombudsman attention: whether the publisher of the Herald and other executives should have met with lobbyists and with major developers of Parkland outside the Urban Development Boundary, without business, real estate, and environmental journalists in the Herald conference room.
This question should be asked in the context of deference paid by Herald executives to other developers invited to the newsroom and to the entire matter of failed editorial coverage of the excesses of the building boom-- like allowing the former LBA president Willy Bermello to rant in favor of the housing bubble in 2005 without an opposing point of view.
(Another subject for the ombudsman: why the Herald has failed to support the excellent "Borrowers Betrayed" series with editorials linking for readers the obvious fraud at the top of the political and economic ladder and that afflicting poor people-- the subject of the Herald series-- who were conned into foreclosure and worse by non-existent regulatory oversight of those originating mortgages. It is a similar point to the Pulitzer-prize winning series, "The House of Lies", that also focused exclusively on criminal behavior afflicting poor people, while the Herald failed to connect up with the lobbying and diversion of attention of public officials to repeated assaults against the Urban Development Boundary-- occurring at the same time.)
I understand perfectly well that the economic crisis and competitive media have pushed traditional newspapers to the edge of insolvency; but pandering to the well-organized conservative right is wrong, lead to mistakes by media executives and partly accounts for a national economic crisis.
Recommendation of the week: Robert Baer on Iran: "The Devil We Know". If you have access to ITunes, download the free NPR Fresh Air episode with Baer, 10/2/2008.
9 comments:
Contrary to Gimlet's opinion, there are many conservatives in Miami-Dade that agree with Matos and would welcome a more balanced coverage from the paper. If all we wanted was left wing commentary we would turn to the NY Times.
Then you say that the Herald editorial writers reflect a return to common sense after a decade of disinformation, lies, and outsized influence in the press of fear-mongerers, charlatans, and liars in the public realm. Please folks we are on the brink of electing BO, the biggest liar and charlatan on earth to the highest office in our land.
It is amazing how people who sound like they have some common sense fall for the balony put out by the extreme right wing. If anything I see that the Herald has gone overboard to be fair. It is just when you are running the wrong people to govern us the paper has to be honest and tell us that.
This is what the conservatives are going to vote for?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8__aXxXPVc
This is Not the John McCain New Hampshire Once Loved
by Ken Burns
What happened to John McCain? What happened to the man so many of us in New Hampshire have admired and respected for so long? The fierce bipartisan warrior, the straight talker, the maverick whose ideas nearly everyone found some common ground with now seems missing in action. He seems to have betrayed the very attributes that originally commended him to us and earned our earlier trust and support.
We continue to stand in awe of his heroic service to his country during Vietnam, but now he shamelessly uses those experiences at every opportunity, as if it excuses him from having to answer any really tough questions about the economy or foreign policy. The answer to everything is not to mention his admittedly harrowing POW days. My experience interviewing heroes of war is that most prefer to deflect attention from themselves and let their record speak for itself. McCain seems to think that it buys him a permanent pass. But it is impossible to know how to fight the new wars if you are hopelessly lost in the old ones.
Surrounded and programmed by the lobbyists he once despised, the man who once effortlessly straddled the aisle and spoke from the heart now carefully hews to a prompter-read, soulless far-right agenda.
This is a man who once denounced and purposefully avoided the politics of personal destruction, having felt firsthand its painful consequences in 2000 in South Carolina, but who now wants to win at any cost. By ridiculing his opponent's commitment to public service, he has undermined the very reason we were drawn to McCain in the first place. By trying to steal the mantle of change from the Democrats, he demonstrates only the riskiness of his shoot-from-the-hip style. That may have worked in the Senate and on the campaign trail, but it is hardly presidential. In fact, it is frightening in the extreme and bespeaks an instability difficult to reconcile considering our complicated world and its myriad problems.
More to the point, he continues almost daily to demonstrate that instability and other judgmental and temperamental concerns, issues and complaints that originally brought a slew of challengers into the Republican primary contests. And in the most important decision of his candidacy, he cynically and irresponsibly chose the supremely unqualified Sarah Palin, cheapening the race as if it were some high school popularity contest or the latest "American Idol" competition.
Even the most ardent true-believers among us must be privately shaking in their boots contemplating a heart-beat-away Palin presidency during these difficult times. When Putin acts up, who do you want whispering in your President's ear: Joe Biden or Sarah Palin?
McCain is a man who once championed openness and fairness in government, who now wants to continue the failed policies of the current administration and who increasingly wants to make the crucial decisions of our democracy behind closed doors with the same cronies who got us into this mess in the first place. And he has shown a profound indifference to and often startling ignorance of economic affairs just as our country inches toward depression.
That threatens to make him the next Herbert Hoover if he should win. And his old strong suit, foreign policy, is slipping away too, as gaffe after gaffe displays his fundamental shortcomings. I want my President to know the difference between a Sunni and Shia. John McCain does not.
We in New Hampshire bear some responsibility, I suppose. Thinking we had the old McCain, we gave him a decisive victory in our primary that permitted him to vanquish those challengers. But he betrayed us. If you have to say you're a maverick in your ads, it's clear you're not. The real maverick turns out to be Barack Obama, who bucked his party's establishment and whose once-lonely positions have been adopted by nearly everyone including even the Bush administration. Nearly everyone, that is, except John McCain. So what happened to him?
That's what Granite State citizens have been asking the last few months. The answer is enough to turn us blue.
This article first appeared in the Manchester Union Leader.
Yes, I get my voting advice from Jackie Mason.
I beg to differ. When I'm in Miami I am struck by how liberal the slant is in the editorial pages. The paper may have cultural diversity but not ideological diversity.
>>Please folks we are on the brink of electing BO, the biggest liar and charlatan on earth to the highest office in our land.
Back up your claim.
I for one, find it offensive that John McCain, a man I once found admirable, would take on a total joke (read Palin) of a running mate and then stoop to the lows he as adopted. The Straight Talk Express has derailed and is on a crash course.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden represent at least some semblance of intelligence and reason.
Obama-Biden Ya Betcha! ;-)
What surprises me are the political hacks from both sides of the aisle, but I will clear it up for those tools
1. McCain is clueless
2. Obama is as crooked as the political machine he was raised in
3. BOTH THE DEMOCRATIC AND REPUBLICAN PARTIES CAUSED THIS MESS
4. Also to blame are greedy business and YOU the American citizen
Both candidates suck as bad as their crappy parties.
My choice........well thats like asking me whether I want a s**t sandwich or a piece of s**t -on-a-stick
Vote them all out regardless of party and vote 3rd party wherever a 3rd party candidate is available
Gimleteye is right on as usual. If the media is so liberal how come they did nothing to question the lies coming from the Bush administration in the lead up to the Iraq war? Conservatives need to listen up because your leaders have led you nowhere. Come on over to our side, we won't hold a grudge!
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