Did you all see this story this morning, I'm betting that you did.
Why Reporters Are Down On Obama
Reporters say the White House is thin-skinned, controlling, eager to go over their heads and stingy with even basic information. All White Houses try to control the message. But this White House has pledged to be more open than its predecessors, and reporters feel it doesn’t live up to that pledge in several key areas:
I say bullshit. This story outraged me on so many different levels that I had to post.
Read the whole thing and you'll find they say the same thing over and over again: The White House plays hardball, they challenge reporters constantly, and they play favorites with the New York Times, and they can't handle being challenged.
It's an amazing whine that you'd laugh over the fact anyone would write this shit up; until you come to this paragraph:
"They ain’t seen nothing yet," the longtime ABC reporter said. "Wait ‘till they have to start really circling the wagons when someone in the administration under attack, wait ‘till there’s a scandal, wait ‘till someone screws up, then it’ll get hostile."
They're basically saying when 2010 ends and Republicans likely end up with the House and start the subpoena frenzy to ensue they'll see what they're going to get. They'll do a Monica on this administration and report every Republican lie like fact.
But they're doing it now anyway.
I'm outraged over this meaningless story for one reason: health care. We saw this most clearly with the death panel lie. That is not a failure of communication or messaging. That was a failure of the mainstream media to educate the people. It speaks to the systemic and endemic failure of the media to simply report. And that is not the White House's fault; it's the fault of a media that will allow lies to take hold. That is willing to report a lie and give it the same billing as the policy itself warping the public's knowledge and facts.
Yesterday, someone said to me that taxes are crazy. I said to him that the taxes haven't been this low in 60 years. He said, we wouldn't have a tea party if that were true, would we. I told him to Google it. He did. He came back and said, you're right. He also said he found out about the student loan reform while goggling about health care, he found out about the fact that his kid could stay on his insurance until he's 26. He found out a lot he was happy about and he said it changed his mind. He was willing to look a the Democrats this year.
That man is a nice guy. He's got a conservative bent; but he voted for Kerry in 2004. (I should add he's an Obama voter whose been frustrated that health care took precedence when folks need jobs in his view.) He isn't a racist. And he doesn't have time to follow the news because he's got three kids, one of them is a special needs child, and both he and his wife work. He doesn't watch Colbert. He doesn't watch the Daily Show. He sees the Nightly News maybe once a week and he missed those health care spreads. He doesn't read the paper.
But he's a nice guy and he's gotten some pretty crappy emails that weren't racist (because that would turn him off) but of the Norquist taxes are destroying you quality. And there is nothing in the media reports to push back on this.
The president constantly said in his speeches about how the stimulus was a great tax credit for the middle class: did the press emphasize this truth when Republicans pushed back? No, they did a he said/he said mishmash as is there practice.
And that's why when they complain about the president's contempt; I have no sympathy. When they're pissed Gibbs stood them up for dinner in Prague, I don't give a shit. When they complain about being frozen out; I say go and REPORT a fucking story and don't look for handouts.
Because reading this entire seven page story one thing stood out in my mind: Howie Kurtz admitting in the Washington Post that the MSM couldn't destroy the death panel lie. And that this failure hasn't given journalists pause, the lack of knowledge about what is in the bill wasn't a messaging failure. Democrats talk about it all the time; it was a reporting failure. Because PEW showed most papers until passage simply spoke about the politics of the situations and not the substance.
They're reaping what they've sown.
ETA: I'm really sorry for posting this and abandoning it! I didn't think this was a rec list post and I actually had work to do, lol. But thank you all and when I get home I will definitely go through this post. Again, I apologize for posting and leaving.