Media

The Democrats’ Denial-of-Service Attack

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The TV news is all Palin, all the time. And daughter of Palin. Politically this isn’t necessarily bad for Republicans, to the extent it focuses scrutiny on Governor Palin, who I think stands up well to it. However, it is bad (or good, depending on your partisan inclination) in that it removes scrutiny from Obama, who does not. The risk of a media pile-on on Palin was one of the risks McCain took in selecting Palin. Only time will tell if it was a justified risk.

The distributed Obama campaign — including the Obama organization, leftist bloggers and MSM — quickly figured out the dynamics of the situation and are responding effectively. The campaign or bloggers introduce daily talking-points that are repeated and amplified by a media cascade and can generate enough network (online and TV) discussion to crowd out most other topics. That’s what happened today and yesterday. Today’s main talking point was, McCain didn’t adequately vet Palin. This is clearly not true, given that McCain’s people were checking out Palin months ago. Yet given the story about the daughter, the talking point is just plausible enough to give media people cover in keeping it alive for a day as a major story. Conservative and Republican bloggers and MSM people unwittingly help their opponents by focusing even more attention on Palin in order to defend her and correct the record. While all of this is going on, Obama is almost invisible, and he appears to have picked up a few points in the polls. (Notice that the bounce didn’t begin until waves of Palin stories rescued him from the media spotlight.) The concurrent weather story, which isn’t really a story but is being hyped for all it’s worth by the pro-Obama media, further distracts scrutiny from Obama.

Conservative MSM people haven’t quite caught on to the full extent of what is happening. Their supposedly non-partisan colleagues are gleefully helping Obama by repeating endlessly “questions” about Palin that displace both McCain’s message and serious scrutiny of Obama. Who wants to talk about Obama’s relationship with Ayers, or about offshore drilling or tax cuts, when there’s juicy gossip (or merely reckless speculation) to be spread about Palin’s family. On Brit Hume’s show tonight, the conservative commentators were almost sputtering with rage at the Democrats’ dishonest attacks on Palin. Yet these same conservative commentators spent most of their time attempting to rebut the attacks, which means they didn’t talk much about anything else. Larry Kudlow devoted much of his show to defending Palin. Conservative media people watch impotently as their leftist colleagues do Obama’s work. The big-media conservatives aren’t temperamentally or tactically equipped to respond effectively. Perhaps the pro-McCain bloggers will do better.

Obviously Obama would like to keep Palin at the center of media focus. Obviously McCain would like to keep his own policies, and Obama’s failings, at the center of focus. McCain’s electoral prospects depend on how quickly he and Palin can maneuver to shift the focus back to Obama. McCain may yet come out OK if public disgust with scummy media partisanship generates a backlash, or if voters lose interest in the MSM’s dishonest Palin-as-soap-opera meme. Whatever happens, it’s clear that Governor Palin and her family are in for a nasty ride. The leftist political-media complex will go all-out to destroy her as long as attacking her deflects attention from the radical leftist at the head of the Democratic ticket.

UPDATE: Other views, from Rich Karlgaard, Jay Cost and Tom Smith (Smith’s post links to several additional good posts).

“Let the media do the dirty work.”

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Mark Brown, a liberal columnist in the Sun Times, had this to say about Gov. Palin.

Leave her alone. Let it go. Don’t even think about going there. It’s a setup. It’s a trap.
 
I wanted to shout that advice to the Barack Obama campaign Friday, but somebody on the television was telling me it was already too late: Obama’s people had reacted initially to the news of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s candidacy for vice president by belittling her credentials.
 
For Pete’s sake, there’s no reason to do that. Let it happen on its own. Let the media do the dirty work.

Once in a while the mask slips and people blurt out the truth. Here we see Mr. Brown admitting what every rational person knows already. The news media is Obama’s ally, it is partisan, it is in effect an arm of the Democratic Party, engaged in this election on behalf of Sen. Obama. This goes far beyond “liberal bias”, which is also obvious to anyone paying attention. The mainstream media are Obama’s protectors and cheering section. The press area at the Denver convention was full of people with press passes, cheering and chanting along. They are on the team.

The news media is not interested in reporting news about Gov. Palin, or being fair or objective. It is interested in “…belittling her credentials”, it is interested in doing “the dirty work” on behalf of Sen. Obama, to help him win. Brown, who ought to know, since he works at the Sun Times, is telling us that his industry will run interference all the way for Sen. Obama, until he is in the White House, allowing him and his campaign to take the high road.

Thank God these people no longer have a monopoly on news.

Thank God they are part of a dying industry which will not be missed.

BTW, lets all start referring to Sarah Palin as governor. She is the only executive out of the four people at the top of the two tickets. Gov. Palin deserves to be referred to by her office.

UPDATE: Jim Bennett sent this great photo of Gov. Palin with a caribou which is headed for the stew pot. Here’s hoping Sen. Biden is in similar shape, metaphorically of course, after their debate.

UPDATE 2: Lisa Schiffren has an excellent piece about Gov. Palin, and why she has excited the GOP base. It had a nice, big impact on McCain fundraising, which is an objective demonstration of new support. The news media has been mostly wrong about the rationale for this pick. It is much more about mobilizing the party base, and getting the many, many unhappy, reluctant GOP voters excited and willing to work, contribute and vote. The idea that lots of Hillary voters would come over is not plausible. Democrats are good soldiers and will vote for their party on election day. It is much more about taking away the “look-at-the-two-boring-white-guys” theme than about, “I-am-woman-hear-me-roar.” Gov. Palin’s femaleness, in other words, checks one of Sen. Obama’s offensive plays, while her substantive positions mobilize the base.

Obama’s “Brain”

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A brief sojurn into grubby electoral politics:

Recall from years ago, the enormous amount of press received by GOP strategist Karl Rove as George W. Bush’s political “Brain” ? A similar role with Barack Obama is played by Illinois Democratic political consultant David Axelrod, except that Axelrod keeps a far lower profile than Rove did and Axelrod has inifinitely better relationships with the working press, notably with the nominally Republican Chicago Tribune where Axelrod was formerly a political reporter and columnist. Axelrod is also tightly connected to Chicago’s all-powerful Democratic Party boss, Mayor Richard M. Daley, another longtime Axelrod client; and to Exelon/Com. Ed. , the politically powerful Illinois utility that contracts with Axelrod’s public relations firm and whose employees have been among the largest financial donors in Illinois to the Obama campaign.

What kind of campaign can we expect from Axelrod in the general election? Overtly positive themes and public posturing complemented by covertly delievered and mercilessly negative “stiletto” attacks against key people around John McCain that are not directly traceable to Axelrod. The model for this strategy is the previous Obama senatorial campaign in Illinois, where Obama’s two most formidible, centimillionaire, rivals, Democrat Blair Hull and Republican Jack Ryan were personally destroyed in the primaries when salacious details from their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked to the media, which then pressured for their full release, notably in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. Thus, ultimately permitting Obama to run against an out-of-state, clown candidate, religious conservative firebrand Alan Keyes, in the general election.

Negative political advertising is reliably effective, something known since the days of Murray Chotiner running Richard Nixon’s California races, but the information age imposes “blowback” costs when it is used too openly by a candidate. Axelrod’s long courtship of the media will permit similar “fingerprint free” attacks against the GOP to work unless McCain’s campaign is smart enough to start doing social network analysis of key media people crossreferenced with Obama Campaign functionaries and Axelrod associates.

It’s also noteworthy of how little escapes Axelrod’s attention. The conservative intellectual and writer, Dr. Stanley Kurtz, has been digging into the UIC archives on Senator Obama’s extensive political relationship with Dr. William Ayers, the 60’s radical and unrepentant ex-Weatherman terrorist, now a professor of Education at UIC where he is a leading advocate of politicizing teacher certification programs along Leftist lines (Ayers is the son of the late, prominent Chicago business leader, Thomas Ayers, former chairman/CEO of Commonwealth Edison and board member at he Chicago Tribune). Kurtz was invited to be a guest last night on Dr. Milt Rosenberg’s highbrow Extension720 WGN-AM radio show and discuss his research and Rosenberg’s switchboard and email system was instantly flooded and essentially shut down by an orchestrated wave of Obama supporters. While something of a local legend, Rosenberg’s radio show is, in the national media scheme of things, a fairly obscure program. Sort of a conservative NPR, except a lot smarter and writ small.

I would expect the ante be upped against Obama critics to include nuisance suits and worse if the fall campaign tightens.

UPDATE:

It appears that the Obama-Ayers-Annenberg story, which I expect will soon feature the infamous pic of Ayers trampling a U.S. flag in an alley, is making it on to the MSM radar. Michael Barone does a superb job as political anthropologist here, explaining the ” Chicago Way” to Americans in more normal communities:

Obama Needs to Explain His Ties to William Ayers

….Ayers was one of the original grantees of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform organization in the 1990s, and was cochairman of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one the two operational arms of the CAC. Obama, then not yet a state senator, became chairman of the CAC in 1995. Later in that year, the first organizing meeting for Obama’s state Senate campaign was held in Ayers’s apartment. Ayers later wrote a memoir, and an article about him appeared in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayers is quoted as saying. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Ayers was a terrorist in the late 1960s and 1970s whose radical group set bombs at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.

You might wonder what Obama was doing working with a character like this. And you might wonder how an unrepentant terrorist got a huge grant and cooperation from the Chicago public school system. You might wonder-if you don’t know Chicago. For this is a city with a civic culture in which politicians, in the words of a story often told by former congressman, federal judge, and Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva, “don’t want nobody nobody sent.” That’s what Mikva remembers being told when he went to a Democratic ward headquarters to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, and it rings true. And it’s a civic culture in which there’s nobody better to send you than your parents.

Read the rest here.

“Photography as a Weapon”

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Another thoughtful essay by Errol Morris:

…But doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.

Worth reading in full (and shorter than his previous essays on photography).

(A related post of mine is here.)

I Thought This Was a Technology Publication

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This article in Wired (h/t Instapundit) is as of 11:21am CST (14.8.2008) headlined:

Experts Accuse Bush Administration of Foot-Dragging on DNS Security Hole

What’s interesting is that nothing in the article actually mentions the  Administration  at all. Indeed, the article contains no inferences of political intervention of any kind beyond a  vague  statement that the change supported by the article requires some kind of policy change at some level. The article doesn’t even say whether the change is statutory (and thus the responsibility of Congress) or not. Yet, the editor apparently felt compelled to add his own personal perspective.  

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