The Depression Will Be Twittered

"I want us to get in on the ground floor of the next band wagon."

(by William Haefeli, for the New Yorker)

“After the stock market crash, some New York editors suggested that hearings be held; what had really caused the Depression? They were held in Washington. In retrospect, they make the finest comic reading. The leading industrialists and bankers testified. They hadn’t the foggiest notion what had gone bad.” 

-Hard Times by Studs Terkel (1970) 

Speaking with NPR on the current financial situation, Jeff Jarvis supposed that, “I don’t think anyone—including the people in charge—can make sense of what’s happening in the country right now…it’s just too big and too complicated, and it requires both too much background and fundamental understanding about economics.” Meanwhile, news on the changing financial climate is flying in at a breakneck speed. People, seeming to want answers, or at least explanations—somebody to translate the current state of financial affairs into English, are tuning in: the week of 9/14 proved to be the highest rated in all of CNBC’s nineteen year history and viewer ship has more than doubled for shows like CNBC’s Mad Money. But what are they getting? What happens when the media can’t keep up with the news? And really, how many experts does it take to explain the news?

Locked into what NPR called a “quick-twitch story cycle, ” journalists are scrambling for the newest, hottest stories before they burn out and the next fire is lit.  Or as this cartoon from the New Yorker so aptly put it, they are fighting for "The ground floor of the the next bandwagon."  In the interim, seems like the MSM has resorted to melodrama to tide over the onlookers until they can sort out what’s going on. Flashy (and vague) headlines about “nightmares,” “meltdown,” and cute smiles are feeding viewers emotional needs, keeping them glued to the media like passerby’s to a car crash.

Is it possible for the media to break from this cycle and provide quantity and quality--up to the moment news and substantive reporting? Perhaps times of high turnover news are better handled by new medias, like bloggers and twitterers, who can provide up to the moment information. As Hamilton Nolan of Gawker put so kindly, “we don’t need more bloggers. Content is really much more worthwhile. Invest in it. Any asshole can blog, shit. You have reporters. Use them!” Talk is cheap, but perhaps, in an economy like this, news is worth investing in.

Offshore & Off Topic

Offshore Drilling Rig, Minerals and Management Services, US Dpt of Interior.  

With the devastation from Gustav and Ike, newspapers can’t stop talking about fuel and energy. But the media’s conversations aren’t putting the right questions out to the public. The physical extraction of nonrenewable resources require a geological/environmental perspective, but the talk almost always buzzes around politics and prices.  As a result, a majority of Americans support offshore drilling even though geologists say it’s a terribly unsustainable and economically unviable

resource.

In early summer, the media wrote of offshore drilling in terms of John McCain as the maverick pushing to end our dependence on foreign oil.

By September, media outlets (NPR, Huff Post) repeated the political shout, “Drill Baby, DRILL!” accrediting Republican representatives as the issue’s frontrunners.  

Search for “Offshore Drilling” on the NYTIMES.com and a huge list of McCain/Obama articles appear….No articles on the first search frames the issue from a factual, scientific approach.

But some outlets are getting a word in from experts.  Here’s a look at () one a blog post that drills deeper than politics and into the statistics/facts about oil shale (If politicians had a better understanding of oil shale extraction, they probably wouldn’t hunt for it).  Dr. Bill Chameides suggests here that news papers are also producing exaggerated figures for the billions of oil barrels that could potentially lie underneath our shore. 

This oil obsession could shift America’s future economy, environment, and foreign policy.  It’s an issue that needs broader perspectives from experts, but with the way the media reports offshore drilling, we only learn that politicians operate on two speeds: walk and drill.   

Palin vs. Palin

The two faces of Sarah Palin in the media
Photo courtesy of CTV

Thursday’s vice presidential debate seemed to be Palin vs. Palin. Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times and Tom Shales of the Washington Post were in agreement that Palin’s opponent was more her image in the media than Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Who. It was Palin of the Katie Couric - Tina Fey fame vs. confident and feisty soccer mom. According to Jane Kim of the Columbia Journalism Review, “the debate was about media representation, billed as self-representation.” With Palin it’s more about the image and less about the issues. In fact she made it exceedingly clear that she would not be answering the moderator’s questions until she had completed her talking points. And who came blame her. Her image in the media is so tarnished (for good reason, some may say) her biggest battle was in fact against the “other” Sarah Palin. On the other hand, she had managed to lower media expectations to a point where David Brooks of the New York Times may be justified in claiming “few could have expected as vibrant and tactically clever a performance as the one Sarah Palin turned in Thursday night.” Few could have indeed. Evan Cornog of the Columbia Journalism review, says it in all his eloquence : "Palin’s abysmal performance in recent press interviews, particularly her talks with Katie Couric of CBS, had lowered expectations so far that anything short of rotating her head 360 degrees and vomiting green slime while masturbating with a crucifix would have counted as a victory." (Reference to the Exorcist)

Grow a pair.

(Cute graphic, but where's the substance? Photo courtesy of abcnews.com)

Whether you watched to see a Palin trainwreck or a legendary Biden gaffe, the debate has come and gone. And it raked in the highest ratings for any Vice Presidential debate in history, besting the Bush Senior-Ferraro debate by nearly 15 million viewers.

While most analysts in the media agree that Biden won the debate, it appears Palin might come out on top by, well, putting her words in the right order...most of the time. New polls are due out on Tuesday.

But why aren't analysts talking more about misstatements by the candidates, particularly Biden's, a few of which he repeated numerous times? The McCain camp issued a press release calling out 14 of Biden's 'lies' (their word, not mine). Jim Geraghty puts the number at 24. On the flip side, the Obama camp released their own fact-check of the debate.

From Biden falsely asserting, more than once, that Obama never said he would sit down with the Iranian president (come on), to Palin's misrepresentations of Obama's voting record on taxes (he raised some, he cut some), viewers were stuck listening to a bunch of spin, ad nauseam.

While I'm aware this is typical debate warfare, can't the media at least try to right the wrongs of the candidates, with deep research and a vested interest in truth-telling? Don't just write a little article with a cute graphic, buried under a bunch of other links. Be a little more motivated to be the watchdogs we need you to be. Call these candidates liars, philanderers and deceitful. Odds are, most of them are anyway.

All is Fair on Politics and Palin.

interview with CBS News's Katie Couric. (image from Cbs News)
Tom Rosenstiel, director of Project for Excellence in Journalism, has not only noted in recent National Journal article that having female candidates in both parties is, "uncharted territory for the American news media" but also, "...some kind of sexism -- is an inevitable byproduct of covering uncharted territory." So how have the press been keeping up?

Although the McCain camp immediately accused the press of bias and sexism, a recent PEJ news index portrayed that, "gender was a focus of only 1 percent of the stories in the coverage of Palin from Aug. 29 to Sept. 15" (National Journal). Incidently the media has been doing their job in highlighting Palin's background.

And although Howard Kurtz reports that journalists are not going to treat Palin differently because she is a woman, GOP persists at the complaint of "gotcha journalism." Nicole Wallace, a senior McCain adviser said:

"We didn't expect anyone to treat her as a cream puff because she's a girl..but 'm shocked personally at how brutal many of the women in the media have been." Wallace pointed to CNN anchor Campbell Brown, who urged the campaign to arrange more interviews for Palin and stop treating her "like a delicate flower who will wilt at any moment."

To me, that's a contradictory statement, like telling the press to stop treating her like a child but at the same time berating the press for sexism and being a bully every time an interviewer (like Couric) presents her with a hardhitting investigative inquiry and she can't handle it.

Full Disclosure or Needless Muckraking?

Should Ifill have moderated the debate, or should the issue have been raised earlier? Image courtesy of www.blackvoices.com

Vice-presidential debate moderator Gwen Ifill has received criticism for her selection – but it’s largely not due to her performance. While there are scathing reviews of how she handled the debate, most are concerned with the fact that she is currently writing a book titled “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.” Ifill notes that she hasn’t even written the chapter on Obama yet, but critics are unconvinced. Michelle Malkin breaks down her history of supporting Obama, and points to a specific clip of Ifill unenthusiastically reporting on Palin’s nomination acceptance speech to illustrate Ifill as partisan. Most troubling about this frenzy is its last-minute nature. Stories were posted Monday about Ifill’s book, and PBS ombudsman Michael Getler responds to claims from the past few days in a Thursday post. The book has been public knowledge for weeks now – is this just an example of the media’s need to find something wrong with every situation?

The Hunt for Red October

“The New Communists”
Scanned by blogger Andrew Potter for Macleans.ca

This image was a full-page ad in September 23rd’s New York Times paid for by Bill Perkins, a Houston-based venture capitalist, who’s obviously disgusted with the government’s plan to bailout Wall Street. As can be seen, it shows Bush, Bernanke and Paulson erecting an American flag (mimicking the iconic American WWII photograph by Joe Rosenthal called “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima”) with a hammer and the sickle and inscribed with “Big Insurance,” “Detroit Auto” and “Wall St. Banks.” In the background you see the tombstones of “Private Enterprise” and “Capitalism.” The message is clear. To some, the bailout is nothing short of financial socialism, and Bush, Bernake and Paulson are the New Communists.

This is a widely held opinion. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky) has called the bailout "economic socialism and “un-American." Martin Schram’s column "The September Surprise shows Bush to be a socialist” says Bush will be remembered as a president who “brought socialism to the citadel of capitalism -- Wall Street.” Every column by Cliff Kincaid, editor of the right wing Accuracy in the Media Report, invokes socialism: Socialist “Bailout” Could Spark Collapse (9/29), Will Conservatives Embrace Socialism? (9/27/), Senator Bunning Blasts “Financial Socialism” (9/24).

Interestingly, most of these critiques don’t actually explain why the bailout could be a bad idea. They operate under the assumption that Americans will stay true to Red Scare logic: “If the bailout looks like financial socialism and everything socialist is bad, the bailout must be bad.” Last time I checked, China’s economy wasn’t doing too badly. I wasn’t around during the Red Scare; can someone tell me what’s wrong with financial socialism?

According to Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model in their book Manufacturing Consent, the ideology of “anti-communism” prevails in the news media. While looking at the coverage of the bailout, does this still apply?

The criticisms of the bailout that invokes socialism is coming from free market freaks on the right who want the bill to fail on principle. This opinion is by no means mainstream. Sen. Jim Bunning’s quotes are buried in the tail-end of NY Times hard news stories. The mainstream, as demonstrated by the stand taken by the two presidential candidates, supports the bill as a necessary evil.

If the anti-communism filter still prevails, the criticism would be front and center. The mainstream media's support of the bailout support is evidence of another of Chomsky's filters, the corporate ownership of the mainstream media. Of course they're going to side with the institutions that sign their paychecks, they're not going to wish destitution on their parents.

But I’d bet in a country with healthy, vigorous, independent media outlets, the bailout would have been openly opposed on the editorial pages of all ideological slants: by those on the far left, eager to see what happens when Capitalism is left to its own devices, and those on the far right, who want to keep the free market intact at all costs.