Media Matters by Jamison Foser

Media Matters: Matthews for Senate (?)

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:15:26 EST

Chris Matthews' interest in the Pennsylvania Senate seat currently held by Republican Arlen Specter raises the possibility of something that is all too rare among the nation's media elite: accountability.

It has long been clear that if we applied to journalists who cover politics the standards they purport to apply to politicians -- truthfulness, judgment, being in touch with regular Americans, and so on -- many of them would fare quite poorly.

Few journalists are as aggressive as Chris Matthews in purporting to speak for average voters -- or as quick to declare (liberal) politicians to be out of touch with those voters. And few have his track record of failing to live up to the standards he sets for politicians, particularly Democrats. But there is no real accountability in cable news -- no matter how often Matthews is wrong on the facts, or how frequently he offends the concepts of fairness and rational thought, there are rarely consequences.

True, Matthews did have to apologize after a particularly offensive string of commentary about Hillary Clinton earlier this year, though given his long track record of misogynistic comments, it is clear he got off easy even then -- particularly in comparison to his colleague David Shuster, who was suspended after an inappropriate comment of his own. Shuster likely paid the price not only for his own nasty remark about Clinton, but for his more famous colleague's long string of sexist commentary as well. As long as Matthews stops short of Imus-level offensiveness, MSNBC seems quite happy to continue broadcasting his false claims and inane commentary.

Should he run for the Senate, however, Matthews might finally have to answer for his dubious track record. And he'll have to do so outside of his comfortable cocoon of fellow Beltway journalists and political insiders who are too eager to get invited back to ever truly challenge him on his cable program. Indeed, he'll have to do so while facing the very "regular Americans" he has caricatured so grotesquely over the years.

True, Pennsylvania voters aren't much more likely than MSNBC executives to care about Matthews' long string of false claims on Hardball.

But they may well be less pleased than Matthews' bosses at General Electric with his at times effusive praise for President Bush -- and even less pleased with his insults of people who disagree with him. In 2005, for example, Matthews said of Bush: "I like him. Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs, maybe on the left -- I mean -- like him personally." At the time the "real whack-jobs" who disliked Bush constituted a majority of the American public. The following year, Matthews called Bush "a wise man ... almost Atticus Finch."

Matthews' praise for Bush was at its most effusive when Bush gave his "Mission Accomplished" speech in 2003. Praising Bush's "amazing display of leadership," Matthews gushed:

He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. ... He's like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign? ... The president's performance tonight, redolent of the best of Reagan ... He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him -- I mean, he seems like -- he didn't fight in a war, but he looks like he does. ... Look at this guy!

Later that day, Matthews was back at it:

We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton ... They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. ... We want a guy as president.

Matthews' breathless claim that Bush had "won the war" was, of course, premature. But his affection for Bush remained intact. In October 2005, Matthews declared that Bush "glimmers" with "sunny nobility." Later that year, when Bush unveiled his "strategy for victory in Iraq," Matthews praised his "brilliant political move" and derided Democrats as "carpers and complainers." (Keep in mind, it had been more than two years since Matthews announced that Bush "won the war," and still the president felt the need to unveil a "strategy for victory." Yet Matthews didn't care; any criticism of the "strategy for victory" outlined by the president who had supposedly won the war nearly three years earlier was whining.)

If Bush could do little wrong in Matthews' book, it sometimes seemed Barack Obama could do little right, as Matthews frequently ridiculed the Democratic presidential candidate for a preposterous variety of purported shortcomings. (True, Matthews also effusively praised Obama at times, often contradicting his own previous -- and future -- criticisms. Matthews rarely appears burdened by a need to maintain consistent, coherent viewpoints.)

In April, Matthews ridiculed Obama for ordering orange juice in a diner. Let that sit in a moment: Barack Obama asked for a glass of orange juice in a diner, and Chris Matthews belittled him for it. That came shortly after Matthews announced that Obama's bowling form was insufficiently "macho" and said Obama's lack of bowling prowess "tells you something about the Democratic Party." A few weeks later, he suggested Obama was out of touch for playing pool: "Playing pool, not a bad start, but it's not what most people play. People with money play pool these days." Last year, Matthews seemed to suggest that Obama was a flawed candidate because he isn't "beefy" enough: "I don't see a big, beefy alternative to Hillary Clinton -- a big guy. You know what I mean? An ... every-way big guy. I don't see one out there. I see a lot of slight, skinny, second- and third-rate candidates."

The common thread in all these comments -- and many more -- is Matthews' belief that Obama couldn't relate to "regular people." And by "regular people," Matthews repeatedly made clear, he meant "white people":

"How's he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community and from the people who have college or advanced degrees?"

"He can't walk into a dinette with five or six guys there, white guys, in some cases. ... He can't just shake hands and hang out."

"They're the working-class white voters Hillary won and Barack didn't. Can Obama win over the regular folks against John McCain?"

Matthews even suggested that Obama is an "elite" who might not be able to "talk regular" to "the middle class." As evidence for Obama's purported excessive pride and elitism, Matthews pointed to ... the fact that Obama sometimes wears sunglasses when it is sunny. Most "regular people" probably don't think it's all that unusual to wear sunglasses, as long as the wearer isn't courtside at a Lakers game.

Indeed, Matthews himself can be seen wearing sunglasses in this photo of him sitting by the pool at his Nantucket vacation home. No doubt he was thinking about how to "talk regular" to the middle class at the time.

Hosting Ann Coulter in July 2006, Matthews told her, "You write beautifully," adding, "You have a brilliant brain." He described her as "the picture of heaven." Then Coulter called former Vice President Al Gore a "total fag," and Matthews ended the interview by saying of Coulter, "We'd love to have her back."

Which isn't to say he has always praised Coulter. During one broadcast, he asked guests if they find Ann Coulter "physically attractive" and declared that she "doesn't pass the Chris Matthews test."

Which brings us to the most troubling aspect of Matthews' on-air behavior: his treatment of women. When Matthews apologized for what he called a "callous," "nasty," and "dismissive" comment about Hillary Clinton earlier this year, he and MSNBC tried their best to pretend the controversy erupted over a single comment made about a single woman. In fact, Matthews' misogyny goes far deeper than that.

Matthews' comments about Clinton alone paint a clear picture: He has called her a "She devil" and "witchy" and said that men who support her are "castratos in the eunuch chorus" and compared her to a "strip-teaser" and questioned whether she is a "convincing mom" and said she speaks in a "scolding manner" and described her laugh as a "cackle" and suggested that "being surrounded by women" might "make a case against" Clinton being "commander in chief" and called her an "uppity" woman and described her as "anti-male" and obsessed about her "ambition" while ignoring that of the (all male) Republicans running for president.

But Chris Matthews hates Hillary Clinton. He has reportedly said so himself: "I hate her. I hate her. All that she stands for." (If Matthews does run for the Senate, he may soon discover that Pennsylvania Democratic primary voters share neither his hatred of Hillary Clinton nor his view that Barack Obama is insufficiently "macho.") Maybe he doesn't treat other women that badly?

Wrong.

He has described House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as "scary" and suggested she would "castrate" House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. And he has wondered how she could disagree with President Bush "without screaming? How does she do it without becoming grating?" He claimed there isn't a plausible female presidential candidate "on the horizon" because there aren't any "big-state women governors" -- but Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell, and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius all run states with populations comparable to male governors who have recently run for president, including Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Bill Richardson. How large a state does a woman have to run before she qualifies as a plausible presidential candidate to Chris Matthews? One that is twice as large as Mitt Romney's Massachusetts? Three times as large?

One example of his infamously lecherous treatment of female guests was described by the New York Post as a case of Matthews "perving on CNBC hottie Erin Burnett on live TV the other night." Burnett is far from alone in receiving such treatment from Matthews. During one interview of Laura Ingraham, Matthews managed to stop short of asking the radio host on a date -- but just barely. The interview began with Matthews announcing, "I'm not allowed to say this, but I'll say it -- you're beautiful and you're smart" -- and ended in much the same way: "I get in trouble for this, but you're great looking, obviously. You're one of the gods' gifts to men in this country. But also, you are a hell of a writer."

In August 1999, Matthews hosted notorious liar Gennifer Flowers, during which he told her: "I gotta pay a little tribute here. You're a very beautiful woman, and I -- and I have to tell you, he knows that, you know that, and everybody watching knows that; Hillary Clinton knows that. How can a woman put up with a relationship between her husband and somebody, anybody, but especially somebody like you that's a knockout?" After Flowers told him, "Gosh, you make me blush here," Matthews replied, "[I]t's an objective statement, Gennifer. I'm not flirting."

Glad he cleared that up.

None of this has ever seemed to get Matthews into much trouble with his bosses at MSNBC, who are reportedly interested in keeping him around after his contract expires next year. But if he runs for the Senate, with no record to run on other than years of television transcripts, he may soon find that Pennsylvania voters are less indulgent of his cheerleading for Bush, his near-constant ridicule of Democrats, and his frequently offensive treatment of women.

Media Matters: Media pick up where they left off 8 years ago

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:56:09 EST

To anyone who lived through the media feeding frenzy of the 1990s, during which the nation's leading news organizations spent the better part of a decade destroying their own credibility by relentlessly hyping a series of non-scandals, the past few days, in which the media have tried to shoehorn Barack Obama into the Rod Blagojevich scandal, have been sickeningly familiar.

Whenever reporters think -- or want you to think -- they've uncovered a presidential scandal, they waste little time in comparing it to previous controversies. Yesterday, CNN's Rick Sanchez tried desperately to get the phrase "Blagogate" to stick -- the latest in a long and overwhelmingly annoying post-Watergate pattern of ham-handed efforts to hype a scandal by appending the suffix "-gate" to the end of a word.

Sanchez's efforts to create a catchphrase aside, the criminal complaint filed against Blagojevich this week isn't the Watergate of the 21st century -- though it shows signs that it may become this decade's Whitewater.

Right about now, you may be scratching your head, trying to remember what, exactly, the Whitewater scandal was. Didn't it have something to do with a bank? Or a land deal? But didn't the Clintons lose money? How did the congressman who shot the pumpkin fit in?

But Whitewater is quite simple, when it is understood as it should be -- as a media scandal, not a presidential scandal.

As an endless series of investigations, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, revealed, the Clintons broke no law and violated no ethics regulations in connection with Whitewater. They lost money on a failed land deal in which their business partner cheated them. That's all there was. Republicans Ken Starr, Robert Fiske, Robert Ray, Al D'Amato, and Jim Leach, among others, investigated the matter, and none of them found illegality. There was simply nothing there -- except year after year of obsessive, and often dishonest, media coverage, fueled by conservatives who would stop at nothing to destroy the president.

As Joe Conason explains today, "The madness that was eventually classified under the quasi-clinical rubric of 'Whitewater' began, in no small degree, with the dubious idea that Arkansas, the Clintons' home state, was a peculiarly corrupt place -- and that any politician from Arkansas by definition was suspect (but only if he or she happened to be a Democrat)."

Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons noted in Fools for Scandal, his 1994 book about how the media invented Whitewater, "Scarcely a Whitewater story has appeared in the national press that hasn't made references to the state's uniquely 'incestuous' links between business, government, and the legal establishment -- concepts utterly foreign to places like Washington, D.C., and New York City, of course." (Conason and Lyons co-wrote The Hunting of the President, a book that -- along with Fools for Scandal -- are must-reads for anyone interested in the media or politics.)

By portraying Arkansas as thoroughly, and uniquely, corrupt, the media (and Clinton's political opponents) tied him to a long line of misbehavior that had nothing to do with him -- and created the impression that Clinton must be corrupt merely for being from such an ethical cesspool.

Of course, Arkansas was neither thoroughly nor uniquely corrupt.

In addition to the ages-old clichés -- big cities like New York and Chicago; the anything-goes Wild West of Las Vegas and Texas; perennial whipping boy New Jersey -- countless other states and cities have reputations for "unparalleled" corruption. People experienced in Connecticut politics will forcefully argue that their state takes a back seat to no other when it comes to the frequency with which public officials are caught in various degrees of wrongdoing. Then there's Florida, about which the less said, the better. And on and on and on.

Such reputations stem not only from actual examples of actual corruption -- California gave us Nixon; Maryland gave us Agnew; two of the Keating Five, including John McCain, hailed from Arizona -- but from the fact that many people, particularly those who work in politics and the media, tend to engage in a bit of tongue-in-cheek bragging about their home city or state's propensity for scandal.

The point isn't that everyplace is corrupt, or that nowhere is. It's that no location has a monopoly on crooked politicians (nor has there yet been a location over which crooked politicians held a monopoly) -- and that any claim of a city or state's unique history of public officials abusing their office should be taken with a whole shaker of salt. (For what it's worth, USA Today determined this week that "[o]n a per-capita basis ... Illinois ranks 18th for the number of public corruption convictions the federal government has won from 1998 through 2007," behind both Dakotas, Alaska, Alabama, Florida and several other states.)

And yet, here we are again, with an incoming Democratic president who hails from a city we are all supposed to believe is the most corrupt place this side of Dick Cheney's undisclosed location. Chicago, we are told, is a den of villainy so irredeemable it defies credulity to suggest anyone could emerge from so much as a long layover at O'Hare without a closet full of skeletons.

This nonsense was well under way during the presidential campaign, during which John McCain suggested a lack of integrity on Obama's part simply because he is from Chicago. You might think that a man who was a participant in one of the most notorious scandals in the history of the U.S. Senate would be laughed at if he tried to claim his opponent lacked integrity simply because of his ZIP code. Instead, the national media laughed along with McCain, endlessly repeating his witty zinger about Chicago.

And so this week, we've heard over and over how politics in Illinois are rotten to the core.

At Obama's press conference yesterday, the third questioner asked, "What's wrong with politics in Illinois?" Chris Matthews made sure viewers knew that "Barack Obama, of course, rose to political power in a city, Chicago, in a state, Illinois, known for corruption."

ABC's Rick Klein chimed in: "[W]ith one stiff wind, Chicago has grabbed Obama and his transition -- and blown it off-course. ... The underbelly of the Obama political operation, with all its Chicago tints and taints, is now fair game for reporters looking for a story." (Nonsense. If the "Obama political operation" has an "underbelly" featuring actual wrongdoing, it's fair game whether or not a governor is busted in a scandal that has nothing to do with Obama. And if that "underbelly" hasn't actually done anything wrong, Blago's bust doesn't change that -- regardless of tint or taint.)

On his radio show, Bill O'Reilly asked Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass if it is even possible for Obama to have existed in Chicago without being dishonest, leading Kass to reply: "Yes, that is possible. It's also possible that he was found as an infant in a reed basket floating in the Chicago River."

The similarities between the media's current behavior and their shameful performance in the 1990s doesn't stop with their bizarre suggestions that geography is destiny.

One of the central flaws of the media's coverage of the Clintons was that they portrayed nearly everything as evidence of guilt. Perhaps most perverse was the suggestion that the conviction of Clinton Justice Department official Webster Hubbell was evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons. What made that so perverse? Hubbell was convicted, essentially, of stealing money from the law firm in which he and Hillary Clinton were both partners. Hubbell, in other words, stole from Hillary Clinton. The Clintons were Hubbell's victims -- and yet many journalists portrayed his conviction as evidence of their guilt.

Which brings us to Tuesday's New York Times. As Will Bunch has explained, the Times reported that Obama supported an Illinois ethics reform package that passed over Blagojevich's veto, which led to Blagojevich pressing state contractors for contributions before the reform takes effect, which "indirectly contributed to the downfall." Good news for Obama, right? He supported a reform package, even urging the state Senate to pass it over Blagojevich's veto. And yet the Times concludes that this story demonstrates that Obama "has never quite escaped the murky and insular world of Illinois politics" -- as though the fact that Blagojevich allegedly did something improper in an effort to avoid the effects of the reform Obama championed somehow taints Obama. Bizarre.

Most telling is the tendency of many journalists to speculate that the Blagojevich scandal may ensnare Obama without acknowledging that the complaint against Blagojevich contained absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing by Obama, or that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has said, "I should make clear, the complaint makes no allegations about the president-elect whatsoever, his conduct." (You may remember The New York Times' reaction to the Resolution Trust Corporation investigation that exonerated the Clintons of Whitewater wrongdoing in 1995: The "paper of record," which had been relentlessly hyping the non-scandal, all but ignored the RTC report and continued pushing Whitewater.)

Even worse than ignoring Fitzgerald's exculpatory comments, Time actually suggested they are bad news for Obama:

On more than one occasion during his stunning press conference on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald bluntly said he has found no evidence of wrongdoing by President-elect Barack Obama in the tangled, tawdry scheme that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich allegedly cooked up to sell Obama's now vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. But for politicians, it's never good news when a top-notch prosecutor has to go out of his way to distance them from a front-page scandal.

Got that? Fitzgerald said there's no evidence Obama did anything wrong. Bad news for Obama! (For the record: The reason Fitzgerald "has to go out of his way" to distance Obama from the scandal is that news organizations like Time keep going out of their way to baselessly link Obama to the scandal.)

Such attempts to link Obama to scandal via tortured logic and geography rather than more substantive ties were necessary because of the complete lack of substantive ties.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the media's attempts to link Obama to the Blagojevich scandal has been the volume of news reports that are purely speculative -- and not only speculative, but vaguely speculative. That is, they don't even consist of conjecture about specific potential wrong doing. They simply consist of completely baseless speculation that Obama might in some way become caught up in the investigation at some point in the future, for some reason. It's little more than, "Maybe Obama will be involved." Well, sure. And maybe he'll play shortstop for the Washington Nationals next year.

Associated Press reporter Liz Sidoti set the standard for pointlessly speculative news reports with an "analysis" piece declaring that "President-elect Barack Obama hasn't even stepped into office and already a scandal is threatening to dog him." In the very next sentence, Sidoti had to admit that "Obama isn't accused of anything" -- but that didn't stop her from continuing to offer ominous warnings that Obama could be implicated in the scandal, interspersed with concessions that he, you know ... isn't.

Not that Sidoti was unique in stringing together a bunch of coulds and mights and maybes and ifs to create something that vaguely resembles -- but is certainly not -- an actual news report.

ABC's Rick Klein, for example:

The scandal surrounding Blagojevich, the Democratic governor of Illinois, may or may not implicate members of Congress, in addition to at least the outer ring of advisers in the incoming Obama administration.

Got that? The scandal may or may not implicate members of Congress. Awfully hard to argue with that. The modifier "at least" is a nice touch, too -- suggesting that the outer ring of Obama advisers has already been implicated in the scandal (they haven't).

That was par for the course this week, as reporters breathlessly asked what Obama knew and when he knew it (the decidedly non-scandalous answers are apparently "very little" and "very recently").

If you want to make a "scandal" stick to someone despite the inconvenient truth that they aren't actually guilty of the purported wrongdoing in question, one thing you do -- if you're the media covering a Democratic president, or an overzealous conservative -- is continually expand the scandal's definition. So the "scandal" grows and evolves into an amorphous mass of innuendo as political opponents and journalists begin throwing everything against the wall, hoping something will stick.

Eventually what begins as a land deal (in which the Clintons did nothing wrong and lost money) includes an investigation of the tragic suicide of a White House staffer -- and the next thing you know, some B-list congressman is traipsing into his backyard with a shotgun, taking aim at a perfectly innocent pumpkin because the voices in his head told him that gunning down some produce would somehow "prove" that the staffer was murdered as part of an elaborate cover-up of ... well, of nothing. There was nothing to cover up, and no murder to cover it up. The pumpkin died in vain.

And so on Wednesday, the Associated Press issued an article headlined "Questionable associations of Obama." Prompted by the Blagojevich scandal -- which, again, involves no indication that Obama did anything wrong -- the article announces, "In his life and career in Illinois, President-elect Barack Obama has crossed paths with some notable figures who have drawn scorn and scrutiny."

From there, the AP proceeds to describe several such "notable figures," most of whom have little if anything to do with Obama -- or the Blagojevich scandal. What, for example, is Jeremiah Wright doing here? None of their connections to Obama involve so much as a hint of an allegation of legal or ethical wrongdoing. To the extent they are controversial, it is for their views. They couldn't possibly have less to do with the Blagojevich scandal; there is no conceivable reason for the AP to bring them up now -- except to try to fling a bunch of garbage against the wall in hopes of something, somehow, sticking. It's as though the AP, recognizing how tenuous Obama's ties to the Blagojevich scandal are, tried to make it look more substantial by tossing in a bunch of other "notable" ties.

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz complained that it took Obama "24 hours" to decide that Blagojevich should resign, worrying "that kind of excessive caution" could "define his presidency."

Obama called for Blagojevich's resignation within 24 hours, and Howard Kurtz thinks that wasn't fast enough. It's so fast, Kurtz had to measure the time elapsed in hours rather than days. And yet, Kurtz thinks it constituted excessive foot-dragging. This is simply not a sane assessment. It's a desperate attempt to find something to criticize about Obama. Obama is not involved in the scandal, so Kurtz sits by with a stopwatch, trying to document Obama's slow response to it.

CNN's Wolf Blitzer announced yesterday that "some are calling this Obama's first presidential scandal." It isn't. There is no evidence he has done anything wrong. This is not Obama's first presidential scandal -- but it shows signs of becoming the first media scandal of the Obama presidency.

Obviously, the news media should aggressively investigate and report on actual involvement in actual wrongdoing by public figures. There was far too little of that reporting during the Bush administration. (Remember when the media refused to report on the Downing Street Memo? Good times.)

If the news media regains a bit of the skepticism so many of them set aside for the past eight years, that would be an unequivocally good thing, and it should be applauded.

But this week brought signs that much of the media is set to resume the absurd and shameful behavior that defined the 1990s -- guilt by association, circular analysis whereby they ask baseless questions about non-scandals, then claim they have to report on the "scandal" because the White House is "besieged by questions," grotesque leaps of logic, downplaying exculpatory information, and too many other failings to list.

If that happens -- if the media continue to behave as they did in covering Whitewater -- they will damage the country. It's really that simple. We cannot afford to be distracted from serious problems by overheated conjecture and baseless insinuation masquerading as journalism.

Not to mention the outright fabrications. To take just one of many examples, Jeff Greenfield and ABC selectively edited Hillary Clinton's comments during a Whitewater press conference, then accused her of lying -- an accusation that, based on Clinton's full comments, was clearly false. It was a shockingly dishonest report; Greenfield and ABC were simply lying about Clinton -- there's really no other way to put it. Those involved should have seen their reputations take a serious hit -- at the very least. Yet they suffered no consequences due to their dishonorable and unprofessional actions.

That's how the media behaved the last time we had a Democratic president. They devoted wall-to-wall coverage to invented "scandals," ignored exculpatory evidence, saw evidence of guilt everywhere, took people out of context in order to accuse them of lying, and generally behaved like a pack of wild animals who couldn't tell right from wrong or truth from fiction -- or who simply didn't care. As a group, they behaved without ethical standards and without regard for the truth.

It's our responsibility -- all of us -- to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.

Media Matters: The Capus conundrum

Fri, 5 Dec 2008 22:27:47 EST

After Don Imus was fired by MSNBC for racist and sexist comments directed at the Rutgers University women's basketball team last year, NBC News president Steve Capus spoke of the responsibility NBC News and MSNBC have for the content they broadcast. "This is about trust. It's about reputation. It's about doing what's right," he said, later adding, "I hope we don't squander this remarkable opportunity that we have to continue this dialogue that has taken place, to continue the dialogue about what is appropriate conduct and speech, to continue the dialogue about what is happening in America. I think we have, as broadcasters, a responsibility to address those matters."

Capus was right. All broadcasters are responsible for the content they air. But he didn't address something that is just as important -- the responsibility of broadcasters for context they fail to air.

The truth is, what we don't hear from NBC and its sister channels says a great deal more than the flowery vows of responsibility from Capus.

Last week, NBC's Nightly News aired a segment with retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey discussing "Afghan security forces." You'd think that McCaffrey's work for a defense contractor slated to receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department to train a group that is a component of the Afghan security forces would have at least merited a mention -- perhaps even on-screen text noting his involvement?

You'd be wrong:

In a report on the war in Afghanistan, NBC's Nightly News included a clip of retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey discussing "Afghan security forces." But neither NBC News nor McCaffrey disclosed during the report that he is a member of the board of directors of DynCorp International, which has been awarded a $317.4 million contract with the State Department to "provide at least 580 civilian police advisors to advise, train, and mentor the Afghanistan National Police and the Ministry of Interior." According to the State Department, the "Afghan National Police" are one of two components of the "Afghanistan National Security Forces."

Of course, anyone who watches NBC and MSNBC shouldn't be surprised.

Back in April, The New York Times published an explosive report detailing the hidden relationship among numerous media military analysts, the Pentagon, and defense contractors. Following suit, Media Matters released an exhaustive report which found that since January 1, 2002, McCaffrey and others named in the Times report appeared or were quoted more than 4,500 times by news outlets, including more than 600 appearances by McCaffrey alone on NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.

In a follow-up article published last week, the Times focused on McCaffrey's ties to contractors and appearances on the various NBC channels. Steve Capus -- the same Steve Capus who last year extolled the virtues of "responsibility," "trust," and "doing what's right" -- responded by contending McCaffrey need not follow NBC's conflict-of-interest rules because he's a "consultant."

Spin, baby, spin.

On Monday, Salon's Glenn Greenwald published emails obtained from a source reportedly between McCaffrey and NBC executives that uncovered efforts between the two parties to coordinate their spin and response to the Times:

Rather than honestly investigate the numerous facts which [Times reporter David] Barstow uncovered about McCaffrey's severe conflicts, NBC instead is clearly in self-protective mode, working in tandem with McCaffrey to create justifications for what they have done. As these emails reflect, both this weekend's story about McCaffrey and the earlier NYT story in April have caused NBC News to expend substantial amounts of time, effort and resources trying to manage the P.R. aspects of this story.

But remarkably, this "news organization" has still not uttered a peep to its viewers about these stories; has not reported on any of the indisputably newsworthy events surrounding the Pentagon's "military analyst" program; and continues to present McCaffrey to its viewers as an objective source without disclosing any of the multiple connections and interests he has that would lead any reasonable person to question his objectivity.

Perhaps most notable of all is how plainly dishonest the NBC response to Barstow is -- a response which, unsurprisingly (given their coordination) is tracked by the response posted on McCaffrey's website and by his hired P.R. agent, Robert Weiner, who is pasting a defense of McCaffrey in various places on the Internet (including my comment section yesterday) without identifying himself as such. As their only defense to these accusations, both NBC and McCaffrey are repeatedly emphasizing that McCaffrey criticized the Bush administration and Donald Rumsfeld's prosecution of the Iraq War, as though that proves that McCaffrey's NBC commentary was independent and honest and not influenced by his numerous business connections to defense contractors.

Both NBC and McCaffrey are either incapable of understanding, or are deliberately ignoring, the central point: in those instances where McCaffrey criticized Rumsfeld for his war strategy, it was to criticize him for spending insufficient amounts of money on the war, or for refusing to pursue strategies that would have directly benefited the numerous companies with which McCaffrey is associated.

McCaffrey's criticism of Bush's war management doesn't disprove accusations that he was deeply conflicted when appearing as an NBC "analyst"; to the contrary, the criticisms he voiced constitute some of the most compelling evidence proving that McCaffrey should never have been on NBC -- and still should not be.

Greenwald's entire piece is a must-read. The emails he obtained will turn your stomach. They paint a pretty dismal picture of the state of affairs that is NBC News under Capus.

On Wednesday, David Brock, the founder and CEO of Media Matters, sent Capus an open letter expressing deep concern over this ongoing lack of disclosure, which sparked a call to action. The letter read, in part:

You [Capus] contended in a recent New York Times article that Gen. McCaffrey is not obliged to abide by NBC's formal conflict-of-interest rules because he is a consultant and not a news employee. However, failing to acknowledge his ties to the defense industry on-air jeopardizes both his credibility and the credibility of your network because full disclosure is the minimum requirement when the integrity of journalism is at stake.

To eliminate even the appearance of a conflict of interest or doubt over the integrity of NBC News, it is imperative that in the future Gen. McCaffrey's role as a defense contractor be fully disclosed during his appearances, particularly when he is discussing topics of interest to his clients. As recently as November 27, NBC aired a clip of Gen. McCaffrey saying that "Afghan security forces" are the "answer" to the stalemate in Afghanistan -- without disclosing that DynCorp International has been retained by the State Department to train the Afghanistan National Police, one of two components of the Afghanistan National Security Forces.

This is far from an isolated incident; Media Matters has documented numerous examples this year of failures by NBC and its sister channels to disclose apparent conflicts of interest displayed in their news reports and of their on-air reporters, anchors, contributors, and guests.

MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews is the latest culprit, using his prime-time program to preen for Pennsylvania viewers while he reportedly contemplates a run for U.S. Senate in the Keystone State. As Media Matters reports:

Noting news reporting that MSNBC's Hardball host Chris Matthews is considering running for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania, Democratic strategist Phil Singer asserted in a blog post, "If Chris Matthews is seriously considering a run ... he shouldn't be on the air right now." Singer went on to ask: "How could he do an interview with [Democratic Pennsylvania Gov.] Ed Rendell?" Indeed, Matthews has repeatedly gushed over Rendell during interviews with the Pennsylvania governor or when speaking about him on MSNBC throughout the past year.

We're probably more likely to see Dick Morris admit he doesn't have any idea what he's talking about, ever, than see anyone at NBC or MSNBC address this ethical issue on the record before Matthews makes his intentions public. As Politico's Michael Calderone points out:

NBC is maintaining a strict code of public silence on the issue, but there's only so long that network executives can brush everything off as mere rumor and innuendo.

[...]

Matthews, on the other hand, has helped fuel speculation by meeting with Pennsylvania political leaders, talking about his boyhood dream of being a senator, publicly professing his love for the Phillies and flattering Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell on his show. Privately, he's had conversations with several political operatives to lay the groundwork for a possible run.

On Monday, Matthews' two worlds -- potential candidate and talk-show host -- almost collided, as he met with political insiders in Philadelphia to discuss the Senate run and then hosted "Hardball" from the city a few hours later.

[...]

But so far, NBC has been unwilling to comment on multiple reports, and the network's coverage of Specter and potential challengers doesn't include Matthews.

If past is prologue, Calderone shouldn't hold his breath waiting for Capus to adequately address the ethical foibles of one of MSNBC's marquee talents -- he's going to need some outside encouragement from the very people watching Matthews night after night.

The conflicts of interest at NBC are by no means the sole domain of anchors, reporters, and guests -- they've also infected news reports on important issues.

This past summer, as the energy crisis ate up significant airtime, NBC News and MSNBC seemed to join the conservative chorus of "drill, baby, drill" as Today, Nightly News, and MSNBC Live broadcast segments live from an offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

I wonder whose parent company is a major supplier of equipment and services for the offshore drilling industry ... hmmm, I can't quite put my finger on it.

As Media Matters documented at the time:

In the midst of the debate over lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling, NBC's Today and Nightly News, as well as MSNBC Live, aired segments on June 26 in which NBC correspondent Janet Shamlian reported live from a drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico owned by Chevron Corp. But while two of Shamlian's reports included quotes from a Chevron spokesperson, none of her reports included an interview with or quote from any environmental organizations. And though Shamlian acknowledged the existence of "environmental debates" in one report and in another that "[m]any people believe there are environmental concerns," Shamlian did not explain those concerns. Further, neither Shamlian nor the anchors and hosts of the broadcasts on which her reports aired mentioned that General Electric Co., which holds a controlling interest in NBC Universal, has an affiliated business unit that is invested in the acquisition and production of oil and natural gas and another that is a major supplier of equipment and services for the offshore drilling industry.

These reports were hardly alone. They were kept company throughout the summer as NBC/MSNBC played fast and loose with journalistic ethics during coverage of the energy crisis.

In June, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell hosted a discussion on energy policy with former Sens. John Breaux and Trent Lott -- who she noted had just "formed a firm" together.

Viewers were treated to a conversation ranging from the energy policies of Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama to energy independence and the need for increased oil and gas production as Lott and Breaux struck a classically conservative tune. Left on the green room floor, however, was any mention of what exactly Breaux and Lott's new firm, the Breaux Lott Leadership Group, actually does.

Had Mitchell enlightened her MSNBC audience, they would have known that their firm conducts lobbying and that its clients include oil and gas companies Chevron, Shell, and Plains Exploration & Production Co.

Just two weeks later, on MSNBC Live, Chris Jansing again hosted Lott for a discussion of McCain's energy policy, and like Mitchell before her, she failed to inform viewers that Lott is on the payroll of the oil and gas industry.

Despite having failed to note Breaux and Lott's connections to the oil and gas industry, Mitchell eventually took the right first step of disclosure, informing her audience of the former senators' ties during an appearance later that summer -- this after Media Matters pointed out the problem and criticism mounted.

Mitchell is actually an excellent teaching tool here for Capus. Now that he is well aware of the problem -- and believe me, he's well aware -- he has an obligation to actually do something about it.

All the spin in the world can't dig NBC out of the ethical hole it has dug for itself this year. Capus shouldn't even try. Instead, he should do the right thing and take the first step in the right direction.

Maybe he thinks those who care about the integrity of the news they receive will just walk away.

If so, he couldn't be more wrong.

Karl Frisch, communications director for Media Matters, is filling in for Jamison Foser this week while Foser is away on a much-deserved vacation.

Editors Note: Frisch worked at MSNBC for one week leading into the 2004 presidential election helping to produce segments featuring Democratic strategist Joe Trippi.

Media Matters: When did experience become a flaw?

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:56:43 EST

Midway through Bill Clinton's first year as president, Time magazine reported that among the new president's problems was "a staff that has almost no White House or executive experience," pointing to then-political director Rahm Emanuel as a prime example.

Fast-forward 15 years: President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Emanuel to serve as his chief of staff. With years of high-level White House work under his belt, not to mention the connections and clout that come from having been one of the most powerful members of Congress, it would be quite a stretch to say that Emanuel lacks the experience to effectively serve Obama. So this time, some in the media have a different complaint. As CNN's Anderson Cooper put it, Emanuel is "probably the ultimate Washington insider. ... [T]he critics will say, well, look, if Obama is talking about change, why is he having a Washington insider?"

So: Emanuel was insufficiently experienced to serve as political director in 1993 -- and now we're to believe that he's too experienced in Washington to serve as chief of staff? What gives? Was there a brief window in 2003 in which Emanuel's level of experience was just right? Or is there something strange about the media's assessment of President-elect Obama's staffing decisions?

That Time assessment of Emanuel in 1993 was not unique. For 16 years, there has been near-universal agreement that the Clinton administration's early struggles (real and perceived) were in large part due to a lack of White House and Washington experience on the part of Clinton's staff.

Clinton hadn't even taken office before USA Today reported in December 1992 that the "limited Washington experience" of the incoming White House chief of staff, Mack McLarty, "raises the specter of Jimmy Carter's inexperienced inner circle." Six months later, Newsweek noted that McLarty's "lack of familiarity with Washington ways is now considered a political liability." The influential journalists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover later wrote that the choice of McLarty had been "a major surprise and the brunt of considerable criticism, on grounds that McLarty, like Clinton himself, was inexperienced in the Washington meat grinder."

By mid-1994, when a staff restructuring resulted in Leon Panetta's appointment as chief of staff, an Albany Times-Union editorial was typical of media reaction:

[Clinton's] sudden shuffle of White House staff is the latest evidence that he has finally grasped a central fact of Washington political life: It's not the place for the inexperienced, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.

[...]

He's also learned that the chief of staff position is no place for a neophyte. It takes someone with Mr. Panetta's credentials as an insider to fill this pivotal post. That's all the more true at a time when the White House is trying to push through key health care and welfare legislation.

During a January 2001 look back at the Clinton presidency, Nightline host Ted Koppel summed up years of conventional wisdom: "The new president had put together a staff with virtually no experience in governing from the White House" -- something Nightline made clear was a mistake.

When President George W. Bush chose Andy Card, who had served in senior White House roles in two previous administrations, as his chief of staff, the selection -- along with decisions to put other longtime Washington insiders in key positions -- was received favorably by the news media.

Three days into Bush's presidency, CNN's Bill Schneider told viewers that "Bush is now surrounded by a lot of insider Washington deal makers, who have a lot of experience; like Dick Cheney and Andrew Card, his chief of staff; Paul O'Neill at treasury, and Donald Rumsfeld at defense. I think, a hard line and a smiling face and a willingness to make deals -- that could be a formula for success." A month later, The Washington Post ran a 2,000-word profile of Card that emphasized the benefit of Card's experience and portrayed him as bringing efficiency and order to the White House.

So, the history is clear: President Clinton was lambasted by the news media for not having enough old Washington hands on his staff; President Bush was praised for choosing veterans of previous Republican administrations.

Which brings us back to the present, and to the bizarre spectacle of journalists and pundits blasting Barack Obama for choosing staff members and Cabinet secretaries who are experienced and qualified.

Here, for example, is MSNBC's Chris Matthews, noting that Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, John Podesta, and Rahm Emanuel either have or are reported to have roles in Obama's transition or administration:

This is what you do when you don't have elections. You simply promote the people ... who had the deputy jobs. You can do this in any bureaucratic state. You could do it in the old Soviet Union, do it anywhere you have a bureaucracy. You don't need to hold elections to promote deputies to the top job when it comes time, right? You don't need elections for this crap, do you? ... You just keep promoting people from within in any old, tired bureaucracy. That's what you do.

This is nothing short of insane.

Eric Holder, reportedly Barack Obama's choice for attorney general, did indeed have one of the "deputy jobs" at the Justice Department -- in the Clinton administration, not the Bush administration. It's a pretty safe bet that if we didn't have an election a few weeks ago -- if the Bush administration were continuing indefinitely -- Eric Holder would not be the next attorney general. It's an even safer bet that Rahm Emanuel would not be chief of staff. Much of the nation may wish the Bush administration never happened, but it did. None of the people Matthews mentioned are being "promoted from within" -- not a single one.

(Matthews, by the way, was unconcerned about hiring officials from former administrations when George W. Bush was doing the hiring: In 2001, he praised Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell as "real heavyweights in terms of experience.")

Matthews' MSNBC colleague Pat Buchanan is very much on the same page, repeatedly complaining that the incoming Obama administration will be filled with "retreads." Yes: Pat Buchanan, born and raised in Washington, D.C.; educated at Georgetown; a veteran of two GOP White Houses and himself twice a candidate for the presidency; a 20-year fixture on cable news -- that Pat Buchanan is complaining about too many "retreads."

That was a common theme on MSNBC, where longtime Washington insiders Chris Matthews, David Gregory, and Christopher Hitchens -- among others -- suggested that the choice of former Clinton administration officials was contrary to the idea of "change":

Chris Matthews: "The possibility that Barack Obama might pick Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state has a lot of people asking, 'Whatever happened to change, the change we can believe in?' "

David Gregory: "Is this change you can believe in? The Obama team is going to face these questions about big-time Clinton administration people into the fold now in some of the biggest jobs in the Cabinet. Eric Holder certainly fits that bill."

Christopher Hitchens: "This is the woman who, if you were for change that you can believe in, whichever change it was, you were voting against. ... [I]t's Clinton redo, not just Rahm Emanuel. Whatever this is, it's not change."

This has been a sentiment expressed commonly in the media, nowhere more frequently than on MSNBC, but the suggestion that bringing on former Clinton administration officials -- even Clinton herself -- is inconsistent with a desire for change is pure bunk. Asserting such inconsistency requires some deeply flawed assumptions: that everyone who worked in the Clinton administration is alike; that the Clinton and Bush administrations pursued identical policies with identical effectiveness; or that the desire for "change" is simply a desire for change in the types of people who hold government jobs.

People want a change in policy and a change in effectiveness. They want a change from George W. Bush, of whom disapproval is near-universal. The idea that 67 million people voted for Barack Obama because they disliked the Clinton administration is ludicrous. It ignores the wide and deep disgust with the direction Bush has taken the nation and the stunning incompetence with which he has done so. And it overlooks the obvious fact that people voted for Barack Obama because they like him and they like his policy positions.

But there is no evidence -- none -- that the nation as a whole has a deep desire to shun some of the people most qualified and experienced for administration jobs simply because they worked for Bill Clinton. Hard-core Republicans and Washington journalists may have such a desire, but that's about it.

The whining from journalists about Clinton alumni in the Obama administration is even sillier when you consider that they would presumably criticize Obama if he chose people without prior White House experience, as they criticized Bill Clinton. So the only way Obama can escape criticism is if he hires a bunch of people who worked in the Reagan and Bush administrations. Perversely, after two straight elections in which the American people convincingly rejected failed Republican rule, the punditocracy would be less likely to criticize Obama for abandoning his promise of change if he retained the services of the very Bush administration officials who screwed up the country so badly in the first place.

No piece of transition news has rankled the chattering class as much as the rumored selection of Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state -- not, in most cases, because they think her unqualified, but because they just don't like her. Christopher Hitchens, for one, lashed out at the news on MSNBC, leading the cable channel to treat his comments as though they were both surprising and important. They are neither. Hitchens hates the Clintons. Maybe not as much as he hates Mother Teresa, but there is little doubt that he hates them. Christopher Hitchens criticizing a Clinton is roughly as surprising as a Boston native speaking ill of New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter.

Despite the fact that there is no indication that anyone outside of its own studios cares what Christopher Hitchens has to say about the Clintons, MSNBC has played his comments over and over again, and even invited him back on the next day to interview him about their previous interview of him. Host David Gregory explained MSNBC's obsession with Hitchens' comments by insisting -- all evidence to the contrary -- that "everybody is talking about" them.

Hitchens' bizarre comments about Hillary Clinton included his claim that he has never heard that she is respected by military leadership -- a claim that, if true, merely confirms that Hitchens knows far too little about Clinton for his assessment of her to be taken seriously. And he claimed that in 1993, Hillary Clinton instructed her husband not to intervene in the Balkans because she was afraid that it would interfere with her health-care initiative -- but the book he cited to support his claim does not do so.

As Media Matters' Eric Boehlert noted this week, the media has been essentially alone in their anguish about Clinton serving as secretary of state:

The press represents nobody but the press on this topic. Meaning, the press has no political cover on this story because there's no partisan angle to the SoS story, which means their long-running Clinton hatred is just sort of out there, exposed for all to see.

Think about. It's been virtually impossible to find any senior members of Congress--Republican or Democrat--who publicly oppose Clinton as the SoS, which in and of itself is rather astonishing.

And within the liberal blogosphere, where one might expect there to be vocal opposition to Clinton since so many within the netroots opposed her during the primaries, most A-list writers have been extremely quiet in terms of airing opposition.

[...]

So, if you're keeping score at home, that means the Obama White House is in favor of Clinton, Republicans in Congress are in favor, Democrats in Congress are in favor, and liberal activists are, essentially, in favor. (And so are most Americans.)

In the early stages of the last two administrations (both the result of "change" elections), the media made much of the importance of new presidents bringing on old hands with White House experience. Suddenly, they portray such moves as inconsistent with the idea of "change." There are really only two possible explanations for this inconsistency: They are blinded by their hatred of the Clintons, or are desperate for something -- anything -- to use as an excuse to criticize Obama.

Either way (or both), they look like fools by coming down in favor of inexperience. America is a nation at war, with stock and housing markets that are falling faster than a flock of turkeys dropped out of an airplane, a broken health-care system, and countless other problems -- and the punditocracy thinks Barack Obama should refuse to hire anyone who worked in the most successful administration of the past several decades. Incredible.

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.

Media Matters: The media's Minnesota debacle

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:38:07 EST

With only about 200 votes out of nearly 3 million cast separating Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman and his Democratic challenger, Al Franken, the race is headed to a recount.

Naturally, conservative radio hosts are working themselves into a lather, baselessly accusing Democrats of trying to "steal" the election. That shouldn't surprise anyone. But NBC and The New York Times have also pushed the dubious notion that the Minnesota recount has been plagued by chaos and impropriety.

Here's how Meredith Vieira, co-host of NBC's Today, began a report on the Minnesota recount: "If you thought the election debacle in Florida could never happen again, wait until you see the situation in Minnesota."

This is nonsense. The "debacle" in Florida wasn't that there was a recount; the "debacle" was an absurdly designed ballot that led to thousands of people who meant to vote for Al Gore voting for Pat Buchanan instead. The "debacle" was that thousands of voters were improperly purged from voter rolls. The "debacle" was that the state's electoral votes were awarded to the candidate for whom fewer voters attempted to cast ballots. None of those factors are present in Minnesota.

The Minnesota Senate race is simply in the midst of a recount. Recounts happen. They aren't the illegitimate, anything-goes street fights the media pretend they are; they are a part of how elections work, their process written into law and executed every year. They are necessary, for a perfectly obvious reason: They make it more likely that the candidate who receives the most votes takes office. That is an unequivocally good thing.

During that Today segment, reporter Lee Cowan announced that the situation "has some remembering shades of Florida, of butterfly ballots and hanging chads. There are neither of those here."

What possible reason could there be for bringing up "butterfly ballots and hanging chads," given that "there are neither of those" present in Minnesota? Whatever the intent, the effect is clear -- it creates the impression that the situation in Minnesota is utter chaos, a "debacle" in the making.

Cowan continued: "Still, ballots have suddenly appeared out of nowhere, including some found unsecured in an election worker's car."

That appears to be completely false. Election officials have said the ballots did not "suddenly appear[] out of nowhere," and they were not "unsecured." The claim about unsecured ballots in a car appears to have originated with Norm Coleman's lawyer. Cowan did not attribute the car story to anyone or anything, he simply asserted it as fact. Adopting and repeating Coleman's lawyer's claims as though they are facts is bad enough. What makes it worse is that the lawyer had already backed off the claim. Two full days before Cowan's report, the Coleman lawyer had been quoted saying that "we've heard enough from the city attorney to let go of this. It does not appear that there was any ballot-tampering, and that was our concern."

So Cowan offered a sensational and -- by his own acknowledgement -- wholly irrelevant comparison to the "butterfly ballots and hanging chads" of the 2000 recount. Then he made a false assertion of ballots materializing out of thin air, and of unsecured ballots -- an assertion that seems to have been based entirely on the already-retracted claims of a Coleman campaign lawyer.

Vieira concluded the segment by referring to the "mess in Minnesota." But there is no mess. There is simply a recount -- a recount that does not involve butterfly ballots or hanging chads, a recount that, despite the best efforts of Vieira and Cowan to convince us otherwise, has not a thing in common with the "debacle" in Florida. Just a simple recount.

Today's New York Times similarly promoted the idea of chaos and impropriety in the Minnesota recount -- without actually providing any evidence or examples. The Times reported:

If Fritz Knaak has his way, Mr. Franken will never have a shot at solving those problems. A lawyer hired by Mr. Coleman expressly for the recount, Mr. Knaak described himself as "the new gun with the shiny pistol." Citing suspicion over what he called a series of "shenanigans" that have narrowed Mr. Coleman's lead, he has requested the official paper tape with the number of ballots and the time stamp printed out by each ballot machine, in every voting precinct.

The Times gave no examples of "shenanigans" or any indication of who is "suspicious" that such "shenanigans" have occurred. Nor did it give any indication that it asked Knaak for examples of either shenanigans or suspicion.

Later in the article, the Times reported:

Mr. Coleman's campaign manager, Cullen Sheehan, accused the Franken campaign of "a brazen, last minute act of desperation," by asking Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, to reconsider 461 rejected absentee ballots.

Mr. Franken's lead lawyer, Marc Elias, called such assertions of ballot stuffing "fanciful and bogus."

But there were no "assertions of ballot stuffing" -- none the Times reported, anyway. The Times simply quoted Coleman's campaign manager saying the Franken campaign's request to reconsider previously rejected ballots is an indication of "desperation." That's quite different from making an allegation of "ballot stuffing."

Then the Times reported that Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten expressed concerns about the ability of Minnesota's Democratic secretary of state, Mark Ritchie, to act impartially during the recount, without indicating Kersten's own political leanings. As Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert explained, "Kersten is a right-winger who smeared Franken right before Election Day as a 'slanderer of Christianity.' "

Next, the Times quoted a "Republican researcher" who is "very, very concerned" about Ritchie. Then it quoted Sean Hannity saying "[f]ishy business" is occurring in Minnesota, where Democrats and elections officials are "up to no good." To what "[f]ishy business" was Hannity referring? Were his allegations legitimate? The Times did not say.

Finally, the Times quoted the Facebook status of "Noah Rouen, 34," a Minnesota man on a pheasant hunt who, along with his friends, "could not help but hatch a conspiracy theory."

If it seems the Times is desperate to find people concerned about the legitimacy of the Minnesota recount -- resorting to quoting vague allegations from hard-right partisans like Sean Hannity and Facebook conspiracy theories -- maybe that's because Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota's Republican governor, says there is "no actual evidence that there's been any fraud or problems." (That quote didn't appear in the Times article; maybe it got cut to make room for the pheasant hunter's Facebook status.) And as Media Matters noted, the Times did not note that Pawlenty said that the bipartisan state canvassing board Ritchie appointed to oversee the recount was "fair" and that a lawyer for Coleman's campaign reportedly said that the "state should feel good about who's on the panel."

The news media's tendency to compare any recount to the "butterfly ballots and hanging chads" made famous during Florida's 2000 recount, and to breathlessly report the merest rumor of impropriety, is not merely lazy and absurd and sensationalist. It is also dangerous. It causes people to be frightened and concerned about all recounts -- to be wary of the very concept of recounts. But recounts needn't be like the "debacle" of 2000; in fact, they rarely are. They are far more frequently the best way to ensure that errors in counting do not result in the candidate who received fewer votes taking office. (Indeed, in 2004, a manual recount in the Washington governor's race reversed the results of the initial Election Day tabulations and machine recount.) Sensational and baseless reporting like that produced this week by NBC and The New York Times runs the risk of undermining public confidence in an essential part of the democratic process.

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.

Media Matters: All over but the lying

Fri, 7 Nov 2008 20:25:53 EST

On Tuesday, Americans chose as their next president an African-American named Barack Obama who campaigned on a near-universal health-care plan, allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire, and a move away from the belligerent foreign policy of the past eight years. Republicans, and some journalists, had spent months (falsely) saying Obama is the single most liberal member of the U.S. Senate -- and maybe even a socialist. The American people responded by electing him in a landslide.

This, naturally, is very good news for the Republicans, according to many pundits. It proves once again that America remains a "center-right" nation.

Right about now, you're probably scratching your head, wondering how the election of the "most liberal" member of the Senate, a man who campaigned on a promise of near-universal health care, could possibly be described as evidence of a conservative country.

To be sure, it requires some creative thinking.

NBC's Tom Brokaw, for example, looked at county-by-county election results and concluded that counties carried by John McCain account for greater land mass than those carried by Barack Obama. This would be meaningful, if only fields and streams and rocks and trees were conservative voters. But they aren't: They are fields and streams and rocks and trees. They are neither liberal nor conservative; they tell us nothing about the nation's political leanings. People tell us something about the nation's leanings -- and more people voted for Barack Obama.

Then there's CNN's John King Wednesday night. Just try to follow his logic:

KING: Without a doubt, the electorate voted for Barack Obama, but still perceives him to be a liberal. And one thing you don't want to do when you win an election like this, a sweeping election like this, is alienate the people here in a place like Cincinnati. Why? George W. Bush carried that county four years ago. You don't want to drive them away.

[...]

So, Barack Obama is making inroads in communities that not too long ago voted Republican. The last thing you want to do if you want to keep them four years from now is to alienate them with a liberal agenda.

That simply does not make any sense. John King says Barack won a "sweeping election" even though the electorate "perceives him to be a liberal" -- so he better not pursue a "liberal agenda" or he will "alienate them."

Got that?

Later that same night, King added that Obama "does not get a mandate to be a liberal." Again, this is pure nonsense. John King says voters perceive Obama to be a liberal. John King says Obama won a "sweeping victory." And yet John King says that Obama's sweeping victory among an electorate that considers him a liberal does not constitute a mandate to be a liberal. This is illogical, self-discrediting foolishness.

At least King was considerate enough to debunk his own absurd conclusions in near-real time. Conservatives making similar claims were not so kind.

Media Research Center president Brent Bozell -- who does not get nearly the recognition he deserves for being one of the most clownish figures in the conservative movement -- took to Fox News to announce that Obama had won by campaigning as a "Reaganite" and a "fiscal conservative."

Couple of problems with that claim.

First, Bozell didn't explain what he meant by "fiscal conservative," but its typical meaning -- supportive of restrained spending and balanced budgets -- is so far removed from the actual governing performance of actual conservatives that the phrase ought to be retired from use.

Second, Bozell's claim that Obama won as a "Reaganite" is a little odd, given that it wasn't that long ago that conservatives were saying Obama was campaigning on a "redistribution of wealth" that constituted "socialism." And when I say "conservatives," I mean Brent Bozell. And by "it wasn't that long ago," I mean last week.

(How much of a fraud is Bozell? In 1998, Bozell claimed the media weren't paying enough attention to Monica Lewinsky -- at a time when there were 500 news reports a day on the topic. Now he's alternately claiming Obama is a "socialist" and a "Reaganite." And in his column last week, he complained that a recent Project for Excellence in Journalism study overstated the extent of negative coverage of Obama by including "talk-radio hosts from Rush Limbaugh to Randi Rhodes" who are supposed to "express an opinion." But that complaint is completely false. The study in question specifically excluded talk radio. It's right there in the study's methodology: "Talk radio stories, which are part of PEJ's regular NCI, were not included in this campaign study of tone." If Brent Bozell tells you the sun is shining, you better grab an umbrella.)

It isn't hard to figure out why Brent Bozell makes absurd claims about Obama winning as a "Reaganite" -- he's an ideologue with far greater commitment to his agenda than to the truth.

But why would Tom Brokaw and John King and Newsweek and countless other Beltway journalists and pundits continue to say things like "America remains a center-right country" and insist that Barack Obama's clear victory does not constitute a mandate for the progressive policy positions he ran on?

It might have something to do with the long-held assumptions of many journalists and pundits (and more than a few progressives) that progressives are inherently politically weak and conservatives are inherently politically strong.

Three of the most foolish pieces of punditry of the past several years reflect such assumptions.

Newsweek's Howard Fineman announced in late 2005 that Democrats were justifiably "gloomy" about their electoral prospects. It seemed preposterous, given that President Bush's approval ratings were in the tank, his mishandling of Hurricane Katrina had enraged the nation, and Republicans in Congress were being fitted for orange jumpsuits by the dozen. Still, Fineman insisted, it was true: Democrats were in trouble. One reason? A "Lack of star power." Fineman explained: "it's incontestably true that the Democrats simply aren't blessed with much charisma in the leadership ranks." The 200,000 people who stood in Chicago's Grant Park for Obama's victory speech would probably disagree. (Yes, Fineman said "leadership ranks," and Obama wasn't in the party "leadership" in 2005. But Fineman contrasted the Democrats' purported lack of "charisma" with Republicans who weren't, either, so that doesn't get him off the hook.)

Since Fineman argued that Democrats had good reason to be gloomy, they've picked up more than 50 House seats, 12 in the Senate, and the presidency. Republicans have won ... well, John Boehner has probably won a few rounds of golf, but that's about it.

Then there's NBC political director Chuck Todd. Shortly before the 2006 elections, Todd predicted that if Democrats won control of Congress, President Bush's approval rating would be above 50 percent by the following July. Democrats did win control of Congress -- and Bush's approval rating was at 30 percent the following July. And at this point, Bush wouldn't be above 50 if you added his approval ratings in the last two CBS/New York Times polls together.

And finally, the dean of the Washington press corps, David Broder: In September 2005, Broder predicted that Bush's handling of Katrina would help him regain his standing with the public. Things didn't work out that way, as Broder eventually acknowledged, but he continued to predict a Bush resurgence. In early 2007, Broder announced that "President Bush is poised for a political comeback."

It isn't just that these three predictions were wrong; people make incorrect forecasts all the time. Many of those incorrect predictions are based on reasonable analysis that just turns out to be wrong. But it has been pretty clear since mid-2005 that the Bush administration has been a spectacular failure, that the public has rejected the disastrous conservative policies President Bush had used to drive the nation into a ditch. There hasn't been any reason to believe the Republicans would rebound, other than blind faith. And that isn't something that is clear only in hindsight: It has been obvious for years.

Democrats have won the popular vote in four of the past five presidential elections. When the new Congress is sworn in, they will hold more than 250 seats in the House and at least 57 in the Senate. Public polling shows -- and has shown for quite some time -- that Americans back progressive solutions to the nation's problems. The current progressive ascendancy won't last forever, of course. But it's about time for the Beltway pundit crowd to let go of their tired old assumptions about the relative strength of the parties and the ideological leanings of the country. Unless, of course, they enjoy making fools of themselves.

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.

Media Matters: The Right's "bias" charade

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:22:30 EST

At the end of the 1992 presidential campaign, there was a flurry of news reports about the possibility that the media had favored Bill Clinton over incumbent George H.W. Bush, and that the media's coverage of the race helped Clinton win.

Such complaints might seem a little odd, given the media's relentless focus during that campaign on Clinton's alleged relationship with Gennifer Flowers, his youthful marijuana use, and his purported "draft-dodging."

Still, complaints from conservatives about the media's coverage of the 1992 campaign worked to their benefit by complimenting their campaign to undermine Clinton's "legitimacy" as president. And they caused reporters, always sensitive to (typically bogus) charges of biased reporting, to bend over backwards to disprove their critics -- an instinct that, no doubt, contributed to the absolutely brutal media coverage Clinton received almost immediately upon his election.

How brutal? How quickly? The Los Angeles Times explained in a 1993 look back at the earliest days of the Clinton presidency:

Twelve days after President Clinton took office -- with only 1,448 days left in his term -- Sam Donaldson of ABC News was on a weekend talk show, saying, "This week we can talk about, 'Is the presidency over?' "

That same day, a Page 1 story in the Los Angeles Times warned, "The President must tighten his grip or risk disaster."

Later that week, a Page 1 story in the New York Times said, "The President desperately needs a victory, as soon as possible."

And that was barely six months in to Clinton's first term. Sure, by then reporters had suggested Clinton's presidency was over before it reached the end of its second week and inaccurately obsessed over his Air Force One haircut. But they were just getting started; the wall-to-wall coverage of Whitewater and countless other trumped-up faux scandals was still to come.

But no matter how hostile, how relentlessly negative, how scandal-obsessed the media were in their coverage of Clinton, conservatives kept right on going with their complaints of liberal bias. On October 26, 1996, The New York Times reported:

Sounding like a crusader, Bob Dole implored his audiences today to "rise up" against the nation's news organizations, which he said were protecting the Clinton Administration ...

"We've got to stop the liberal bias in this country," he declared ... "Don't read that stuff! Don't watch television! You make up your mind! Don't let them make up your mind for you!"

[...]

At another point he asked: "When do the American people rise up and say, 'Forget the media in America! We're going to make up our minds! You're not going to make up our minds!' This is about saving our country!"

Singling out The New York Times for the second straight day, Mr. Dole went on: "We are not going to let the media steal this election. We're going to win this election. The country belongs to the people, not The New York Times."

[...]

Mr. Dole's complaints against the news media -- reminiscent of those by President George Bush in the waning days of his losing 1992 campaign -- are greeted with wild cheers. Mr. Dole said today that President Clinton would be losing the election if he was not "getting propped up by the media."

A Nexis search yields 539 hits for "Clinton and Whitewater" in the The New York Times between January 1 and October 26, 1996 -- nearly two per day. And that focus hardly let up as the campaign reached the home stretch; there are 42 hits for "Clinton and Whitewater" in the Times from October 1-26. Nor was the Times alone in hammering away at Whitewater during the fall campaign: Expanding the search to all news organizations yields 2,412 hits for the month of October alone.

And that's to say nothing of the relentless media focus on Democratic fundraising controversies. Or the various other Clinton "scandals," most of which turned out to exist only in the fevered imaginations of the news media. Or the fact that the news media, having obsessed for years about Clinton's infidelity, buried a story about an alleged Dole affair that his campaign aides considered a "mortal threat" threat to his candidacy.

Let's stop there for a second: Just weeks after The Washington Post, which had reported on allegations of infidelity on Clinton's part, spiked a story about an alleged Dole affair, Bob Dole was running around accusing the media of being in the tank for Clinton. That's awfully reckless behavior -- if Dole actually believed the media were against him. Sincere or not, Dole's complaints ring hollow; I can't think of a presidential candidate whose alleged "scandals" received more election-year coverage than Clinton's in 1996. Such coverage isn't the whole story, of course, but it's awfully hard to justify claims that the media were in the tank for Clinton when they were running so many reports about Whitewater and other such nonsense.

But Dole's wasn't the most absurd conservative claim of media bias during the Clinton years. For that, we have to look to the pro: Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center. On February 9, 1998, the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran an interview with Bozell in which he complained that the media weren't devoting enough coverage to the Monica Lewinsky story.

Given that most observers would likely agree that the Lewinsky saga involved the longest, most intense media feeding frenzy in modern American history, Bozell's claim should be self-evidently fraudulent.

On the off chance that it isn't: On February 9, the day the Bozell interview ran, there were 529 news reports mentioning "Clinton" and "Lewinsky," according to a search of the Nexis database. Those 529 hits include 59 television transcripts, eight hits in the New York Times folder, and 11 for USA Today. In just one day. And that was a typical day, not an unusual one.

Still, Bozell told the Star Tribune, apparently with a straight face, that the media had "stopped" covering the story -- "as they always do." Five hundred news reports a day, and Bozell thought the media had stopped covering the story. This is up-is-down, black-is-white, the-moon-is-made-of-green-cheese stuff. And it is typical of conservative media criticism.

Why do they make such absurd claims? Because it is clear that it works. (If, unlike many journalists, you understand what the goal is.)

Which brings us to 2008.

John McCain's campaign, and its conservative allies, have spent much of the year attacking the news media. No surprise there; that's what conservatives do, even conservatives who have been the beneficiaries of a decade of glowing, fawning coverage from swooning reporters.

McCain and his allies were attacking the media back in the Spring, when reporters were obsessively scrutinizing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- and openly acknowledging that they weren't giving McCain similar scrutiny. They attacked the media in late summer, when the media were breathlessly touting the "authenticity" of a Sarah Palin speech that was filled with falsehoods. And they have attacked the media throughout the fall, even as it has become clear that the scrutiny reporters promised back in the spring that they would eventually give McCain isn't coming. It isn't a coincidence that scrutiny never came: it is, in part, an obvious and intended result of the attacks McCain and his allies have been leveling on the media all year.

But if, as the polls suggest, Barack Obama is elected next Tuesday, those attacks will have ultimately proven unsuccessful, right? Wrong.

First, that's a silly way to assess whether a strategy has "worked"; a candidate can derive benefit from a strategy without winning.

Second, it ignores the long-term goals of the attacks: to delegitimize an Obama presidency in the eyes of many Americans, and to browbeat journalists into covering an Obama administration much more critically than they otherwise would.

Whether those goals are met depends in part on whether journalists take the attacks seriously, or recognize them as the predictable continuation of a right-wing work-the-refs strategy that is so fraudulent it even involved claiming the media were devoting insufficient attention to Monica Lewinsky. And it depends in part on whether progressives push back on the bogus narrative that the media handed Obama the election, or simply ignore it.

Unfortunately, the conservative complaints got some superficial support from a recent study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) that claimed that John McCain has received much more "negative" coverage than Barack Obama during the campaign.

The PEJ study quickly got significant attention from the establishment media and blogs.

But while the study lends rhetorical support to the conservatives' arguments, it is nearly useless as an actual assessment of how the media covered the campaign.

First off, it is worth noting this little nugget about the study's methodology, buried at the end of the PEJ report: "Talk radio stories ... were not included in this campaign study of tone." PEJ offers no justification for the exclusion of talk radio. Not a word. In what surely must be a coincidence, talk radio skews further to the right than any other medium.

Now, here's PEJ's description of how it assesses whether a news report is "positive" or "negative":

To examine tone, the Project takes a particularly cautious and conservative approach. Unlike some researchers, we examine not just whether assertions in stories are positive or negative, but also whether they are inherently neutral. This, we believe, provides a much clearer and fairer sense of the tone of coverage than ignoring those balanced or mixed evaluations. Second, we do not simply tally up all the evaluative assertions in stories and compile them into a single pile to measure. Journalists and audiences think about press coverage in stories or segments. They ask themselves, is this story positive or negative or neutral? Hence the Project measures coverage by story, and for a story to be deemed as having a negative or positive tone, it must be clearly so, not a close call: for example, the negative assertions in a story must outweigh positive assertions by a margin of at least 1.5 to 1 for that story to be deemed negative.

OK ... anyone want to guess what that means in practical terms?

Unfortunately, the few actual examples of "positive" and "negative" coverage PEJ offers do little to clarify its methodology, and less to inspire confidence. For example, PEJ notes:

Some of that positive coverage was related to evidence that the financial crisis was aiding Obama. "Recent economic woes have given Democrat Barack Obama a clear lead over Republican John McCain," declared a story posted on AOL News on Sept. 24, citing a 9-point lead for Obama in a new Washington Post/ABC News poll.

That's what counts as "positive" coverage of Obama? A fairly straightforward report that a poll finds Obama in a "clear lead" over McCain? And, it seems, much of Obama's "positive" coverage consisted of reports like that:

The data clearly point in this direction for some of the explanation. Of those stories that focused mostly on polls, a clear majority (57%) were positive for Obama, while less than a quarter (23%) were negative. Similarly, stories about the electoral map, swing states and campaign strategy were even more favorable (77% positive vs. 6% negative). These represent the most positive element of Obama's coverage.

So, if a candidate is winning, and the polls show that, and the media report that the polls show the candidate winning, that counts as "positive" coverage. Well, OK, it's true that such a story is "positive," but it tells us nearly nothing about the media.

Examples of "negative" coverage of McCain similarly fail to illuminate. Here's the first:

On Sept. 24, he announced he was suspending campaigning to return to Washington to work on a rescue bill and advocated delaying the first debate, scheduled two days away in Oxford Mississippi. ... [S]ome of the coverage depicted McCain's decision-making in an unflattering light, such as a Sept. 26 CNN.com piece stating that "some fellow lawmakers said McCain hadn't contributed much to the financial debate, and senior campaign advisors told CNN they believed it was politically crucial that McCain show up in Oxford, Mississippi."

Actually, that's the only example of negative coverage of McCain. As Bob Somerby noted, "According to Pew, McCain has been hit with a bunch of 'negative stories' in the six weeks under review ... But what do these 'negative stories' look like? In the age of the simple electronic link, it's incredible that Pew provides no examples."

To PEJ's credit, it says only that coverage of the candidates is "positive" or "negative," not "favorable" or "unfavorable" or that coverage is "biased" in favor of a given candidate. As a literal matter, describing news reports such as the CNN.com example as "negative" is defensible, though it doesn't really tell us much.

But many people interpret those descriptions as evidence of "bias" -- as PEJ must know they will do. Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, for example:

Critics, including many conservatives, say the media have been too easy on Obama, and bias cannot be discounted as a factor. A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that from the end of the conventions through the debates, McCain's coverage was more than three times as negative than Obama's.

Such interpretations are simply not defensible. PEJ's explanation of its methodology suggests that a purely factual news report about McCain trailing in the polls constitutes a "negative" report -- as would a report debunking a McCain lie. Again, such a report could defensibly be described as "negative" for McCain, but interpreting that as evidence of media bias is absurd. Debunking a lie isn't "bias," it's what journalists should be doing every day.

PEJ made no effort to assess things that actually could give some indication of whether media coverage has been unfair - whether news reports were more likely to uncritically report false claims from one candidate, or whether similar controversies surrounding each candidate received disparate coverage, for example. (Media Matters has documented several such examples of double standards that have benefited McCain.)

PEJ did offer this intriguing statement:

Much of the increased attention for McCain derived from actions by the senator himself, actions that, in the end, generated mostly negative assessments. In many ways, the arc of the media narrative during this phase of the 2008 general election might be best described as a drama in which John McCain has acted and Barack Obama has reacted.

That seems to support my observation that the media have covered precisely what McCain wants them to cover:

The truth is that when John McCain says "jump," the media still ask, "How high?" Think about this: When was the last time McCain or his campaign has wanted the news media to focus on something, and they have refused? From "lipstick on a pig" to Bill Ayers, the media have scampered after whatever mud McCain has flung, like a puppy dog chasing a stick thrown by its master. Sure, sometimes they have pointed out that McCain is lying -- and that's tremendous progress for a profession that has spent a decade flatly asserting McCain's honesty. But -- as I've explained in the past -- even as they've debunked McCain's claims, they've too often privileged the lie by allowing those claims to drive their coverage.

Unfortunately, PEJ did not explain its assertion that "the media narrative ... might be best described as a drama in which John McCain has acted and Barack Obama has reacted." Examining that idea more fully could have actually told us something useful about whether the media have favored one candidate or the other, in effect, if not intentionally.

PEJ's analysis may have only limited academic value. But there's nothing academic about the need to rebut its flawed conclusions. If the media themselves perceive that Barack Obama benefited from favorable media coverage -- as is suggested by their uncritical citation of the PEJ study -- that perception could have ominous implications for the coverage he will receive if he becomes president.

As a 1993 Christian Science Monitor op-ed by a University of California-Irvine professor noted:

[H]ow the media treat a new president may have less to do with personality, personnel, perks, or pessimism than it does with how the media treated that president as a candidate. Treatment of a new president may be inversely related to their coverage of the president as a candidate for office. The easier the media's treatment of a presidential candidate during the campaign, the harsher will be their treatment once the candidate has become president. Conversely, harsher treatment of a presidential candidate during the campaign may precipitate a much longer media honeymoon for a new president.

Media Matters: The clouded wrath of the crowd

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:19:58 EST

As Election Day approaches, the right-wing media are becoming increasingly vitriolic and irrational.

Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Jerome Corsi, and others have attacked Barack Obama over his visit to his ailing grandmother.

On Monday, Savage responded to Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama by insisting, "The only people who don't seem to vote based on race are whites of European origin." Later in the week, Savage said welfare recipients shouldn't be allowed to vote. Fellow radio host Jim Quinn went a step further over the edge, declaring that there was "good reason" for allowing only landowners to vote.

A Washington Times columnist called Barack Obama a "Marxist" who believes that "murdering innocent babies ... is an inalienable right." ABC's The Note declared that little piece of overheated rhetoric a "must-read."

The creative conspiracy theorists over at WorldNetDaily claim that Obama "campaigned for" "radical Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga" during a 2006 trip -- a claim supposedly substantiated by obviously fake emails Jerome Corsi claims to have obtained. In the extraordinarily unlikely event that the emails are real, they still do not substantiate WND's claims -- in fact, they don't contain so much as a single statement of support for Odinga.

Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell compared Obama to Hitler, Mao and Jim Jones. What's the similarity? Well, they all spoke inspiringly of "change."

Believe it or not, that isn't the craziest Hitler comparison to ooze forth from the right-wing fever swamps in the past month. Bill O'Reilly recently declared that Nancy Pelosi practices her speeches too much, noting that Hitler also practiced speeches before delivering them (O'Reilly claimed he wasn't comparing Pelosi to Hitler. Right.)

For radio host Bill Cunningham, comparing Obama to Hitler doesn't go far enough. He prefers to suggest that Obama is the antichrist. (Cunningham has frequently peppered his comments about Obama with gratuitous references to the candidate's middle name, Hussein -- once embellishing by referring to "Barack Mohammed Hussein Obama.")

KSFO radio host Lee Rodgers falsely claimed that Obama has admitted that he would "stand with the Muslims" against "the Western world" -- a twisted fantasy reminiscent of Savage's claim to "doubt" that Obama "would take our side" in the event of a terrorist attack. Speaking of which: Two weeks ago, Savage announced that "[N]ot all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists happen to be Muslim." Just in case the bigotry and stupidity of that statement isn't obvious: Tim McVeigh wasn't a Muslim.

There is, in short, a lot of hate and venom spewing forth from right-wing media, particularly radio and blogs. The last time a Democrat was elected president, the right used that hate to mobilize opposition to him and his agenda. There's no reason to think the Rush Limbaughs of the world will react differently to an Obama presidency. The only question is whether the "mainstream" media will take their cues from the far-right hate merchants again -- and whether progressives will be more aggressive in fighting back.

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.