Why does Bob Novak still have a job?
FAIR's Peter Hart catches Bob Novak contradicting himself on how big a victory has to be to constitute a "mandate." Novak writes today that Obama's victory doesn't give him a "mandate" -- but Hart points out that in 2004, Novak said of Bush: "Of course it is [a mandate]. It's a 3.5 million vote margin."
Novak does deserve credit for one thing, though: In today's post, he made it all the way to the second sentence before making a truly absurd claim:
The first Democratic Electoral College landslide in decades did not result in a tight race for control of Congress.
I have no idea what the second half of that sentence is supposed to mean, but the first half is only true if by "decades," Novak means "12 years." Bill Clinton won 379 electoral votes in 1996 -- and 370 in 1992.
By the way: if you haven't yet checked out FAIR's new(ish) blog, be sure to do so.
Comments (0) »Bill Kristol, the failed NYT experiment?
There's some chatter onilne that Kristol's stay on the Times' Op-Ed page might not extend beyond one year, and that his contract might not be picked up for 2009.
If that's how it unfolds, how would Kristol's stint at the Times be remembered? We'll let Nora Ephron do the honors:
The man could not write his way out of a paper bag. His column was simply awful. Reading it was like watching someone dance on the head of a pin: his need to prove to his base that he hadn't gone over to the other side was so strong, his need to please his constituency was so moving, that I began to wish he would quit his job as editor of the Weekly Standard and become a Times columnist full-time. It was certainly not going to inconvenience him: the column couldn't have been taking him more than about twenty minutes to write. And it was great having him there, visible, so people like me could see what people like him were like. He was wrong about everything. It was such a comfort.
The press rewrites Dem history
Keep your eyes on this meme as it continues to gain momentum inside the Beltway, as it anxiously awaits the arrival of the Obama administration.
The D.C. Establishment, which includes the press corps, seems jittery that Democrats might actually govern from the left following their impressive electoral gains. That's a bad idea, the talking heads insist, because the nation is fundamentally conservative.
Forget that the facts don't back that up. Here's where the revision comes in: Pundits keep warning Obama that he shouldn't make the same mistakes Bill Clinton made in 1993 when he arrived in Washington, D.C. and ran into all kinds of political setbacks because he, you guessed it, governed from the left!
See, according to the pundits, it was Clinton's run-away liberalism that did him in early on during his first months in the White House. And wouldn't you know the Post's Ruth Marcus hits that very point today, insisting that Dems need to "resist" the urge be liberals:
Yet the experience of President Bill Clinton's rocky early months -- remember gays in the military? the BTU tax? -- suggests the steep political price of governing in a way that is, or seems, skewed to the left. This risk is particularly acute for Obama, whose opponents have painted him as a leftist extremist. The good news is that his advisers seem exquisitely aware of this trap and determined not to fall into it.
The truth however, is a bit different. And the truth simply does not support the revisionist history about Clinton that's being spread around in attempt to fend Obama off from tilting to the left. As one GOP corporate lobbyist recently told Politico:
He recalled the arrival of President Bill Clinton in 1993. Rather than going after business, Clinton presented a moderate image and reached out to the corporate community. Clinton's goal was to "co-opt a portion of the business community" through his positions on free trade and other issues, said this lobbyist. And the strategy worked pretty effectively with global corporations.
But none of that matters, because the pundits are convinced that Clinton (and Dems) circa 1993, were left-wingers. That's what Time's Mark Halperin said on MSNBC this morning; that Clinton selected "left-wing people" to serve in his first administration. Y'know, people like Warren Christopher and Lloyd Bentsen.
Joe Biden and the press: A case study in the absurd
Keep in mind that in comparison with the other candidates, Biden received very little coverage. (The amount was positively minuscule compared with the media circus that surrounded GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin.) Yet what little coverage Biden generated seemed at times to be devoted exclusively to the trivial pursuit of his so-called gaffes.
In other words, the gaffe coverage didn't represent some of the Biden coverage. It was the Biden coverage.
Read the rest here.
The media bid farewell to the campaign
And to influence. From Gawker:
For the media, the campaign means life. It means purpose, and employment, and attention, and a sense of self-importance. It's an unparalleled opportunity to cast oneself as an expert with no qualifications whatsoever, and to profess to speak for millions of "real Americans" without any factual basis. In reality, campaign reporters have a far less objective view of the Presidential race than a fat, laid-off auto worker sitting on his ass playing XBox in the ugly part of Toledo.
Newsweek and the center-right nation
David Sirota suggests juxtaposing the weekly's recent cover story about how America remains a conservative country, with the electoral college map from last night.
All Fox, all the time
Isaac Chotiner at TNR takes the cabler's temperature during a marathon, election eve viewing session:
Fox truly felt like an alternate universe. Instead of being a cheerleader for John McCain or the Republican Party or the United States, the channel appeared interested only in raising conservatives' blood pressure. With conservatism fighting for its life, one of its key outlets spends its days venting to the like-minded. It's hard to imagine that the movement will re-emerge stronger for its time in the cocoon.
As if to prove the point, here's Fox's Carl Cameron reporting yesterday that the McCain campaign is very optimistic about its electoral chances!
Vote Supression at MSNBC?
MSNBC continues to run graphics claiming that polls close in Florida at 8 pm EST. In fact, in the vast majority of the state, polls close at 7 pm EST. There are similar problems with MSNBC's closing times for various other states.
Sure, every once in a while an MSNBC reporter reminds viewers that the times listed at the bottom of the screen may not be accurate in all parts of the state, and viewers should check with local officials for their closing times. That's great for the viewers who happen to be listening the one time an hour or so that MSNBC decides to tell the truth.
But anyone who doesn't happen to hear that and relies on the graphics that have been scrolling across the screen non-stop is in danger of showing up to vote after polls have closed.
So here's the question: At what point does the fact that MSNBC is knowingly misinforming voters about their voting hours cross the line from "irresponsible" to "illegal vote supression"?
The NYT misreads America?
John Harwood, for the second time in eight days, is just amazed that a black man might be president. Or more specifically this week, he's amazed that lots of whites are going to vote for Obama:
Remarkably, Mr. Obama, the first black major party presidential nominee, trails among whites by less than Democratic nominees normally do.
Seems to us the press has spent an inordinate amount of time covering the issue of race in this campaign, even though the candidates themselves rarely discuss it. (Surrogates, especially on the right, are another story, of course.) And when covering the campaign and race, the press has habitually couched the issues with a sense of total astonishment; that it was "remarkable," as Harwood put it, that Barack Obama would win huge support from white voters.
That, despite the fact that polls have shown for at least a year that Obama stood a very good chance of winning the general election. Why still the sense of wonder on Election Day?
Bottom-up vs top-down
Or, how the Obama and McCain campaigns dealt with the Internet. CJR has the interesting analysis:
Barack Obama's campaign reaches out to activist bloggers in order to communicate with and mobilize campaign volunteers and feed them into its online social networking site, MyBarackObama.com. In contrast, John McCain's campaign takes a top-down approach, using blogs-many of which it helped incubate-as an echo chamber for channeling mostly anti-Obama attacks into the mainstream media, in order to create an impression of grassroots online support.
It's the fault of minority journalists!
So goes the latest theory being embraced by conservatives as they toss darts at a board trying to come up with their official liberal media theory to explain John McCain's possible loss.
Former Bob Dole flack Douglas MacKinnon hypes the minority journalist theory in a recent liberal-media-bias essay posted online at the New York Times:
The pressure within the news business to diversify and be politically correct means more minorities, women and young people are being hired. And young and ethnically diverse reporters and editors go easier on candidates who look more like them, are closer to their age or represent their ideal of a presidential candidate.
Ugh (as my palm hits my forehead). First, who exactly is doing all this news business hiring? In case MacKinnon hasn't heard, news orgs are desperately shedding thousands of jobs each month, which means there is no new flood of young, minority hires being made anywhere in the industry.
Second, the idea that minority journalists, and specifically African-Americans, boast a significant presence in newsrooms across the country and now dictate political coverage is absurd.
Third, even more comical is that notion that African-Americans dominate senior, decision-making positions within the press, and that's why it allegedly swooned for Obama.
MSNBC misleads voters on poll closing times
MSNBC is currently running a graphic along the bottom of the screen listing states in which polls close at a given time.
MSNBC's focus seems to be on when voting in a given state is finished so that they can "call" the winner.
The unfortunate result is that MSNBC is telling viewers that polls close in Florida at 8 pm EST. But for the majority of the state, that isn't true -- in most of the state, polls close at 7 pm EST. So Florida voters who rely on MSNBC could show up to vote after polls have already closed.
There are likely similar problems with MSNBC's listing of closing times for other states, too.
MSNBC should really fix this. And voters should check their local poll closing times with more reliable sources.
UPDATE: Chuck Todd explains MSNBC's graphics: "We encourage you, if you're confused about when your polls close, to go and check with your local officials ... we want to tell our viewers when we'll start seeing vote counts, and that's why we have those final times up on our screen. So if you need to know when your polls close, check with your local officials."
Of course, if you want to know when your polls close, you should check with local officials. But in an ideal world -- a world in which MSNBC recognized that it's a really bad thing to mislead voters about when they can vote -- you could count on news organizations like MSNBC to tell you the truth about such things.
"Bias"
Go read Matt Yglesias.
"The Coming Obama-Press War"
So says Slate press critic Jack Shafer.
There's a slight problem with his piece, and that's his claim that the Beltway press corps is just naturally inclined to be tough on new presidents. That when the campaign winner arrives in Washington, D.C., the established press is, traditionally, just itching to shift into its hyper-skeptical mode.
Writes Shafer [emphasis added]:
The press corps works to hold the president accountable for what he does and extra hard to hold him accountable for what he does not do, a territory so vast and encompassing that foraging journalists assigned to the beat can never hunger for a story. Everything and nothing become fixings.
Because the press worked so hard to hold then-new president George Bush accountable in the winter of spring of 2001, right? Only somebody who thinks the press did a stellar job during the last eight years and who refuses to acknowledge the press completely rolled over for Bush, especially in his first term, would cling to the naive notion that the Beltway press treats all incoming presidents with deep skepticism.
The Drudge collapse, cont'd
"It appears Matt Drudge, along with the Republican Party is in complete meltdown," writes Crooks and Liars.
