Pacific Progressive

Think Again: NPR and O’Keefe: Déjà Vu All Over Again

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Eric Alterman 

It’s difficult to decide what is most infuriating—or depressing—about the spectacular success of James O’Keefe’s sting operation. But here are a few nominees.

O’Keefe is a known fabricator, and the mainstream media has already allowed him to make them look like idiots. And yet they did it again. I went on the NPR show “On Point” last week to discuss the still-exploding scandal and suggested that whenever anyone discussed any alleged malfeasance discovered and presented by the criminal right-wing provocateur, it’s a good idea to wait a few days and find out what he’s lying about.

O’Keefe lied to the country about his big ACORN sting. He lied about his meetings with ACORN officials and the videos he doctored in support of those lies. You can find examples here, here, here, and here. He makes no bones about this. O’Keefe sets up his sources, lies to them, and then lies to the public about what they said and did. And he’s not above using criminal methods to stalk his prey.

Even so, many media outlets swallowed O’Keefe’s version that his sting video caught NPR in the act of being a parody of what NPR’s critics say it is. (And how many reporters owe their audiences regretful rethinks of what they originally wrote, like this one by Time’s James Poniewozik?)

Think Again: “Follow the Money”

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Eric Alterman 

Deep Throat’s advice worked for Woodward and Bernstein, and it remains useful today. Take a look at the major stories of the day. Most often, they are portrayed in the media as clashes of personality first and ideology second. But almost always, they are, at bottom, about money.

The “resignation” of National Public Radio CEO Vivian Schiller is being played by the avatars of conventional wisdom as the result of her inability to rein in the crazy liberalism of the place. Well, not so much. In the first place, the refs have worked NPR so effectively that it feels compelled to include the views of certified lunatic David Horowitz in an obituary of leftist historian Howard Zinn.

It’s true that NPR’s firings of both Juan Williams and Ellen Weiss were mishandled. But the real reason that Schiller had to go was the manner in which her vice president for fundraising, Ron Schiller (no relation), felt a need to suck up to what he thought were some silly Arab moneymen claiming affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, who thought that perhaps American Jews exercised an unseemly degree of influence over how Israel and the Palestinians are portrayed in the media. (Naturally, the Anti-Defamation League is getting into the act.) He also had some unfriendly views to offer about the Tea Party.

Think Again: The Contours and Context of the Conservative Class War in Wisconsin

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Eric Alterman 

When Ian Murphy of the online newspaper Buffalo Beast prank-called Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, he was, as he admitted, “wildly unprepared.” But it didn’t really matter. All he had to say were the words “David Koch” and Walker was running off at the mouth about his plans to trick the missing Democrats from the legislature into returning for a phony-baloney negotiating session while the Republicans push through Gov. Walker’s bill to destroy the unions’ collective bargaining rights. (The Murphy/”Koch” suggestion that troublemakers be placed in the crowd is the newsmaker here, but not necessarily the most interesting news.) But whatever the eventual outcome of the Wisconsin struggle there’s no question that it represents a turning point in the shape and contour of American politics.

I warned in two recent Nation columns of the onset of a new “class war” here and here. Conservatives and their billionaire allies, having won enormous victory in shifting the tax burden from the rich to the rest of us, would now seek to use state financial difficulties to destroy public unions who were among the last bastions of money and people-power for progressive candidates.

ACORN was taken down with remarkable ease with the help of a cowed mainstream media as I discussed here and here. Right-wing billionaires such as the Koch brothers were behind almost all of these efforts, among others. They funded phony organizations as well as directed their actions, often unbeknownst to the people holding the signs and chanting.

Race to the Bottom - Gov. Walker Assaults Jobs, Innovation, and Clean Energy in Wisconsin

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Kate Gordon 

Newly elected Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker held an event called “Wisconsin is Open for Business” the day he was inaugurated. But every move the governor makes shows him to be an antibusiness, anti-innovation politician intent on running the state into the ground.

Let’s take clean energy. Clean energy industries offered a glimmer of hope during the past two years in the midst of a national recession that has hit the Midwest particularly hard. In Michigan, for example, total private employment dropped 5.4 percent from 2005-2008, while during the same period employment increased by 7.7 percent among the state’s 358 “green” firms. Michigan’s new governor, Rick Snyder, recognized the growth potential of these industries when he ran on a 10-point plan that emphasized the need to invest in clean energy sectors such as advanced batteries.

In Ohio, too, the green writing is on the wall. New Gov. John Kasich initially sounded off against clean energy, running on a platform that included rolling back the state’s renewable energy standard. But he reversed this position soon after his election when multiple business leaders told him how important green industries were in the Toledo area in particular. The city, which ranked in the bottom 10 by per capita income in 2000, has seen a renaissance as a hub for solar innovation and production. Over 6,000 individuals are employed in these industries in Toledo today, and the city is home to several major solar panel exporters including First Solar and Xunlight.

Think Again: A Real Tea (Pity) Party

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Eric Alterman

In its apparently endless quest to assuage the sensitive feelings of all the victimized right-wingers in America one day at a time, The Washington Post published Steve Hendrix’s sob story of the pain and suffering experienced by Washington’s “tea party residents” who live in a city where “home can at times feel like enemy territory.”

How bad is it? Well, a man at another table in a coffee shop said “sorry” and walked away from one guy. And another one had to experience the pain of being asked whether “your boyfriend listens to Glenn Beck.” Apparently, the notion that self-proclaimed “tea party patriots” listen to Glenn Beck is the kind of thing one hears “in the left-wing news media ... they don't know any real tea party people.” No wonder Tea Party member Brian says, “I fear for my country." He is, after all, “just more tolerant than they are."

I admit it’s no picnic calling oneself a “tea party” member. After all, how do you claim you are not part of a “corrupt” political system when, as Stephanie Mencimer writing in Mother Jones notes, “the group's leaders have cozied up to political insiders implicated in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal and have paid themselves significant salaries”?

Did the Vaccine Industry Manipulate the WHO to Sell H1N1 Shots?

This article was first published by Science Progress.

By Arthur Caplan

Just about a year ago the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe announced a bizarre inquiry. They launched an investigation to establish to what extent pharmaceutical companies connived throughout 2009 to gin up a global panic about swine flu. They suggested that industry was behind a conspiracy to make sure that people all over the world were vaccinated against H1N1 flu. In particular, they cited the crafty pharmaceutical industry’s manipulation of the World Health Organization to promote this diabolical scheme.

A key reinforcement for their inquiry was an article in the British Medical Journal, orBMJ. Co-authored by Deborah Cohen, the BMJ features editor, and Philip Carter, a journalist who worked for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, the article claimed to have found secret ties between vaccine manufacturers like Glaxo and advisors to the WHO on pandemic flu. The article stated,

“…our investigation has revealed damaging issues. If these are not addressed, H1N1 may yet claim its biggest victim — the credibility of the WHO and the trust in the global public health system.”

Antivaccine groups gleefully received all this conspiracy theorizing. Websites bubbled over with comments like this one:

Think Again: The 'Problem' of Liberal Academics, Again

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Eric Alterman

Here we go again. The periodic “problem” of liberal dominance of academia is back. Indeed, it never left. Former left-wing-Stalinist-turned-right-wing-Stalinist David Horowitz has been bilking gullible wingnut contributors for more than a decade now by making this same complaint, most often in lurid McCarthyite terms. But Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia social psychologist celebrated in a recent New York Times column by John Tierney for insisting that the liberal bent of social science professors represents a “statistically impossible lack of [ideological] diversity,” is no David Horowitz (or he wouldn’t be worth discussing).

Again, Haidt’s news is not new. Horowitz’s ravings aside, we heard four years ago from a team of sociologists that “Democrats typically outnumber Republicans at elite universities by at least six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences.” One study found, for instance, that Democratic-leaning psychology professors outnumber Republicans by a factor of nearly 12-to-1. Overall, when it comes to social science faculty, 72 percent identify as liberal.

What Haidt brings to the party is a new thesis. He insists, according to Tierney’s reporting, that liberal social scientists constitute a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility—as well as blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for nonliberals.

Think Again: Chutzpah on the Right

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Eric Alterman 

You may have noticed conservatives are divided over the proper response to the Egyptian people’s demands for a democratic transformation of their nation.

Fox's Ralph Peters thinks President Barack Obama risks being on the wrong side of history by standing by Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. Peters criticized President Obama for failing to get behind the revolutionaries with sufficient fervor. “This guy always wants to split the difference,” said Peters. “There is a right side; that's the winning side.”

Peters is in league with many conservatives, like those at The Wall Street Journal editorial page, who want to give President George W. Bush “credit” for the revolutions. They are also tentatively supportive of the crowds’ demand for an end to Egypt’s dictatorship.

But Dick Morris, writing on Newsmax, thinks it essential that President Obama prop up the dictator: “Unless President Barack Obama reverses field and strongly opposes letting the Muslim Brotherhood take over Egypt, he will be hit with the modern equivalent of the 1952 question: Who Lost Egypt?” (Morris predicts that “the Iranian government is waiting for Egypt to fall into its lap. The Muslim Brotherhood, dominated by Iranian Islamic fundamentalism, will doubtless emerge as the winner should the government of Egypt fall.”)

The New Obama Narrative

by: George Lakoff, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

President Barack Obama inspects a high-efficiency light system as he tours Orion Energy Systems in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, on January 26, 2011. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)

For the first two years of his administration, President Obama had no overriding narrative, no frame to define his policy making, no way to make sense of what he was trying to do. As of his 2011 State of the Union Address, he has one: Competitiveness.

The competitiveness narrative is intended to serve a number of purposes at once:

1. Split the Republican business community off from the hard right, especially the Tea Party. Most business leaders want real economics, not ideological economics. And it is hard to pin the "socialist" label on a business-oriented president. He may succeed.
2. Attract biconceptuals - those who are conservative on some issues and progressive on other issues. They are sometimes mistakenly called "moderates" or "independents," though there is no one ideology of the moderate or the independent. They make up 15 to 20 percent of the electorate, and many are conservative on economic issues and progressive on social issues. He attracted them in 2008, but not in 2010. He needs less than half to win in 2012. He may well succeed.
3. Competitiveness has five natural metaphors: A war, a race, a competitive sport, a competitive game and dog-eat-dog predation. The president's "Sputnik moment" imposed the cold war metaphor - one in which we are temporarily losing a worldwide economic war, but can catch up with mobilization.

Think Again: Call it 'Craven News Network'

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Eric Alterman 

It’s no simple matter to sum up all that’s wrong with the “thinking” that characterizes contemporary news coverage. But if I had to pick a potent symbol of just how rudderless are the allegedly “responsible” media executives making the decisions about who and what constitute “news” these days, I’d have to go with CNN’s decision to carry Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.

Remember, Rep. Bachmann is just a mere member of the House of Representatives. She was actually rebuked by her own party when she ran for a leadership position in the current congressional class. She has no standing whatsoever to represent anything other than a majority of her Minnesota district to the rest of the nation. And yet CNN decides to treat her rant as an alternative State of the Union because the Tea Party—representing fewer than a fifth of the nation’s views according to most polls—anointed her as its spokesperson. To get a liberal equivalent of Rep. Bachmann, CNN would have had to turn over their cameras right afterward to Ward Churchill.

How do they justify it?

Public Opinion Snapshot: The Public's View of Obama

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Ruy Teixeira

Conservatives are fond of asserting that President Barack Obama’s “socialist” big government agenda has been a complete failure and will only get worse over time. The public does not agree. In a just-released Pew poll a plurality of Americans (47 percent) believe that most of what Obama has done in his first two years as president will be “good for the country in the long run” compared to 42 percent who think results will be bad.

What’s more, the public displays a markedly positive attitude toward President Obama when asked their impression of him on a number of different dimensions. An overwhelming 77 percent think he stands up for what he believes in; 75 percent think he is a good communicator; 70 percent describe him as warm and friendly; 64 percent think he is well informed; 60 percent believe he is someone who cares about “people like me”; 58 percent think he is trustworthy; 54 percent think he is able to get things done; and 53 percent say he is a strong leader.

These data suggest that conservatives’ attempts to demonize President Obama have a long way to go. They also suggest that conservatives’ view of the world and the public’s view are vastly different, as usual.

Ruy Teixeira is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. To learn more about his public opinion analysis go to the Media and Progressive Values page and theProgressive Studies program page of our website.

 

Hate Speech, the Right's Magic Bullet

by: Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov had a rule: if you show a gun in the first act, by the time the curtain falls, it has to go off. For weeks and months, that gun, the weapon of angry rhetoric and intemperate rabble rousing, has been cocked and loaded in plain view on the American stage; Saturday morning outside a shopping mall in Tucson, Arizona, it went off again and again and again.

The target, Gabrielle Giffords, a member of the United States Congress, lays critically wounded, one of 13 shot and still alive. Six others are dead, including a respected Federal judge who happened to be there, but who previously had received death threats from anti-immigration extremists; a member of Congresswoman Giffords' staff; and a nine-year old girl, Christina-Taylor Green. Just elected to her school's student council, she had been brought by a neighbor to Congresswoman Gifford's constituent event so she could see how grown-ups put democracy into action.

Instead, this child - born on 9/11 - became just one of the latest victims of more political violence in America, violence fueled by an incoherent rage against government and elected officials, who cannot instantly bring back prosperity and the jobs lost overseas or restore in a blink some idealized vision of a nation that might once have been, but is no more. And all of it egged on by right-wing leaders and their cronies lurking in the swampier reaches of the Internet, hate radio and television.

Inflaming 'Weak and Vicious Minds' - We Need to Remove Allusions to Violence from Political Debate

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Scott Lilly 

When it became clear that the Republican National Convention in 1912 was going to select President William Howard Taft as the party’s standard bearer in the fall election, Theodore Roosevelt announced that he would accept the nomination of any party that held a convention of “honestly elected” delegates. Roosevelt went on to become the nominee of the so-called Bull Moose Party and was the object of harsh attacks from supporters of both political parties because his standing in the polls indicated he might have a real shot at the presidency. 

Less than three weeks before the election, a man approached Roosevelt as he emerged from his car in Milwaukee for a scheduled campaign appearance. The man fired a 36-caliber revolver at Roosevelt’s heart from close range. Fortunately, Roosevelt had prepared a lengthy speech that had been stuffed in the inside pocket of his coat. The bullet pierced the speech and lodged in the muscle of the former president’s massive chest. 

Recognizing the dramatic impact of what had just happened and that he had gained at least for a brief period the undivided attention of not only his audience in Milwaukee, but the entire nation, Roosevelt insisted on going forward with the speech. As his white dress shirt became increasingly red from the blood flowing from his wound, Roosevelt talked of the man who had just attempted to take his life: 

Now, I do not know who he was or what he represented. He was a coward. He stood in the darkness in the crowd around the automobile and when they cheered me, and I got up to bow, he stepped forward and shot me…but it is a very natural thing that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me…

Inflaming 'Weak and Vicious Minds' - We Need to Remove Allusions to Violence from Political Debate

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Scott Lilly 

When it became clear that the Republican National Convention in 1912 was going to select President William Howard Taft as the party’s standard bearer in the fall election, Theodore Roosevelt announced that he would accept the nomination of any party that held a convention of “honestly elected” delegates. Roosevelt went on to become the nominee of the so-called Bull Moose Party and was the object of harsh attacks from supporters of both political parties because his standing in the polls indicated he might have a real shot at the presidency. 

Less than three weeks before the election, a man approached Roosevelt as he emerged from his car in Milwaukee for a scheduled campaign appearance. The man fired a 36-caliber revolver at Roosevelt’s heart from close range. Fortunately, Roosevelt had prepared a lengthy speech that had been stuffed in the inside pocket of his coat. The bullet pierced the speech and lodged in the muscle of the former president’s massive chest. 

Recognizing the dramatic impact of what had just happened and that he had gained at least for a brief period the undivided attention of not only his audience in Milwaukee, but the entire nation, Roosevelt insisted on going forward with the speech. As his white dress shirt became increasingly red from the blood flowing from his wound, Roosevelt talked of the man who had just attempted to take his life: 

Now, I do not know who he was or what he represented. He was a coward. He stood in the darkness in the crowd around the automobile and when they cheered me, and I got up to bow, he stepped forward and shot me…but it is a very natural thing that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me…

Think Again: The Gift Who Keeps on Giving

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Eric Alterman Sarah Palin is the gift who keeps on giving. Think about it. Palin holds no public office. Her political experience includes, exclusively, a term as a small-town mayor and an unfinished, albeit scandal-ridden term as governor of America’s least populous state. Her educational background includes attendance at six different schools merely to earn a bachelor's degree. Despite having run for vice president—in what John McCain’s top advisers later admitted was a desperation move—she has never participated in a full-fledged press conference with members of the national media. She communicates almost exclusively via 140-character pronouncements on Twitter, updates on her Facebook page, and brown-nosing interviews with the likes of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck on Fox, from a studio the network built for her in her home. And yet she is by far the most written about, talked about, and most definitely muttered about woman in America.

Palin received more coverage in 2010 than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi combined, according to the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. And guess what? She did even better on MSNBC than on Fox, though CNN was close, too. Print, and the networks, followed a similar pattern.