Historians win one for the team

by: Daniel De Groot

Mon Jan 10, 2011 at 10:30

"We have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand," the network said in a statement late Friday about the eight-part miniseries, The Kennedys, starring Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes as President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie. Canadian Barry Pepper plays Robert F. Kennedy.

"We recognize historical fiction is an important medium for storytelling and commend all the hard work and passion that has gone into the making of the series, but ultimately deem this as the right programming decision for our network."

This is an amazing victory given the lack of hue and outcry not even among the public, but also within the politically involved.  I remember reading at Digby's place that this piece of crap was being made, but really nothing since from anyone I read regularly.  So congratulations to Robert Greenwald and his crew of historians: Rick Perlstein, Nigel Hamilton, David Nasaw and former JFK advisor Theodore C. Sorensen.  Apparently someone in the "History" network actually believes in telling history using facts and putting events in the right order and stuff.  

Inside, some examples of the glaring historical revisionism the series indulges in (note it isn't dead, other networks will likely still air it, but at least it loses the imprimatur of factual accuracy that comes from being on the "History" channel).

On the progressive approach to long-term investment in media

by: Adam Bink

Wed Jan 27, 2010 at 15:30

In the early nineteen seventies the Washington Post and New York Times were instrumental in helping expose the Watergate scandal and publishing the Pentagon papers. Conservatives felt that liberals had an advantage in setting the agenda because of the influence of New York and D.C. newspapers on the national media. In 1976 Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post and it has lost money every year since, the total loss estimated to be more than half a billion dollars. In 1983, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon created the Washington Times, which has also lost money every year. Widely published reports place Moon's losses at over $1 billion on the Times and other political media including a purchase the venerable wire service UPI. These money losing properties have put dozens of conservatively slanted stories onto the national radar screen, altered the framing of every important political issues, and nurtured virtually every right wing pundit who now thrive as TV talking heads.

More recently, Phillip Anschutz bought the money losing Weekly Standard from Murdoch and announced plans to invest in more conservative media and his fellow billionaire and former Republican Treasury Secretary Pete Petersen started a digital news service called The Fiscal Times.

The fatal flaw in Air America's genetic code was the pretense that liberal talk radio was a great business opportunity, that progressives could have their cake and eat it too, do well by doing good, make big salaries and get a great return on investment while also pursuing an ideological agenda. Sure, every once in awhile political media like Michael Moore's movies or Rush Limbaugh's radio show will make money, but for those interested in influencing public opinion, media in all venues is vital whether they make money or not.

[...]

Some progressives blame bad management for the failure of both Air America and Democracy Radio and since I spent one unhappy year midway through Air America's life as its CEO I suppose I am one of a dozen or so who are in that category. But if progressives really wanted to address talk radio they could have started competing companies with different management. Instead, most of the monied progressive community did the opposite of their conservative counterparts and bought into the notion that media should stand or fall based on media market forces.

The whole story with Air America is of course a little more nuanced and complicated, but it does raise the interesting question of whether or not a business should be founded with the understanding that it will lose money for years, and whether or not progressives engage in that as much as conservatives do. Cenk Uygur, who hosts The Young Turks, discussed here last July how progressives have found models online that are both sound progressive media and make money, so it's not necessarily an either/or. Cenk spoke to how progressives are lapping conservatives, but the other point his piece made to me is that "it doesn't have to be this way" in terms of funding media that will always lose money. That may not apply to all the mediums out there, but it's worth thinking about. I don't know a lot about funding streams, but I also wonder if it's pieces like Cenk's that lead to progressive funders to insist on sound, profitable business models rather than being willing to fund media for media's sake, as some conservatives do- and if they do, whether that's a healthy thing or not for our movement.

Comedian Rick Perlstein?

by: Living Liberally

Thu Feb 26, 2009 at 17:45

We're all big fans of Rick Perlstein, and know him best for Before the Storm and Nixonland.

So I was surprised to read in Time Out Chicago's coverage of this Saturday's "Nation Guide to the Nation" event:

Each Laughing Liberally show mixes stand-up with musical numbers and political discussion, plus other entertainments. This weekend, the free event includes appearances by comics Rick Perlstein, James Fritz and Carrie Callahan

Rick, is the march of right-wing institution-building that realigned our country really that funny?  

Memories of Jay Carney

by: Chris Bowers

Mon Dec 15, 2008 at 19:26

Nixonland Makes Amazon's Best Books of the Year List

by: Mike Lux

Fri Aug 15, 2008 at 09:17

Fox's Faux Populism vs A Shadow Elite--pt. 2

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun May 04, 2008 at 11:45

While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".

In this diary, I want to dig back into history, and uncover some key turning points that brought us from the economic populist solidarity of the New Deal to the sorry state we find ourselves in today, where the Democratic Party is still virtually clueless about how to respond to such outrageous lies.  A key figure in this story is the pivotal Republican President of the past 75 years--Richard Nixon.

While Barack Obama and legions of his supporters insist on seeing Reagan as his hagiographers have painted him--as a trascendental transformative figure--the simple reality is that he was nothing of the sort.  He was the beneficiary of an enormous amount of high-power myth-making.  But Nixon was the one who made it all possible.  

I've argued elsewhere about why 1968 was a de-aligning election--ending the "New Deal" Fifth Party System, in which Democrats dominated Congress and the presidency as thoroughly as any party has ever dominated a party system, and ushering in the only party system in American history in which the dominant "party" is divided government.   Now, in an excerpt from his new book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Rick Perlstein provides a striking snapshot of how that deeply split 1968 election sent down much deeper splits into the bedrock of American politics.  The excerpt, "Then No One Would Be a Democrat Anymore" (at American Prospect Online) describes the progression of blue-collar anti-anti-war violence, rioting, and eventual mass marching that thrilled Nixon with the prospect of a vast political realignment:

Nixon had tried to talk to the student demonstrators. He concluded he preferred the hard hats. "Thinks now the college demonstrators have overplayed their hands," Haldeman wrote in his diary, "evidence is the blue collar group rising against them, and [president] can mobilize them."

New York construction workers now took every lunch hour for boisterous patriotic demonstrations. So did hard hats in San Diego, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Some of the rallies were not entirely spontaneous: "Obviously more of these will be occurring throughout the nation," White House staffer Stephen Bull wrote in a memo to Chuck Colson, "perhaps partially as a result of your clandestine activity." Peter Brennan, the combative head of the Building Trades Council of Greater New York, accused of organizing the "hard hat riot," defiantly denied it -- then showed what he could do as an organizer: one hundred thousand marchers on May 20, complete with a cement mixer draped with a LINDSAY FOR MAYOR OF HANOI banner. Signs read GOD BLESS THE ESTABLISHMENT and WE SUPPORT NIXON AND AGNEW. Time called it "a kind of workers' Woodstock."

Rick Perlstein's Nixonland

by: Matt Stoller

Mon Apr 14, 2008 at 16:52

This reads like an amazing book.  I'm excited to read it.

Understanding, and Changing, Conservatism

by: Chris Bowers

Thu Jan 24, 2008 at 10:44

Conservatism is not an aberration. It is a facet of human nature and a permanent fixture in American life. At the moment they have a successful political movement that first grew out of a genuine grassroots uprising and was soon funded by the aristocrats (who are always conservatives) to help them protect their interests. We will not eliminate conservatism or even transcend it. But we might be able to win a governing majority for a while and do some good. This back and forth and give and take, between the polarities of our American philosophy --- freedom and equality, opportunity and security, tradition and progress--- is America. We are, as a people, both conservative and liberal.

It is true that conservatism is never going away, and in terms of electoral politics the best thing we can hope for is a governing majority that lasts a decade or two during which time we can do some real good. However, I think we can do even better than that. While conservatism isn't going away, over the last 200 years it has consistently been forced to drop many of its central aims and shift to the left. Since, say, 1780, Western conservatism has supported absolute monarchies over constitutional monarchies, constitutional monarchies over republics, state religions over freedom of religion, slavery over emancipation, conquest of Africa and Asia over national sovereignty, gender superiority over gender equality, racial superiority over racial equality, and much more. Over the course of time, liberals and progressives have forced conservatives to drop many of their central policy planks. From monarchies, to slavery, to the denial of suffrage, to segregation, to worldwide direct-rule colonialism, what was once mainstream in our political discourse has become heresy. As I see it, the goal of the progressive movement is not only to form a governing majority that can last for a decade or two, but also one that forces contemporary conservatives to permanently drop a couple of their central tenants. In our lifetime, I believe that these goals should include the end of favoring legal discrimination against homosexuals, the end of the war on drugs, the end of the national security state, and the end of the fossil fuel economy. As progressives, our ability our inability to force even most conservatives to drop those ideas will be the true measure of progressive success in the first-half of the twenty-first century, just as de-colonization, de-segregation, and second wave feminism will be always known as the great progressive achievements of the second half of the twentieth century.

David Frum's Refined Racism: Nativism, Producerism And Pseudo-Wonkism

by: Paul Rosenberg

Thu Aug 16, 2007 at 16:45

"This has imported a large new community of people who are both economically struggling (and thus open to Democratic arguments) but who lack deep attachment to the American nation (and who are thus immune to the most potent of Republican appeals)."

The nativist racism here is striking, though hardly surprising.  Then, in response to Rove's resignation, Frum wrote a piece for the New York Times that was remarkably frank about Rove's failed legacy, but that revealed another facet of rightwing populism with strong roots in the 19th Century, a facet known as producerism.  Together, they tell us a lot about how the right might try to regroup.