The news that Democrats have just selected Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi to continue as House Minority Leader has led a number of commentators to note her continuing unpopularity. Blogger Nate Silver, for instance, recently came up with a column titled "Is Pelosi America's Most Unpopular Politician?"
There is no denying that Ms. Pelosi is very, very unpopular. This is old news, and relatively boring stuff.
What is more interesting is exploring how Ms. Pelosi became one of the least-like politicians in America.
We can either continue to fight these sorts of battles with both hands tied behind our backs, and both feet in concrete, or we can get serious about a long-term effort to build our own media infrastructure. It's really just that simple.
had a lot of people saying either that we aren't up to the task of building a left media, that it's impossible because of corporatism and imbalance of money, or that since I brought it up, WTF is my plan.
I want to start off by pointing out that all these responses, while they contain a grain of truth, are also forms of resistance to actually solving the problem. I'm not trying to finger-point by saying this, because I've had all those thoughts myself at one time or another. I just want to suggest that people notice this, ponder it awhile, and look for ways to move beyond it.
Here's one suggestion: Create an Internet-based national newspaper that can be automatically customized to be as local as you want to be. The accelerating death of newspaper journalism is one of the causes of the sorry state of American politics, but it's also an opportunity.
As a newspaper journalist myself, I mourn what is happening, but if professional print journalism is a dying profession, it would be far better to see well-trained, dedicated citizen-amateurs take over as much as possible, rather than nothing but a void filled by corporate flacks.
What I have in mind is simple: connect citizen reporting of local events--particularly local government meetings and the issues they deal with--all the way up to state, national and international government. Don't just limit it to government, of course. Also cover what civic organizations are doing, local arts and culture, and yes, even sports. Everything you might want to know if the daily paper you grew up with had routine coverage of your community.
By using a hierarchical geographic structure, and selectively promoting stories at one level to a higher level based on some combination of reader interest and editorial judgment, this would provide a means for tens of thousands of citizen journalists to create something unique together--and in the process to create a platform that could also highlight existing progressive voices and media projects--such as Democracy Now! and GRITtv--potentially giving them a much larger base audience.
As a unified structure that starts off giving people information about what's happening in their community--even as fine-grained as who's playing at local pub, and how the high-school girls basketball team did last night--right alongside headline coverage of national labor, environmental and social justice issues, the potential for building a large national audience is quite real. Considering how small cable news audiences are compared to the total population, it would be quite feasible for such a site to equal or even substantially exceed their audiences.
Of course it would take money to do this. But it would take a lot less money compared to the amount of volunteered individual time and effort than just about anything else I can think of. And this is just the sort of formula that meshes with our most fundamental politics on the left.
Raleigh, N.C.- As its affiliated Republican Party's fortunes rose in the last year, Fox News' have declined. In January 2010, PPP showed Fox as by far the news outlet most trusted by American voters. In this month's poll, Fox is still relied on by more than some other competitors but is far behind PBS, tested for the first time. PBS is the only group trusted by a majority and distrusted by fewer than 40%.
A year ago, Fox's 49-37 (+12) trust-mistrust margin significantly outpaced ABC's -15, CBS' -14, NBC's -9, and CNN's -2. In the meantime, all but CNN have boosted their images. Fox now stands at 42-46 (-4), better only than CBS' -7 and ABC' s -8, but worse than CNN's -3, NBC's 0, and PBS' 50-30 (+20).
Both moderates (from -15 to -32) and liberals (from -40 to -76) have almost completely abandoned Fox. But it remains the most trusted by any one ideological group (conservatives, at 72-16) of any of the networks except PBS' 76-11 with liberals. Conservatives only mistrust PBS by a -32 margin, way less than their -49 of NBC, -51 of ABC, -53 of CBS, and -54 of CNN. The narrow moderate plurality (41% to conservatives' 40%) give PBS a +49, roughly two to three times their +26 for CNN, +24 for NBC, +17 for ABC, and +16 for CBS.
While Republicans have only slightly declined in their esteem of Fox (from 74-15 to 67-22), independents have gone from about even (41-44) to -16, and Democrats' mistrust has doubled from -22 to -43. PBS is the only channel at all trusted by independents, with a strong 44-32, but they do trust Fox more than ABC (-21) or CBS (-22) and only narrowly less than CNN (-15) or NBC (-14). A year ago, independents disliked most of the networks by around 30-point margins.
Particularly interesting in light of (1) past results from PIPA/WorldOpinion.org showing Fox most misinforms and PBS least misinforms their respective viewers and (2) conservatives' resurgence in desire to defund PBS/NPR for firing Juan Williams.
Cross-tabs for outlets by ideology on the flip, along with a reminder of the findings on misinformation.
While most contributors here are using more appropriate terms, such as wealthy or rich or oligarchy, some folks here are falling into the right-wing messaging/framing trap of using the the phrase "top earners". "Top earners" is one of the most obnoxious, Orwellian labels that the conservatives and the MSM have ever created.
While I expect media companies owned by Rupert Murdock or GE to engage in this kind of right-wing framing, I would like Kossacks to please consider using more accurate and less conservative-narrative-reinforcing terms.
I avoid this phrase like the plague, and am uncomfortable even repeating it in this diary, but it seems that some Kossacks have fallen in this rhetorical trap. I'll explain over the jump...
If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.
- Jeremiah Wright, April 2007
Today, former Reverend Jeremiah Wright is nationally infamous as the controversial former head of President Barack Obama's former church. During the primary campaign, tapes of Mr. Wright's sermons did deep damage to Mr. Obama's candidacy, to which Mr. Obama later responded with a unique and heartfelt speech about race. To this day the Wright affair remains the most damaging scandal the president has encountered.
ABC's news report, however, was not the first time that a news organization reported about Mr. Wright's controversial statements. Take, for instance, this fascinating New York Times story - a report written a full year before the Jeremiah Wright scandal exploded.
Sometimes watching cable news is a tiring endeavor. Seeing the same people yelling, the same old political arguments, and the same accusations can be wearying. Indeed, nowadays there is not actually much news in a cable news show. Instead it is mostly political entertainment.
This blogger has therefore taken to checking out the news on Univision; it is always interesting to get a different perspective than the old cable-news paradigm. While most news does not go outside America, for instance, Univision devotes a substantial amount of coverage to neglected Latin America.
Then there is immigration. Univision is very, very passionate about immigration. This is understandable, given that many of the anchors and much of the audience is composed of immigrants - people who have an profoundly personal stake in the immigration debate. The intensity of their coverage is unmatched even by Fox News.
(We haven't had enough time/space in the last week to give this the attention it deserves - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
One of the biggest stories of the year is being virtually ignored by one of the most influential media outlets in America. Meanwhile, Iran's government news outlet engages in journalism.
The latest document dump from WikiLeaks would seem to be one of those massive, stop the presses, drop everything and throw all available resources at it stories that dominates news cycles for weeks on end. One of the first revelations was of Frago 242 (a Guardian story describes a frago as "a 'fragmentary order' which summarises a complex requirement"), which directed soldiers not to investigate war crimes that did not directly involve members of the coalition. There are reports that US soldiers may have engaged in war crimes themselves. There are hundreds of thousands of documents and they will take a long time to digest.
The New York Times featured it Saturday. On Sunday it did so again; this time with an accompanying character assassination of Julian Assange, which Glenn Greenwald promptly took apart. While Greenwald focuses on the author of the smear - London Bureau Chief John Burns - in a sense it is a somewhat narrow critique.
It seems similar to how some activists focused their ire on Rahm Emanuel when initiatives appeared to get frustrated by the White House. After all, the hard charging, abrasive chief of staff who draws fire (conveniently) away from the president is a stock character in Washington. Emanuel was hardly novel. More importantly, he was not calling the shots. Anyone put off by him should focus at least as much on his employer.
The same goes for Burns. Whatever journalistic sins and malfeasance can be hung on him (and Greenwald catalogs them brilliantly) the fact is, his employers give him the platform. We should spare some scrutiny for them. For instance, look at the front pages of the Times on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. There is nothing about the new documents at all.
North Korea today constitutes one of the most isolated countries in the world. Precious little information is known about the regime; people do not come in, people do not come out. Until recently, there was only one known photo of Kim Jong-un, the purported successor to Kim Jong-il - and even today the most recent photo of the man is decades old.
North Korea is also supposedly a living hellhole. To live in North Korea is to reside in one of the poorest countries in the world. North Koreans are raised to believe that Kim Jong-il is literally a God. They live in perpetual fear of the secret police. Millions are starving from the failed economic policies of the authoritarian government.
Wait a second - if North Korea is such a mystery, how do we know all this?
Summer is in full swing, which means that Hollywood has come out with the usual set of summer blockbusters. This year's summer movies - from Inception to Despicable Me - have generally been good quality, well-done things. Indeed, the film Inception may become one of the great classics of movie fame.
Then there was The Last Airbender, by M. Night Shyamalan - a movie which may earn the title as the worst movie this year. From its inception (pardon the pun) to its sorry release, Airbender has been dogged in the wake of controversial casting decisions. The graphic below neatly summarizes the controversy:
With the death of the Senate energy bill, efforts to combat global climate change have reached a standstill. It does not appear that a cap-and-trade scheme is anywhere in the near future.
A number of factors killed the energy bill. Democrats from states dependent upon traditional energy, such as West Virginia, did not support the bill. Neither did previous cooperative Republicans, such as Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Perhaps most importantly - and least mentioned - was the economic recession, which shifted the public's concern from the environment to the pocketbook.
There was also another factor, a factor which should not have - but did - increase skepticism.
It has been fashionable to compare President Barack Obama to many of his predecessors. Liberals, facing the toughest midterms since 1994, have taken to recalling the presidencies Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan - two men who faced similar challenges during the same parts of their terms, yet ended their terms with high approval ratings and respected legacies. Conservatives prefer the example of former president Jimmy Carter.
In the early days of the Obama presidency, it was also rather fashionable to measure Mr. Obama against another president: the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Nowadays this comparison is less used. Mr. Obama and Mr. Roosevelt, however, do have at least one interesting similarity - and it is a similarity few talk about.
Much has been made of the recent Russian spy swap, in which ten Russian infiltrators were exchanged for four American infiltrators. The overall reaction has been one of amusement. Russian spies combined with Desperate Housewives? Straight out of a Cold War movie thriller!
In fact, the reaction to the spy scandal reveals far more about American attitudes towards Russia than most classified information would. Simply put, the United States no longer regards Russia as its number-one nemesis and rival. In the days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union had ten thousand nuclear missiles pointed at America, the reaction would have been far different - far more hostile, and far less amused.
in 2009 the [Sunday] talk shows told us (by their selection of congressional guests) that the people who matter are disproportionately white, male, senior, and Republican - disproportionate not just when compared to the American population overall, but also when compared to the population of Congress itself.
The broadest overview of the findings were shown in these two charts: the first broad-range overview of the demographics, showing that both women and minorities are dramatically under-represented in Congress:
And the increased imbalance on the talk shows:
There was also one chart showing the appearance of individual legislators--with no representatives, not even Speaker Pelosi--warranting individual mention. I decided to use this chart, combined with two measures of ideology--DW-Nominate and Progressive Punch--to provide a sharper picture of the ideological postioning of congressional representatives on the Sunday talk shows. Once again, these measures showed that what we're presented with on network TV is not the actual country we live in, but a center-right version, which has been subjected to sharp rightward tilt from reality:
The "score" columns take no account for how many appearances each Senator made. The "cumulative" columns multiply their scores by the number of appearances, allowing for aggregate averges to be computed.
Over the past few weeks, the Catholic Church has found itself mired in controversy, plagued by an ever-growing sexual abuse scandal unfolding in Europe. The pope himself has come under substantial criticism, to such an extent that a leading German magazine titled a report, "The Failed Papacy of Benedict XVI."
Yet the media's growing chorus of criticism reveals as much about itself as it does about the mishaps of Pope Benedict XVI. It reveals much about how the media thinks about itself, and about the media's worldview of what society ought to be like.
The press secretary dismissed the "professional left" in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality."
Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: "They wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."(...)
Progressives, Gibbs said, are the liberals outside of Washington "in America," and they are grateful for what Obama has accomplished in a shattered economy with uniform Republican opposition and a short amount of time.
Oy, on many levels.
If the White House really doesn't think it has any problems among self-identified liberals or progressives, and that all the complaints are coming from a grasstop elite, it needs to look at the data again. From 2008 to 2010, President Obama has suffered far more erosion of support among self-identified liberals than among self-identified moderates or conservatives:
In 2008, according to exit polls, 89% self-identified liberals voted for President Obama. Over the past four weeks, according to Gallup, President Obama's approval rating among self-identified liberals has averaged 74%. That is a decline of 15 points.
In 2008, according to exit polls, 60% of self-identified moderates voted for President Obama. Over the past four weeks, according to Gallup, President Obama's approval rating among self-identified moderates has averaged 54%. That is a decline of 6 points.
In 2008, according to exit polls, 20% of self-identified conservatives voted for President Obama. Over the past four weeks, according to Gallup, President Obama's approval rating has averaged 24% among self-identified conservatives. That is an increase of 4 points.
So, according to Gallup, disapproval among self-identified liberals accounts for the majority of President Obama's approval rating underperformance compared to his 2008 vote share (from the perspective that the smaller decline among moderates is partially canceled out by the small gain among conservatives). If it were not for President Obama's decline among liberals, there would be virtually no difference between his 2010 approval rating and 2008 voter performance.
Maybe the White House knows that its problem among self-identified liberals is not confined to the grasstops. Maybe it is "reaching out" to liberals in this insulting manner because it figures that while it has lost more support among liberals than among any other group, those liberals are still going to vote Democratic anyway.
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