Tag: MSNBC

Is It A Conspiracy?

There are some that see a conspiracy at every turn….fortunately I am not one of those pea brains….but there are some situations that beg to be defined as a conspiracy…….and this time it appears, at least to me, that there maybe a conspiracy developing…..The Tour du Palin…..The book tour…..the “Going Rogue” Express…..the continuing saga of one Sarah Palin…..

Then what would the conspiracy be?  The Mainstream Media has its reporters on the book signing route for “Going Rogue”……My question is……why are the networks devoting so much time and resource in covering a book signing?  It cannot be that it is subjective policy book…in fact there is little to no policy in the book, just opposition to everything Obama…..then why is it so damn important?

NBC has a well respected journalist, Andrea Mitchell, covering the first stop of the signing express……this is reporter that can get an interview from just about anyone in politics and yet she is covering some mindless book tour….and reporting that the Palin crowds are some sort of a phenom……crap they have gotten some local color to do that sort of thing…..but what do I know?

Okay Professor what is up?  Appears, at least to me, that the MSM is trying to install Palin as the face of the GOP….they are assisting Palin in keeping her face in the news…..she, Palin, has NO substance and has NO policy sense whatever….no where does she deserve the coverage she is getting……and she does not deserve the free PR for her book…….that is unless the MSM is attempting to make her the “voice” of the GOP and in doing so helping liberals in their campaigns in the future……

I told you that I see a conspiracy…….I maybe WRO……Wr……..W….. (heavy sigh)…….MISTAKEN……this maybe just that the media has nothing better to report but the person that gets her facts from a placement at IHOP……

Obama’s Free Ride–Revisited

For weeks now, if not months, I have heard this pundit or that pundit talk about the free ride that Obama’s campaign has gotten in the media.  Some blame the “Northeast elites”.  Most of the ones accussing the media of the free ride have been int broadcast media.  The whole time I never saw it that way, they continually beat up Obama on associations, etc they gave Repub surrogates all the time they needed to push the McCain saga and seldom asked important questions, just the ones the the McCain people wanted to answer.

I continually asked where was the free ride.  Never got a good answer to the question.  Last night on Countdown With Keith Olbermann, he mentioned something that may have answered my question.  He said in his campaign commentary and I quoite,

“And what would be happening tonight in the minds of tens of millions of voters if it had been Sen. Obama who had his people negotiate, behind the scenes and off the record, to force favorable coverage of his campaign at three television networks?”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27522443/

Now if that is true, which I am beginning to think it is, that could explain the disconnect with me.  I even would go so far as to guess that NBC was one of those that cut the deal with the McCain people, why else was this not reported before the night before the election?

And you think that the media is fair and balanced, that it is not controlled by corporations…..sorry you are delusional.

Olbermann On Palin

I have been writing against the whole label of socialist/Marxist/communist/un-American thing that has become ever popular in the conservative circles.  Finally, someone has come out with a critical look at it.

This is from Countdown with Keith Olbermann on 28 Oct 08.

Finally tonight, the Campaign Comment, and the real danger when you run a presidential candidate who thinks he’s Joe six-pack the Plumber, and a Vice Presidential candidate who thinks she’s Huey Long.

It’s not that the rhetoric in a desperate flailing last week on the stump can get hyperbolic and dangerous. It’s that each person on that campaign hears some of that giddying hyperbolic and dangerous rhetoric and tries to top it.

This has ended up, as it usually does, with one of the desperate candidates going so far to the right that they meet themselves coming back in the other direction.

That’d be you, Gov. Palin. You’ve finally done it. You’ve accused Obama of doing something wrong, of being something evil, something you boasted of doing, and being, yourself, just two months ago.

You try to figure out what this might have been, while I go back and talk to those good people over there. The Republicans called Obama a neophyte and then they picked a V.P. nominee with a tenth of Obama’s experience.

The Republicans called Obama a celebrity and then they bought that nominee $150,000 in designer clothes. The Republicans called Obama a terrorist sympathizer and then McCain said he was proud to be a friend of Gordon Liddy.

It’s like they’ve been unknowingly endowed with ESP and have been telling their own futures. And now the GOP has selected its last drum-thump for the remainder of the campaign although they said that about the last 17 “last drum-thumps.”Obama is a socialist!

Missouri Congressman Todd Akin, speaking near St. Louis:

“This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing It’s a referendum on socialism.”

Arizona Sen. John McCain, who is apparently still running for President, at Dayton Ohio yesterday:

“Barack the Redistributor.”

Then he realized that sounded like an auto part, so, John McCain at Pottsville, Pennsylvania, later yesterday:

“Sen. Obama is running to be Redistributionist in Chief.”

No, no, go back to the first one.

Nobody you’re talking to, even understands what socialism means, Senator.

“Re-dis-tri-bu-shun-ist”is six syllables, and it sounds more like he’s recycling newspapers or something. Go simpler, like Michelle Bachmann’s only rival for “least stable member of the House of Representatives:” Steve King, R-Iowa, 5th District and 17th Century.

Warming up a crowd at a high school in Sioux City, for Gov. Palin on Saturday, King, who is amazingly still let out of the house each day without adult supervision, said of the Obama candidacy:

“When you take a lurch to the left you end up in a totalitarian dictatorship.”

“There is no freedom to the left. It’s always to our side of the aisle.”

“We choose freedom and liberty.”

Presumably that’s why the Congressman’s party was good enough to torture prisoners, eavesdrop on Americans, suspend Habeas Corpus, demonize dissent, pay news organizations to run favorable stories, and generally come as close to a totalitarian dictatorship as any American president ever has.

To choose freedom and liberty. For Congressman King and invited guests. Not for the country. Can you tell I’m stalling?

I’m trying to give Gov. Palin out there, a couple more seconds to figure out how she managed to get herself, as Shakespeare wrote of people destroyed by their own evil plans, “hoist with her own petard.”

Got it yet, Gov?

Okay, you remember Sen. Obama telling J.T. Plumber that it would help the country to “share the wealth”—a sentiment with which anybody not receiving $150,000 in free clothes would probably agree?

So you went off in Des Moines, remember this?

“See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else. If you thought your income, your property, your inventory, your investments were, were yours, they would really collectively belong to everybody. Higher taxes, more government, misusing the power to tax leads to government moving into the role of some believing that government then has to take care of us. And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us. Now, they do this in other countries where the people are not free.”

So Gov., Obama’s not just a socialist? Not just a re-distributionist re-distributor? Maybe not just a totalitarian? Maybe not just a dictator, he may be a communist?

To paraphrase you in Des Moines, Governor, Obama wants to set up, unlike other candidates, collectively owning the resources. By sharing that wealth and those resources. Collectivist sharing’ the wealth socialist communism, I’d say.

And still none of that sounds familiar to you, Governor?

“And Alaska – we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.”

Who said that, Governor?

Who was the collectivist share-the-wealther, who was boasting to the reporter visiting from “The New Yorker Magazine,”of having been able to send a check for $1,200 to every man, woman and child in the state since, quote “Alaska is sometimes described as America’s socialist state, because of its collective ownership of resources?”

Why, you said that, Governor! You’re a share-the-wealth, collectivist, Almost-Socialist-Governor, Governor! Who also believes that income, property, inventory and investments, collectively belonging to everybody else, leads to a misuse of power, and government making decisions for us, turning countries into places where the people are not free.

Places like,  Sarah Palin’s America! Governor, all sorts of choice words apply here: hypocrite, double-talker, snake-oil seller, socialist. But let me stick with just one, with which to bid you goodbye. You, governor, are a fraud.

Well said, Keith!

Olbermann/Matthews Revisited

NBC‘s decision to move Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews out of the MSNBC anchor slots for this fall’s election – widely seen as an attempt to protect the traditional NBC News brand – points up a longer-term problem with splitting that brand, a rival executive said yesterday.

After weeks of infighting, several uncomfortable on-air moments and mounting criticism that MSNBC’s political coverage was tainting NBC’s image of objectivity, NBC announced that David Gregory would become MSNBC’s chief anchor. Olbermann and Matthews will continue as analysts.

Critics have already weighed in on that question. When speakers were blasting the alleged bias of mainstream media at the Republican convention last week, delegates chanted, “N-B-C!”

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, who has engaged in a heated feud with Olbermann, said Thursday night, “The networks are biased, there’s no question, and NBC is the worst.”

NBC News may not take its cues from O’Reilly, but it is not immune to the perception.

That’s where it’s gotten tricky for NBC. If “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams is on MSNBC, is he labeled opinionated like the rest?

The impact of moving Olbermann and Matthews out won’t matter much to the typical viewer, who looks at MSNBC as just another cable network, said analyst Andrew Tyndall.

“NBC has established such a good reputation over the years because of Tim Russert, who made it the place to go for politics,” said Tyndall, publisher of the Tyndall Report, which tracks coverage. “This is really a symbolic move.”

Olbermann And Matthews Bite The Dust

MSNBC is removing Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews as the anchors of live political events, bowing to growing criticism that they are too opinionated to be seen as neutral in the heat of the presidential campaign.

David Gregory, the NBC newsman and White House correspondent who also hosts a program on MSNBC, will take over during such events as this fall’s presidential and vice presidential debates and election night.

The move, confirmed by spokesmen for both networks, follows increasingly loud complaints about Olbermann’s anchor role at the Democratic and Republican conventions. Olbermann, who regularly assails President Bush and GOP nominee John McCain on his “Countdown” program, was effusive in praising the acceptance speech of Democratic nominee Barack Obama. He drew flak Thursday when the Republicans played a video that included a tribute to the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that if the networks had done that, “we would be rightly eviscerated at all quarters, perhaps by the Republican Party itself, for exploiting the memories of the dead, and perhaps even for trying to evoke that pain again. If you reacted to that videotape the way I did, I apologize.”

THis is typical of corporate controlled media. Oldermann and Matthews, while I may not agree with them, are about the only ones on MSNBC that have original thoughts. Choosing Gregory seems the right course for GE since he was on tape doing the electric boogaloo with Rove and the guys a a press dinner.  Gregory also thinks that he and others in the media did all that they could to press the government on the run to war. He is the prefect choice to keep the message of crap alive.  He will let the surrogates spout crap and never answer a question.  Neutral?  Does anyone truly believe that pile of steaming crap?  If they were truly neutral they would not let McCain constantly get away with his screw ups, he would be called to task.  And please do not let me get started on the crap that they are ignoring about Palin.  Neutral?  Now there is the joke of the day.

MSNBC has shown that it is NOT the place of politics that it claims.

We Have Ways Of Making You Patriotic

For months I had been bitching that MSNBC was misleading the public in several ways.  Theyt nwere on board with Romeny and Huckabee and then with Clinton and now this story has come out about the reporting to assist in patriotic fervor.

CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin said Thursday she was referring to her time spent at MSNBC when she said she felt pressure not to report stories critical of the Bush administration during the time leading up to the Iraq war.

Yellin’s initial comments, made during a discussion with Anderson Cooper on CNN Wednesday, shifted attention to the news media’s performance following release of a critical assessment of the Bush administration by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. He wrote that Bush’s strategy for selling the war was less than candid and honest.

During her CNN appearance, Yellin said the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives to make sure the war was presented “in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings.”

The higher Bush’s approval ratings, the more pressure she felt from news executives to put on positive stories about the president, she said. Pushed by Cooper to explain, Yellin said her bosses would turn down critical stories about the administration and try to put on positive pieces.

She said she didn’t mean to leave the impression that corporate leadership edited her work; she was referring to senior producers who “wanted their coverage to reflect the mood of the country.” She didn’t identify any of the producers or give a specific example about how things were changed because of this.

MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines said Yellin was a “freelance overnight news reader at MSNBC for one year who was not renewed.” But he didn’t dispute Yellin’s claim that she did some Washington and Pentagon reports while there.

Back in the 1920’s Italian political theorist, Gramsci predicted that the mass media would become the leader in the formation of political thought of the people.  He was so accurate.