Category: Culture

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So-called “war” between Fox News and White House is war in name only

Any rational human knows that Fox News isn’t a real news network. They blur the line between opinion and news reporting to the point that it all seems the same to them. The White House was only expressing the consensus of the rational people in pointing it out in public and on the record. Like any other right wing group Fox now claims to be a victim. The facts just don’t support Fox News.

Those of us who watch mainstream news programs and the cable networks have known for years that Fox News has been the mouth piece of the Republican Party. The media watch dog site Media Matters even has a video clip showing how Fox opinion bleeds into its news reports:

Fox and other conservatives have come back and said well President Obama and the Democrats have MSNBC as their official voice. The problem with that false equivalency is that a rational person can see a distinct difference between MSNBC’s news reports and their opinion programs. The other proof against such a charge by Fox is that on some of the shows like Hardball and Countdown the hosts and guests disagree with the current administration and say so but that doesn’t get passed on in the news reports like we see time and time again with Fox News.

A more recent dust up involved a reported exclusion of Fox to interview a Treasury official. Fox was crying all day about censorship and then claiming the other networks came to its defense and refused to interview the guy unless Fox was included.

Like most everything coming out the mouths at Fox, the incident didn’t happen the way it claims.

The version Fox has pushed all day is that the network was excluded from an interview roundtable with Feinberg yesterday, and that bureau chiefs from ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN came to Fox’s defense.

TPMDC dug into it, and here’s what happened.

Feinberg did a pen and pad with reporters to brief them on cutting executive compensation. TV correspondents, as they do with everything, asked to get the comments on camera. Treasury officials agreed and made a list of the networks who asked (Fox was not among them).

But logistically, all of the cameras could not get set up in time or with ease for the Feinberg interview, so they opted for a round robin where the networks use one pool camera. Treasury called the White House pool crew and gave them the list of the networks who’d asked for the interview.

The network pool crew noticed Fox wasn’t on the list, was told that they hadn’t asked and the crew said they needed to be included. Treasury called the White House and asked top Obama adviser Anita Dunn. Dunn said yes and Fox’s Major Garrett was among the correspondents to interview Feinberg last night.

Simple as that, we’re told, and the networks don’t want to be seen as heroes for Fox.

WH: We’re Happy To Exclude Fox, But Didn’t Yesterday With Feinberg Interview

But this is also why a news network with only about 3 million viewers can have an effect, good or bad, on a national discussion.

The other networks live inside the same beltway bubble and so when Fox harps a story for many days the others think there is a story there and end up picking it up too – even when it is false or not what it seems.

Take the above incident with the Feinberg interview. Even though it wasn’t a case of the White House saying “No Fox” the CBS Evening News had a story about the non-story and used Fox’s view of it.

(CBS) After months of taking incoming fire from the prime-time stars of Fox News, the Obama White House is firing back, charging that FOX News is different from all other news.

“FOX News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party,” said Anita Dunn, White House communications director.

“If media is operating basically as a talk radio format, then that’s one thing, and if it’s operating as a news outlet, then that’s another,” Mr. Obama said.

And the White House has gone beyond words, reports CBS News senior political correspondent Jeff Greenfield. Last Sept. 20, the president went on every Sunday news show – except Chris Wallace’s show on FOX. And on Thursday, the Treasury Department tried to exclude FOX News from pool coverage of interviews with a key official. It backed down after strong protests from the press.

“All the networks said, that’s it, you’ve crossed the line,” said CBS News White House correspondent Chip Reid.

President Obama’s Feud with FOX News

It also needs to be pointed out that the White House has never tried to censor Fox or prevent it from covering the White House, it just hasn’t favored it on equal footing to NBC, CBS, or ABC.

Its not like an administration has never tried to freeze out or isolate a network before. In the last administration the Bush Whit House went after MSNBC and NBC while holding meetings with only right wing talk show hosts:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Again the problem with Fox is that it is more a talk radio style program rather than a real journalistic news organization. They pass off lies, rumors, and smears as facts and it bleeds into their “news” reports. The other news programs thinking they are missing a story then report on those lies, rumors, and smears which give them a “creditability” it couldn’t gain on its own just by being “reported” by Fox.

That’s what Fox does – blow up lies, rumors, and smears into stories that don’t deserve to be stories and wouldn’t be if real journalism was being practiced in this country.

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Digging some Carson Daly

I admit I am not a fan of media personality Carson Daly nor have I been a fan of his late night show Last Call. I may still agree with Jimmy Fallon’s old parody from SNL that Daly is a tool but I have started to like his show a bit better now that it is a magazine format.

Last Call was Daly’s attempt at a traditional talk show with guests, and joky bits. He was trying to play off his popularity from his hosting duty on the old TRL show on MTV. Frankly it was lame. The guests were fine and he had on musical guests who were either new to me or just breaking in the US, but his impression of Jay Leno or Conan O’Brien came off stiff and lame.

A few years into the show it moved to Los Angeles and actually became more lame with the addition of a house band and really unfunny sketches. I watched less and less.

In 2007 the show was forced to go back on the air during the WGA strike or the non-striking members of the show would be fired. I boycotted the show after that.

Then one day I caught an episode. Basically I was writing on the computer and left the TV on after Late Night and Daly was in Seattle or some place touring the best hang out places and what not. His guests were interviewed in a bar or hotel restaurant and sometimes in a studio. The musical guest was filmed playing live at some club and they would spend a short time letting them speak to a camera about themselves.

Basically due to budget cuts Last Call became a magazine style show rather than the old lame talk show format.

Carson Daly is a good host in this style of show where he introduces the segments and interviews the guest.

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Why real life sports reporting is like my fantasy football team

This past week the Cleveland Browns traded Braylon Edwards to the Jets. Edwards was formerly the 3rd pick overall in the NFL draft and was a Pro Bowl selection is 2007. It seems some experts in sports reporting let that fact cloud their analysis of the trade.

Bob Hunter, a sports columnist for The Columbus Dispatch wrote in his Friday column:

Many of the Browns were concerned about how trading a potential game-breaking receiver, who was a former No. 3 overall draft pick, for a so-so receiver, a special-teams player and two draft picks, believed to be third- and fifth-rounders, makes a bad team better.

Bob Hunter commentary: Rumblings

Those of us who follow the team on a regular basis know why he was traded and this fan is glad they did something with Edwards. In 2008, he had the league top spot in dropped passes at 16. It was excruciating watching time after time Edwards drop a pass. This season he seemed to be improving but he still lacked the supposed game-breaking potential and he then got into trouble at a nightclub at 2:30 in the morning the day after the team lost their last game.

I’m glad Edwards had time to party after the loss….

It reminded me of a long bus trip home when I was on our high school football team as a senior. We had just lost the game but from the laughs and high jinks by the lads on the bus that night you wouldn’t think we did. One of the coaches had enough he stood up and yelled “You just lost a game! Act like it…”

So how is the Edwards situation and Hunter’s reaction to it like my fantasy football team?

Well I have a habit of drafting big names from the previous season who then do squat this season and then I can’t bring myself to dump them because “they scored 10 TDs in 2008!” as if their lack of stats this season will turn around. I can’t waste time on dead weight. Its “what have you done lately” that most coaches operate on and Edwards had his chance through the preseason and 4 games to show he could do better. He didn’t and the team decided to get what they could for him on the market.

Such tunnel vision can effect even TV people paid to watch the games.

During one Browns game one of the CBS commentators complained when Brady Quinn was pulled from the game – “he’s 6 of 8 for 34 yards!” seeming to forget that 6 of 8 for 34 yards before half time is almost the same as being 0 for 8 for a quarterback. Those stats aren’t going to win the game and the coaches were right to pull Quinn from the game. The team still lost the game but Derrick Anderson seemed to spark the team a little bit more than before.

Sometimes, changing teams is better for the player. If Edwards returns to his game-breaking potential we saw in 2007 while on the Jets then good for him, but I still wouldn’t feel bad for the Browns because he wasn’t the same player he was in 2007 and it didn’t look like that Edwards was going to show up this season either.

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It is so obvious it makes me sick

Like dragging ones feet across the carpet on a cold dry day and then getting a jolt when touching anything, I get to a point where some things in life and the world become so obvious to me I wonder why it seems I am the only one who sees it and why can’t I get others to see it too. When others get that way they get ulcers or fly into a rage – me? I beat my head on a wall and write about it in my blog. Here is the latest obvious crap flaking my pie crust.

1. Where’s the change I voted for? It seems even with a new administration in Washington and the bullies out of power in Congress, we were to see actual real change. I’m still waiting. The Health Care reform debate is a prime example. It’s been obvious for years that we must end the monopoly by private insurance companies who profit from the pain and suffering of their customers. We don’t tolerate it for any other industry except health insurance.

Now it seems both spineless Democrats and the GOP bullies are planning a big wet kiss to the insurance companies along the same lines as we saw when the Medicare D pharmacy plan came out – huge payments to big insurance companies for crappy coverage for those least able to afford any medical bills in the first place. Can you say Donut hole?

Republicans have lied about the reform from the beginning – just plain lied – and our fourth estate and even Democrats just let them do it.

Here are the facts 40 MILLION people have NO insurance and approx 40,000 DIE each year because of having NO insurance.

What kind of human would allow that to happen? Republicans for one and Democrats who accept money from the insurance industry.

Polls show overwhelming public support for reform and a public option, yet some in Congress let the money do their thinking for them. SHAME ON THEM!!!!

2. Passing off “talking points” as news. What boils my blood almost as much as the GOP lies about health care reform that go unchallenged is the general incest that goes on within the Washington DC media complex.

We had an election in November and the Democrats won handy majorities in both houses and have the White House but you wouldn’t know it if you watch or read the mainstream media that comes out of DC.

It seems that the Sunday talk shows and political news in print supposedly needs to have a 1 to 1 “balance” of left and right views. While it seemed on some Sundays, former VP Dick Cheney, or for some odd reason, his daughter, was allowed to basically give a monologue about his version of events when he was President and approved of the criminal torturing of human beings among other GOP centric discussions.

Do you remember tug-of-wars from your childhood? I remember the adult in charge lining up us kids by height and then going down the line, alternating which team we would be on, to ensure that neither side was unfairly stacked. That notion of balancing the sides to make things fair has morphed in modern media to this simplistic binary equation of Republican vs. Democrat. But it’s a false equivalence, because it assumes a completely valid argument on both sides, and as we chronicle daily here at C&L, rarely do we see sensible, much less valid, arguments coming from the right to make the “balance” actually informative. Instead we get death panels, socialicommunistmarxism, concern trollism over deficit spending and the Olympic Games.

Sunday Morning Bobblehead Thread

The point again is this assumes that both sides have equally valid arguments and in some cases, like the health care debate, this is not even close. The lies about death panels, lack of public support for a public option, and “socialized medicine” told by the right are lies. Lies are not valid arguments.

Only a few years ago if you dissented against the President your words were treasonous and you should be “sent to Gitmo” or worse, where regular people wearing T-shirts saying “Bush Sucks” were detained by police when they showed up to protest Bush in public. Since November if you bring a gun to an event the President is appearing, it’s called “free speech” and you want to “take back your country” from a black guy and his uppity ways.

It kind of has an Orwellian “doubleplusgood” ring to it all.

3 Finally, who the hell is Kim Kardashian? What has she done to merit any mention in the press? I had to look her up in Wikipedia and just as I guessed she is famous for no real reason. She didn’t land a plane in the Hudson, she didn’t cure a disease, and she doesn’t contribute to society in any memorable way.

If she was someone of substance I could see why she would be newsworthy but unless I missed her winning an Oscar recently then her celebrity worth is very small compared to the amount of press she gets.

I’m just fed up with narcissism being passed out as something important. I don’t care about her or any other “celebutante” and I’ll now have to spend time scrubbing the taint from this blog. UGH!

And THAT is this edition of my Obvious rant….

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Spending time off the net – Part 2

I was without Internet access for about 10 days and I didn’t realize how much its tentacles reached into my life. I had 10 days to kill and this is the second part of what I did to kill the time.

4. There was a faded celebrity with a new book accusing her now dead celebrity father of incest when she was a drugged up teenager in the late 1970’s early 1980’s. She was interviewed on Oprah which is like the President being on all channels for a speech. I understand that her ordeal is major and it may have had an influence on her later substance abuse and she should get treatment for it- but I can’t understand why she would need to be on Oprah and discuss it. People have said that by her being so public that some regular people who suffered the same trauma might finally come forward to deal with it … I guess that is one way of looking at it but I just don’t get someone wanting to be so public about whatever trauma they have suffered.

5. Got to watch some shows from the season DVDs of “Due South” that I missed the first time they were on back in the 1990’s. The problem with the season set is there isn’t any extras – just 6 episodes on each disk. Still funny after all these years – Thank you kindly. Just before I lost my Internet I got word that fans of the show will be meeting in Toronto in 2010 for a convention.

6. Finished up a screen writing workshop I had on DVD and that got me warmed up to write again. In one day I wrote 20 pages of a new script…. whooo hooo. Although I really wish I could write comedy. Got to really read one of my writing magazines I paid for but hardly read.

7. Kept up on my house cleaning and laundry…. wow – didn’t take long at all.

8. Really got to thinking why am I charged cell phone minutes to hear my voicemail. Shouldn’t voicemail be free for me to hear it? Yet another scam – just like paying $9 a month for Netflix even if you don’t use it very often and if you do then they charge you more.

9. Edited and converted some digital video files I made from some old VHS tapes including some guest starring turns in 2000 from an acting favorite of mine. They appeared on several shows that season and I had video taped the shows. Also converted some old footage from the day of the 9/11 attacks. I had put in a tape and just pressed record during the wall to wall news coverage. Also had a bit of the first Letterman, Leno, and Saturday Night Live back after the attacks.

10. Listened to some of the commentary tracks on some of the DVD movies I have. A good one was the technical commentary on Clerks II with Director Kevin Smith and Dave Klein who was the Director of Photography. Another good one was the one to the 2000 reissue of “Superman the Movie” (1978) with Director Richard Donner and writer Tom Mankiewicz. The one thing I didn’t know was that Chris Reeves flew in 7 different ways for the movie all without any CGI (since they didn’t have CGI yet). Well I did know CGI didn’t exist but didn’t know they used 7 different ways to make him fly. That film still holds up. I also have “Superman Returns” and it is cool to compare the two movies and see so much was the same in theme and tone. I really love when both Supermen say “Well, I hope this experience hasn’t put you off flying. Statistically speaking, it’s still the safest way to travel.” Cracks me up every time.

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