1. Howard Kurtz points out some of Walter Cronkite’s partisan and personal transgressions. The most trusted man in America slanted his news coverage to favor Democrats over Republicans and to take sides in intra-Democratic rivalries. Kurtz argues that these would be a big deal today. We don’t need nostalgia for the media institutions of the mid-1900s. If anyone thinks the Obamamania of 2008 was bad, they should look at the media treatment of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Mainstream journalists seemed to be operating under the assumption that if they could call Goldwater a lunatic, Nazi, Fascist enough times, liberals would never again have to face electoral competition. For pure slanderous bad faith, I can’t remember anything that compares with Daniel Schorr reporting on CBS News that Goldwater was going to Germany ( of as Schorr put it “Hitler’s one-time stomping ground” – in case you missed the point) as part of meeting of the international far right.
2. There are several advantages to the existence of the populist conservative media (talk radio, Fox News, blogs.) One major advantage is that, by virtue of the size of the audience of the right-leaning media, the right-leaning news outlets can sometimes force the “mainstream” media to report stories that they would prefer to avoid. I remember back in 2008 where, for a while, I lived in a kind of parallel news universe from my friends who didn’t consume right-leaning media. I knew about the John Edwards affair story and so did tens of millions of other people, but for folks who got their media from outside the right-leaning outlets, the story didn’t exist until it was reported by the networks. The same thing happened with the story about the forged George W. Bush National Guard documents and Elizabeth Warren’s phony Native American heritage. As the right-of-center media exposes the story to larger audiences, and sticks to pressuring the nonconservative news outlets, the willingness of the nonconservative news outlets to embargo the story decays. And only one major nonconservative news outlet has to cave in and report the story for the whole news embargo to collapse. When ABC decided to report the Edwards story, then everybody followed.
So the populist conservative media can, with great effort and some cost, get the nonconservative media to report inconvenient truths they would have ignored in an earlier era. But there costs are real too. If Elizabeth Warren had been a conservative Republican, the story would have been “Warren is a fraud.” Now, in effect, the story is “Warren’s conservative opponents say she is a fraud.” That’s better than nothing but it isn’t the same thing. And the conservative media can’t consistently set the agenda for the nonconservative media that is consumed that by persuadables that don’t watch FOX or listen to talk radio. If the New York Times and the Today Show decide that Bain Capital is a story, then Bain Capital is a story.
3. There were advantages to the old media set up. Audiences were very large. If you has the money, they had the time and the eyeballs. The norms of the era demanded that they covered major political remarks (State of the Union speeches, national convention speeches) more-or-less without interruption. You could put Reagan in the “A Time For Choosing” infomercial and lots of people who thought conservatives were all about starving old people and starting nuclear wars would listen and have their views softened. It didn’t matter if the network journalists spent the next thirty years implying (with various levels of subtlety) that Reagan was stupid/heartless/crazy/bloodthirsty. The public would still get a chance to hear Reagan at length and they heard what they heard. It is harder to reach persuadable (or potentially persuadable) voters at similar length today, but the media cues that the Democrats are the “good guys” are still there. Audiences are more fragmented. Many of today’s voters come from families that weren’t here when Reagan was President and haven’t been socialized into the conservative narrative and they probably don’t know it exists. They aren’t going to get it from the right-leaning media because that isn’t the media they consume. If they are going to be reached, they are going to have to be reached out to. Most of them aren’t going to come to us. This doesn’t mean things are worse than when Walter Cronkite was the unofficial national interpreter of reality. It is just a different set of challenges.
4. I love this story for its pure passive-aggressive evil. The headline should be “Mormons Massacred A Bunch Of People. It Was Like 9/11 With Mormons. Romney Is A Mormon. We’re Just Saying.” Yes, the story actually contains a 9/11 reference. Most Obama water carrying by the media (outside the MSNBC lunatic asylum) will probably be more subtle than this story but it does show some of the advantages that media power gives the left-of-center. The media can (sometimes in the form of bogus human interest stories) go dirty on Romney (or whatever right-of-center figure) while Obama sticks to ”real issues” like Bain or contraception or whatever is the most important issue on the world today. The nonconservative media aren’t the only ones to play the game. The Boston Herald ran a story yesterday about how hard it would be for the Massachusetts Democrats to dump Elizabeth Warren over the phony Native American thing. There wasn’t any move by state Democrats to dump Warren. The story was basically an excuse for an “Elizabeth Warren is a phony Native American” story on a day when no news had broken on the subject. My sense is that this is bigger problem for the right-of-center, because they have greater trouble reaching that majority of Americans who do not regularly consume right-leaning media.
May 22nd, 2012 | 11:48 pm
If people in Arkansas and Missouri still hold a grudge over the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, how about the people of Lawrence, Kansas, who lost 150 or more ancestors to an 1863 attack by the Missourians and other Confederate sympathizers under Quantrill’s Raiders? Good Christian men from the Ozarks.
How many more atrocities pile up if we look at the American Indians and slaves who suffered under the rule of the people in that region? Are 21st Century Americans supposed to nurture murderous grudges like the Hatfields and McCoys? Or are Christians supposed to learn to forgive others as they wish God to forgive them?
May 23rd, 2012 | 12:03 pm
Some very amusing play with headlines here, Pete.
May 23rd, 2012 | 3:07 pm
A little touchy there Raymond. I think you missed Pete’s irony.
From a merely Machiavellian view, all this Lie-a-watha stuff is playing out too early in the election cycle. The Democrats will think of something better than what they have going on now.
May 23rd, 2012 | 7:57 pm
Raymond, one of the points brought out in the article was that the events of 1857 seemed to have no measureable political salience today. And yet the article was published anyway for purposes of guilt by association and to create a general creepiness vibe related to Mormons. It is obviously a despicable bad faith story. There are going to be more of them by the various organs of tolerance ove the next half year – just more subtle for the most part.
May 23rd, 2012 | 11:51 pm
To put these things in perspective, how many public school children are taught that Fraklin Delano Roosevelt, against the advice of the FBI and his attorney general, ordered 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps guarded by barbed wire and machine gun towers, for three years, without any trial or hearing? How many are told that Chief Justice Earl Warren, regarded as heroic for the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, was one of the prime advocates of the Japanese internment camps? How many are told that FDR had turned away thousands of Jews seeking refuge from the Nazis, and only relented because of the courageous stance of a Democratic Senator from Utah, Elbert D. Thomas, who had served as a Mormon missionary in Japan?
Those actions by FDR, which reflected his racial and religious prejudices, contributed to the deaths of
hundreds of people. Yet his personal culpability is seldom considered in public discourse.
May 25th, 2012 | 10:15 am
I wouldn’t call the article despicable. It is relevant if a candidate is a member of a weird cult that used to massacre people. For an account of the massacre from a Mormon church magazine, see
http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=1c234dc029133110VgnVCM100000176f620a____&locale=0
This account is presumably slanted toward the Mormon view, but it makes it clear that a local “stake president” started the attack, then got permission from the church’s district militia commander to wipe out every single person old enough to report the attack to the federal government, and then shot the pioneers in cold blood after they had surrendered with promises of protection. Brigham Young did send a message, arriving two days too late, telling them not to harm wagon trains. The stake president and militia commander were excommunicated 13 years later, and 17 years later, 9 men were indicted, of whom one was convicted and executed. The top Mormon leadership, still venerated today, covered up the crime for 17 years and then tried to pin it on one scapegoat. That’s what you can get out of a PRO-Mormon article (with appropriate reading between the lines). For a balanced account see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_massacre .
For and anti-Mormon account, see http://1857massacre.com/MMM/Brigham_Youngs_Involvement.htm .
May 25th, 2012 | 9:27 pm
I would have had marginally more respect for the article if it had baldly stated that Romney personally owed an explanation for whatever act might have been committed by his coreligionists (but only his coreligionists and those others of “weird” religious groupings) across the centuries. The article would have been much more honest if it explictly took a stand on the bases of bigotry and guilt by association rather than on pretending to examine a political impact it admitted was nonexistent.
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