Posts by DonIrvine:
- About social media.
• No road rage; walk away from the keyboard.
• Be useful.
• Be responsive.
• Be willing to correct and acknowledge errors immediately.
• Show restraint; remember that you are posting to The World. Forever.
• Try for a mix of 20 percent fun and 80 percent hard information.
• Read every link before re-tweeting or re-posting.
• It’s a tool, not an end in itself. - About journalism.
• Don’t cut corners. Do the actual work.
• If you “borrow,” always credit with a link and a specific mention, and always write in your own words.
• You can lose your reputation and your career in an instant.
• Despite that, don’t be timid. Be brave; just don’t be brave and stupid.
• Ask for advice from smart people.
• Do the work that improves the world, even in a small way.
• Don’t sink to least-common-denominator journalism.
• A little snark goes a long way.
• Think more about fairness than objectivity.
• Think about how close you can get to the truth.
• Put yourself in the place of the people who will be affected by your work. That doesn’t mean to pull your punches.
• Be rigorous. Go the extra mile. If you think you should interview five people, interview 10. Fact-check with a vengeance.
• Be aggressive — a passive journalist isn’t really a journalist.
• Get to be really good at one or two things. And get to be decently good at a whole bunch of things. (A hat tip to my friend Drake Martinet of Vice Media here.)
• If you screw up, apologize fully and move on.
• Try to work for someone great.
• Whatever help you’ve received in your career, pay it forward.
• Be idealistic. Resist cynicism.
• Never be boring — be engaging and clear, especially when the subject is complicated or hard to understand. If you’re writing blurry stuff, maybe you don’t understand the subject yet. Pity the readers (or viewers) and consider their attention span. (E.B. White on clarity, referring to his teacher William Strunk: “Will felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, a man floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get his man up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope.”)
• You are not in this business for the money, so what are you in it for? Do that work.
Trump Dumps CPAC, Leaving Attendees Disappointed
March 5th, 2016
GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, who was scheduled to speak on Saturday morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), announced today that he will not be attending and will instead be campaigning in Kansas and Florida.
The campaign issued the following statement on the withdrawal from CPAC:
The Donald J. Trump for President Campaign has just announced it will be in Wichita, Kansas for a major rally on Saturday, prior to the Caucus. Mr. Trump will also be speaking at the Kansas Caucus and then departing for Orlando, Florida to speak to a crowd of approximately 20,000 people or more. Because of this, he will not be able to speak at CPAC, as he has done for many consecutive years. Mr. Trump would like to thank Matt Schlapp and all of the executives at CPAC and looks forward to returning to next year, hopefully as President of the United States.
CPAC tweeted that they were disappointed in Trump’s decision:
According to National Review, efforts were underway to organize a walkout during Trump’s speech, which may have led to Trump’s decision.
Trump’s appearance had split attendees who weren’t convinced that Trump is a conservative and won’t betray them should he win the GOP nomination and the presidency. Yet despite the Trump haters, there were plenty of attendees who were disappointed that Trump wouldn’t be speaking, depriving them of a chance to hear from the potential Republican nominee in person.
While I personally am not a Trump fan, I didn’t have a problem with him speaking at CPAC—after all, he’s spoken at the conference before. But I do think it’s a strategic mistake for him to bow out and not face his critics, plus there was no guarantee that the walkout threat was real.
Trump has an uneasy relationship with conservatives, and this move certainly won’t help.
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New Emails Reveal that Clinton Dictated Media Coverage of 2009 Speech
February 12th, 2016By Don Irvine.
If there has ever been any doubt about the favoritism the media show to liberals, a new set of emails should dispel that doubt. The emails reveal that Hillary Clinton was able to dictate coverage of a 2009 policy speech, right down to the words they would use.
The emails were obtained by Gawker as part of a Freedom of Information Act request they filed in 2012. They show an exchange between Marc Ambinder, then-politics editor of The Atlantic, and Philippe Reines, who Gawker described as Clinton’s notoriously combative spokesman and consigliere.
On July 15, 2009, Ambinder sent Reines an email asking for an advance copy of the speech that Clinton was scheduled to give later in the day to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Instead of approving what was a fairly routine request, Reines told Ambinder that he would “on two conditions.”
Ambiner agreed and Reines then sent him a list of the conditions:
From: [Philippe Reines]
Sent: Wednesday, July 15 2009 10:06 AM
To: Ambinder, Marc
Subject: Re: Do you have a copy of HRC’s speech to share?3 [conditions] actually
1) You in your own voice describe them as “muscular”
2) You note that a look at the CFR seating plan shows that all the envoys — from Holbrooke to Mitchell to Ross — will be arrayed in front of her, which in your own clever way you can say certainly not a coincidence and meant to convey something
3) You don’t say you were blackmailed!
Ambinder responded immediately:
From: Ambinder, Marc
Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 10:07 AM
To: Philippe Reines
Subject: RE: Do you have a copy of HRC’s speech to share?got it
The end result was a Reines influenced first paragraph in Ambinder’s “Hillary Clinton’s ‘Smart Power’ Breaks Through” article:
When you think of President Obama’s foreign policy, think of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That’s the message behind a muscular speech that Clinton is set to deliver today to the Council on Foreign Relations. The staging gives a clue to its purpose: seated in front of Clinton, subordinate to Clinton, in the first row, will be three potentially rival power centers: envoys Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell, and National Security Council senior director Dennis Ross.
Ambinder now says he regrets his actions:
It made me uncomfortable then, and it makes me uncomfortable today. And when I look at that email record, it is a reminder to me of why I moved away from all that. The Atlantic, to their credit, never pushed me to do that, to turn into a scoop factory. In the fullness of time, any journalist or writer who is confronted by the prospect, or gets in the situation where their journalism begins to feel transactional, should listen to their gut feeling and push away from that.
Being scrupulous at all times will not help you get all the scoops, but it will help you sleep at night. At no point at The Atlantic did I ever feel the pressure to make transactional journalism the norm.
Scruples seem to be in short supply in the media. Gawker reported last week about Politico Playbook author Mike Allen allowing Reines to ghostwrite a Playbook item on the State Department in 2010. Gawker also reported in November 2015 that Allen offered a “no-risk” interview to Chelsea Clinton that would only include questions he and Reines “would agree on … precisely in advance.” That interview never took place.
It’s impossible to tell how much transactional journalism actually occurs, but the fact that it is taking place at all is disturbing and is certainly not going to help the media’s already tarnished reputation with the public.
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Clinton Campaign Press Secretary Doesn’t Know the Difference Between a Liberal and a Progressive
February 7th, 2016By Don Irvine.
Hillary Clinton’s national press secretary Brian Fallon admitted that he didn’t know the difference between a liberal and a progressive, despite saying that Hillary is a “progressive who gets results.”
Fallon made his comments during an interview with Bloomberg TV’s With All Due Respect co-host John Heilemann:
Heilemann: Would Hillary Clinton call herself a liberal?
Fallon: I think in the last few years you’ve seen Democrats really rally around the term progressive to define their commitment to working class.
Heilemann: What’s the difference between being a progressive and being a liberal?
Fallon: I’m not sure, but I think Republicans have tried to turn liberal into a dirty word,” Fallon said. “But I think progressive is a term that Democrats pretty proudly wear.
Many liberals have, in recent years, chosen to redefine themselves as progressives, as the L-word has taken on a more negative connotation with the public, to the annoyance of true progressives.
The basic difference—and Fallon should have known this—is that liberals want to use taxpayer money for subsidies, transfer payments, and payments to take care of those in need, while progressives feel that government fiat—think increased regulation and minimum-wage laws—are the answer. While the two terms are used interchangeably, they are very different.
Clinton, who has previously referred to herself as “moderate,” is embracing the progressive label in an attempt to fend off what has been an unexpectedly stiff challenge from socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and his left-wing supporters, not because she really believes in progressivism.
Or in other words, “What difference does it make?”
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Despite Absence Trump Dominates Google Debate Searches
January 30th, 2016By Don Irvine.
Donald Trump may have skipped the GOP debate last night in Iowa, but he still loomed large as he led the field in Google searches during the debate.
Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly started off the debate by asking Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) about Trump’s absence in order to “address the elephant not in the room tonight,” proving that even though he was three miles away, he was still on the minds of everyone on stage.
Trump. who has been feuding with Fox News since the first debate in August when moderator Megyn Kelly grilled him on his previous remarks about women, spurned the cable news giant and the RNC by skipping the debate and holding his own event at the same time to salute veterans. He was apparently hoping to cut into Fox’s debate audience, which no doubt will be lower due to Trump’s absence.
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Conservative Cablers Eye Al Jazeera Slot
January 19th, 2016
It didn’t take long, after the announcement that the Qatari government-owned cable network Al Jazeera America would be shutting down at the end of April, for some conservative cable networks to signal that they might be interested in taking over the propaganda network’s cable distribution.
The three networks—Newsmax, One America News and The Blaze—have signaled an interest in making a deal in the hope of improving the distribution of their programming.
But as Al Jazeera learned when they took over Al Gore’s Current TV network, transferring the distribution agreements is extremely difficult.
Time Warner Cable dropped Al Jazeera after the Current TV sale, citing a change in ownership clause, later striking a new carriage deal with the network.
What Al Jazeera has, but Newsmax and the others lack, is distribution with the country’s two biggest cable systems—Time Warner Cable and Comcast—which will be tough to accomplish.
In addition to the distribution agreements, Al Jazeera also occupies a coveted slot on the dial in New York City, in the same neighborhood as CNN and Fox News, which would make it more likely to attract news junkies.
The problem for Al Jazeera is that without any guarantee of the distribution agreements—which places the network in 60 million homes—there is little value in the network and it may instead just shutter the network rather than attempt a sale.
If Newsmax, One America News and The Blaze haven’t been able to strike distribution agreements with Time Warner Cable and Comcast to date, there is little likelihood that they will be able to do so by buying up what’s left of Al Jazeera America
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Propaganda Network Al Jazeera America Shutting Down
January 14th, 2016
Al Jazeera America, which launched with much fanfare in 2013 after paying Al Gore and his partner an estimated $500 million for their failing Current TV network, announced on Wednesday that it will be shutting down at the end of April.
In addition to the money that the Qatari government paid Gore, Al Jazeera invested at least $100 million in staff and facilities for an audience that was too small to be regularly rated by Nielsen.
Al Jazeera, which has been trying for years without success to gain a foothold in the U.S., thought that buying Gore’s network with its availability in 60 million homes would give it both a larger audience and instant credibility.
Instead, the network failed to gain any traction. Its ratings, when measured by Nielsen, was often less than half of what even low-rated Current TV had attracted. That led to the network cancelling its morning programs one year ago, signaling the eventual demise of the network.
The low ratings resulted in sparse advertiser support. Though the Qatari government had deep pockets, they have undoubtedly been hurt by the collapse in oil prices, which are now at a 12-year low.
Needless to say, the demise of Al Jazeera America is a huge embarrassment for the Qatari government, but a victory for those who felt it never should have been on the air in the first place.
CEO Al Anstey’s email to employees on the shutdown is below:
Dear All,
You will have just seen the announcement from the Network about the closure of Al Jazeera America by April 30th this year. In the same email you will see the Network plans to expand its global digital services later this year. The decision is driven by the fact that our business model is simply not sustainable in an increasingly digital world, and because of the current global financial challenges.
I know this will be a massive disappointment for everyone here who has worked tirelessly for our long-term future. The decision that has been made is in no way because AJAM has done anything but a great job. Our commitment to great journalism is unrivaled. We have increasingly set ourselves apart from all the rest. And you are the most talented team any organization could wish for.
We are working hard to ensure we put our people at the forefront of every decision related to the closure of AJAM, and we do the right thing by you. There will be a series of HR briefings meetings later today where this will be discussed in more detail and your questions can be answered. The briefings will also outline a number of other measures that are being taken in order to support every one of you as a result of today’s announcement.
You are a brilliant team made up of the most committed, professional, and dedicated people. I am deeply impressed and appreciative of the dedication and skill demonstrated by every one of you.
In recent months at every level, and in every department, we have been making progress and demonstrated improvements and seen positive change. Our audiences continue to climb. Slowly, but steadily. Our Editorial excellence was demonstrated time and time again on the major stories of recent months. And we continue to win praise from our colleagues in the industry, and from our viewers for the quality of our output.
Between now and April, we will continue to show America why AJAM has won respect and the fierce loyalty of so many of our viewers, who have steadfastly supported us from day one. Through your remarkable work at AJAM we have shown that there is a different way of reporting news and providing information. The foundation of this is integrity, great journalism, impartiality, and a commitment to the highest quality story telling. This will be our lasting impact, and as we produce and showcase the best of our work in the weeks to come this will be clear for everyone to see.
For me personally, it is a privilege and honor to work with you all. I arrived in New York six months ago prepared for a great challenge and committed to working with you all to build our content and reputation into the future. I quickly realized I had joined one of the best teams anyone could ever hope to work with.
I’m truly sad that that future we were making great strides towards cannot be realized. However, the achievements of the past two and a half years should be a source of great pride for everyone. In the months to come we will do everything that we can to support you, to work with you, and to ensure you are shown the respect you deserve.
Al
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Washington Post Drops Liberal Columnist Due to Lack of Readers
January 6th, 2016
The Washington Post shocked the liberal world by firing liberal columnist Harold Meyerson—not over ideology, but because he failed to attract enough readers for the Post to justify his continued employment.
Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt explained to Politico the rationale for firing Meyerson:
The Post opinion section takes pride in publishing a wide range of views, including progressives Eugene Robinson, EJ Dionne, Ruth Marcus, Greg Sargent, Paul Waldman and Katrina vanden Heuvel and contributing columnists Rachel Maddow and Danielle Allen. We’ve been pleased to publish Harold’s columns for the past 13 years, but he failed to attract readers as these others have. And while our decision should never be made based only on clicks, I think it would be arrogant to entirely ignore what our readers are telling us.
Liberals who weren’t happy with the decision included Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who tweeted that “There are few progressive voices in corporate media. @HaroldMeyerson is one of the best. His insights will be sorely missed by Post readers.”
Well, at least by the few people who bothered to read his column.
While the Post has remained a liberal paper after being bought by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meyerson’s firing may mark a shift in policy that just because someone is liberal, it doesn’t mean lifetime employment is guaranteed, as seemed to be the case during the Graham era.
Bezos has largely left the editorial side of the Post alone, but he has made moves to improve the business side of the money-losing paper. Meyerson’s firing is an example of this new approach—columnists will need to justify their existence.
This provides a golden opportunity for the Post to replace Meyerson with a conservative voice, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
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NY Times Issues Nonsensical Explanation for Edits on Obama Article
December 22nd, 2015
By Don Irvine.
The New York Times came under fire last week for making “stealth edits” to an article on President Obama’s private meeting with journalists. They removed a paragraph that made the President look bad, and then made things worse when they issued a nonsensical explanation for the edits.
The original web version included a paragraph that said the President didn’t fully appreciate the anxiety Americans felt after the Paris and San Bernardino terrorist attacks because he didn’t watch enough cable television:
In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments. Republicans were telling Americans that he is not doing anything when he is doing a lot, he said.[The above paragraph was deleted. The following two paragraphs were added]
Mr. Obama argued that while there were potentially threats that would merit the kind of investment of lives and money equivalent to that made in the Iraq war, the Islamic State does not pose an existential threat to the United States and therefore the response should be measured. The United States needs to take on the group, in part to defend allies in the region, he said, but it should not be an all-out war.
Moreover, he added, part of the group’s strategy is to draw the United States into a broader military entanglement in the region. A sustained but limited campaign may be slow and politically unsatisfying, but ultimately will be more successful, he contended.
In response to questions on social media, the Times issued the following statement:
There’s nothing unusual here. That paragraph, near the bottom of the story, was trimmed for space in the print paper by a copy editor in New York late last night. But it was in our story on the web all day and read by many thousands of readers. Web stories without length constraints are routinely edited for print.
That sounds plausible on the face of it, except for the fact that if the Times was indeed editing for space why did it add two paragraphs and increase the word count?
Three words—liberal media bias.
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After Low-Rated Debate Democrats Step Up Criticism of DNC
November 16th, 2015
Democrats who weren’t happy about the Democratic National Committee’s debate schedule stepped up their criticism after it was revealed that Saturday evening’s debate drew a paltry 8.55 million viewers, making it by far the least watched debate of the 2016 campaign cycle.
One of the first to criticize the DNC was Martin O’Malley’s deputy campaign manager Lis Smith, who, in an interview with Politico, criticized DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her handling of the debate schedule.
“We can’t fool ourselves — the Republicans are eating our lunch in terms of attention and viewership because of the unprecedented, unilateral, and arbitrary way the DNC Chair determined this schedule,” said Smith, adding, “It’s clear we need to open up the process, have more debates, and engage more voters in this process.”
It’s hard to get more voters involved, though, since Wasserman Schultz has limited the debates to six—compared to 12 for the Republicans. And like Saturday’s debate, the next two debates are the Saturday before Christmas and the Sunday before the Martin Luther King holiday—times that virtually guarantee a minuscule audience.
The scheduling has opened Wasserman Schultz up to charges that she is protecting front-runner Hillary Clinton. While she has denied those charges in the past, Saturday’s debate was a prime example of why she would try to protect Clinton, who stumbled on several questions, including her 1960s campus activism and donations from Wall Street.
It wasn’t just O’Malley’s campaign that thought that the DNC has erred in their debate schedule—a Democratic operative told Politico that “there was a clear intent to bury these debates to the benefit of Clinton,” and that it was a disservice to the Democratic Party since the GOP is posting large numbers for their debates.
Not surprisingly, Clinton has remained largely silent on the issue, saying that she would participate in whatever debates the DNC sanctions, though she clearly prefers the current schedule since it protects her from embarrassing herself too much and damaging her presidential ambitions.
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“Demented” Carly Fiorina strikes back at The View
November 9th, 2015
By Don Irvine.
Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina extracted a little revenge Friday on The View after her looks were criticized following the last GOP debate.
On October 29, the hosts on The View said that Fiorina looked “demented” and that her face was like a “Halloween mask.”
Those comments not only enraged conservatives, but also CNN’s Brooke Baldwin, who chastised The View for focusing on Fiorina’s looks. Baldwin wondered about whether or not they had a double standard since Behar had disapprovingly asked Donald Trump why he talked about Fiorina’s face instead of her brains, in reference to comments he made about her for Rolling Stone when he appeared on the show.
After some initial discussion about the campaign and what Fiorina is focusing on, Goldberg turned to the issue of humor and the comments that were made on the October 29 show.
“There are going to be lots of comics saying lots of different things and I wondered, because we saw that you were a little upset about us, about a comic comment that was made,” said Goldberg, “and so how will you steel your skin … Do you know what I mean? How will you get a thicker skin to accept some of the humorous things that will be said about you?”
“If you meant your comment about my face being demented and a Halloween mask as humorous, so be it,” Fiorina said. “I guess you misinterpreted Donald Trump’s comments about my face and thought those were not humorous, you sort of took him to task. But the point is, I have a real thick skin.”
Fiorina’s response didn’t sit well with Behar who jumped in and tried to defend herself by saying that she has made plenty of jokes about Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits and Bill Clinton’s sex life, and therefore didn’t understand “why any politician should be exempt from my comedic jokes.”
Making fun of Hillary’s pantsuits isn’t exactly the same as cracking jokes about Fiorina’s face, so I fail to see the logic there.
Fiorina got the last laugh, though, when Paula Faris said that she was making money off of her feud with The View, calling it “making lemonade out of lemons.”
“Oh, so you guys are telling me that you guys are lemons?” Fiorina said, earning applause from the hosts for her witty response.
The attacks on Fiorina’s looks weren’t comedy, but rather an attempt by Behar and company to take her down just in case she does win the Republican nomination, because they know that she would indeed be Hillary’s worst nightmare.
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Joe Scarborough Schools MSNBC Panel on Liberal Media Bias
November 4th, 2015By Don Irvine.
MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough gave the show’s panel an education on liberal media bias on Monday, decrying the lack of objectivity on the major broadcast networks’ Sunday morning programs.
Scarborough stated that Walter Cronkite and Tim Russert, who were liberals, and Tom Brokaw, who he loves and respects, have probably never voted in a Republican primary.
Bloomberg Politics managing editor Mark Halperin agreed that liberal media bias does exist. But he doesn’t want a Republican as the debate moderator, but rather someone who is objective.
“Somehow, if you’re George Stephanopoulos, it’s okay because you’re a Democrat,” Scarborough said. “If you’re Tim Russert, it’s okay. All I am saying is, you cannot do it and nobody here can do it…Name the single Republican that has hosted a Sunday show, that has been an anchor of a news network for the big three networks over the past 50 years. You cannot do it.”
The best Halperin could do was name the late Tony Snow. But as Scarborough pointed out, he worked for Fox News and not ABC, CBS or NBC, which is what he was talking about.
Scarborough mentioned that he met with an NBC News executive about the possibility of having him and Mika host a weekend program on the network. The meeting ended when the executive told Scarborough he couldn’t possibly put him on the air because he was a Republican:
What I’m trying to explain right now is we have been told for 50 years that it’s just about impartiality. The entire process is rigged against us, because liberal network heads would never, ever dream of allowing, let’s say, Brit Hume 10 years ago, to run NBC Nightly News or to run CBS Evening News. They would never dream it because there’s such a built-in, left-wing bias.
The left-wing bias was on full display at last week’s Republican debate in Colorado, and the candidates have finally had enough. They are calling for changes to the debate process that will hopefully put them on a more equal footing and without the “gotcha” questions the liberal media love to ask.
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Bloomberg’s Halperin: Chair Wasserman a “disgrace”
October 14th, 2015By Don Irvine.
Bloomberg Politics managing editor Mark Halperin criticized Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her handling of the Democratic debates, calling it a “disgrace” and an unprecedented abuse of power by a national political party chair:
In my career I cannot think of another more obvious abuse of power by a national chair of either party. It is a disgrace. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is facing some public heat and she’s just going to sit and take it.
Halperin was referring to a New York Times article from Monday that said that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) had been disinvited by Wasserman Schultz’s chief of staff from the first Democratic debate, which takes place in Las Vegas tonight, because she had publicly disagreed with the DNC chair.
Gabbard and another DNC vice chair, R.T. Rybak, have called for more than the six scheduled, sanctioned debates—something that Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley have called for as well. Republicans, by comparison, have scheduled 11 primary debates.
Halperin’s colleague John Heilemann pointed out that Wasserman Schultz made the decision to limit the number of debates unilaterally, without consulting Gabbard and other vice chairs of the committee, and said that “it sure looks, smells, feels, seems stinky.”
Wasserman Schultz said the limits are necessary to make“sure that we not let the debate process get out of control,” while allowing the candidates to remain on the campaign trail talking to voters and raising money.
Considering that many Democrats, in addition to the candidates, want more debates, that argument doesn’t hold water. It only adds to the speculation that Wasserman Schultz is more interested in protecting Hillary than in providing fellow Democrats any real opportunity to compete in this race.
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NBC news chairman says more changes to come at MSNBC
October 8th, 2015
NBC News chairman Andrew Lack, who was hired in April to oversee NBC News and MSNBC, told Variety’s Brian Steinberg that he isn’t finished making changes at the struggling cable network.
Lack has reworked MSNBC’s daytime programming with the jettisoning of low-rated programs hosted by Joy Reid, Ronan Farrow, Ed Schultz and Al Sharpton in favor of more news oriented programs hosted by Thomas Roberts, Kate Snow and Chuck Todd. But he still feels that more needs to be done to reverse the 14% slide in viewership the network experienced in 2014.
One possible change that Lack hinted at was expanding Morning Joe beyond its three-hour block, in an effort to reach more west coast viewers. He told Steinberg that he thinks “it is the most influential program in cable news in the morning, and I think it’s missing an opportunity in the West.” Influence apparently counts more than ratings as Morning Joe has been locked in a see-saw battle with CNN’sNew Day for the last year, often trailing the latter in the key demo.
While Lack was short on specifics regarding any other changes, MSNBC did announce yesterday that Steve Kornacki, who has been hosting Up with Steve Kornacki on the weekends, would be leaving the show to join Chuck Todd onMTP Daily and will be replaced by Alex Wagner, whose weekday program was canceled in July.
The moves that Lack has made to date have been mainly cosmetic and really haven’t moved the needle much. What he needs to do is what MSNBC president Phil Griffin has failed to do: overhaul the primetime lineup, which has been struggling for several years now. The longer Lack sticks with the status quo, the longer they will remain a low-rated cable news network, which is fine with me.
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NBC’s Chuck Todd: Democratic Base is “Uninspired” by Clinton [Video]
August 17th, 2015
By Don Irvine.
Commenting on the struggles of the Hillary Clinton campaign, NBC’s Chuck Todd said the Democrats aren’t really dissatisfied with her, but they are “uninspired” by her candidacy.
Todd made his comments on the Today show where he was discussing the possibility that Vice President Joe Biden and former veep Al Gore are both considering entering the race, as Hillary’s poll number continue dropping:
Guthrie: All of this unrest, all of this chatter points to two things. Number one, are Democratic voters dissatisfied with the Hillary Clinton candidacy so far, and secondly, do top Democrats, potential candidates, smell weakness, see problems in that candidacy?
Todd: I think there’s a whole bunch of people that have not signed on—to answer your second question first—that have not signed on to the Clinton campaign, that do see weakness, that…are concerned, that think she could be a general election liability.
But I don’t think the Democratic Party rank-and-file is dissatisfied with Hillary Clinton. I think the better way to call it is they’re uninspired by her. You talk to people that are saying they’re for Sanders, and they’ll tell you, Savannah, I’ll vote for Hillary Clinton if she’s the nominee, but they’re not so in love with her that they want to go and caucus for her, that they want to put a bumper sticker on their car or a yard sign in their yard. That’s sort of the disconnect right now, and that’s something Hillary Clinton has to deal with when she comes out to Iowa today.
If Clinton wins the nomination she will have to overcome the “enthusiasm gap” in order to win the presidency, and that will be a tall order for the often aloof and insular candidate.
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Clinton campaign email tries to reassure supporters on server investigation
August 14th, 2015
By Don Irvine.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which has been wobbling all summer, went on the attack yesterday in a 700-word email to her supporters.
Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri sought to reassure supporters that the FBI investigation into Hillary’s email server is nothing to worry about, and that many of the GOP contenders have had their own “email issues.”
“Many of the Republican candidates for president have done the same things for which they’re now criticizing Hillary,” Palmieri wrote, referring to governors Walker, Bush, Perry and Jindal.
“Look, this kind of nonsense comes with the territory of running for president. We know it, Hillary knows it, and we expect it to continue from now until Election Day,” Palmieri added.
“It’s okay. We’ll be ready. We have the facts, our principles, and you on our side. And it’s vital that you read and absorb the real story so that you know what to say the next time you hear about this around the dinner table or the water cooler.”
The timing and length of the email only underscores just how concerned the Clinton campaign is after months of negative news that has sent Hillary’s poll numbers plunging, raising doubts among Democrats as to her viability as their nominee in 2016.
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DNC Chair Stumbles When Asked “What’s the Difference Between a Democrat and a Socialist?” [Video]
August 2nd, 2015By Don Irvine.
Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz stumbled badly while being repeatedly pressed on Thursday night by MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews to explain the difference between a Democrat and a socialist.
Matthews, who is an ardent Clinton supporter, began by asking Wasserman Schultz if she wanted presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to speak at the Democratic National Convention, given that he’s a socialist?
Wasserman Schultz responded that he should speak, but was evasive as to whether or not it should be in primetime. She said that “he should speak in a slot where the appeal that he has ‘across the board’—the progressive, populist message that he has…Absolutely that should be featured.”
That’s when Matthews hit Wasserman Schultz with the question that stumped her.
Matthews: What’s the difference between a Democrat and a socialist? I used to think there was a big difference. What do you think it is?
Wasserman Schultz: The more important question should be what’s the difference between a Republican and a Democrat?
Unsatisfied, Matthews pressed her again.
“You’re the chairman of the Democratic Party. Tell me what’s the difference between you and a socialist.”
Wasserman Schultz once again avoided giving an answer by saying that the relevant debate will be on the differences between Democrats and Republicans.
Sanders entry into the race has vexed the Democrats, as he has drawn large crowds of enthusiastic supporters and connected with voters, unlike Clinton. She has stumbled badly in recent polls, making Democrats nervous that she isn’t as invincible as they had previously thought, and that her election as president isn’t inevitable.
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NY Times Public Editor Gives Journalism Students Advice—Fairness Over Objectivity
July 13th, 2015
By Don Irvine.
New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan gave her students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism some advice last week based on what she’s learned in the last three decades, since she entered the field:
Overall, Sullivan gives some solid advice, particularly in using social media. But a couple of things caught my eye in her journalism advice to the students.
Sullivan tells the students to fact-check with a vengeance, but never mentions the word accuracy. Maybe she thinks it’s a given, but way too often the media today fail to strive for accuracy, though they obviously should.
Sullivan also puts fairness over objectivity rather than telling the students they should try to be both fair and objective.
And we wonder what’s wrong with journalism today?
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Report: New NBC news president reevaluating MSNBC programming
May 22nd, 2015
MSNBC, which has been struggling in the ratings for the last two years and has recently been hitting new 10-year lows, may finally be getting the attention it needs from NBC News.
According to Mediaite, new NBC News president Andrew Lack is beginning to take an active role at the left-leaning cable news network. He often attends MSNBC president Phil Griffin’s editorial meetings and regularly appears “underwhelmed” by the story pitches, according to one witness.
Producers of three shows, Now with Alex Wagner, The Ed Show, and All In with Chris Hayes have been asked by Lack to present evidence that they are still viable in the face of faltering ratings, which is not a good sign for the future of those shows.
In addition to those three programs, Lack is considering a total overhaul of MSNBC’s daytime programs, which have struggled more than the primetime programs under Griffin’s watch.
Mediaite also reports that while Lack likes Griffin personally, he has serious questions about Griffin’s ability to run a large cable news network like MSNBC. a concern that is more than warranted given the falling ratings and revenue at the network.
Griffin, who just two years ago proclaimed that MSNBC would beat Fox News by 2014, has run the network into the ground with his programming decisions during that period. He has already had to backtrack and jettison Ronan Farrow and Joy Reid from the daytime ranks less than a year after giving them their own shows, and seems incapable of making any decisions regarding the primetime lineup, which has been losing ground to CNN and HLN.
If Lack is really serious about reviving MSNBC, he should fire Griffin immediately, overhaul both the daytime and primetime programming, and change the political orientation to a more mainstream viewpoint.
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Liberal Media Say Clinton Campaign Lacking “Substance”
April 17th, 2015
By Don Irvine.
While some in the liberal media have been fawning over Hillary Clinton’s campaign, since she officially announced that she was running for president on Sunday, there are some who are unimpressed by her efforts to date.
The Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman is one of those who sees little difference between this campaign and the one she ran in 2008.
Fineman told MSNBC’s Jose Diaz-Balart that Hillary’s problem is that “she was the establishment then and she’s the establishment now,” adding that she’s failed to make any news about the “substance” of her blueprint for the future.
That feeling was echoed by Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post, who told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that Clinton’s video announcement was “substance free,” and that three of her four issues were very boilerplate.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow commented on her show that the first three parts of Clinton’s platform could have been anybody’s—even most of the Republicans who are running against her—though she expects that Clinton will “put meat on those bones” and that they won’t sound like generic political slogans.
Clinton, who thought she was the inevitable candidate in 2008—until Barack Obama proved to be far too deft for her—is trying a different tactic this time around, with her “everyday” people theme and traveling around Iowa in what has been termed as the “Scooby Doo” van.
Yet, as she has been trying to remake her image, she has stuck with a generic platform, as noted above, lacking in specifics.
President Obama said that voters want a “new car smell” candidate in 2016. But in Hillary’s case she’s offering them one that just blows a lot of smoke and pollutes the air.
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WaPo Fact Checker Gives John Kerry Four Pinocchio’s for Climate Change Hearing Claims
March 24th, 2015
The Washington Post Fact Checker thinks that Secretary of State John Kerry may have a Brian Williams problem when it comes to the facts about his role in the first climate hearings when he was a senator.
Last week, Kerry gave a speech to the Atlantic Council about climate change in which he said the following:
Climate change is an issue that is personal to me, and it has been since the 1980s, when we were organizing the very first climate hearings in the Senate…. Al Gore, Tim Wirth, and a group of us organized the first hearings in the Senate on this, 1988. We heard Jim Hansen sit in front of us and tell us it’s happening now, 1988.
According to the Fact Checker, this wasn’t the first time Kerry had made this claim:
In 2007, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, he asserted, ‘I was privileged to be part of the first hearings that we held in the United States Congress on this subject, with Al Gore, on the Commerce Committee, where we sat together in 1987, 20 years ago.
In 2009, speaking at a Senate hearing at which Gore testified, Kerry said: ‘It’s well known that Al and I have a certain political experience in common. What is less well-known is that we also teamed up on the first-ever Senate hearing on climate change for the Commerce Committee back in 1988.’ (He also said something in yet another Council on Foreign Relations speech in 2009.)
In a 2010 article for The Huffington Post, Kerry wrote: ‘My bottom line: Al Gore and I held the Senate’s first climate change hearings in the Commerce Committee way back in 1988. Since then, precious little progress has been made and ground has been lost internationally, all while the science has grown more compelling.’
And, in a 2014 profile of Kerry in The Boston Globe, Andrew Holland of the American Security Project was quoted as saying Kerry ‘has had a personal interest in climate change going back to when he worked with Al Gore in 1988 on the first climate hearing on Capitol Hill.’ Holland told The Fact Checker that the source of this factoid was Kerry himself.
While Kerry is trying to claim credit for working with Gore on the “very first” Senate or Capitol Hill hearings on climate change, the facts are less clear according to Glenn Kessler, who writes the Fact Checker column.
Kessler tries to pinpoint when the first hearing actually did take place, by going back to the 1970s. He talked with some climate change experts and determined that the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on June 23, 1988, that Kerry has repeatedly referred to, was what brought climate change to the attention of the public.
There’s just one problem with Kerry’s statement. Neither he nor Gore were at that hearing because they weren’t on Wirth’s committee.
When questioned about this, Kerry spokesman Alec Gerlach issued the following statement:
Secretary Kerry rightly referred to the work he contributed to in the Senate along with Senators Gore and Wirth beginning in 1988 and 1989 on the issue of climate change, a cause he’s been committed to for his entire career. As the Secretary made clear, these hearings were a turning point: the first to point to new research that made clear the human impact on increasing greenhouse gasses was connected to climate change and a warming planet. No prior congressional discussions had made that critical connection. Without that link to a human impact, the case for this generation to act to curb emissions is dampened, but as Secretary Kerry made clear in his remarks, since those hearings: ‘the science has been screaming at us, warning us, trying to compel us to act.’
That’s all well and good, except that Kerry’s statements repeatedly refer to one, not multiple hearings.
The Pinocchio Test
To be fair to Kerry, he has been involved in the debate about climate change for many years, as a member of the Senate. He can certainly claim to have been passionate about the issue for a long time. While he may have been a junior member of the Senate in the late 1980s, his role on the issue certainly grew as he gained seniority.
But his pattern of exaggeration about the congressional hearings is disturbing. On repeated occasions, he has said or suggested that he and Gore were responsible for the first congressional hearing on climate change–and that he was one of the Senators who participated in the pivotal 1988 Hansen hearing organized by Wirth.
Gore might have bragging rights about organizing one of the first hearings, but not Kerry. Kerry was not even a participant in the most important hearing of that time; he simply spoke at a hearing that took place the following year. And yet, like Brian Williams claiming to have come under fire in Iraq, Kerry has repeatedly placed himself at the center of the action—and the narrative.
He earns Four Pinocchios.
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