Back then when Fox was just getting started the public was even less willing to buy the media’s “ Drudgery” and other right wing smearmeisters. The media went into overdrive trying to sell the public on all the faux scandals — Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Chinagate, etc. but Clinton’s poll numbers stayed solid and even went up as high as +70% during impeachment. In fact:
“ Bill Clinton's job approval rating in the first quarter during which the Lewinsky situation became public knowledge (1st quarter 1998) jumped 5.6 points compared to the immediately preceding quarter”.
Throughout it all the media kept telling us that the public was appalled by Clinton which made me feel like I had fallen through the looking glass.
A lot of people blame the media’s behavior on corporate pressure from higher ups but it has always felt to me like groupthink, as Eric says. Guys like Cillizza act like kids in high school trashing the serious student to impress their friends and the macho bullies
It can be both. Pressure and influence from the corporate heads pushing their ideology out into the public and unserious dumbasses like Chris Cillizza who thinks he's hot stuff when in reality he doesn't know what he's talking about a lot of the time!
The last sentence of your commentary tells the story of the future of msm. No one is buying it anymore. I personally haven’t watched any tv news in weeks. The Sunday shows are fodder for comedians and my subscription to the NYT was cancelled long ago. Somehow those is charge of providing up to date information can’t read the writing on the wall.
I can imagine CNN's producers and directors avidly monitoring Fox News and NewsMax, looking for storylines. It's reminiscent of the 90s, when it seemed all of the DC media was looking to Drudge every day to see what was hot, and then chasing after the shiny object du jour. Trump didn't replace Obama - he replaced Drudge.
It's not just CNN of course - The NY Times et. al. have made emphasizing Democrats in trouble a default.
The dynamic is simple, if something to which the media seems largely oblivious. Republican policies crash the economy on a regular basis; Democrats get stuck cleaning up the mess - and getting blamed for it because they've taken ownership of fixing the mess.
Now we are seeing strikes across the country. After literally decades of union-bashing and pro-business policies of the GOP coming home to roost, this is seen as a problem for Biden and the Democrats. How are they going to 'pacify' the union mobsters of their base wrecking the economy - as the GOP will spin it?
The media that has been ignoring the war on workers all this time has discovered that strikes are now too big to ignore any longer and are making it a crisis for the Biden administration. Again, the GOP made the mess, Democrats will have to clean it up and end up taking responsibility for fixing it.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Republicans break everything they touch. They were doing that even before Trump amplified it to extreme levels. Democrats are the ones expected to fix everything - so everyone blames them while giving the GOP a pass.
If there is one thing Democrats need to learn from the Republican Party, it's how to prevent letting them hang blame around the necks of others. The GOP has made projection of their sins onto others into an art. Democrats need to learn how to truly make them "the party of personal responsibility."
It is very much true Democrats are held responsible by the press for not fixing every problem that the Republican party gets a pass on ignoring. Saw a post that had the reasons why Biden’s poll numbers were slipping, and it was simply a list of every crisis facing the Country and the World and only two were checked off (dealing with Covid and believe the other was getting us out of Afghanistan). Therefore Biden’s numbers were slipping because he had not solved the climate crisis, handled voter legislation, brought about gun control, got the minimum wage increased, made health care improvements, tackled wage inequality, improved civil rights legislation and probably 10 more.
Biden has been in office 8 months, and we’re supposed to be upset because he has not stopped or fixed every problem, many that have been developing for decades.
They won't be happy until the former guy is running again officially. Interesting Freakamonics podcast this week, which mentions just how negative the NYT is and it's up there at the top. On NPR yesterday...here's the link. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/american-culture-negative-media/
It's not just CNN. Over the weekend The Washington Post posted an article equating Joe with Jimmy Carter. Of course I remember how the post endlessly slimed Carter...
Jackie Calmes illustrates how easy it is for the press to provide cover for a preferred narrative protecting the Republicon Party by providing cover with a preferred narrative defending the Republicon Party. The standard trope is that Nixon's crimes were too much for some in the GOP to condone, and he was forced to resign because they had lost confidence in him. This telling of history manages to declare that the GOP had integrity in the 70s that they lack now, and suggests that the press of the time did as well. But the truth is that neither claim is valid or accurate. There wasn't a single Republicon who would have refused to allow Nixon to crime all he wanted, as long as he successfully fueled white anxiety against uppity blacks to keep them in office. But they knew it wouldn't work, that the evidence against Nixon (it wasn't his corruption or dishonesty, you see, but just the optics and lack of deniability) was too overwhelming and they would have to vote to impeach and remove him or they would lose reelection themselves. When Goldwater went to the Oval Office to tell Nixon he had to go, he was not putting country ahead of party, and neither were any of the other Republicons. Quite the opposite, in fact. Barry Goldwater was telling Nixon he had to go for the good of the party, not the good of the country. What was best for the country was a public recitation of his crimes and formal removal from office followed by criminal prosecution. Had that occurred, I dare say Trump never would have happened. But neither would any other Republicon president; the proto-fascists who had taken over the GOP in the 1960s following the CRA knew damn well it would be impossible to elect a Republicon to the White House ever again, and so instead we get a swift resignation, "our long national nightmare is over", a preemptive and blanket pardon, and then Saint Ronnie "piss on the needy" Reagan just as soon as shadowy right wingers could manage to engineer Jimmy Carter's destruction.
By retelling the "heroic Watergate heroes of the GOP" bedtime story, Calmes (hopefully unknowingly) is defending the "both sides" framing to protect her own naivete as a young reporter, 'coming of age' when the wrong side had already abandoned their creditable role. By letting Nixon slip out the side door, the former GOP played the media and the country to protect their political power, and they've been doing nothing else ever since, at the cost of our system, our democracy, our discourse, and even our planetary ecology.
I'm familiar with 3 instances in which Republicans posed a threat to democracy in the twentieth century. The first was the Wall Street Putsch in 1933 timeline.com/business-plot-overthrow-fdr-9a59a012c32a, which NYT said was no big deal. The second was NIxon campaign's undermining Johnson's Paris Peace Talks in 1968. The third was Ronald Reagan campaign's negotiations with Iran to delay hostage release in exchange for guns. Does anyone here remember extensive media coverage of the last two events or a history lesson about the first? Media and Rethuglicans have been in lock step forever.
I don't believe the Business Plot has quite the partisan color you're portraying, and the details exemplify why it doesn't make a good grade school history lesson. Yes, FDR was, almost inexplicably given the historical context, a Democrat, but the somewhat-inchoate plot to remove him from office wasn't otherwise related to partisan machinations. And Dickstein, the Democrat Representative who brought Smedly Butler's accusations to light, turned out to be a paid agent of Soviet Communists, so....
The problem with CNN is much the same as the problem with Fox: they have a business model that obscures news and punditry. Fox always tries to claim that they are separate divisions (News v. Entertainment), but after firing Shep Smith, it is pretty much all punditry.
Likewise, CNN. Except as far as I know, CNN doesn’t try to claim entertainment. Jeff Zucker came to CNN not with a background in news, but from entertainment at NBC. And let’s not forget, he was the guy who green lighted “The Apprentice.”
My rule of thumb now is to never watch the Sunday Talkies, and the moment a show announces a panel, turn it off. It is not news and it is absolutely not Public Affairs. Especially at CNN.
Well just maybe this is some good news-the fact that voters aren't buying it. If polls are to be believed and why shouldn't they be, it seems that a majority of Americans are totally fed up with the Republican narrative and want the things that are in the infrastructure bill and the voting rights bill. The mainstream media is looking dumber and dumber every day.
This was about Carlson on fox, but is sure does apply to CNN as well. "We all know that’s how journalism works. Who can forget the famous Woodward and Bernstein headline, ‘Did Nixon Do Watergate? Seems Like the Kind of Thing He’d Do, but Who Knows?” — SETH MEYERS
And this one, this morning on CNN; "Empty Store Shelves Spell Danger For Biden" As if a global pandemic's disruption of Everything, ignored by trump and his goons, then exacerbated by republican fueled vaccine and mask lies, is somehow Biden's fault.
I believe Jackie Calmes WAS at The Times, but, of course, she could no longer be there, for obvious reasons.
On CNN: John Harwood usually doesn't succumb that easily to Cillizza-ism, which reminds me that any organization that gets rid of Cillizza immediately can boast of a higher IQ.
CNN can do that Most Trusted Name branding thing as much as they want but CNN hasn’t actually been all that trustworthy since around Zucker taking over. So this beating on Biden narrative: not surprising. As I keep ranting, the mainstream is all about narratives and only incidentally about truth or serious focus on truly important issues. So, you know, CNN isn’t exactly special in the failing the audience thing; they all do it and the numbers show it.
Just look at who's running CNN. Jeff Zucker was previously in charge of NBC and he took that network from the top spot all the way to number five! The POS also greenlighted Drumpf's vanity affair, The Apprentice, which is how his mindless followers best remember him as.
You'd think that would make him toxic to other networks. But no! with the Peter Principal in action, Zucker got hired to run CNN like he did NBC. Just in time for his good buddy Drumpf to announce his candidacy for president. And it's been downhill ever since.
Keep pounding away, Eric, as it seems there is nothing else that is working to change the anti Biden narrative CNN et al push. Greed in a bubble, impervious to their uniquely important Constitutional responsibility and what should be a sacred role they SHOULD be playing to tell the truth to our American polity. Money has replaced principle. What is so maddening to me is that the press has chosen this Faustian bargain over the pride that would come with reporting in good faith the news of the day to their country. Wow. A consummate and seemingly irreparable press failure. Shame on CNN. They’ve tarnished their brand with inane drivel and hollow mouthing of absurd, self important ideas that should never be spoken out loud let alone on world wide tv.
Back then when Fox was just getting started the public was even less willing to buy the media’s “ Drudgery” and other right wing smearmeisters. The media went into overdrive trying to sell the public on all the faux scandals — Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Chinagate, etc. but Clinton’s poll numbers stayed solid and even went up as high as +70% during impeachment. In fact:
“ Bill Clinton's job approval rating in the first quarter during which the Lewinsky situation became public knowledge (1st quarter 1998) jumped 5.6 points compared to the immediately preceding quarter”.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/4609/presidential-job-approval-bill-clintons-high-ratings-midst.aspx
Throughout it all the media kept telling us that the public was appalled by Clinton which made me feel like I had fallen through the looking glass.
A lot of people blame the media’s behavior on corporate pressure from higher ups but it has always felt to me like groupthink, as Eric says. Guys like Cillizza act like kids in high school trashing the serious student to impress their friends and the macho bullies
yes, massive/embarrassing disconnect during the Clinton yrs
It can be both. Pressure and influence from the corporate heads pushing their ideology out into the public and unserious dumbasses like Chris Cillizza who thinks he's hot stuff when in reality he doesn't know what he's talking about a lot of the time!
Yes. Everything you said.
The last sentence of your commentary tells the story of the future of msm. No one is buying it anymore. I personally haven’t watched any tv news in weeks. The Sunday shows are fodder for comedians and my subscription to the NYT was cancelled long ago. Somehow those is charge of providing up to date information can’t read the writing on the wall.
silver lining?
Newsletters like this a few others and lots of research on your own. Thank you for this Eric truth.
same; I only kept the NYT for food and talked them down to 10 a month...otherwise I too, would be outta there.
Same.
The future is now! And it sucks!
CNN believes Trump's griftapolooza tour is worthy of a slice of their coverage. That says it all.
That's why I won't turn CNN on. The misinformation and hatred is just like fox entertainment.
I can imagine CNN's producers and directors avidly monitoring Fox News and NewsMax, looking for storylines. It's reminiscent of the 90s, when it seemed all of the DC media was looking to Drudge every day to see what was hot, and then chasing after the shiny object du jour. Trump didn't replace Obama - he replaced Drudge.
They're obsessed with 'winning the morning' not delivering news a citizen can use.
It's not just CNN of course - The NY Times et. al. have made emphasizing Democrats in trouble a default.
The dynamic is simple, if something to which the media seems largely oblivious. Republican policies crash the economy on a regular basis; Democrats get stuck cleaning up the mess - and getting blamed for it because they've taken ownership of fixing the mess.
Now we are seeing strikes across the country. After literally decades of union-bashing and pro-business policies of the GOP coming home to roost, this is seen as a problem for Biden and the Democrats. How are they going to 'pacify' the union mobsters of their base wrecking the economy - as the GOP will spin it?
The media that has been ignoring the war on workers all this time has discovered that strikes are now too big to ignore any longer and are making it a crisis for the Biden administration. Again, the GOP made the mess, Democrats will have to clean it up and end up taking responsibility for fixing it.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Republicans break everything they touch. They were doing that even before Trump amplified it to extreme levels. Democrats are the ones expected to fix everything - so everyone blames them while giving the GOP a pass.
If there is one thing Democrats need to learn from the Republican Party, it's how to prevent letting them hang blame around the necks of others. The GOP has made projection of their sins onto others into an art. Democrats need to learn how to truly make them "the party of personal responsibility."
It is very much true Democrats are held responsible by the press for not fixing every problem that the Republican party gets a pass on ignoring. Saw a post that had the reasons why Biden’s poll numbers were slipping, and it was simply a list of every crisis facing the Country and the World and only two were checked off (dealing with Covid and believe the other was getting us out of Afghanistan). Therefore Biden’s numbers were slipping because he had not solved the climate crisis, handled voter legislation, brought about gun control, got the minimum wage increased, made health care improvements, tackled wage inequality, improved civil rights legislation and probably 10 more.
Biden has been in office 8 months, and we’re supposed to be upset because he has not stopped or fixed every problem, many that have been developing for decades.
They won't be happy until the former guy is running again officially. Interesting Freakamonics podcast this week, which mentions just how negative the NYT is and it's up there at the top. On NPR yesterday...here's the link. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/american-culture-negative-media/
oh cool, thanks for the link
It's not just CNN. Over the weekend The Washington Post posted an article equating Joe with Jimmy Carter. Of course I remember how the post endlessly slimed Carter...
Carter (low approval) is always the media go-to for when Dem in WH, Reagan (high approval) for when GOP.
funny how that works
Hunter Biden is now the new Billy Carter, too
Jackie Calmes illustrates how easy it is for the press to provide cover for a preferred narrative protecting the Republicon Party by providing cover with a preferred narrative defending the Republicon Party. The standard trope is that Nixon's crimes were too much for some in the GOP to condone, and he was forced to resign because they had lost confidence in him. This telling of history manages to declare that the GOP had integrity in the 70s that they lack now, and suggests that the press of the time did as well. But the truth is that neither claim is valid or accurate. There wasn't a single Republicon who would have refused to allow Nixon to crime all he wanted, as long as he successfully fueled white anxiety against uppity blacks to keep them in office. But they knew it wouldn't work, that the evidence against Nixon (it wasn't his corruption or dishonesty, you see, but just the optics and lack of deniability) was too overwhelming and they would have to vote to impeach and remove him or they would lose reelection themselves. When Goldwater went to the Oval Office to tell Nixon he had to go, he was not putting country ahead of party, and neither were any of the other Republicons. Quite the opposite, in fact. Barry Goldwater was telling Nixon he had to go for the good of the party, not the good of the country. What was best for the country was a public recitation of his crimes and formal removal from office followed by criminal prosecution. Had that occurred, I dare say Trump never would have happened. But neither would any other Republicon president; the proto-fascists who had taken over the GOP in the 1960s following the CRA knew damn well it would be impossible to elect a Republicon to the White House ever again, and so instead we get a swift resignation, "our long national nightmare is over", a preemptive and blanket pardon, and then Saint Ronnie "piss on the needy" Reagan just as soon as shadowy right wingers could manage to engineer Jimmy Carter's destruction.
By retelling the "heroic Watergate heroes of the GOP" bedtime story, Calmes (hopefully unknowingly) is defending the "both sides" framing to protect her own naivete as a young reporter, 'coming of age' when the wrong side had already abandoned their creditable role. By letting Nixon slip out the side door, the former GOP played the media and the country to protect their political power, and they've been doing nothing else ever since, at the cost of our system, our democracy, our discourse, and even our planetary ecology.
I'm familiar with 3 instances in which Republicans posed a threat to democracy in the twentieth century. The first was the Wall Street Putsch in 1933 timeline.com/business-plot-overthrow-fdr-9a59a012c32a, which NYT said was no big deal. The second was NIxon campaign's undermining Johnson's Paris Peace Talks in 1968. The third was Ronald Reagan campaign's negotiations with Iran to delay hostage release in exchange for guns. Does anyone here remember extensive media coverage of the last two events or a history lesson about the first? Media and Rethuglicans have been in lock step forever.
I don't believe the Business Plot has quite the partisan color you're portraying, and the details exemplify why it doesn't make a good grade school history lesson. Yes, FDR was, almost inexplicably given the historical context, a Democrat, but the somewhat-inchoate plot to remove him from office wasn't otherwise related to partisan machinations. And Dickstein, the Democrat Representative who brought Smedly Butler's accusations to light, turned out to be a paid agent of Soviet Communists, so....
Yep. It is unreal to me how well Republicans played this, and how easily manipulated the media was to enable it.
The problem with CNN is much the same as the problem with Fox: they have a business model that obscures news and punditry. Fox always tries to claim that they are separate divisions (News v. Entertainment), but after firing Shep Smith, it is pretty much all punditry.
Likewise, CNN. Except as far as I know, CNN doesn’t try to claim entertainment. Jeff Zucker came to CNN not with a background in news, but from entertainment at NBC. And let’s not forget, he was the guy who green lighted “The Apprentice.”
My rule of thumb now is to never watch the Sunday Talkies, and the moment a show announces a panel, turn it off. It is not news and it is absolutely not Public Affairs. Especially at CNN.
I’ve developed the same rule. It’s just not worth the rage it induces.
Well just maybe this is some good news-the fact that voters aren't buying it. If polls are to be believed and why shouldn't they be, it seems that a majority of Americans are totally fed up with the Republican narrative and want the things that are in the infrastructure bill and the voting rights bill. The mainstream media is looking dumber and dumber every day.
This was about Carlson on fox, but is sure does apply to CNN as well. "We all know that’s how journalism works. Who can forget the famous Woodward and Bernstein headline, ‘Did Nixon Do Watergate? Seems Like the Kind of Thing He’d Do, but Who Knows?” — SETH MEYERS
And this one, this morning on CNN; "Empty Store Shelves Spell Danger For Biden" As if a global pandemic's disruption of Everything, ignored by trump and his goons, then exacerbated by republican fueled vaccine and mask lies, is somehow Biden's fault.
They really try to create self-fulfilling prophecies.
It’s not just CNN. There is this today on MSNBC website:
If Biden's approval rating is falling, he's got himself to blame
Biden has been strangely passive in reversing his polling spiral, in contrast to the boldness he first exhibited.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/if-biden-s-approval-rating-falling-he-s-got-himself-n1281561
Absolutely infuriating.
MSNBROC is just as bad as CNN. I refuse to watch any of the cable or broadcast network "news".
I believe Jackie Calmes WAS at The Times, but, of course, she could no longer be there, for obvious reasons.
On CNN: John Harwood usually doesn't succumb that easily to Cillizza-ism, which reminds me that any organization that gets rid of Cillizza immediately can boast of a higher IQ.
I agree. I think Harwood is actually pretty reasonable based the tweets I've seen. I found Jackie Calmes' article from his retweet.
CNN can do that Most Trusted Name branding thing as much as they want but CNN hasn’t actually been all that trustworthy since around Zucker taking over. So this beating on Biden narrative: not surprising. As I keep ranting, the mainstream is all about narratives and only incidentally about truth or serious focus on truly important issues. So, you know, CNN isn’t exactly special in the failing the audience thing; they all do it and the numbers show it.
it's so obvious they've glommed onto a Narrative
With their narratives, they’re like dogs with bones — or maybe more like infants with their toys.
Just look at who's running CNN. Jeff Zucker was previously in charge of NBC and he took that network from the top spot all the way to number five! The POS also greenlighted Drumpf's vanity affair, The Apprentice, which is how his mindless followers best remember him as.
You'd think that would make him toxic to other networks. But no! with the Peter Principal in action, Zucker got hired to run CNN like he did NBC. Just in time for his good buddy Drumpf to announce his candidacy for president. And it's been downhill ever since.
Jeff Zucker running CNN is horrible for America!
Keep pounding away, Eric, as it seems there is nothing else that is working to change the anti Biden narrative CNN et al push. Greed in a bubble, impervious to their uniquely important Constitutional responsibility and what should be a sacred role they SHOULD be playing to tell the truth to our American polity. Money has replaced principle. What is so maddening to me is that the press has chosen this Faustian bargain over the pride that would come with reporting in good faith the news of the day to their country. Wow. A consummate and seemingly irreparable press failure. Shame on CNN. They’ve tarnished their brand with inane drivel and hollow mouthing of absurd, self important ideas that should never be spoken out loud let alone on world wide tv.