Eric, if you watch the Psaki pressers, Fox isn't always the worst offender — NBC's Peter Alexander is always trying to play gotcha with her and the way he phrases his questions is just utter crap. I used to think he was a very respectable reporter, but he has just got into the gutter. I had to angry tweet at him!
I was shocked to see the list of questions that Dan Froomkin suggested reporters ask Biden at his press conference. For example “.....when did you finally realize that your Iraq war vote had enabled a full-fledged disaster, and what did you learn from that?” Also a question about the crime bill he signed. Another was about the 2005 bankruptcy bill. While those questions made sense when Biden was running for office that seems like inside the beltway games to me. Journalists should represent the public and what they want and need to know and there are a lot of problems we are facing right now that are much more important than what he did in the past.
Obviously, what matters to Peter Alexander is what matters to only 99.99999% of the DC political media brothel: Being seen and noticed, as opposed to actually being reporters.
I like that nickname, though I refer to him as the chief chucktodd of them all. There's also Norah O'Donnell, who holds The David Broder Chair in Destroying One's Reputation, and the interview style that supplicates completely to the interviewee if it's a republican: margaretbrennaning.
Apropos of all that, FDR hated Arthur Krock of The New York Times and vice versa. One time a Times White House correspondent asked a nasty question and FDR said, "I bet Li'l Arthur spent all night coming up with that one."
I refer to Maggie H as Axis Maggie. I saw someone on Twitter (wish I could remember who) coined #JakeTodd and #ChuckTapper. Either one of those is a perfect collective description of the whole mewling lot of them. My favorite description of the Beltway Political Propatainment Complex is courtesy of Hamlet: "It appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours".
I'm a bit easier on Jake Tapper, who, it seems to me, puts up with a lot less on CNN, though he has his moments, too. And as usual, yes, Willie Shakespeare nailed it.
Remember how the NY Times’s Kate Seelye and the WaPo’s Ceci Connelly trashed Al Gore? The fact that top journalists could have been more impressed with the callow and ignorant Dubya than Gore still boggles my mind.
Somehow I have missed Norah O’Donnell’s bad behaviors. It must be awful for you to compare her to David “The Dean of Washington Journalists” Broder. Any links?
Golf is too elitist. He could go bowling a lot. Or he could buy a ranch and pretend to be a cowboy like Bush did then drag foreign dignitaries there instead of hosting them at the much more prestigious White House. You know they and the media actually hated having to go there but no one would dare admit that.
The only person who had the guts to call him out for his phony macho man act was Vincente Fox who called Bush a “windshield cowboy” and poked fun at him for being afraid of horses. The media knew that Bush had only bought that ranch when he had decided to run for president but they played along with his pretense.
Bush sold it not too long after leaving office turning Crawford from a tourist destination to a ghost town. But they had served their purpose in his faux macho act.
The best defense Biden can levy is the one his administration is already doing--ignore this absurd chatter and do the work the American people elected him to do. I watched in horror many years ago when Ronald Regan labeled Walter Mondale a liberal and instead of defending how liberal policies improved the lives of middle class Americans, Democrats ran away and hid and lost in a huge landslide. I believe that was the beginning of when Republicans with the help of the press began to kick sand in the faces of Democrats. Fast forward to today where finally Democrats under Biden have appeared to grow a backbone and have not taken the bate from these DC press types who seem to have forgotten how they were mistreated under Donald Trump. Jen Psaki has been a brilliant mouthpiece for the administration. More importantly Americans by and large support President Joe Biden and overwhelmingly support Covid relief as well as other Democratic policies. The Biden administration is working for the people, not the mainstream media and that's the way it ought to be.
We need today’s so-called “news outlets” to hire about 50,000 journalists that will use common sense and that will respect the truth so we can once again have confidence in all news reporting.
We should demand that will treat their job and the truth as important as famed news anchor Walter Cronkite did.
Oh, and if Fox News continues to spread nonsense and outright lies they should be labeled as an opinion channel and not be allowed to call what they do as news.
What I want to see in addition to respecting the truth is putting the needs of us citizens first. Not that they don’t often distort the truth but there are also a lot of technically true things like what kind of watch Biden wears that don’t help us understand what is going on in our world.
I would like to see the media stop their obsession with negative stories and start reporting more on what is working both here and abroad. For example the reporting on our public schools is overwhelmingly negative. I am not suggesting that the media ignore the very real problems our schools have to deal with but there is nothing objective about an overwhelmingly negative portrayal of our schools. The media has to know that studies that have compared performance of public and charter school students from similar backgrounds have consistently shown that charter schools do not outperform public schools and often perform worse. It doesn’t matter that a few of them are exceptions because the same thing is true of some public schools.
We should also be hearing about what other countries have done to solve problems. Germany has buried many of its power lines so they have far fewer outages than we do. Finland has a very successful media literacy program that has been shown to make their people the EU citizens least susceptible to fake stories. London has been having a lot of success improving the performance of minority students and poor white students while the north parts of England have not. We could learn a lot about what has worked there.
Germany has a very successful universal health care system that is based on private insurance bought by individuals or employers. Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Japan use similar models yet in our media actually claim that all other developed countries have single payer healthcare. Taking the time to report on the pros and cons of different approaches takes a lot of work so why bother when you can get away with simplistic claims?
That's a lot of good information to know about how schooling is handled & I agree that the press could do a lot better job of presenting both sides and not just go for the easy, negative, story.
Going for the negative stories and ignoring stories about successful programs here and abroad just serves to feed the belief that nothing can be done by government and thereby discourages people from demanding anything from our government. That is exactly what Republicans want.
I hope Biden continues to unplug the outrage until the press corp fully adjusts to the new normal of no-drama informative-oriented press briefings, and that he doesn’t fold under their fake outrage and do one before planned. There’s a reason they’re making such a stink about it right now. It is all about gotcha questions and framing a rightwing narrative. And he’s denying them that opportunity.
I freaking love it.
About the online harassment of female journalists, yes. It is the main reason I stopped publishing, in a vain attempt to make the cyberstalking stop. All it did was end my career before it was even fully established, and I’m still dealing with that psychopath stalking me. I wish there were more protective measures in place to stop it. As it is, I couldn’t even get my own family to take it seriously or understand it is a big deal that ruins lives. It is just yet another example of misogyny making harassment easier for the harasser and more acceptable with no real consequences.
There are real outrageous stories to be told. Voter suppression via new rules or good old fashioned gerrymandering for one. Anther assault on a woman’s right to choose. This one calls for the death penalty for exercising your right to a legal medical procedure. Stories of pay for play in vaccine distribution. The attitude of the media reminds of the reason the IRS gave for not investigating the taxes of the rich, it’s just too hard. Much easier to write about non existing problems than real, possibly criminal, definitely concerning issues before us.
Our failed political press is trying to prove —against all odds— that they are still relevant, when clearly they are not. They are demanding that President Biden legitimize their continued employment.
And when he does give a press conference at the end of the month, they will distinguish themselves once again with would-be gotcha questions.
I'm going to do what I can to be watching that press conference, Scotch in hand (no matter what time of day it is), just so I can toast the President the first time he gives a questioner the "Really?" look he does so well.
Why it's happening at all is why Trump got elected in the first place. Ratings. The MSM is addicted to being the story. It’s the death of the imagination. The death of wanting to well by the people. As many journalists whose names we will never know due or are captured all over the world. It goes in detected to the public eye. What is put in front of everyone is a whiny journalist who has one goal to e the story.
I didn’t have a problem understanding what you wrote but I did grow up with a mother who constantly called condominiums condoms, the NAACP the NCAA. etc/ My dad was freaked out when he overheard her talking to a friend about the IRS setting off bombs. It took him a while to realize she was talking about the IRA but her friend knew exactly what she meant.
OMG!! CNN is so often terrible! Of course DeSantis isn’t facing recall the way Newsome is because he is a Republican. It’s Republicans in Cal who are trying to remove Newsome.
Eric, Oliver Knox did it again in his March 15th WP Daily 202, and invited readers to submit links that -- in his words -- offer "...politics or policy stories you think deserve more attention!" So I sent him the link to this essay with a note: "Your Monday report on President Biden not yet holding a press conference puts you and The Post in a cohort so perfectly described here by Eric Boehlert." He was not pleased, and his pivot was beyond weak. It didn't even land on the same planet: "Name a single bad thing about Donald Trump that you learned from Boehlert and had not previously been reported by the mainstream media." I laughed, because his response so proved the essence of your essay.
After 5 years of covering Trump’s deranged tweets as headline news they have no clue what to do now that he's banned from Twitter. The DC reporters don't realize the government is supposed to be boring especially if it's competent and working well The President isn't supposed to be an entertainer. That's what was so appealing about Obama. He stayed calm in the middle of the right-wing media storm. People shouldn't have to worry every day about what their President is tweeting and saying to reporters. Biden's team realizes that and so far they've been great at message discipline and not getting distracted by the latest GQP and Faux News propaganda. .
I think you need to go on some of the Sunday shows, and tear them a new one. Trump learned his phony controversy and "ratings" schtick in the modern media environment, which is obsessed with grabbing attention and generating BS to gab about at any cost.
Eric, if you watch the Psaki pressers, Fox isn't always the worst offender — NBC's Peter Alexander is always trying to play gotcha with her and the way he phrases his questions is just utter crap. I used to think he was a very respectable reporter, but he has just got into the gutter. I had to angry tweet at him!
I agree...it’s stiff competition !
I was shocked to see the list of questions that Dan Froomkin suggested reporters ask Biden at his press conference. For example “.....when did you finally realize that your Iraq war vote had enabled a full-fledged disaster, and what did you learn from that?” Also a question about the crime bill he signed. Another was about the 2005 bankruptcy bill. While those questions made sense when Biden was running for office that seems like inside the beltway games to me. Journalists should represent the public and what they want and need to know and there are a lot of problems we are facing right now that are much more important than what he did in the past.
https://presswatchers.org/2021/03/how-to-get-joe-biden-to-tell-us-something-new-because-theres-a-lot-we-dont-know/
I am so with you on this one Merrick. I have been so disappointed in him lately. I always thought he was a stand up guy. Hate to see it.
Obviously, what matters to Peter Alexander is what matters to only 99.99999% of the DC political media brothel: Being seen and noticed, as opposed to actually being reporters.
He probably planned that question with the man who is the political director of NBC, Chuck the Toady Todd.
I like that nickname, though I refer to him as the chief chucktodd of them all. There's also Norah O'Donnell, who holds The David Broder Chair in Destroying One's Reputation, and the interview style that supplicates completely to the interviewee if it's a republican: margaretbrennaning.
Apropos of all that, FDR hated Arthur Krock of The New York Times and vice versa. One time a Times White House correspondent asked a nasty question and FDR said, "I bet Li'l Arthur spent all night coming up with that one."
I refer to Maggie H as Axis Maggie. I saw someone on Twitter (wish I could remember who) coined #JakeTodd and #ChuckTapper. Either one of those is a perfect collective description of the whole mewling lot of them. My favorite description of the Beltway Political Propatainment Complex is courtesy of Hamlet: "It appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours".
I'm a bit easier on Jake Tapper, who, it seems to me, puts up with a lot less on CNN, though he has his moments, too. And as usual, yes, Willie Shakespeare nailed it.
Remember how the NY Times’s Kate Seelye and the WaPo’s Ceci Connelly trashed Al Gore? The fact that top journalists could have been more impressed with the callow and ignorant Dubya than Gore still boggles my mind.
Somehow I have missed Norah O’Donnell’s bad behaviors. It must be awful for you to compare her to David “The Dean of Washington Journalists” Broder. Any links?
This did it for me: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=676344186365152
Trump is considered part of the NBC "family" because the Apprentice.
I hate to say this but they all suck no decency in any of them.
Maybe he should buy Delaware and call it Delaware-a-Lago. Then they'll lay off.
and go play lots of golf
Golf is too elitist. He could go bowling a lot. Or he could buy a ranch and pretend to be a cowboy like Bush did then drag foreign dignitaries there instead of hosting them at the much more prestigious White House. You know they and the media actually hated having to go there but no one would dare admit that.
The only person who had the guts to call him out for his phony macho man act was Vincente Fox who called Bush a “windshield cowboy” and poked fun at him for being afraid of horses. The media knew that Bush had only bought that ranch when he had decided to run for president but they played along with his pretense.
Bush sold it not too long after leaving office turning Crawford from a tourist destination to a ghost town. But they had served their purpose in his faux macho act.
The best defense Biden can levy is the one his administration is already doing--ignore this absurd chatter and do the work the American people elected him to do. I watched in horror many years ago when Ronald Regan labeled Walter Mondale a liberal and instead of defending how liberal policies improved the lives of middle class Americans, Democrats ran away and hid and lost in a huge landslide. I believe that was the beginning of when Republicans with the help of the press began to kick sand in the faces of Democrats. Fast forward to today where finally Democrats under Biden have appeared to grow a backbone and have not taken the bate from these DC press types who seem to have forgotten how they were mistreated under Donald Trump. Jen Psaki has been a brilliant mouthpiece for the administration. More importantly Americans by and large support President Joe Biden and overwhelmingly support Covid relief as well as other Democratic policies. The Biden administration is working for the people, not the mainstream media and that's the way it ought to be.
Amen!
We need today’s so-called “news outlets” to hire about 50,000 journalists that will use common sense and that will respect the truth so we can once again have confidence in all news reporting.
We should demand that will treat their job and the truth as important as famed news anchor Walter Cronkite did.
Oh, and if Fox News continues to spread nonsense and outright lies they should be labeled as an opinion channel and not be allowed to call what they do as news.
common sense does seem to be lacking
You win the award for Best Wry Understatement. Made me laugh out loud.
What I want to see in addition to respecting the truth is putting the needs of us citizens first. Not that they don’t often distort the truth but there are also a lot of technically true things like what kind of watch Biden wears that don’t help us understand what is going on in our world.
I would like to see the media stop their obsession with negative stories and start reporting more on what is working both here and abroad. For example the reporting on our public schools is overwhelmingly negative. I am not suggesting that the media ignore the very real problems our schools have to deal with but there is nothing objective about an overwhelmingly negative portrayal of our schools. The media has to know that studies that have compared performance of public and charter school students from similar backgrounds have consistently shown that charter schools do not outperform public schools and often perform worse. It doesn’t matter that a few of them are exceptions because the same thing is true of some public schools.
We should also be hearing about what other countries have done to solve problems. Germany has buried many of its power lines so they have far fewer outages than we do. Finland has a very successful media literacy program that has been shown to make their people the EU citizens least susceptible to fake stories. London has been having a lot of success improving the performance of minority students and poor white students while the north parts of England have not. We could learn a lot about what has worked there.
Germany has a very successful universal health care system that is based on private insurance bought by individuals or employers. Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Japan use similar models yet in our media actually claim that all other developed countries have single payer healthcare. Taking the time to report on the pros and cons of different approaches takes a lot of work so why bother when you can get away with simplistic claims?
That's a lot of good information to know about how schooling is handled & I agree that the press could do a lot better job of presenting both sides and not just go for the easy, negative, story.
Going for the negative stories and ignoring stories about successful programs here and abroad just serves to feed the belief that nothing can be done by government and thereby discourages people from demanding anything from our government. That is exactly what Republicans want.
Nicely written, Eric. You captured the essence of an, unfortunately, large portion of the medias mentality.
thanks, appreciate it
I hope Biden continues to unplug the outrage until the press corp fully adjusts to the new normal of no-drama informative-oriented press briefings, and that he doesn’t fold under their fake outrage and do one before planned. There’s a reason they’re making such a stink about it right now. It is all about gotcha questions and framing a rightwing narrative. And he’s denying them that opportunity.
I freaking love it.
About the online harassment of female journalists, yes. It is the main reason I stopped publishing, in a vain attempt to make the cyberstalking stop. All it did was end my career before it was even fully established, and I’m still dealing with that psychopath stalking me. I wish there were more protective measures in place to stop it. As it is, I couldn’t even get my own family to take it seriously or understand it is a big deal that ruins lives. It is just yet another example of misogyny making harassment easier for the harasser and more acceptable with no real consequences.
I’ve been impressed by Biden WH discipline re: unplugging, too
I hope they keep it up!
Can we reverse it on the stalker and stalk him. If possible women unite and stalk the stalker
Ha! Interesting concept.
There are real outrageous stories to be told. Voter suppression via new rules or good old fashioned gerrymandering for one. Anther assault on a woman’s right to choose. This one calls for the death penalty for exercising your right to a legal medical procedure. Stories of pay for play in vaccine distribution. The attitude of the media reminds of the reason the IRS gave for not investigating the taxes of the rich, it’s just too hard. Much easier to write about non existing problems than real, possibly criminal, definitely concerning issues before us.
Our failed political press is trying to prove —against all odds— that they are still relevant, when clearly they are not. They are demanding that President Biden legitimize their continued employment.
And when he does give a press conference at the end of the month, they will distinguish themselves once again with would-be gotcha questions.
I'm going to do what I can to be watching that press conference, Scotch in hand (no matter what time of day it is), just so I can toast the President the first time he gives a questioner the "Really?" look he does so well.
Why it's happening at all is why Trump got elected in the first place. Ratings. The MSM is addicted to being the story. It’s the death of the imagination. The death of wanting to well by the people. As many journalists whose names we will never know due or are captured all over the world. It goes in detected to the public eye. What is put in front of everyone is a whiny journalist who has one goal to e the story.
Do well
Too many typos. Never type while in commute. You will never get your point across! Just disregard it. Thanks.
I didn’t have a problem understanding what you wrote but I did grow up with a mother who constantly called condominiums condoms, the NAACP the NCAA. etc/ My dad was freaked out when he overheard her talking to a friend about the IRS setting off bombs. It took him a while to realize she was talking about the IRA but her friend knew exactly what she meant.
Astonishing: https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/politics/ron-desantis-covid-florida/index.html
OMG!! CNN is so often terrible! Of course DeSantis isn’t facing recall the way Newsome is because he is a Republican. It’s Republicans in Cal who are trying to remove Newsome.
Eric, Oliver Knox did it again in his March 15th WP Daily 202, and invited readers to submit links that -- in his words -- offer "...politics or policy stories you think deserve more attention!" So I sent him the link to this essay with a note: "Your Monday report on President Biden not yet holding a press conference puts you and The Post in a cohort so perfectly described here by Eric Boehlert." He was not pleased, and his pivot was beyond weak. It didn't even land on the same planet: "Name a single bad thing about Donald Trump that you learned from Boehlert and had not previously been reported by the mainstream media." I laughed, because his response so proved the essence of your essay.
"manufacture news" = the real fake news
After 5 years of covering Trump’s deranged tweets as headline news they have no clue what to do now that he's banned from Twitter. The DC reporters don't realize the government is supposed to be boring especially if it's competent and working well The President isn't supposed to be an entertainer. That's what was so appealing about Obama. He stayed calm in the middle of the right-wing media storm. People shouldn't have to worry every day about what their President is tweeting and saying to reporters. Biden's team realizes that and so far they've been great at message discipline and not getting distracted by the latest GQP and Faux News propaganda. .
I think you need to go on some of the Sunday shows, and tear them a new one. Trump learned his phony controversy and "ratings" schtick in the modern media environment, which is obsessed with grabbing attention and generating BS to gab about at any cost.
So do you want to be Hedrick Smith or Kim Kardashian? Your journalism professors want to know.