Hillary Clinton agrees there is still a “vast right-wing conspiracy” — and if anything it has only become more richly financed.
During the New Hampshire town hall debate on Wednesday night, CNN host Anderson Cooper asked the presidential hopeful if she still believes there is a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” as she said there was during the late 90s to initially explain the Monica Lewinksy scandal involing her husband.
“Don’t you?” Clinton replied, as the audience laughed. “Yeah. It’s gotten even better funded.”
“They brought in some new multibillionaires to pump the money in. Look, these guys play for keeps.
“They want to control our country.”
Seconds before the conspiracy exchange, a supporter in the audience asked the Democratic front-runner how she would, as nominee and president, defend herself against right-wing attacks.
“I’ve had a lot of practice,” Clinton replied. “I can laugh up here but it’s not easy.
“It is a brutal experience and when it first started happening to me … I was just stunned. I could not understand how they got away with it.
“So now that I’ve been through this for so many years,” the former first lady continued, “my understanding of the political tactics that the other side uses is pretty well versed. They play to keep. They play to destroy.
“I know I have to keep defending against them,” Clinton added. “But I’m the one who has the experience to do that.
“It’s unlike anything you’ve ever gone through, to be the subject of tens of millions of dollars of untrue negative attacks.”
The Clintons have great experience in “they play to destroy” and “tens of millions of dollars of untrue negative attacks,” having instigated the most vicious political machine of someone not named Kennedy. Apparently Hillary isn’t really interested in bridging the partisan and ideological gaps and healing and all that.
That reminds me that about 20 years ago I called a classic rock radio station and dedicated this song to Hillary and Janet Reno:
Meanwhile, the Des Moines Register isn’t done with covering the Iowa caucuses, Politico reports:
In a strongly worded editorial on Thursday, The Des Moines Register called on the Iowa Democratic Party to move quickly to prove that Monday’s results are correct.
The piece titled “Editorial: Something smells in the Democratic Party,” starts out: “Once again the world is laughing at Iowa.”
It gets sharper from there. “What happened Monday night at the Democratic caucuses was a debacle, period. Democracy, particularly at the local party level, can be slow, messy and obscure. But the refusal to undergo scrutiny or allow for an appeal reeks of autocracy,” the DMR reads. “The Iowa Democratic Party must act quickly to assure the accuracy of the caucus results, beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
The editorial cites Clinton’s razor-thin victory as too close “not to do a complete audit of results.”
The newspaper editorial also said there were too many opportunities for error to arise.
“Too many accounts have arisen of inconsistent counts, untrained and overwhelmed volunteers, confused voters, cramped precinct locations, a lack of voter registration forms and other problems,” the editorial reads. “Too many of us, including members of the Register editorial board who were observing caucuses, saw opportunities for error amid Monday night’s chaos.”
The editorial ends by calling on the state’s Democratic Party to “work with all the campaigns to audit results. Break silly party tradition and release the raw vote totals. Provide a list of each precinct coin flip and its outcome, as well as other information sought by the Register. Be transparent.”
I have a better idea: Dump the caucus and create a primary election, and join the 21st century.
In case you didn’t notice from all the political “news,” Super Bowl 50 is today.
Football as a sport is simultaneously unparalleled in popularity and embattled. David French writes:
I grew up in the kind of eighborhood where I could walk with my football to the n field near my house, kick the ball around a few times, and — within minutes — my friends would be pouring out of their homes ready to play for hours on end. Those were some of the greatest times of my life. On that field, a skinny, nerdy kid who was more comfortable with graph paper and 12- and 20-sided dice could learn how to take a hit and — just as important — how to deliver one. I gained confidence, I was humbled (more than once), and I fell in love with America’s new athletic pastime.
However, there are some on the left who want to deny kids those kinds of days, to turn America against its favorite sport. To them, football is just too male, too martial, and too darn American. They’ve argued that football breeds disrespect for women, that it’s too violent, and that its culture is too religious. Yet none of those criticisms have made an impact. People kept watching football, and — crucially — they kept letting their kids run outside, join the games in the field or at school, and level their friends on the crossing route.
But now there’s a new attack — one that precisely tracks the timid tenor of our times. Sure we knew football was violent, but now we know it’s dangerous — so dangerous that it’s immoral to watch.
And, yes, it is modestly dangerous. Kids who play football tend to get injured more than kids who player other sports, and — yes — they have a greater likelihood of suffering from concussions. Repeated concussions can and do cause brain damage, and for those who play football for a living, there are sad stories of retired NFL players who have suffered severe and even deadly damage to body and mind.
When children are denied the opportunity to take risks, they often approach the world with a fear and timidity that can haunt them for life.
This is the worst possible news for today’s parents, who often seek above all to guarantee the physical and psychological safety of their children. Children are being raised as if they’re fragile, in need of constant protection. For these (often upper-middle-class) parents, new information about football’s dangers makes their decision easy. Johnny can play basketball or soccer, but he can’t play football. Indeed, in just one year’s time, the percentage of Americans who said they wouldn’t let their children play football jumped nine points, from 22 percent to 31 percent.
Yet this mindset advances the great error of modern parenting — the belief that we should protect our kids from as much harm as we can. This short-sighted, fearful attitude ultimately damages the very children we so desperately safeguard. By taking risks, children learn other virtues, and when children are denied the opportunity to take risks, they often approach the world with a fear and timidity that can haunt them for life. What if my parents had kept me from the field near our house, protecting me from those many blows — endured without a helmet or shoulder pads or protection of any kind? Would I be the same person that I am today? Or would I perhaps be a bit more fearful, uncertain of my own physical courage and toughness?
Football, moreover, channels natural and desirable male risk-taking and aggression into a game bound by rules and governed by a code of conduct. In football, as in many sports, you learn self-sacrifice, including how to deny yourself and risk yourself for the benefit of your teammates. One doesn’t have to play football to learn those lessons, and playing football is not necessary to turn boys into young men, but the fear that motivates parents to reject football can indeed keep boys from growing into men.
To deny a young man the opportunity to test himself is to deny and diminish his very essence.
Since the dawn of time, boys have courted danger and tested the limits of their own endurance. To deny a young man the opportunity to test himself is to deny and diminish his very essence. Not all young men are aggressive, but young men with aggressive instincts will attempt to find outlets for their innate sense of adventure. This puts them in direct conflict with the fearful spirit of the age. Parents, schools, and maternalistic government officials who try to deny those outlets or strip the masculine aggression and valor from boys do far more harm than good. They crush the spirits of the young men they seek to protect.
When I watch the NFL, I don’t see victims. I see men who have known their entire lives that football can be dangerous. These men have injuries, and they’ve suffered their own pain, but they play on. They do it for the thrill of competition, for the love of their teammates, and — yes — for the fame and money their athletic prowess provides. At the end of the day, however, the courage they show on the football field is central to their very identity. Long before there were stadiums full of cheering fans, each one of those players pursued his own lonely, self-sacrificial quest for greatness. It is not immoral to applaud their achievements, to appreciate their sacrifice, and to enjoy the sheer spectacle of the sport they love.
Every football player, when he steps onto the gridiron, demonstrates a degree of bravery that directly rebukes our increasingly bubble-wrapped culture. Our nation needs bravery far more than it needs safety, but in the cultural struggles ahead I believe that fear may prevail. And if fear does prevail, it will do more than destroy a great sport, it will rip the valor and purpose right out of the hearts of men.
The winners of Super Bowl 50 today will, not surprisingly, pay a lot of taxes, about which Dan Mitchell writes:
Imagine a taxpayer who earns $50,000 and pays $10,000 in tax.
With that information, we know the taxpayer’s average tax rate is 20 percent. But this information tells us nothing about incentives to earn more income because we don’t know the marginal tax rate that would apply if the taxpayer was more productive and earned another $5,000.
Consider these three simple scenarios with wildly different marginal tax rates.
The tax system imposes a $10,000 annual charge on all taxpayers (sometimes referred to as a “head tax”). Under this system, our taxpayer pays that tax, which means the average tax rate on $50,000 of income is 20 percent. But the marginal tax rate would be zero on the additional $5,000 of income. In this system, the tax system does not discourage additional economic activity.
The tax system imposes a flat rate of 20 percent on every dollar of income. Under this system, our taxpayer pays that tax on every dollar of income, which means the average tax rate on $50,000 of income is 20 percent. And the marginal tax rate would also be 20 percent on the additional $5,000 of income. In this system, the tax system imposes a modest penalty on additional economic activity.
The tax system has a $40,000 personal exemption and then a 100 percent tax rate on all income about that level. Under this system, our taxpayer pays $10,000 of tax on $50,000 of income, which means an average tax rate of 20 percent. But the marginal tax rate on another $5,000 of income would be 100 percent. In this system, the tax system would destroy incentives for any additional economic activity.
These examples are very simplified, of course, but they accurately show how systems with identical average tax rates can have very different marginal tax rates. And from an economic perspective, it’s the marginal tax rate that matters.
Remember, economic growth only occurs if people decide to increase the quantity and/or quality of labor and capital they provide to the economy. And those decisions obviously are influenced by marginal tax rates rather than average tax rates.
This is why President Obama’s class-warfare tax policies are so destructive. This is why America’s punitive corporate tax system is so anti-competitive, even if the average tax rate on companies is sometimes relatively low.
And this is why economists seem fixated on lowering top tax rates. It’s not that we lose any sleep about the average tax rate of successful people. We just don’t want to discourage highly productive investors, entrepreneurs, and small business owners from doing things that result in more growth and prosperity for the rest of us.
We’d rather have the benign tax system of Hong Kong instead of the punitive tax system of France. Now let’s look at a real-world (though very unusual) example.
Writing for Forbes, a Certified Public Accountant explains why Cam Newton of the Carolina Panthers is guaranteed to lose the Super Bowl.
Not on the playing field. The defeat will occur when he files his taxes.
Remember when Peyton Manning paid New Jersey nearly $47,000 in taxes two years ago on his Super Bowl earnings of $46,000? …Newton is looking at a tax bill more than twice as much, which will swallow up his entire Super Bowl paycheck, win or lose, thanks to California’s tops-in-the-nation tax rate of 13.3%.
You may be wondering why California is going to pillage Cam Newton since he plays for a team from North Carolina, but there is a legitimate “nexus” for tax since the Super Bowl is being playing in California.
But it’s the level of the tax and marginal impact that matters. More specifically, the tax-addicted California politicians impose taxes on out-of-state athletes based on how many days they spend in the Golden State.
Before we get into the numbers, let’s do a quick review of the jock tax rules… States tax a player based on their calendar-year income. They apply a duty day calculation which takes the ratio of duty days within the state over total duty days for the year.
Now let’s look at the tax implication for Cam Newton.
If the Panthers win the Super Bowl, Newton will earn another $102,000 in playoff bonuses, but if they lose he will only net another $51,000. The Panthers will have about 206 total duty days during 2016, including the playoffs, preseason, regular season and organized team activities (OTAs), which Newton must attend or lose $500,000. Seven of those duty days will be in California for the Super Bowl… To determine what Newton will pay California on his Super Bowl winnings alone, …looking at the seven days Newton will spend in California this week for Super Bowl 50, he will pay the state $101,600 on $102,000 of income should the Panthers be victorious or $101,360 on $51,000 should they lose.
So what’s Cam’s marginal tax rate?
The result: Newton will pay California 99.6% of his Super Bowl earnings if the Panthers win. Losing means his effective tax rate will be a whopping 198.8%. Oh yeah, he will also pay the IRS 40.5% on his earnings.
In other words, Cam Newton will pay a Barack Obama-style flat tax. The rules are very simple. The government simply takes all your money.
Or, in this case, more than all your money. So it’s akin to a French-style flat tax.
Some of you may be thinking this analysis is unfair because California isn’t imposing a 99.6 percent or 198.8 percent tax on his Super Bowl earnings. Instead, the state is taxing his entire annual income based on the number of days he’s working in the state.
But that’s not the economically relevant issue. What matters if that he’ll be paying about $101,000 of extra tax simply because the game takes place in California.
However, if the Super Bowl was in a city like Dallas and Miami, there would be no additional tax.
The good news, so to speak, is that Cam Newton has a contract that would prevent him from staying home and skipping the game. So he basically doesn’t have the ability to respond to the confiscatory tax rate.
Many successful taxpayers, by contrast, do have flexibility and they are the job creators and investors who help decide whether states grow faster and stagnate. So while California will have the ability to pillage Cam Newton, the state is basically following a suicidal fiscal policy.
Basically the France of America. And that’s the high cost of high marginal tax rates.
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
“We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”
“Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the Democrats believe every day is April 15.”
“Socialists ignore the side of man that is the spirit. They can provide you shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you’re ill, all the things guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave. They don’t understand that we also dream.”
“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals — if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.”
“Democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.”
“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”
The Packers are certainly familiar with Super Sunday, having won four of five Super Bowl visits as part of their 13 NFL championships, more than any other NFL team.
Wisconsin is naturally crazy about the Packers, but for those who don’t live in the Green Bay TV market, there is no substitute for being in the Green Bay TV market during a Super Bowl trip.
In 1997 the NFC championship was played at Lambeau Field. Two days before that I attended (after failing to get a pass for the actual game) the NFC championship press conference at a Green Bay hotel. All the Green Bay TV stations carried it live, and therefore all showed me (or by audio) ask the same question of Brett Favre and Reggie White, to note how different that season was with three relatively new teams in the conference championship round. (That was also the season that, while I was getting gas at an Appleton gas station, someone asked if I was Brett Favre. That’s certainly not surprising, since as everyone knows it was natural for Favre to drive a 1991 Ford Escort GT and get gas minutes before he was supposed to be at practice 30 miles away.)
What about the non-championship seasons? Cliff Christl profiles the almost-seasons:
5- 1997 – Yes, this team lost a Super Bowl as the favorite. But it was not the same team that won in 1996. There was no Desmond Howard returning kicks, no Keith Jackson beating defenses down the seam and no Sean Jones at right defensive end. It might have been time to replace Jones, but Gabe Wilkins wasn’t the answer. Unlike the 1960 Packers who kept getting better, this team’s defense hit the wall in the Super Bowl. The defensive linemen, including Reggie White, were running on fumes at the end – if they were running at all – and 34-year old safety Eugene Robinson might have set some kind of record for missed tackles. In fact, I’m not so sure the 1995 Packers weren’t better. Their misfortune was playing the Dallas Cowboys, a truly great team and the last of the NFL dynasties, in the NFC title game. …
4- 2011 – The Packers went 15-1 in the regular season, their best winning percentage since 1929. Aaron Rodgers had an MVP season with an NFL record 122.5 passer rating and a phenomenal touchdown-to-interception ratio of 45-6. The Packers won the division by five games. They scored more than 40 points six times. Sure, the defense ranked last in the NFL in yards allowed. But at the time, defense wasn’t the all-important element it had once been. While that might be changing again, two Super Bowl champs in the previous five years, Indianapolis and New Orleans, had ranked lower than 20th in defense. And the 9-7 New York Giants, the team that bounced the Packers out of the playoffs in the divisional round and went on to win the Super Bowl, ranked 27th in defense that year, only five slots better than the Packers.
3- 1941 – This Packers team split two regular-season games against the Monsters of the Midway when they were at their peak. The Bears had crushed Washington, 73-0, in the previous season’s championship game. They would repeat as champions in 1941 with pretty much the same players and with another decisive 37-9 title-game victory over the Giants. But the Packers beat the Bears, 16-14, late in the season when Curly Lambeau surprised them with a seven-man defensive line and paralyzed their vaunted T-formation. As a result, the two teams tied for the Western Division title with 10-1 records before the Packers lost the playoff, 33-14. Cecil Isbell led the league in passing and Don Hutson led it in scoring and receiving.
2- 1960 – This was Lombardi’s second team and it probably played as well as any of his five champions down the stretch, if not better. It won a tight five-team race by winning its final three games by a combined score of 89-34. Then it dominated Philadelphia in the NFL championship, outgaining the Eagles, 401 yards to 296, running 77 offensive plays to their 48 and picking up 22 first downs to their 13. But this would be the only Lombardi team to lose a title game. It bowed, 17-13, when Chuck Bednarik tackled Jim Taylor at the Eagles’ 9-yard line on the final play. In Lombardi’s eyes, it wasn’t his team that lost the game. He blamed himself, citing two fourth-down gambles that backfired.
1- 1963 – Vince Lombardi once said, “‘61 and ’62 were great teams, but the ’63 team was probably the best team of all time.” Seems like a strange thing for a coach to say who preached there were only two places: First and last. But he probably based it on this: His 22 starters in ’63 averaged an ideal 5.5 years of experience and only three were older than 30. Had he lived longer would Lombardi have reconsidered? Perhaps. But who am I to argue with him? The 1963 Packers finished 11-2-1, losing to the Chicago Bears twice. The Bears won the season opener, 10-3, and the rematch in Wrigley Field, 26-7. That allowed them to edge the Packers by a half-game in the Western Conference race – the Bears finished 11-1-2 – and to beat the New York Giants, 14-10, in the championship game. Paul Hornung was suspended and missed the season. An injured Bart Starr missed four starts, including the second Packers-Bears game. Otherwise, it was basically the same lineup that went 13-1 and won the 1962 title. The one change was Lionel Aldridge replacing Bill Quinlan at right defensive end.
To this list could be added the 2003 Packers, which despite having Favre and a road-grader running game with Ahman Green, needed an improbable Vikings loss to Arizona to get in the playoffs as the NFC North champion …
… which was followed by the first defensive touchdown to win an overtime playoff game in NFL history …
… only to end with a second-round loss to the Eagles in the infamous fourth-and-26 game.
Bizarrely, I have to write about Stephen Colbert twice in a week, because, Scouting Magazine reports:
Earning the Eagle Scout award is “quite an achievement,” says Stephen Colbert. But more than that, writes The Late Show host, earning Eagle is “the first steppingstone toward having your own TV show.”
That’s how “Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, D.F.A.” begins a hilariously awesome congratulatory letter to a newly minted Eagle Scout.
Whether Colbert was even ever a Boy Scout, obviously he either learned something or did his research.
One of the improvements of American life that drives liberals nuts is the rise of the right-wing media roughly since the start of the Clinton administration.
Liberals hate, hate, hate the fact that conservative talk radio has been far more commercially successful than liberal talk radio. (Air America, anyone?) Al Gore’s attempt to build a liberal Fox News, Current TV, was absorbed into Al Jazeera America, which is pulling its own plug. When National Review is derided as the establishment, it proves that there are plenty of conservative voices, which did not use to be the case in the mass(ish) media. It proves National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.’s truism about liberals claiming to support other views without supporting the existence of other views.
Susan Wright isn’t happy with the conservative media, however:
The Golden Age of journalism is dead. There are no more Edward R. Murrows, William F. Buckleys, or Walter Cronkites. Don’t look for them. They don’t exist. Those days when the news was the news and a journalist made his bones by digging for the facts and breaking the big stories are now the stuff of faded legend. While the advent of the internet has given us a few inspiring bloggers and investigative wonders (R.I.P Andrew Breitbart), you find that you spend more time sifting through the ramblings of tinfoil hatted-bedlamites, in search of a grain of authenticity than you do reading factual, supported news.
Trust used to be a core principle of the journalism game, as well. Walter Cronkite was once called the most trusted man in America. People wanted to believe that when they invited those familiar faces into their homes each night that they were being told the truth, with no shading or variances, in any way. These days, you can’t be sure if what you’re hearing is factually based, distorted to suit the political ideology of the reporter, or if their reports are rooted in backroom deals and payoffs.
All that brings me to my point: We have reached a tragic period in our nation’s history, where the media seeks to influence the news, rather than simply report it. The danger in that is that they seek further treasure than just ratings. I don’t even care about CNN, MSNBC, or any of the other alphabet soup networks, who, over the years, have proven to be reliably left-biased. Conservatives assumed they had one network that didn’t seem to be overrun with leftist radicals, and that was FOX. There are also a litany of supposed rightwing talk radio hosts. Millions of conservatives tune in to Fox News, each day. Just as many tune in to hear Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, or Sean Hannity on any given day, in hopes of hearing well-researched and principled discussion on the state of the nation.
At this very critical juncture in our history, while our nation and our liberties have been ravaged by the Obama years, and life as we know it in this nation hangs precariously by a thread, Fox News, Limbaugh, Levin, and Hannity have gambled with our future, knowing we have no collateral to back up the game. For months, these fair weather friends of conservatism have heaped slovenly, starry-eyed adoration on Donald Trump. Trump – that gilded toad, who’s conservative history began at about the time he decided to run as a Republican has been shoved in our faces from the day he announced, garnering twice as much attention as any actual, proven conservative candidate by Fox News. In fact, Fox flooded the airwaves with appearances by Trump more than double any other candidate, according to a Business Insider article from December 2015, and that’s not taking into account the time dedicated to marveling over his every word and deed. In spite of the supposed lingering feud between Trump and Fox, they have been a boon for him. Their 24/7 coverage of all-things-Trump have made this arrogant buffoon seem like a legitimate candidate, rather than a bad Saturday Night Live skit. He already had name recognition, due to his reality TV show, but what Fox has done borders on journalistic malpractice. At the expense of other candidates, with actual conservative credentials to fall back on, not to mention experience and policy knowledge, they have led the public to believe that it is the job of other candidates to answer for Trump. There was no programming with Fox where Trump wasn’t mentioned, and if another candidate got air time, that time was spent fielding questions about Trump. The idea of letting those candidates give their pitch for their campaigns was something that came only in passing, and usually the Fox personalities found a way to direct it back to a Trump question. For those of us who actually want to hear from candidates who’ve been conservative for more than a year, it has been a disgusting debacle to witness.
Then there’s “conservative” talk radio. For any who thought turning off the TV and switching to radio would offer some respite from Trump fatigue, no such luck. I was once an avid listener of Levin, Limbaugh, and Hannity, but no more. For months after Trump’s ridiculously garish announcement, these talking heads would gush, ad nauseam, about his boldness, how he was turning the establishment on their heads, he was shaking things up, he was saying what nobody else would say, etc… If Trump wore a blue tie on a Thursday, Sean Hannity would spend 2 hours of his 3 hour show dissecting the significance, and outright brilliance of that tie choice. The other hour would be spent asking callers to tell how much they loved Trump’s tie. I’ve seen brown-nosing and toadie groveling, in my day, but Hannity’s obsession with Donald Trump borders on the psychotic. No one will be surprised when Hannity is busted outside of Trump’s penthouse apartment building, holding a boombox over his head, while Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” cuts through the night air.
Mark Levin’s fans are voicing feeble defenses of the man these days, pointing out how harsh he’s being with Trump. GEE… Welcome to the party, Mark! For months, Levin couldn’t stop talking of Trump’s brilliant strategy, how he was tapping into conservative angst. He wasn’t PC and the so-called establishment couldn’t stand it! Oddly enough, in 2011, Levin said of Trump, “Trump is NOT the real deal. He will get Obama re-elected. This is not a game. This is not a circus. He is not a conservative… We should not encourage this,” But a mere 4 years later, Levin was one more clown under the Big Top. His recent return to his senses is too little, too late.
Rush Limbaugh is a particularly heinous breed of sycophant. Supposedly, Trump is a golfing pal of Limbaugh’s. If he would just say he was going to stump for his friend, those of us who know Trump is a dangerous, narcissistic, tyrant-in-waiting, would at least know why, but el Rushbo plays it off, while pretending to be impartial. He’s anything but that. He likes to tout his “talent on loan from God.” Maybe he should return the talent and ask for some integrity. He has sold us out. He has sold himself out. Any vestige of being a courageous voice for the right is gone. He’s a voice for the highest bidder, well-being of our nation be damned.
The thing is, I get how Trump appeals to the public’s anger. Republicans turned out and gave their party the majority in the House and Senate, only to see them promptly become the right arm of Obama. People are angry, but at some point, you stop venting and you start looking at the best way to fix what has gone wrong. Unbridled anger may be temporarily satisfying, but it won’t lead to the solutions we so desperately require. That is where media becomes important. Done responsibly and with honor, it is a valuable tool for vetting our choices, but here we are. The media are playing a game, attempting to shape the race, rather than do their jobs and give the public a full and accurate picture of our choices. What’s more, they’ve worked overtime to give undue publicity to a man no more qualified to be president than an 8 year old is qualified to be a surgeon.
The reason for it all is ratings. This vile man’s antics bring ratings from a populace that too often would rather be entertained than informed, and the media is exploiting that fully. Trump, the grand self-promoter, guarantees the Honey Boo-Boo crowd will flock to him like flies to horse dung and Fox News, along with the right wing punditry are doing the shoveling. Who cares that a Trump nomination will likely give us a minimum of 4 years of Hillary? If he gets the nomination and somehow wins the general, even if the nation goes swirling, he’s likely to say something outrageous to some foreign dignitary or insult an ally so flagrantly, that the ratings will go through the roof! I guess it’s a matter of priorities, and the priorities of the media are corrupt.
I’m glad that there are still some conservative stalwarts out there, who refuse to play this game and are rightly sounding the alarm against Trumpism. Governor Rick Perry called it early, but I watched with disgust, as Fox News personalities treated him like an enemy of the state, in interview after interview. Voices like Erick Erickson, Glenn Beck, Brent Bozell, Mona Charen, Dana Loesch, and Bill Kristol have joined to try and speak uncompromising reason, where the Hannitys, Limbaughs, and Levins have wallowed in their acquiescence to this reality TV candidacy.
Michael Reagan, in a recent interview with OpportunityLives.com may have given the most wise and insightful word on what we’re seeing in media today:
“We’ve given too much power to talk radio. The Republican Party has allowed talk radio to define us. The Republican Party needs to itself, not rely upon talk radio to define it. They might find out talk radio isn’t always their friend” (Emphasis mine).
I can only pray that the damage of Fox News, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and others, who’ve acted as Donald Trump’s personal PR team for months now is not lasting and sanity takes hold before this primary season is over. Maybe if we all started switching off and doing our own research, rather than feed on a steady diet of self-serving media, we’ll once again find ourselves in a place where We the people choose our candidates, based on merit, not the Cult of Personality that drives news coverage, these days.
As someone who neither watches Fox News nor listens to hardly any conservative talk radio, I think there is some accuracy and some inaccuracy here. It’s a bit disturbing to find someone who doesn’t grasp that the media — right wing, left wing, unaligned, etc. — is a business dependent on advertisers, who advertise based on audience (readers, listeners, viewers, etc.) numbers.
The so-called Golden Age of Journalism is, believe it or not, not the usual historical state of journalism. Only in the last century did most newspapers confined their partisan or ideological biases to the opinion pages. The line between news and commentary has been blurred more often than those of us in journalism like to admit. For instance …
… was it appropriate for Cronkite to editorialize that the U.S. should get out of Vietnam?
Was that commentary appropriate from NBC’s Chet Huntley the night John F. Kennedy was assassinated?
Every journalist has a political point-of-view and they don’t magically check that at the door the minute they land a job. Many pretend to pursue some noble cause of pure “objectivity,” but it is truly in vain. Every good journalist is informed about what the subjects they cover and it would be near-impossible to be informed and not have an opinion.
Aside from outright disclosing a political bent (or as we do here at Mediaite, labeling an article a “column”), there are plenty of ways “objective” journalists can unwittingly reveal their biases.
Let’s say a conservative commentator spends a whole minute speaking with passion about some issue. Journalists can show their bias by writing it up in two generally different ways: “Conservative commentator ranted about xyz topic” or “conservative commentatorspoke passionately about xyz topic.” In the mind of the reader, the former could paint the conservative as a raving lunatic; the latter, an eloquent defender of ideas.
There is also the more indirect form of tipping your hand: selection bias. For example: some would say Fox News’ “hard news” hours spent way too much time harping on the Benghazi attacks over the last month; others would say MSNBC’s “hard news” programming, in addition to all the traditionally “liberal” broadcast network newscasts, outright ignored the story.
You may notice that outlets often accused of conservative bias do tend to focus more on stories that are embarrassing to the left, while dismissing or neglecting stories that could do damage to the right. The same goes for the news outlets generally assumed to be liberally biased.
That’s why we would all be better served if journalists simply disclosed their political biases and abandoned all pretense of the “objective” journalist.
I’ll start: If you read any of my posts labeled as “columns,” you might already know that I am a libertarian. I believe President Barack Obamais a terrible president; and I think Mitt Romney is just as terrible a candidate for replacement. If you read a “column” of mine and you understand libertarianism, you generally know what you are getting.
And when you read a post of mine that is intended to be “straight reporting,” you know what the writer behind the article thinks of his subjects. You can choose to nitpick for bias in my story selection, chosen verbs and adjectives, and characterizations; or you can read it and know that I did my best to be fair despite my own personal views.
Our very own Tommy Christopher and Noah Rothman catch a lot of heat from critics accusing them of “shilling” for Democrats and Republicans respectively. But you know where they stand. They’ve disclosed it on numerous occasions. If you don’t like their viewpoints, you can choose not to click. It’s that simple. And when Rothman writes a “straight” post (Christopher typically only writes columns) you can choose to read it or dismiss it knowing that there is a conservative behind the report.
That certainly applies to Hannity and Limbaugh. If you don’t like what they have to say, don’t listen to them. The superiority of the free market is proved by the fact that if enough people choose to not listen, Hannity and Limbaugh will lose their jobs.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 