PressThink: A Stooge Figure Speaks

A Stooge Figure Speaks

"McClellan's specialty was not lying, or the traditional art of spin, but what I have called 'strategic non-communication.' Lying we understand; spin we have to come to grasp. Non-communication we still do not appreciate. Its purpose is to make executive power less legible."

“I thought he handled his assignment with class, integrity…. One of these days he and I are going to be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days and his time as the press secretary. And I can assure you I will feel the same way then that I feel now, that I can say to Scott, “Job well done.” —George W. Bush, April 19, 2006.

Scott McClellan deserves to be remembered, not as the greatest but as one of the most effective stooge figures in the Bush Administration. (The greatest: Alberto Gonzalez.) Last week’s news from his publisher—that the stooge says he had unknowingly passed along false information provided to him by Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Andrew Card, “and the president himself”—would seem to suggest that McClellan may be waking up a bit to what his actual role was during the three years he served as White House press secretary.

But I wouldn’t count on this awareness reaching very far. In fact, by seizing on a case where an outright falsehood was passed along to the press, we may overlook the meaning of McClellan’s tenure as the jerk at the podium, which is what I called him in my April, 2006 retrospective. You can read that post for the full interpretation; here’s the gist of what I want you to appreciate about McClellan, because it’s worse than lying.

Athough he stood at the podium and managed the briefings, McClellan was not there to brief the press. He was there to frustrate and belittle it, and to provoke journalists into discrediting themselves on television. Choosing McClellan to be the president’s spokesman was a brazen act because it contradicted at least 40 years of received wisdom on how to manage White House communications. ((For more on this part, see the interview that PBS’s Frontline did with me.)

From the the time of John Kennedy until Bush the younger, it was assumed that the President’s powers were not only the formal ones granted by the Constitution but the far greater powers granted by the modern media: the power to dominate the news agenda, to persuade the nation when Congress won’t go along, to influence world opinion from stages like the White House briefing room, and to present an image of a man in charge when others have to act through clumsy and faceless institutions.

Power like that is actually kind of frightening because it obeys no Constitutional logic. To make it less scary—and to add legitimacy to the imbalance in media power that favors the executive over other actors in the system—we came to assume that the president, who clearly dominates the political stage, should occasionally have interlocutors on that stage. And so instead of just declaiming like a dictator, “this is the way it is,” the White House makes announcements, and then officials speaking for the president answer questions— or the man himself does. The briefing room is thus a stage for both projecting presidential power and making it appear more reasoned, more legitimate, more subject to an essentially democratic back-and-forth. (Academics have a word for it: dialogic.)

Okay, now consider: Al Qaeda makes announcements, and like the president’s they instantly travel around the world. But Al Qaeda doesn’t have to answer questions. That gives Osama and company an edge. You have to start with something like that in understanding Scott McClellan because that is where Cheney started, and he influenced Bush in a direction Bush wanted to go anyway to conceal his own weaknesses.

Cheney and company had a different view of presidential power. They equated it not with the outsized political presence the president gains with his command of the cameras and the public stage, but with the “absence of constraint,” as former insider Jack Goldsmith wrote in his book, The Terror Presidency. One of the constraints that Cheney and Bush wanted to obliterate was the interlocutor. To put it another way: they wanted to make presidential power less dialogic.

Thus we got rollback. The whole idea that the executive ought to be questioned—by Congress, by the press, by allies, by members of his own cabinet, by the American people—was a premise they dared to question.

They had a different idea, a truly radical one, which Goldsmith grasped only after David Addington, Cheney’s chief-of-staff, explained it to him. “We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop.” Under this theory the president when elected has all the legitimacy he will ever need. His powers rightly overawe everyone’s unless the White House errs and grants legitimacy to those who would “check” and question him or seek elucidation.

McClellan’s specialty was not lying, or the traditional art of spin, but what I have called “strategic non-communication.” Lying we understand; spin we have to come to grasp. Non-communication we still do not appreciate. Its purpose is to make executive power less legible. Only a stooge figure would be willing to suffer the very public humiliations that such a policy requires of the man in the briefing room.

What I mean by a stooge figure was explained well by John Dickerson, Slate’s White House correspondent, after McClellan announced his resignation in April 2006:

When Scott McClellan went to Karl Rove and Scooter Libby and asked them about their roles in the Valerie Plame leak, they denied any involvement. McClellan dutifully took up their defense with reporters and lied for them. Because neither Libby nor Rove nor anyone else stepped forward to rescue McClellan or provide a plausible explanation for his release of inaccurate information, his credibility was shot. Even reporters who wanted to think the best of him could no longer trust what McClellan said because they didn’t know if he was being given more bad dope. The episode also sent a signal to reporters about McClellan’s status in the administration. Rove and Libby could mislead McClellan and know that neither McClellan nor the president would make them pay.

Actually it was worse than that. The way I read this note written by Dick Cheney, he was saying: Hey, if McClellan can be used to lie to the press for Bush’s boy Rove, then he’s also going to be used to lie for my guy, Libby. Fair is fair.

And the stooge went out there to clear Libby too.

McClellan was often described as “robotic” because he would mindlessly repeat some empty formula he had concocted in anticipation of reporters’ questions. The point here was to underline how pointless it was even to ask questions of the Bush White House. And reporters got that point, though they missed the larger picture I am describing. Many times they wondered what they were doing there.

I will tell you: they were a constraint being made gradually more absent with every exchange they had with the thick-headed and graceless McClellan. The agenda was not to get the White House message out; it was not to explain the president’s policies. At both of these common sense tasks McClellan was awful, his performance a non-starter. No, he was part of something larger and far more disturbing; and it would have been disturbing even to loyal Republicans if they had bothered to understand it.

The goal was to make the American presidency more opaque, so that no one could see in. No self-respecting man would take that job aware of what he was going to be asked to do. McClellan, I think, was unaware. And he remains so.

Originally published at the Huffington Post in a slightly different, shorter version: A World Made More Opaque: Why Scott McClellan Had His Job. (Nov. 23, 2007)

Posted by Jay Rosen at November 25, 2007 1:20 AM Print

Jay,

I loved your article on Scott McClellan -- very well written and so right on the mark. BRAVO!

When Scott was on the podium stooging away, I wrote him a note and sent him a copy of "On Bullshit," a real book. Here's my note to him in case you're interested. (I don't know how the formatting will come out sending it this way.)

I look forward to reading more of your stuff!

Walt Clayton
Las Vegas

YO, SCOTT!

Enclosed is a small tome that I thought you would truly appreciate, and could put to good use in your oh-so-critical mission as White House spokesman. It's called On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt, and delineates the difference between outright lying and the circumloquacious drivel America hears almost daily at your press conferences. You are such a master of both that I sometimes wonder if you were a silent consultant on this work.

Whenever you decide to retire from being a spokesman, or the self-righteous, self-serving, numbingly arrogant administration you aid and abet is run out of office, you should seriously consider a teaching position in journalism, perhaps for a Master of Glibness degree. Suggested courses you might personally spearhead (dare I say "trailblaze"?) would include:

Stonewalling 101, 201, and Advanced General Mendacity: White Lies to Deep Deceit

Advanced Mendacity: Deceiving the Whole World

Covering for a Lying Boss: Pitfalls and Risks

Evasion at the Podium: Skirting Irksome Questions

Dealing with the Press: Mastering Aloofness & Disdain

Cover Your Ass: The Art of the Euphemism

Lying to a Nation: Defending Needless Deaths

Transparent Bullshit: When Obvious Lies Fail

Assuming you have a decent education and are of reasonable intelligence (i.e., above WalMart or Post Office hiring requirements), don't you ever question what you're doing? In the wee hours of the night do you ever stop to think of the outrages you're defending? Did your parents ever teach you the difference between right and wrong?

You're the point man of an insidious administration pathologically bent on deceiving the American public and exploiting it at all costs for its true constituency: Big Business. What a sorry career, fronting for even sorrier hypocrites. I only hope that someday you'll see the egregiousness of your actions and somehow make amends -- but I doubt that will ever happen.

In the meantime, enjoy On Bullshit and maybe glean something from it.

Careful to not choke on your own bullshit, Scott!

Walt Clayton
wclayton3@yahoo.com

Posted by: Walt Clayton at November 25, 2007 10:45 AM | Permalink

"As the media universe grows fragmented, atomizied, user-driven and transnational,...

From your mouth to God's ear!

"...its second tier of casualties, following the first tier commonly known as the MainStreamMedia itself, includes those institutions that exploited the organs of mass communication. The Presidency of the United States was surely chief among these."

This is a good conjecture, but remains to be seen. In the second half of the 20th century, I can recall some 'exploitation' of the MSM by the Executive branch - but any channels of communication will in future be similarly exploited, simply because the Executive must act and set policy, and those items make news however it's conveyed. And the Congressional branch outdoes it in spades - think of all those myriad offices, spinning industriously on their own behalf.

However, I can recall two Administrations that can hardly be called models of MSM 'exploitation': those of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. Rather, they became targets of the most concerted and public hatefests led by said media, which seemed to value the toppling of those administrations higher than any mere news reporting function. A fragmented, atomizied, user-driven and transnational media would ultimately present the public with a far less corrosive and biased menu of news than we see at present. And perhaps the readers and viewers would congregate where the most useful information appeared - that is, news - and the agenda-driven public could splinter at will according to the viewpoint of the purveyors.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at November 25, 2007 2:48 PM | Permalink

Prof:

I think your comparison of McClellan and Gonzales is extremely helpful in trying to understand the radical nature of what Bush and Cheney have been trying to achieve.

I think you're suggesting, and I agree, that whether or not McClellan and Gonzales knew they were lying about any particular issue is really beside the point. In the case of McClellan and Gonzales in particular, even the substance of whatever statement they were making was not particularly important; what was important was their essential role in delegitimizing any questioning of the Executive's actions. To take their statements at all seriously undermines the questions being asked and indeed the questioners themselves.

We have never previously elected a self-consciously Jacobin government in this country. The only possibly relevant prior example would be Lincoln, but it's reasonably clear that his Jacobins were only one of many other groups with which he had to contend, and he had one-third of the country at war with the other two-thirds, to say nothing of the phenomena of the United States Army streaming back into the streets of our capital twice after major defeats thirty miles from the White House.

It is no accident that our modern Jacobins are so fond of referring to the President as "Commander-in-Chief", for their view of the Presidency is that of an elective dictatorship, memorably referred to Mr Bush as his "accountability moment" in November 2004. Congress and the Judiciary are expected to rubber-stamp whatever the Executive deems necessary to carry out its policies, and not to interfere if the Executive determines that even rubber-stamping is not required. The press should dutifully disseminate the "information" the Executive wishes to be transmitted to the public. Any independent inquiries made by the press should be quashed, and the reporters bullied into submission through manipulation of the publishers and broadcasters. The White House press corps has been "embedded" in the same way that the press has been "embedded" by the Pentagon in Iraq.

In the Jacobin style, none of this has been particularly subtle, but the Establishment press continues to behave as if this is all business as usual, even hiring the Michael Gersons and Karl Roves. Even more puzzling has been the reluctance of the Democrats in Congress to resist, although Harry Reid's procedural checkmate of recess appointments suggests that there is at least some consciousness on Capitol Hill that this administration does not "play ball".

What I still do not understand is why the Establishment media refused to accept Bill Clinton as elective King, but continue to accept the Younger Bush, who lacks Nixon's intelligence, Reagan's popular touch and "Hollywood glamour", or even his father's patrician good breeding coupled with alter ego Jim Baker's silky smooth iron-fist-in-velvet-glove power broking. I still think there is more here than meets the eye, and it goes well beyond the obvious "economic self-interest" arguments that simply don't add up when you compare the actual policies of the Clinton administration with those of the Younger Bush. There is an emotional and psycho-social dimension to this that goes well beyond CEOs.

Posted by: HenryFTP at November 26, 2007 1:21 PM | Permalink

The press' actions don't always burn me up. Watching them self-destruct is sometimes amusing.
It's not as if they haven't been warned. "Don't get caught lying!!!" But, noooo. Do they listen?

The WH press corps is portrayed as sitting around doing crosswords until a briefing. Apparently, being promoted to WH cabana boy meant never having to report again. As in, find out what's going on. If you can't get the straight scoop from the podium, find it out elsewhere.

What the hell is the whining about? If what you say of McClellan and the admin is true (coming from a journalist, it probably isn't), then the bulging brains in the press corps should have known it. And quit bothering. Why should anybody show up? I know. In case McClellan has a heart attack and falls off the podium, anybody who isn't there is a bum.
If the WH press corps knew it was getting zilch, they were wasting the money of their employers hanging around complaining about getting zilch.

They should have been reporting.

Given the media's views of the admin, the admin was, if not justified, easy to understand in deciding to stuff the journos. They did what they thought they had to do.

Plan B is for reporters to act like reporters.

What's the big deal?

Notice the NYT getting busted again. Their "corrections" correct basic facts which, being true, ruin the original story, which could only survive being based on the incorrect facts.
Now, if you were in an institution suffering such treatment from journos, what would you do?

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 26, 2007 3:14 PM | Permalink

Dan: You raise an excellent point. Near as I can tell, the situation was this: Rollback was a big gamble and with McClellan in particular they over-reached; it not only failed, it crashed as public support for Bush crashed.

It weakened the Bush White House because they actually destroyed one of the best assets they had: the White House briefing room, which broadcasts American democracy to the world, as well as the president's arguments. The press is a minor impediment as part of a major microphone the President uniquely controls.

A cold and realistic assessment would have told them that, but they actually listened to the "hot" voices of the culture war way more, satisfying a key constituency while putting into practice Cheney and Addington's "executive power as the absence of constraint."

The results were miserable: The Bush Bubble was bad enough and made worse by Rollback. The doctrine of infallability set in. A weak press secretary emboldens denial-based strategies, because the belief is you can put anything over.

What I have called the retreat from empricism gained another front. The realists lost another round, if you will. As I said above, when McClellan took over Bush was at a respectable 59 percent. When he left 33. And it's never recovered.

Rollback was quietly declared a failed policy by Josh Bolton in replacing Andrew Card. I went into in Snow at the Podium, Rollback on the Rocks:

During all of Scott McLellan’s time as press secretary, the Bush team charted an historically new course, which I have called Rollback, the decision to starve rather than feed the news beast, and wherever possible disengage from the press, treating it as either hostile or irrelevant, not a conduit to the nation but a special interest group begging for goodies it doesn’t deserve.
Back ‘em off, starve ‘em down and drive up their negatives. That was the policy. But in the news about Tony Snow there were signs of regret.

* From Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times: “Mr. Snow’s appointment has been described by Democrats and Republicans as an acknowledgment by the White House that it needs, among other things, a whole new approach to dealing with the national press corps after years of trying to keep it at a distance.” A whole new approach, huh?

* From Jim VandeHei and Michael A. Fletcher in the Washington Post: “White House aides said there is now broad agreement that the first-term strategy of largely ignoring the mainstream Washington media was a mistake… The strategy worked well for a long while, but aides said it eventually undercut their credibility with reporters and impeded the administration’s ability to receive fair treatment from the media when Bush’s popularity began to fade.” A mistake? Hmmmm.

* From Mike Allen, Time: “A Republican official familiar with the selection process said Snow, 50, was chosen because Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and Counselor Dan Bartlett want ‘an informed and successful advocate’ who can spar with reporters and make the White House case more aggressively — both off-camera and on.” If they want an informed and successful advocate now, what did they want before?

The White House evacuated spaces where the president can legitimately be questioned because it was Adminstration policy in general that Bush’s authority went unchallenged, his descriptions of the world uncontested. This made him more brittle, but they felt strong doing it.

In this sense press rollback had a single customer: it’s what Bush wanted. Being questioned by non-believers who knew stuff… he definitely did not want that. The staff got the message, the message became a style and they never realized the impression they left: that Bush wasn’t up to taking questions, except from friendlies in very controlled situations.

And that was devastating to Bush's political strength. Rove, Card, Bush, Cheney, Hughes, Bartlett. They screwed up big time, Dan. The funny thing is, and something I did not appreciate at the time... "Rollback was tried and it failed hugely" was a story no one had an interest in telling. Think about it: who would want it out there for examination?

The press was embarrassed that it got pushed around and never left the briefing room en masse.

The Card-Rove-Bartlett White House was embarrassed that its innovation turned into a disaster.

Bolton didn't want to start the job angering the culture warriors by advertising his rollback of rollback. That would be folly.

The cultural right still thinks rollback was necessary and valid and just and right and good.

The left thinks the press wimped out and allowed itself to be rolled back and of course Bush got away with it. They argue it was a success!

There is no constituency for "...rollback was part of a grand strategic gamble that failed."

Plus: The retreat from empiricism--which in my view happened throughout the government--is an embarrassment to the entire Washington elite, none of whom could prevent it, or even give it a name.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 27, 2007 1:03 AM | Permalink

Jay. As regards Armitage. It's a kind of odd statement you make.
He commits what was advertised as the worst kind of betrayal. But he skates.
Somebody whose memory disagreed with another couple of guys' memories gets punished for his misremembered remarks about it.
From which it appears that, retroactively, Armitage didn't do anything wrong.
So, what he did wasn't wrong.
So what the hell was Fitz investigating?

He had a non-crime which he knew was a non-crime (or he'd have chased Armitage) and thought was a thing needing the full resources of his office and in which he could guarantee catching somebody misremembering what he said about the non-crime. Because you can always catch somebody stating something differently from somebody else or from an earlier statement. In fact, the FBI was forced to admit they couldn't really prove what Libby said before which was supposedly contradicted by what he said later. Lost the notes. Slam dunk.

That anybody thinks this is legit is...not amazing.

It does, however, prove you should never talk to the FBI without fully recording the session and keeping several copies in different places. Or, more safely, never talk to them.

Well, at least we know that outing Plame wasn't a crime, or even an offense. Or SOMEbody on your side would have a word or two about Armitage. Which, it goes without saying, nobody on your side does.

Anyway, you can argue all you want with people like me. You should be arguing with the folks who are no longer paying attention to you. Hell, with me, you have somebody to talk to.

Helps to pass the time.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 27, 2007 12:45 PM | Permalink

Lukasiak --

Your "benign neglect" and Rosen's "stooge" may be two sides of the same coin.

From the start, the Bush Administration's ruling strategy can be dubbed Government By Talking Points -- a technique that values word-perfect repetition and message discipline over subtlety, flexibility and responsiveness. It reached its apotheosis on that famous pre-war Sunday morning when all senior officials spoke simultaneously of their fear that the smoking gun might turn out to be a mushroom cloud. Here we saw creative political rhetoric rendered as nothing more subtle than a soundbite slogan.

McClellan was caught in a situation where the Soundbite of the Day talking point he was hired to recite became more and more unhinged from reality. By the time Hurricane Katrina came along he was cast in the role of Bush's Baghdad Bob.

Rosen's intimation, earlier in this thread, that Mark Halperin's recantation is a significant straw in the wind is significant here, I feel. The strategy of Government by Talking Points arises from the worldview of the Permanent Campaign, where generating wedge issues and gotcha moments is more valuable than the traditional tools of government -- persuading waverers, building coalitions and compromising with opponents.

Halperin's best seller The Way To Win argued that adept campaigners make the best rulers. McClellan appears to be Exhibit A in the case against that.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at November 27, 2007 8:04 PM | Permalink

Andrew: "The strategy of Government by Talking Points arises from the worldview of the Permanent Campaign ..." [links added]

Agreed.

"It reached its apotheosis on that famous pre-war Sunday morning when all senior officials spoke simultaneously of their fear that the smoking gun might turn out to be a mushroom cloud."

Interview With Condoleezza Rice September 8, 2002

BLITZER: Based on what you know right now, how close is Saddam Hussein's government -- how close is that government to developing a nuclear capability?

RICE: You will get different estimates about precisely how close he is. We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. We do know that there have been shipments going into Iran, for instance -- into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to -- high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.

We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon. And we know that when the inspectors assessed this after the Gulf War, he was far, far closer to a crude nuclear device than anybody thought, maybe six months from a crude nuclear device.

The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't what the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat October 7, 2002

Some citizens wonder, after 11 years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now? And there's a reason. We've experienced the horror of September the 11th. We have seen that those who hate America are willing to crash airplanes into buildings full of innocent people. Our enemies would be no less willing, in fact, they would be eager, to use biological or chemical, or a nuclear weapon.

Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. As President Kennedy said in October of 1962, "Neither the United States of America, nor the world community of nations can tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation, large or small. We no longer live in a world," he said, "where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nations security to constitute maximum peril."

Understanding the threats of our time, knowing the designs and deceptions of the Iraqi regime, we have every reason to assume the worst, and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring.

Posted by: Tim at November 27, 2007 9:22 PM | Permalink

CQ: How many times has our charming host gone to the well with the "rollback" meme? ZZZZzzzzzzz.

Oh, I freely admit it's a theme I have tracked obsessively. I can do that; its my site. Readers know how to opt out.

But the cure for your ZZZZ is to become a better reader.

It started with "we don't think you have a fourth estate role..." via Andrew Card, and "You're Assuming That You Represent the Public. I Don't Accept That," which was W's idea. (April, 2004)

Previous presidents had the same resentments, of course, and drew cheers in parts of the electorate for voicing them. Previous presidents avoided the press, or routed around it with TV and photo ops. All presidents try to manipulate the news. It took until Bush the younger for the imaginative leap to be made: Attack the claim that any public interest at all is served by “meeting the press.” Remove the press from the system of checks and balances. Deny that it’s any “fourth branch of government” (Douglas Cater’s idea, 1959.) Don’t just work around a troublesome crew. Be bolder. Reject the reporters’ claim to be channeling the public and its questions.
Not only that. In January, Auletta reported the following on the Bush Thesis: “the White House has come to see reporters as special pleaders,” an interest group “that’s not nearly as powerful as it once was.” Bush thinks the national news organizations don’t have the influence Richard Nixon and other angry presidents saw in them. Here the Bush Thesis is like a mafia read, a Sopranos script: “You don’t have that kind of muscle any more, so shut the fuck up.”

But then I realized that these attitudes were part of something larger: de-certification of the press. (March, 2005)

But then I realized that de-certification was part of something larger, and more aggressive: Rollback of the press. (July, 2005)

But then I realized that rollback was part of something larger- larger than the press. The retreat from empiricism throughout the government. (Dec. 2006)

Then I realized that the retreat from empiricism was part of larger development: executive power as the absence of constraint, including the constraint of reality itself. (Sep. 2007)

You don't know how to read my Rollback Series, so you see only repetition, not development. I would add that both the warning about the retreat from empiricism and presidential power as the absence of constraint came from loyal and worried Republicans trying to describe what they had seen.

At that point Bush had become a danger to the Republican brand. The besotted--some of who we find here--are still focused on Bush hatred in others, partly (I believe) to avoid facing their own, oncoming.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 29, 2007 11:23 PM | Permalink

The thing is, Dr. Rosen, when Bush said the press doesn't represent the public, he was and still is empirically correct -- both at the level of partisan politics, and at the deeper structural level. The fact that over 90% of journalists vote Democrat proves the first. And for the second, you yourself have explicated the flaws of our political media better than anyone, when you're not thinking about George Bush -- remember the cult of savviness?

(I'd still like a considered answer to the question I asked before: is the WH briefing room, in fact, a net good to the public? Is giving the President the opportunity to reply to objections worth the cost of puffing up the self-importance of the objectors, and depreciating real knowledge and real intelligence across the whole trade of journalism?)

To me, Bush's conduct toward the media is fully explained by the media's biases in favor of rhetoric and against dialectic, combined with Bush's total incapacity for rhetoric; he retreated not from the empirical world, but from the world of image and fantasy where much of the US political class prefers to live. And what I see in the Rollback series is a man who was living in that world, who stumbled over some empirical facts hard to reconcile with that world, and who has now explained them away, and thrown the blame for all the troubles he's noticed onto a satisfactory scapegoat. What you say now about Bush reads as if you believe that Bush's sinking in the polls has brought the world back to its proper course -- that the many lacunae in the public's knowledge of the world, which exist thanks to the cult of savviness and other vices of the US media, are no longer a problem, because Bush's stratagem against the media has failed. Rather like a drunkard thinking he doesn't need to stop drinking, because this time the doctors managed to get his liver working again ...

Posted by: Michael Brazier at November 30, 2007 4:42 AM | Permalink

Professor --

Acknowledging the recapitulation of your own narrative of your understanding of the ideological project of the current administration...

Repeal of the Fourth Estate
Decertification of the Inside-the-Beltway Media
Rollback of the Role of the Press
Retreat from Empiricism
Absence of Restraint

...some of these stages intersect directly with PressThink; others address the administration's relationship to the entire body politic.

Your quote of Ken Auletta back in April 2004 is germane because, ideology aside, its insight is accurate: “'The White House has come to see reporters as special pleaders,' an interest group 'that’s not nearly as powerful as it once was.' Bush thinks the national news organizations don’t have the influence Richard Nixon and other angry presidents saw in them."

The so-called MainStreamMedia are indeed not nearly as powerful as they were in the second half of C20th. No institution of the mass industrial age is. Not the news media, not political parties, not labor unions, not Madison Avenue, not Detroit's Big Three, not metropolitan daily newspapers, not the entertainment-industrial complex.

Any incumbent of the White House -- benign, malign or merely neutrally experimental -- would have been obliged to toy with new media strategies in the face of this fragmented and defanged press corps. Many of those experiments would have failed. Experiments mostly do.

Both Anderson and Brazier hit the nail on the head, however, when they caution against reading too much into the particular failure of McClellan's brand of Rollback:

Anderson: "Moving past the McClellan model still leaves a considerable order of business yet to be done before we could consider ourselves to have recovered a democratic culture, even stipulating that rollback has failed and even assuming a more traditional pretense of White House accountability is one day restored."

Brazier: "What you say now about Bush reads as if you believe that Bush's sinking in the polls has brought the world back to its proper course -- that the many lacunae in the public's knowledge of the world, which exist thanks to the cult of savviness and other vices of the US media, are no longer a problem, because Bush's stratagem against the media has failed."

Indeed the work of PressThink still has to be done. What about journalists? What do their experiments need to be to represent the interests of the body politic in a post-mass-media world? (As Insufficiently and Neuro and Aubrey all point out, journalists' sloppy experiments can make matters worse just as surely as sloppy experiments at the White House can) How do we citizens ensure that our government is accountable now existing monitoring mechanisms have lost clout? How can the public ensure that its lacunae of knowledge get properly filled?

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at November 30, 2007 7:41 AM | Permalink

I never said the American press was in its politics representative of the politics of the American people. I never believed it. I never considered for a second that it may be true, and so I don't feel obliged to "admit" that Bush was right when he made this idiotic point that Bush dead enders repeat endlessly.

The observation Bush offered back then is significant only because it touched on something else: the White House press did represent at one time the American public's interest in having an interlocutor capable of questioning the President in an informed way.

I would agree that this system is at an end. It has crashed, for a multitude of reasons, "rollback" being only one. Press behavior is another one. Change in the media universe a third, and changes in cultural authority a fourth.

I agree with Andrew that any occupant of the White House would have had to confront alternatives to that (crashed) system; that will also be true for the next president. We are entitled to examine and criticize the alternatives chosen.

In my rollback series I criticized the system that Card, Cheney, Bush, Hughes, Rove, Bartlett and company put in place of the old, disintegrating one.

It was later that I realized that Bush and Cheney intended to destroy every single interlocutor the President could have as a means of expanding executive power and adjusting to Bush's massive personal weaknesses, which begin with the fact that more than most politicians he cannot handle being questioned. By anyone.

Not good at rhetoric? No, Michael. Not good at handling any challenge to a pre-determined world view and more intellectually dishonest than any previous president we have had.

I never said McClellan "caused" a damn thing. I said he was a clown, a stooge, a weak figure you could roll over. Such men do not move events. Rather, he shows the true colors of the Bush crowd: willing to harm itself if it can make another constraint more absent. So I don't feel obliged to admit that he didn't cause this, that or the other. The idea of McClellan as a "cause" is, again, idiotic.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 1, 2007 11:04 AM | Permalink

"Athough he stood at the podium and managed the briefings, McClellan was not there to brief the press. He was there to frustrate and belittle it..."

Admirable! Since the press in the US now conceives itself to be the Opposition to the Bush administration, and does its utmost to frustrate and belittle and undermine it and turn public opinion against it, it would be proper for anyone so beset by this cabal of scribblers to fight fire with fire.

If the press were serving its readers with balanced news, it would be a different matter. Since it's not, there's not much reason to take it seriously - as plunging subscription rates demonstrate.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at November 25, 2007 9:36 AM | Permalink

Just so. And the put-a-stooge-out-there strategy worked well too. Bush's approval rating was a respectable 59 when McClellan took over and an embarrassing 33 when he left. Go librul media, go!

Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 25, 2007 10:00 AM | Permalink

Oh it fits, baby. It fits fine. I train people to destroy Republicans and promote a socialist agenda, and I am so proud that the White House press corps did just that with Bush. Plus, I didn't even have to train them! They just knew! So the shoe fits and it feels good to kick your butt with it, mister insufficiently insightful.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 25, 2007 11:07 AM | Permalink

"Plus, I didn't even have to train them! They just knew!"

You have made my point exactly: groupthink in the media is a major problem in a democracy - it tends to silence half the debate.

The 'ghost of democracy in the media machine' must refer to the few heretics who still report news without intent to bulldoze public opinion.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at November 25, 2007 11:56 AM | Permalink

There is an alternate way to read Rosen's narrative, finding a comforting moral in the tale rather than a frightening one. Consider the "far greater powers" of the Presidency, those extra-Constiutional ones "granted by the modern media" of the second half of C20th. The mass media during that period conferred such clout on the office of the President, such an "imbalance," as Rosen puts it, that the White House was obliged to accept interlocutors in order not to appear illegitimate, antidemocratic, imperial.

The phenomenon represented by Cheney-Addington-McClellan -- abandoning the "dialogic," seeking to act with the "absence of constraint" -- might be read as a reaction to the disintegration of the modern mass media. As the media universe grows fragmented, atomizied, user-driven and transnational, its second tier of casualties, following the first tier commonly known as the MainStreamMedia itself, includes those institutions that exploited the organs of mass communication. The Presidency of the United States was surely chief among these.

Thus the aberrant, maximalist and self defeating tactics embodied by McClellan can be seen as last gasps in response to a dying order. Sure, the current administration has sought to seize unprecedented control over and to defang the independence of the media apparatus attached to the White House -- but it has been fighting for more power over a diminishing asset. Not only that, but accelerating that asset's devaluation in the process.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at November 25, 2007 2:20 PM | Permalink

The WH press corps and anybody else who could get a hand up did not ask useful journalistic questions.
They preened. They set up gotchas with false premises and planted axioms.
This was no innocent attempt to inform the American people of what was happening.
So it was useful to stuff the journos' lousy practice back at them.
A question like, "What is the admin's position on...? is good. A followup--"in that case, why...?" indicating a potential conflict or contradiction is good.
Not what we saw.
The press attempted to make the WH look bad. Not to inform the American people of what was going on. Different things. Really.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 25, 2007 7:28 PM | Permalink

My word: the Bush dead enders never change a single note in their song.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes: damn right the press tried to make Bush look bad. That's because he is bad. He is bad because he's not librul. Axe-eee-oh-matic, baby! Doesn't believe in socialism like all good journos do, plus Bush is super competent and journos, they're all incompetent, so Bush by comparison makes journos look bad, so bad they had to go out and get him, couldn't inform, no, had to destroy, plus... Bush is dead set against big government, which (bless 'em) journos are strongly for, and he wants to defeat the terrorists, which the journos are secret fans of (well, not a total secret, Michelle Malkin knows...) so they tried to drag him down and it was a hatefest but a righteous one... and holy Grandma Moses they did it! They did it! Hail the conquering journos. Boo, Bush, bad Bush. If journos hadn't stepped in attacking instead of informing, he'd still be at 80 percent in the polls. My friends, I say it to you plainly: Librul media today. Librul media tommorah. Librul media forever!

Tim: thanks for that, had not seen it.

Andrew: very interesting thesis.

This is quite amazing. I may have to write on it.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 25, 2007 11:54 PM | Permalink

"Oh yes: damn right the press tried to make Bush look bad. That's because he is bad. He is bad because he's not librul..."

This is a professor of journalism writing? The drunks in my neighborhood bar can make better arguments. Let him return to his frat-house buffoonery, and bathe in the praise of all the right-thinking brothers. Courage, Professor! Keep up the good fight, and we'll find our news where it packs more information than cant.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at November 26, 2007 4:36 AM | Permalink

The post I wrote has quite an intricate argument in it. To which you replied with: liberal bias.

At this very late date I have nothing to say on that subject to an anonymous Bush dead ender waving the bias banner mindlessly around and still smarting from the downfall of Nixon. Did you get that? I cannot think of a single useful thing to say to you. (Neither can anyone else.) I have no arguments for you, no rejoinders, no interest. You may as well ask why I don't have a theological exchange with a trained seal.

Words fail me, or I them. This is what I was attempting to say with my faux frat-house buffoonery, which I admit is dreck. As for the imperiled future of journalism, if you read PressThink consistently you would find that I address it quite a lot.

If you think the press is biased against Bush and it burns you up, then you should by all means seek your news elsewhere. I think that is one thing--perhaps the only one--we can all agree on.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 26, 2007 8:41 AM | Permalink

I enjoyed your faux frat-house buffoonery/dreck (exhaustive Pressthink bias debates here).

I think it helped me to think about the "librul/faux news" bias warriors in terms of our wiring toward first-order/automatic/intuitive thinking.

Posted by: Tim at November 26, 2007 9:44 AM | Permalink

> "This is quite amazing. I may have to write on it."

also, in case anyone missed it, Cline on Seelye's defense of horserace journalism

and more immediately relevant, via Etaoin Shrdlu, Teresa Nielsen Hayden on Boing Boing's "Insufficiently Sensitive" commenters -
"...they don't actually want free speech. All that would give them is the freedom to call the shots on their own websites. What they really want is someone else's audience."
(though how we titrate that against 'speaking truth to power', I don't know)

Posted by: Anna at November 26, 2007 3:56 PM | Permalink

Jay: Your insights into the assignment the White House gave the hapless McClellan have been fascinating. But I'd like to challenge you to think about whether people like Cheney, Rove and Addington ever came to realize they had only harmed themselves, even on their own terms.

After all, the people around Bush were finally persuaded to replace McClellan with Tony Snow, a far more formidable presence who apparently demanded and got access, and who sparred with the press in a more traditional way. What do you think that was all about?

Posted by: Dan Kennedy at November 26, 2007 10:28 PM | Permalink

Slemp vs. Correspondents

The Talkative President: The Off-The-Record Press Conferences of Calvin Coolidge

The briefings and skull sessions which preceded the Eisenhower and Kennedy press conferences were not for Mr. Coolidge. If such anxious preliminaries had been part of the press conference operation, Mr. Coolidge would have abandoned the whole thing. The rugged man from Vermont liked his comfort.

Posted by: Tim at November 26, 2007 11:22 PM | Permalink

The last I knew, Rove and Libby actually didn't have anything to do with the leak of Valerie Plame's name and position. Richard Armitage was the one who did that. So how can McClellan be blamed for saying Rove and Libby were not involved, when that was not just what they said, but the simple truth?

Turning from facts to theories, in light of the White House press corps' shared delusion that access to the President grants knowledge of world politics that can't be had anywhere else, and the damage this delusion does to the general press' analytical skills ... is the WH briefing room, in fact, a net good to the public? Is giving the President the opportunity to reply to objections worth the cost of puffing up the self-importance of the objectors, and depreciating real knowledge and real intelligence across the whole trade of journalism?

Posted by: Michael Brazier at November 27, 2007 8:56 AM | Permalink

Brazier --

The Plame confusion is easily cleared up. Chronologically, Armitage was the first to violate her secrecy but the effort to spread that tidbit was a multipronged one and others -- Libby, Rove, Fleischer et al -- have been implicated in it.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at November 27, 2007 10:15 AM | Permalink

Andrew. Being first would seem to be worst. Otherwise, the second, third, et al wouldn't have had anything to say.
But Armitage skated. Funny, that.

I liked watching Snow. He was absolutely brilliant at telling the journowhiners that the axioms planted in their questions were BS.

That McLellan and the stooge strategy did worse for the admin than the journos would have done with a different spokesman presumes something nice about the journos which is not in evidence.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 27, 2007 10:48 AM | Permalink

So how can McClellan be blamed for saying Rove and Libby were not involved, when that was not just what they said, but the simple truth?

Andrew's answer is accurate. Mine would be:

Why are you asking us, Michael? Ask McClellan: He's the one who's saying (in his book) that when he told the press Rove and Libby weren't involved, "There was one problem. It was not true." Check it out:

The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
There was one problem. It was not true.

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself.

As for why Armitage didn't get in a lot of trouble, I am just speculating here but it might have something to do with the fact that he not only didn't lie about his involvement but volunteered that information when he figured out that Novak had relied upon his tip.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 27, 2007 11:07 AM | Permalink

"As I said above, when McClellan took over Bush was at a respectable 59 percent. When he left 33. And it's never recovered."

Indeed, McClellan was such a bad stooge that he personally led the Bush administration off a cliff.

Meanwhile, of course, the countrywide MSM (except for the 0.26% of it that enjoyed the perks of attending WH bashings) was diligently spinning the Iraq war, the economy, John Bolton, global warming, 'international law', Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, to inflict maximum damage on the Bush administration. This occurred throughout McClellan's entire 2003-2006 term, independently of McClellan's failure to engage in witty sparring matches with the WH reporters. And yes, the poll-driven opinion rating - surprisingly! - sank.

McClellan was always a footnote in the bigger scheme of things, unless one is fixated on extracting all Administration news through the single micro-pipe of one man's throat - while enjoying the spectacle of a roomful of verbal bullies punching that individual in rotation.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at November 27, 2007 11:55 AM | Permalink

McClellan was such a bad stooge that he personally led the Bush administration off a cliff.

I didn't argue that. Nobody did. And you are a clown--an anonymous, reductive clown--for arguing against it when no one made that point.

What I said is that "power as the absence of constraint" plus the retreat from empiricism, plus the Bush Bubble, plus the hubris of "we make of our reality," plus the stupidity of rollback helped lead the Administration off the cliff.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 27, 2007 12:18 PM | Permalink

Thanks for the kind words, Anna.
But I'm fixin' to retire.

Goofy question. Armitage didn't get any crap from anybody for one of the worst betrayals of US intelligence in the last ten thousand years.

He claims it was an accident.

What if it wasn't?

Why would he do it?

Because he knew the dems and journos would pretend it was the WH and go hysterical for a year or so.

Question: If Armitage had done it on purpose and the journos knew, would it have made any difference?

Answer: Don't be absurd. Of course not.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 27, 2007 4:36 PM | Permalink

Jay, I think your McClelland "grand strategy" theory may be a bit overdetermined.

McClelland became Press Secretary when Ari left, because he was the number 2 guy in Ari's office.

Could it not be that McClellan was chosen for the job because of his gifts, he got the job despite his lack of gifts -- that McClellan wasn't "rollback" of the press so much as "benign neglect"?

Posted by: p.lukasiak at November 27, 2007 7:27 PM | Permalink

So, basically, having McClellan as Press Secretary was a major strategic blunder in the War on Terror, which is an Information War as much as anything else.

They didn't lose only approval rating points -- they lost a lot of hearts and minds in the Arab world, and also a lot of American soldiers.

Posted by: Richard B. Simon at November 28, 2007 3:26 AM | Permalink

Tim -- yes, September 8, 2002:

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on CNN's Late Edition
Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC's Meet the Press
Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers on ABC's This Week
Secretary of State Colin Powell on Fox News Sunday
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on CBS' Face the Nation

All hit the same talking points about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program -- but you are correct, I misremembered, only Rice envisioned a mushroom cloud.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at November 28, 2007 7:02 AM | Permalink

I recall when Albright and others came out and publicly insisted that the First Horndog was not lying.
Message uniformity is not new.

Recent book by a guy who had a lot to do with debriefing Saddaam after his capture. Says the whole thing was a result of SH trying to convince Iran that he still had the stuff. He thought Iraq was still under threat. In the meantime, he was trying to convince the rest of the world he didn't.
Tough balancing act.
He succeeded, probably, with Iran, but a bit too much, failing in the second component.
If this is true, he has no WMD in any tactically useful form (see Kay and Duelfer about SH's remaining ability to reconstitute), but plenty of false evidence leading the rest of the world to a false conclusion, one SH wanted to be believed only by Iran.
Seems there was a bit of splatter.

I don't know how, Richard Simon, the Bush information failures cost American lives. The implication is that more Americans would have gotten on board and, not giving the admin trouble, made the war safer. Or quicker. Which means some of the resistance in the US based, you say, on lack of bandwagoning by the WH, cost US lives. You really want to hang American deaths on the antiwar folks?

And the idea that Iraqi hearts and minds could have been won by a more articulate WH spokesman is ...what's nuttier than fantasy?

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 28, 2007 7:50 AM | Permalink

"It does, however, prove you should never talk to the FBI without fully recording the session and keeping several copies in different places. Or, more safely, never talk to them." -- Aubrey

And how exactly does one blow off the FBI, Richard ? "Fuck off, I don't want to talk to you" ?

That may work with UPS, or FedEx, or your friendly neighborhood census taker -- but the FBI ? I'm not so sure.

I think you've been watching too much Tony Soprano.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at November 28, 2007 7:26 PM | Permalink

Steve.
Never watched the Sopranos.
The FBI can talk to me if they have a warrant for my arrest.
I don't have to talk to them.

The way it works is they take written notes of the conversation. If, later on, I address the subject somewhat differently from the handwritten notes, which means possibly word for word the way I spoke the first time---I join Scooter. Or, if I don't want to join Scooter, I tell them what they want to know. Even if it's not, you know, exactly true.

One of the charges against Libby was based on no handwritten notes at all. The agent lost them and was forced to rely on memory. Or imagination.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 28, 2007 9:23 PM | Permalink

It seems odd, Andrew, that you would choose this post to criticize the Bush administration for engaging in political persuasion by going in front of the public, Congress and UN in the Fall of 2002.

Given the context of this post, wouldn't those be considered the heady pre-McClellan, pre-bubble, pre-rollback days?

For those that want to hunt for "word-perfect repetition" of "talking points" and "soundbite slogans" matching Condolezza Rice linked above:

Transcript of Interview with Vice-President Dick Cheney on Meet the Press, 8 September 2002

Transcript: Colin Powell on Fox News Sunday, Sunday, September 08, 2002

Secretary Rumsfeld's Interview On Face The Nation

Posted by: Tim at November 28, 2007 11:01 PM | Permalink

In these threads, Jay never acknowledges any bad faith on the part of the press. But yet again, we see that CNN allowed an ambush by Hillary stooge at tonight's Republican debate.

Media bias, incompetence, or both?

Posted by: Neuro-conservative at November 28, 2007 11:59 PM | Permalink

Neuro.

I don't believe the good professor has addressed the recent Harvard study.

At worst, when pressed, it's a matter of journalists are generalists and they try, really, really try, to get it right and sometimes even correct errors. What more could you want?

But being biased?

Bite your tongue.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 29, 2007 7:39 AM | Permalink

Tim --

I do not think we disagree. Those were indeed "heady" days in the fall of 2002. The word I used was "apotheosis." My argument was that Government by Talking Points turns out to be a powerful strategy when times are fair: when the majority already supports the President and needs minimal persuasion; when no contradiction is exposed between rhetorical claims and objective facts; when opposition is fragmented and demoralized.

Even back then, however, it was a closed system. There was no "pre-bubble, pre-rollback" as you put it. My contention is that it was not until circumstances turned adverse -- when talking points became "more and more unhinged from reality" -- that the strategy's fragility becomes exposed. And McClellan was the luckless individual, the "stooge" in Rosen's words, caught holding the parcel when the music stopped.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at November 29, 2007 8:26 AM | Permalink

Andrew: There was no "pre-bubble, pre-rollback" as you put it.

I disagree, and so does Jay if I've been reading correctly.

I would add that the Senate was controlled by Democrats before and after 9/11, and the No Child Left Behind, DNI, DHS, ..., are products of "bi-partisan" political persuasion. The Republicans regained control of the Senate in January 2003 after the 2002 elections. McClellan took over from Ari Fleischer in July 2003.

I do agree that when rhetoric runs counter to reality, it's less persuasive. That's always been true.

Posted by: Tim at November 29, 2007 1:28 PM | Permalink

Your post made me wonder if you aren't implicitly working out a metrics of anti-democratic infamy in the White House. If democracy is ultimately a question of promoting the health of public dialogue and Scott McClellan's personal job description was to kill it, he effectively volunteered for service against democracy per se--against public accountability--entirely apart from whether the ends of the administration on behalf of which he worked have been laudable or not.

I understand one of Andrew's comments to suggest an interesting question--if governing by advertising technique is a perversion of democracy and Scott McClellan's stooge routine delegitimated that perversion--the loss of Scott McClellan's robotic approach would seem to return us to the previously reigning perversion of democracy--rule by more sophisticated advertising technique.

In other words, as I'm sure most would agree, moving past the McClellan model still leaves a considerable order of business yet to be done before we could consider ourselves to have recovered a democratic culture, even stipulating that rollback has failed and even assuming a more traditional pretense of White House accountability is one day restored.

Posted by: Mark Anderson at November 29, 2007 1:58 PM | Permalink

Steve.
Never watched the Sopranos --Aubrey

Well, then, that explains the tunnel vision.

A novelist friend of mine considers the Sopranos "the most important literature of the past 25 years."

Not easy for a print person to say of a TV show. But I think she may be on to something.

The Sopranos, taken as a whole, certainly shines a (refracted) light on the Bush gang -- thugs, one and all.

That's really the only explanation I've come across that embraces the whole sorry history of the past seven years. Once you accept that premise, all becomes clear -- from Gonzales, to Rove, to Cheney, to Libby, to Rumsfeld, and finally to the head thug himself.

But that's a very difficult barrier for a reporter to hurdle -- the idea that thugs have been, are and will be in charge.

Consequently, few do.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at November 29, 2007 2:07 PM | Permalink

Specious.. spurious, take your pick.

Whether or not Armitage knew Plame was covert, he had a duty, along with anyone in this administration, to clarify Plame's status BEFORE blabbing his mouth about her.

That he and everyone else following the Roverator's pronoucement that Plame was "Fair Game" did not exercise even a minimal due diligence to clarify Plame's status, tells me that her outing was intentional... more to eliminate the whole team of Covert CIA Operatives on WMD's in Iraq and Iran... to eliminate any reliable refutation of their Niger Forgery criminal complicity and God knows what else was in their Wall to Wall War Plan.

Posted by: Kathleen at November 29, 2007 2:49 PM | Permalink

How many times has our charming host gone to the well with the "rollback" meme? ZZZZzzzzzzz

Time's a-wastin'---the Bush-haters shelf life will expire in January '09. Beyond that, they will look idiotic, petty and foolish.

I hear the Clintons always tell the truth, don't intimidate the press and never spin.

What will Pressthink talk about when a Democrat is in the WH?

Love and happiness will rule the land! whoo!Hoo!

Can't wait----I've been bored by Bush-hate since '00, at least. Let's hear it for the Democrat Dead Enders!

Posted by: QC Examiner at November 29, 2007 2:57 PM | Permalink

But the thing I remember most about Mr. McLellan is that he had a cute ass. Well, not that cute. And the ass happened to be president. Or resident. He was around there somewhere... tugging at Cheney's leash.

Posted by: MrWondrous at November 29, 2007 3:39 PM | Permalink

Novelist friend, huh?
Well, my novelist friend has sold more than your novelist friend and he thingk Sopranos is a cheesy crime series. Not the depth of Hill Street Blues.

Sopranos = knowing stuff.

Wow.

Does explain some things, not to mention what to anticipate in the next generation of journos, presuming any of them can get one of few paying gigs left.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 29, 2007 6:55 PM | Permalink

It might be a good idea to start pitching some of your less competent colleagues off the sled.
Start by insisting "CNN isn't journalism. Really."
Unless you don't mind being in a group whose extremely public face includes such as CNN.

Maybe you think that will do you good, or at least no harm. Their only fault, like CBS, is getting caught. Maybe they'll be sharper next time.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 29, 2007 7:22 PM | Permalink

I think Hugh Hewitt puts it succinctly:

No serious anchor would want to be where [Anderson] Cooper is today, at the center of a vast train wreck which cannot be explained away as the inevitable result of the sudden appearance of big news in a difficult setting, as with hysterical Katrina coverage of bodies stacked in freezers and gun fights in the Superdome, or the result of the input of bad data, as with the early call of Florida for Gore in 2000.

No, this [was] premeditated mediocrity. The network had months to prepare and consider and execute. But even with all that time, it lacked the minimal talent necessary to produce a serious debate about important issues using new technology. All it could deliver was a carnival of bad taste, trick questions, and full frontal left wing bias.

Posted by: Neuro-conservative at November 29, 2007 10:11 PM | Permalink

"You're Assuming That You Represent the Public. I Don't Accept That."

Or, just maybe, it's possible that even when the press attempts to "represent" the public, it only seems find paid Democratic shills.

Posted by: Neuro-conservative at November 29, 2007 11:44 PM | Permalink

I'm liking my theory more and more: the librul media as obsessive hate object--paid agents of the enemy party!--keeps "inappropriate" feelings of Bush hatred from rising in the throat.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 30, 2007 12:09 AM | Permalink

It isn't a biased media, I tell you! When CNN hosts a Democratic 'debate', it selects 'undecided voters' who turn out to be Democratic activists. And for the Republican 'debate', it selects 'undecided voters' who turn out to be Democratic activists. If that isn't equal treatment, what would be?

I believe Professor Rosen, or maybe his frat-house cronies, would call those activists 'stooges', but his language and his thinking have run to the indelicate side recently and we must try to understand.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at November 30, 2007 12:19 AM | Permalink

I offer zero defense of CNN's debate production, which I do not care for in style, tone, selection, anchor "talent," or the politics on display. I think they have been terrible.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 30, 2007 12:28 AM | Permalink

Jay -- You're projecting again. You are the one with the obsessive hate object. You seem to believe that Bush and Cheney sat in the Oval Office and planned this policy of "rollback" out of sheer dictatorial malevolence and detachment from empirical reasoning. This is a childish fantasy born of too many '70s conspiracy movies --movies which the White House press corps probably should have avoided as well.

Posted by: Neuro-conservative at November 30, 2007 12:36 AM | Permalink

Republic of Denial: Press, Politics, and Public Life, by Michael Janeway, Yale University Press, 1999. Summary: Hard to top, "This book offers the most insightful critique of the decline of American journalism and politics in decades."

Out of Touch: The Presidency and Public Opinion, by Michael J. Towle. 2004. Summary: Towle is an associate professor of political science. Based on comparative research, he suggests that administrations self-congratulate during popular times and engage in rationalization and cognitive dissonance during unpopular times.

Posted by: Tim at November 30, 2007 3:33 AM | Permalink

Uncertain Guardians: The News Media as a Political Institution

In this book I build on the work of Cater and his successors, Leon Sigal and Herbert Cans in particular, to explain why the news media effectively constitute a political institution and why this fact matters to students of American politics.

Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution

Instead, the news media share more with two other political institutions: the political parties, and the interest group system.

Posted by: Tim at November 30, 2007 5:34 AM | Permalink

Andrew.

I would think that, in other professions, the watchword would be, "Physician, heal thyself." or words to more specific effect.

Jay thinks CNN screwed up. This time. He doesn't understand that people watch this stuff and incrementally lose their interest in what journos have to say. Or, if he acknowledges it, doesn't think that the accumulation of such increments, the reasons for which are provided daily by his colleagues (and daily defended by his colleagues) has no effect.

According to Glenn Reynolds, various journalists' professional rags have failed to notice the botany at CNN about the debate. Nope. Nothing new here. Apparently, this is sort of like the plane landing safely or the dog biting the man.

The really scary thing is what was done by the media we haven't yet found out about.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 30, 2007 8:36 AM | Permalink

George Bush has run the f*ck you presindency. F*ck you empricism, f*ck you press, f*ck you liberals, f*ck you Saddam, f*ck you middle class. He treats his adversaries with contempt and his allies with bungling disrespect.

Bush has amassed illegitmate executive power with macheavelian subversion of the rule of law - completely comprimising the office of legal counsel and subverting a succession of government agencies to serve his presidency politically in contravention of their founding purpose.

Bush uses his presidency to circumvent a public debate of policy, circumvents the press while implementing the radical policies, and rolls the press back when they catch wind of his purpose - keeping us in the dark like mushrooms while he exercises illegitimate power with manufactured consent for the benefit of his constituencies and not for all of America. /rant over

Posted by: Neil at November 30, 2007 11:03 AM | Permalink

Posted by: Joern Puetz at November 30, 2007 1:51 PM | Permalink

I haven't watched one of these debates since Nixon vs. Kennedy, so I'm a little bit in the dark about CNN's alleged sins. (Though I certainly wouldn't put just about any stunt past them.)

I recommend this approach for keeping one's sanity.

Much better to attend the next-door neighbor's chili party.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at November 30, 2007 2:49 PM | Permalink

Steve,

Probably a good idea. But many people do, and CNN's lock on "The most busted name in news." got another belt of steroids.

So pretending indifference may suit you, but the people who watch can't figure out that CNN isn't hournalism.
Hardly any journalists have said it isn't.
So.... CNN is journalism. You are journalism.
Is CNN improved by the association more than you are stained?

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 1, 2007 9:31 AM | Permalink