Weekend Update

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

7 August 2011

Screen shot of the Fox Nation website describing a White House barbecue as "hip-hop"

Picture of the week is this screenshot of the top story at the Fox Nation website this past Friday. Note: Jay-Z is a hip-hop artist, but Charles Barkley is a basketball player, Barack Obama is a President, and Chris Rock is a comedian. Comments Ilya Gerner:

This is basically Fox saying, ”There sure are a lot of black people at the White House, what’s up with that,” right?

Dave Weigel's summary is more pointed:

"Uppity Blacks Eat Soul Food and Laugh While You Hunt for A Job You Can't Get Because of Welfare Queens, Affirmative Action, and Carjackers."

The Americans hurried toward the bedroom door. The first SEAL pushed it open. Two of bin Laden’s wives had placed themselves in front of him. Amal al-Fatah, bin Laden’s fifth wife, was screaming in Arabic. She motioned as if she were going to charge; the SEAL lowered his sights and shot her once, in the calf. Fearing that one or both women were wearing suicide jackets, he stepped forward, wrapped them in a bear hug, and drove them aside. He would almost certainly have been killed had they blown themselves up, but by blanketing them he would have absorbed some of the blast and potentially saved the two SEALs behind him. In the end, neither woman was wearing an explosive vest.

He seems intent on following Bill Clinton's 1995/1996 playbook, but the magic ingredient that made it work for Clinton — a growing economy that made "pure independents" eager to give him the benefit of the doubt — is missing this time around. Playing Mr. Reasonable looks a lot different to voters when they're out of work or fearing for their jobs.

The question is whether the anti-Walker energy has dissipated in recent weeks. Union activists are taking no chances, and have built up a turnout operation they believe is superior to that of the GOP. Meanwhile, in a potential good sign for Dems, Republicans are conceding that the energy is on the Dems’ side. As one GOP operative involved in the recall fight puts it: “The average Republican voters in Wisconsin viewed the passage of the Walker proposals in March as the end of a tough battle, while Democrats viewed it as the beginning.”

After the jump: Why Congress is like Foursquare, Chris Christie takes on Islamophobes, and some nice-looking video of Los Angeles.

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"There's never been anything quite like the trigger," Justin Marlowe, a professor at the Evans School of Public Affairs, said in an email. ... [It] "is a game-changer. It shifts the default from inaction to action."

Though it's not much used in politics, new media folks have a term for systems like this which embed artificial consequences or rewards in a real-world situation: gamification.

Republicans appeared to dig in their heels in early November, when the House passed a bill increasing the debt limit—but only through the next month—as well as a continuing resolution that included higher Medicare premiums and other spending cuts. Instead of attempting to negotiate over the cuts, Clinton simply vetoed both bills. “America has never liked pressure tactics, and I would be wrong to permit these kind of pressure tactics to dramatically change the course of American life,” Clinton said. “I cannot do it, and I will not do it.” The government shut down.

One abandoned yard is a mess; 20,000 abandoned yards is an ecosystem. At this scale, Cleveland’s vacant land begins to look less like a sign of neglect and more like an ecological experiment spread over some 3,600 acres.

I don’t want the east side to become a hipster bee farm that can produce expensive organic honey (this is our best case scenario???) and I don’t want the population influx that supposedly lies somewhere down the line to result in a NEW, BETTER city being built somewhere nearby while Cleveland becomes a playground for urban explorers

The Tea Party’s strength was larger than its numbers—about eighty in the House and as few as four in the Senate—because the entire House Republican freshman class and some more senior members were sympathetic to its views, and because the ghost of Bob Bennett now haunts many Republicans. Bennett (still alive), a solid conservative three-term senator from Utah, was, astonishingly, rejected for reelection last year by the Utah Republican caucus for having been insufficiently pure in his conservatism. (His vote in 2006 against a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning was seen as heresy.)

  • Colin Rich spent six months putting together a pretty time lapse video of Los Angeles.
  • And since we're on the subject of L.A., I'll give the Song of the Week award to Best Coast's "Our Deal." The video is gorgeous and directed by Drew Barrymore.



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More American connections to the NOTW hacking scandal

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

20 July 2011

James and Rupert Murdoch appear before a UK Parliamentary Committee

James and Rupert Murdoch at a UK Parliamentary Committee hearing yesterday

As a story of journalistic ethics, the News of the World hacking scandal has been largely confined to the United Kingdom, even though News Corporation's global scale means the damage may not be confined to its operations in a single nation. I mentioned last week, however, that thanks to allegations of News journalists hacking 9/11 victims, and the Justice Department investigating to see whether the company has broken any US laws, the Murdoch family's woes have hopped the Atlantic.

It seems, however, that the scandal could extend deeper than that. In the New York Times, David Carr reports on some shady practices involving the American arms of the company:

In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away

[...]

And the money the company reportedly paid out to hacking victims is chicken feed compared with what it has spent trying to paper over the tactics of News America in a series of lawsuits filed by smaller competitors in the United States.

In 2006 the state of Minnesota accused News America of engaging in unfair trade practices, and the company settled by agreeing to pay costs and not to falsely disparage its competitors.

In 2009, a federal case in New Jersey brought by a company called Floorgraphics went to trial, accusing News America of, wait for it, hacking its way into Floorgraphics’s password protected computer system.

The complaint summed up the ethos of News America nicely, saying it had “illegally accessed plaintiff’s computer system and obtained proprietary information” and “disseminated false, misleading and malicious information about the plaintiff.”

Paying large amounts of cash to settle court cases isn't illegal, but this looks like a pattern of a company with little regard for rules and regulations, and a willingness to throw large amounts of money around when that lack of regard causes problems. If this is the sort of culture that the company permits to fester in some of its holdings, the excesses its British tabloids may not be as anomalous as News Corp would want the public to believe.

Finally, it would be awry of me not to draw attention to James Fallows's commentary on the extraordinary humbug of Fox News's reporting of the story. After the jump, watch Fox and Friends analyse the scandal as if the News of the World was the victim of hacking, not the perpetrator:

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News of the World scandal crosses the Atlantic

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

14 July 2011

A cover image of the now defunct News of the World paper

The scandal surrounding the phone-hacking practices of the now defunct News of the World paper has been largely confined to the United Kingdom. News International is a global corporation, but its shady journalistic practices have been almost solely a British story. In two ways over the past week, however, the scandal has jumped the Atlantic and gained an American edge.

The first U.S. angle is the allegation that News of the World journalists hacked the phones of victims of the 9/11 attacks. The FBI has opened an investigation into News International to determine whether the companies employees were engaged in bribery or illegal wiretapping.

Although America will be disgusted, and with good reason,  should the FBI find evidence for hacking of terrorist victims, the perpetrators will nonetheless have been an English newspaper, and not one an outlet Americans connect closely with News, its chairman Rupert Murdoch, or its most visible American venture, Fox News. The second U.S. angle, however, is potentially more damaging to the company's American brand.

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That's the possibility that Murdoch scion James could face prosecution in the United States. The Sydney Morning Herald explains:

The US Foreign Corrupt Practices (FCP) Act makes it a crime for US companies to offer corrupt payments to foreign officials. If the allegations of payments to police officers totalling more than £100,000 ($149,000) are proven, Mr Murdoch might face a US prosecution and the News Corp empire might face a bill of more than $90 million.

Liberal activists in particular are eager to see the Justice Department investigate News. It would be in no one's interest to politicise a criminal investigation of this kind, but Murdoch and his news outlets have been a thorn in the side of the left for so long, I guess some folks get a touch overeager. Nonetheless, it would certainly be remarkable if the singular British media environment found itself entangled in wrongdoing so great that the US got caught up in the mess. This situation is one to keep an eye on.

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What Ailes the right?

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

14 June 2011

I did not mention New York's profile of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes when it was published last month, but as the Republican presidential nomination enters into a more serious stage, its worth revisiting it:

It was that, with an actual presidential election on the horizon, the Fox candidates’ poll numbers remain dismally low (Sarah Palin is polling 12 percent; Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, 10 percent and 2 percent, respectively). Ailes’s ­candidates-in-­waiting were coming up small. And, for all his programming genius, he was more interested in a real narrative than a television narrative—he wanted to elect a president. All he had to do was watch Fox’s May 5 debate in South Carolina to see what a mess the field was—a mess partly created by the loudmouths he’d given airtime to and a tea party he’d nurtured. And, not incidentally, a strong Republican candidate would be good for his business, too. A few months ago, Ailes called Chris Christie and encouraged him to jump into the race. Last summer, he’d invited Christie to dinner at his upstate compound along with Rush Limbaugh, and like much of the GOP Establishment, he fell hard for Christie, who nevertheless politely turned down Ailes’s calls to run. Ailes had also hoped that David Petraeus would run for president, but Petraeus too has decided to sit this election out, choosing to stay on the counterterrorism front lines as the head of Barack Obama’s CIA. The truth is, for all the antics that often appear on his network, there is a seriousness that underlies Ailes’s own politics. He still speaks almost daily with George H. W. Bush, one of the GOP’s last great moderates, and a war hero, which especially impresses Ailes.

Fox News occupies an enviable position in its ability to unite the Republican establishment and the Tea Party base. It's an ability that no Republican presidential hopeful currently possesses, and it's that flaw in the field that troubles Ailes. I imagine the recent ascendancy of Michele Bachmann as a viable candidate pleases the network, but is not seen as a solution to the problem. Bachmann has a greater ability to shift the narrative than to secure the nomination, and powerbrokers like Ailes will be aware of this. The candidates who turned up to today's GOP debate in New Hampshire are less disparate than the motley batch that descended on South Carolina, but none yet can really be considered to be what we could call the Ailes Candidate. 

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The other point worth making about the New York feature is its illustration of just how much Fox has changed during the Obama presidency.

By October 2008, Ailes recognized that Obama was likely to beat McCain. He needed to give his audience a reason to stay in the stands and watch his team. And so he went on a hiring spree. By the time Obama defeated McCain, Ailes had hired former Bush aide Karl Rove and Mike Huckabee and went on to assemble a whole lineup of prospective 2012 contenders: Palin, Gingrich, Santorum, and John Bolton.

Once upon a time, Fox was a news outlet with a determined and unmistakeable right wing slant, but a news outlet nonetheless. Today it does not really hold any credibility with anyone except its conservative audience. That was a business decision, and probably an intelligent one, but it backed the network into the corner it is in now, where it is obliged to act as a constituency for the Republican Party. The power of the kingmaker is a double-edged sword. Fox News's destiny is tied to the Republican party in a way it was decidedly not in the Bush years.

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Fox News's war on Common Sense

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

12 May 2011

To be fair, the rapper born Lonnie Rashid Lynn dropped the "Sense" to go by the shorter alias of Common years ago now. Either way, Fox News was unimpressed by him being invited to the White House to perform at an Evening of Poetry event. Conservatives are displeased that, to quote the Daily Caller, Common's "poetry includes threats to shoot police and at least one passage calling for the “burn[ing]” of then-President George W. Bush."

That is true, as you can see in this video. I'll explain this quickly: rappers are artists, not politicians. The things they say are not speeches detailing personal positions, but are — as their audience understands — impressionistic collages of character, hyperbole, invective, bravado, and fantasy. That is not to say there is no truth in rap; the spoken word piece that has got Fox News all bent out of shape is a lucid critique of the antagonism between law enforcement and black communities. The truth is, as it often is in art, filtered through aesthetic devices and genre conventions.

But I shouldn't need to tell you Fox News is ginning up controversy where there should be none. More interesting is the story around the story. Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, comments on the not-so-subtle racism of this episode:

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David is pointing to something else, something which I tried to get at in my Malcolm piece. Throughout the 80s and 90s, there were a lot of black folks on the public stage who many of us loved, but never really held up as role models or hoped would be "accepted." You can understand why, say, Mike Tyson, Chuck D, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, OJ Simpson, NWA, or Snoop Dogg might be polarizing. A lot of these folks were polarizing even within the black community. You didn't really expect these people to be received as your ambassadors.

But Common is the dude in the Gap ad. His mother is a teacher. Shirley Sherrod is a victim of white supremacist terrorism, who lectures black people on seeing their own prejudice. Eric Holder went to Stuyvesant. Michelle Obama's mother was a homemaker. Her parents forfeited a full athletic scholarship to send Michelle Obama's brother to Princeton. They used to watch the Brady Bunch together.

The point is that Common is not NWA. In fact, though he's deservedly a hip-hop icon, I see him as someone kinda corny these days. He hasn't made a great album in years (2005's Be was aight), he's dropped some seriously wack verses in high profile appearances ("Get 'Em High" on Kanye West's College Dropout is the most egregious offender), and his music has lately devolved into this kind of fluffy, grown-folks wallpaper. If ever a rapper were going to be invited to the White House for a poetry reading, it would be someone as friendly and unabrasive as Common. Which is Coates's point, though I don't know if he shares my distaste for the rapper's latest musical adventures: When conservative opinion-makers get themselves worked up for no good reason about a parade of nice, perfectly innocuous folks, you start wondering whether it might be their skin colour that is the problem.

Even so, Fox News is right on one point. Inviting a rapper to a White House function is a bit out there. Rap is more than thirty years old now, and it has never been accepted by the establishment — musical or political. While listeners outside the genre accused it of being noise, lobby groups tried to ban it for its foul language, its distate for law enforcement, its violence, and its at times lunkheaded attitude to women and gay folks. As you can see from some of the examples Conor Friedersdorf gives of previous White House musical guests, people for some reason get a lot more worried when less-than-kosher speech is coming from the mouth of a young, angry black kid than when it originates from, say, a mop-topped British white man.

So, just like when Barack Obama made reference to the Wu-Tang Clan at this year's White House Correspondents Dinner, or when Jay-Z, Nas, and Kanye West were involved with his campaign or inauguration, it's a small but significant shift in the American cultural landscape. Hip-hop is now considered respectable enough to be heard inside the confines of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. This is partly because hip-hop is getting older, but it's also, I believe, a conscious part of the Obamas' effort to expand the cultural language spoken by the powerful so as to include a broader swathe of America.

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Censorship? Really?

By http://ussc.edu.au/people/erin-riley in Sydney

2 November 2009

As I've been reading some of the controversy and discussion of the Obama administration's so-called war with Fox News, one part of the discussion frustrated me immensely.

It wasn't the hypocrisy of the coverage, though that certainly was irritating.  When the Bush administration made similar claims about MSNBC a few years ago, the accusation had nowhere near the same level of controversy or media coverage.  It annoyed me that this was forgotten, but these things often are.

Nor was it the hyperbole with which the situation was described: in discussions of the "war", I've heard the Obama administration was compared to Chavez, Stalin, and the Nazis.  Ridiculous, to be certain, but not truly frustrating.

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What frustrated me most was the total misuse of the word "censorship."  The Obama Administration has been accused of censoring the Fox News Channel, something that is manifestly untrue.

Ok, so strictly speaking, the word is accurate, if  and only if you take the meaning of "censor" to mean to admonish or criticise, a literal if rarely-used meaning. And I suppose, if you take that meaning, and that meaning alone, one could accuse the Obama administration of censoring Fox News.  But it's hard to imagine anyone seriously making the argument that when someone hears "Obama Administration censors Fox News", they think the administration simply criticised them. The problem, of course, is that few would understand the meaning of the word in that way, especially in the realm of politics.

"Censorship" isn't a word devoid of meaning or context.  Used the way it has been by much of the press in this situation, to "censor" is far more likely to mean to suppress or delete information.  This practice, of course, is one of the oldest forms of political oppression.  For many, censorship is associated with totalitarian rule, with the suppression of democracy, with silencing the minority, or just silencing unwanted voices.  And the Obama administration has not silenced Fox News

Yes, the Obama administration called Fox News a partisan organization.  Yes, they openly acknowledged they would not treat them the same way as a straightforward news network. That might not by wise, but it's not censorship

 The White House did not censor the Fox News Channel. They did not rob them of their first amendment protection.  They did not prevent the Fox News Channel from attending White House press conferences. They even promised to continue providing White House staff to be interviewed on the Fox News Channel, though possibly not as frequently as the network would prefer. 

And the Fox News Channel has certainly not been silent.  The ferocity with which they've condemned the White House is evidence enough of their continued freedom.  There's no talk, anywhere, of limiting the Fox News Channel's voice.  There is no ban.  There is no suppression.

There are certainly interesting issues to talk about around the so-called "war on Fox", but using the term "censor" in these discussions is both misleading and dangerous.  So lets call it what it is or, more accurately, what it isn't: the White House has not censored the Fox News Channel.

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