By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
In my latest for the Huffington Post, I argue that, contrary to what Obama supporters will tell you, the president’s poor performance in Wednesday’s debate will matter a great deal in the days ahead.
Blame Jim Lehrer’s comatose moderating style and Mitt Romney’s falsehoods all you like. Obama could have risen to the occasion, and he didn’t.
For many of us, it began with a tweet Thursday morning from Boston Globe editor Marty Baron:
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/GlobeMartyBaron/status/213267379352907778″]
Clicking led to a blog post by Globe political reporter Matt Viser, who had covered an event by Mitt Romney in Washington at the Newseum, a museum about journalism and the importance of the First Amendment. Toward the end, as Baron noted, came this rather startling paragraph:
Romney stayed to take questions. But following his 28-minute address — held at the Newseum, which is situated between the US Capitol and the White House — reporters were escorted out of the room and weren’t allowed to listen to the questions.
In the Newseum? The irony couldn’t have been any thicker. (And not just Romney. See update below.) As Huffington Post media reporter Michael Calderone put it a short time later:
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/mlcalderone/status/213290979799736321″]
Also jumping in was New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, who guessed — correctly, as it turned out — how the Newseum would respond:
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/213290735695446018″]
Media blogger Jim Romenesko wrote that he contacted Newseum spokesman Jonathan Thompson and “suggested … that the Newseum put a clause in its room-rental contracts requiring journalists be respected in the House of Journalism — for example, not be marched out of a room when it’s time for politicians to face questions.” Please click to read Thompson’s response, but the short version is that Rosen’s prediction was on the mark. You’ll also see my suggestion for how Thompson should have responded.
So those are the facts. What are we to make of this?
First, I’m inclined to give the Romney campaign half a pass here. It is hardly unusual for presidential candidates to hold events from which the media are excluded. You may recall that one of the worst moments of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign was when he complained to supporters at a no-media event about Pennsylvanians who “cling to guns or religion.” In that case, a supporter named Mayhill Fowler, who also blogged for the Huffington Post, decided to write it up.
But Romney only gets half a pass because he and his handlers should have known that excluding reporters from an event in the “House of Journalism,” as Romenesko called it, would create unwanted controversy in a way that excluding them from a fundraiser in a hotel banquet hall wouldn’t.
Second, and more important, the Newseum’s response was reprehensible. I’m reasonably sure officials there didn’t know Romney was going to lower the cone of silence. Maybe it’s never happened before. But the proper response would have been to express chagrin and promise that steps would be taken to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Reporters should never be kicked out of an event at the Newseum, whether it’s private or public. But as of this writing there’s been nothing from the Newseum other than Thompson’s statement and this tweet from Thursday:
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/Newseum/status/213309765412073473″]
No doubt the Newseum needs the rent money. According to its tax filings for 2010, the most recent that’s publicly available at GuideStar, the museum took in $73.4 million and spent $78.8 million, for a deficit of $5.4 million.
On Thursday, though, Newseum officials stepped in it in a way that could end up costing them a lot more in future donations than they’ve ever made in private rentals. My guess is the proverbial high-level conversations are taking place right now.
By the way, Viser is back with a more comprehensive story today.
Update: Politico media reporter Dylan Byers takes a swipe at Calderone, his predecessor in the job, saying that Obama “did the exact same thing” at the Newseum back in March. Yes, it should have been news then. And it only underscores that it’s long past time for the Newseum to prohibit private groups that rent its facilities from banning reporters from their events.
Photo (cc) by David Monack and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has written almost exactly what I was thinking regarding U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren and her exaggerated (and possibly non-existent) Cherokee heritage. So I recommend you read it. I have just a few additional thoughts.
I have to admit this is one of those stories that got by me. I didn’t think it would amount to much after the Boston Herald’s Hillary Chabot broke the story on April 27. Even though Harvard Law School had touted her as a diversity hire, there was no evidence (and there still isn’t) that she had ever sought to claim minority status for career advancement. And when the Boston Globe reported that she was, in fact, 1/32 Cherokee, that seemed to be the end of it. After all, the current tribal chief is only 1/32 Cherokee.
But things got a lot worse for Warren last week, when the Globe published a correction stating that there was no real evidence of Warren’s Cherokee background. Apparently this is nothing more than one of those family legends that may or may not have some basis in fact.
Like Douthat, and like millions of other Americans, I grew up thinking I might have some Native American heritage. My mother’s family was named Shaw; we had a cottage in Onset when I was growing up with a sign out front that said “Shawnee,” a tribute to that supposed heritage. My mother didn’t think there was anything to it, but who knows? As far as I know, no one in my family has traced our ancestral roots. We do go back to the early days of Plymouth Colony, so anything is possible.
I’ve heard it said that Warren should have been able to put all this behind her rather easily, but I don’t think it’s that simple. At root, I think she harbored a romantic vision of herself, which is why she listed herself as a Native American in law directories and contributed recipes to a cookbook by Native Americans. I suspect she’s deeply embarrassed that her fantasies have been exposed and mocked.
Can Warren overcome this politically? We’ll see. I’ve thought from the beginning that Warren’s Republican opponent, Sen. Scott Brown, was a tough candidate with first-rate political instincts. As I recently wrote in the Huffington Post, I thought the only reason that Warren had a chance was the large Democratic turnout that could be expected given that she’ll be on the same ballot as President Obama. Otherwise, Brown would be a shoo-in.
Let’s just say that the events of the past few weeks won’t help Warren.
U.S. Treasury Department photo via Wikimedia Commons.
This commentary has also been published at the Huffington Post.
The general-election campaign finally, definitively got under way on Tuesday, when Mitt Romney won Republican primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia, and all but snuffed out Rick Santorum’s increasingly outlandish hopes.
With seven months of charges and countercharges from Romney and President Obama to look forward to, it will be interesting to see whether the media are up to the task of parsing truth from fiction — or if, instead, they will settle for the disreputable journalistic game of “Candidate A said X today, while Candidate B responded with Y.”
The first test may well be Obama’s tough speech Tuesday about the budget proposal put forth by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee. Among other things, Obama called Ryan’s handiwork “radical” and “thinly veiled social Darwinism.” And he made much of Romney’s praise for the Ryan budget, mocking the former Massachusetts governor for calling it “marvelous.”
So, let’s unleash the X‘s and Y‘s, shall we?
Politico covered Obama’s speech, and ran a separate story on Ryan, who released a statement referring to Obama’s “failed agenda” and “reckless budgets.” The Washington Post characterized the president’s speech as “a stern and stinging rebuke,” balancing Obama’s words with Ryan’s statement. Actual numbers are relegated to a fact-checking piece by Glenn Kessler, who seems reluctant to say anything definitive. PolitiFact, which came under considerable criticism for bestowing its “Lie of the Year” on Democratic critics of Ryan’s Medicare plan last year, has not weighed in yet.
Interestingly, the New York Times appears to contradict the Republican view of reality pretty directly with regard to Obama’s statement that the Ryan budget would cut taxes for millionaires by $150,000 a year. The way this passage is written is a little confusing, but it’s hard not to come away thinking that Obama got it exactly right:
The White House’s calculation for the tax benefit is straightforward, but Republicans on the House Budget Committee say it is wrong. The average household earning more than $1 million would gain $46,000 from the House budget’s repeal of the Medicare hospital insurance tax that was part of the health care law, the Republicans said, and $105,000 from the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts that Mr. Obama wants to see expire next year.
So if “Republicans … say it is wrong,” how is it that the tax cuts add up to $151,000? Yes, the next paragraph goes on to say that might change. But it might not. The Republican Party has demonstrated little in the way of concern about revenue gaps its policies create, especially when those gaps benefit the 1 percent.
Which brings me to reality — that is, to the world of numbers and actual math. The New Yorker’s financial columnist, James Surowiecki, analyzes the Ryan proposal this week and neatly disposes of the notion that it is anything other than a thoroughly political document whose central premises don’t hold up, based as they are on three absurd nos: no tax increases; no cuts in military spending; and no federal intervention in holding down Medicare costs, even as he seeks to privatize the program.
The result, Surowiecki reports, is the Congressional Budget Office has found that all the cuts Ryan proposes — to college assistance, Medicaid, food stamps and other aspects of the social safety net — would, by 2050, come out of just 0.75 percent of the federal budget.
“[T]he Ryan plan is not about fiscal responsibility,” Surowiecki writes. “It’s about pushing a very particular, and very ideological, view of the proper relationship between government and society.”
And it’s the reality of those numbers that the media ought to ask about when they seek out Ryan for comment — or, more important, when they ask Romney why he thinks the Ryan budget is so “marvelous.”
Romney, as we know, is notoriously slippery and flexible, and my concern is that his reputation will work to his advantage. If Rick Santorum were in the lead and had embraced the Ryan budget plan, campaign reporters would assume that Santorum really meant it, and question him accordingly.
But with Romney, there’s an assumption — grounded in his record — that he is, at root, a moderate businessman, not all that ideological, who will say anything and embrace any issue. When the time comes to move to the center, he can make his support for the Ryan budget disappear as though he were, oh, shaking an Etch-a-Sketch.
Words ought to have more consequences that. If Obama can say something demonstrably true, and the media’s principal response is to quote the other side as saying Y, it’s going to be a long, unenlightening spring. And summer. And fall.
Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
My latest for the Huffington Post:
Is it over?
A better way of putting it: Do the media want it to be over?
The Florida Republican primary ended last night with dual scenes reminiscent of campaigns past. The winner, hoping to consolidate his gains and close out a divisive intraparty battle, devoted most of his attention to his general-election rival. His nearest competitor vowed to fight on until the convention.
But the incompatible desires of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich do not matter nearly as much today as how the media will now frame the narrative.
Read the whole thing here.
My latest for the Huffington Post:
The media are having no problem decoding the not-so-secret message from last night’s State of the Union address. More than anything, Barack Obama wants us to know that Mitt Romney is what the president’s new role model, Theodore Roosevelt, would have called a “malefactor of great wealth.”
You can read the whole thing here.
In my latest for the Huffington Post, I take a look at the abuse heaped upon Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton and New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane. And though they clearly deserved to be criticized for their lazy, ill-considered commentaries, the over-the-top nature of the reaction says more about their critics than it does about them.
In my latest for the Huffington Post, I attempt to deconstruct Mitt Romney’s cynical, dishonest victory speech in New Hampshire last night — starting with his amnesia regarding the economic collapse that swept Barack Obama into the presidency.
Aaron Kushner, the greeting-card mogul who’s been trying to buy the Boston Globe for the past year, is part of a group that is acquiring the Portland Press Herald and related properties, according to reports in the Press-Herald and the Globe.
So does the Kushner group see this as a first step toward its ultimate goal — or have the investors decided to focus their attention exclusively on Maine? Chris Harte, a former Press Herald president and a member of the investment group, won’t say, according to the Press Herald.
No one knows whether the New York Times Co. would sell the Globe or not. But certainly Janet Robinson’s sudden retirement as chief executive of the Times Co., followed quickly by the sale of 16 smaller papers, has sparked speculation that the Globe might be on the block.
I recently rounded up the long, rocky history of the Times Co. and the Globe for the Huffington Post.
Within days of Janet Robinson’s sudden retirement as chief executive of the New York Times Co., word leaked that the company was looking to sell its smaller papers in the South and the West.
Which raises a question: Is the Times Co. finally ready to sell the Boston Globe? I review the rocky history of Times Co. ownership in my latest for the Huffington Post.
