The Thriving Failure of News Punditry
10/07/2008 by Gabriel VoilesSalon's media blogger Glenn Greenwald gives a fresh example (10/7/08, ad-viewing required) of news pundits failing up in corporate media:
Two weeks ago, Dick Morris was running around proclaiming McCain's decision to suspend his campaign and make the bailout happen as a "brilliant move" that would pay off "big time" for McCain because he would be viewed as the bailout's prime mover by a grateful public. A mere two weeks later, with McCain continuing to plummet in the polls, Morris today just blithely announces in his column that McCain's woes are due to his awful decision to suspend his campaign and involve himself in the unpopular bailout--and never bothers to mention or even acknowledge that it was Morris himself who, at the time, was breathlessly hailing the move as "brilliant" strategic choice that would be the centerpiece to McCain's imminent victory.
That Dick Morris is a buffoon is hardly news, but... for people who watch Fox News and read the New York Post, he's considered to be one of America's foremost political analysts. A potent reflection of our predominant political culture is the fact that people like Dick Morris can not only exist, but thrive within it.
Diggit
del.icio.us
reddit
Yahoo
Facebook
StumbleUpon
November 25th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
[...] Lauren Auerbach have a new Media Matters exposé (11/24/08) of how, since the beginning of October, Dick Morris has repeatedly used his columns and Fox News appearances to promote and raise money for the [...]
October 29th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
[...] Dick Morris was on the O'Reilly Factor the other night (10/28/09) advocating a troop escalation in Afghanistan--and his argument was characteristically peculiar: Listen, terrorist gangs like Al-Qaeda are like HIV virus. They swim in your bloodstream. They don't make you sick. When they latch on to a cell, a nation state, and they use the DNA of that cell, they then become a threat. When they use the accoutrements of nationhood--secure boundaries, a diplomatic corps, an export and import trade, and air force and navy, a tax system, a conscript population--then they can knockdown the World Trade Center. We have got to stop Al-Qaeda from taking over Afghanistan. And that means stopping the Taliban. [...]