There's a lot of chatter--and presumably more to come--about this Politico story today (8/9/11):

Obama Plan: Destroy Romney

By Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin
August 9, 2011 04:29 AM EDT

Barack Obama's aides and advisers are preparing to center the president's reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee.

It's a safe bet that the Obama campaign, being a political campaign, will engage in some pretty rough stuff.  But this piece makes it sound like something terrible is already happening (look at the headline!).

Politico talks about a "dramatic and unabashedly negative turn" in a campaign that hasn't really started, but concludes nonetheless that

the candidate who ran on "hope" in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent.

Smith and Martin explain:

The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama's reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama's advisers in about a dozen interviews, "weird."

I'm not sure how that would necessarily qualify as a plot to "destroy" Romney. It's been more or less the consensus view after his 2008 campaign that Romney had trouble with authenticity--something Republicans have talked about.

They go on:

The second aspect of the campaign to define Romney is his record as CEO of Bain Capital, a venture capital firm that was responsible for both creating and eliminating jobs. Obama officials intend to frame Romney as the very picture of greed in the great recession--a sort of political Gordon Gekko.

They're going to use his record against him?!

The piece goes on to say that the campaign will make an issue of Romney's flip flops--again, I'm not sure how this is any different than saying they're going to run a political campaign.

The piece talks about how Obama's campaign has studied Bush's 2004 campaign against John Kerry;  they seem to express some professional admiration of the Bush team's ability to turn the campaign into something other than a vote on Bush's first term in office. This doesn't seem all that remarkable, given that campaigns study other successful campaigns in order to figure out what made them successful.

I don't doubt Obama's people feel like they'll need to play dirty in order to win. There's some speculation that "weird" means "talking about his Mormonism." That could be true (and an unwillingness to vote for a Mormon has held pretty steady in polling on potential candidates).

But thinking they'll do any of this is different than actually showing that they're doing it. Politico's role in Beltway journalism is to try and drive the narrative; they're already out now with a "Romney campaign responds to Obama campaign" piece.

"I mean, we are a profit-driven industry. And if you want the most eyeballs, you have to go with the thing that people are most talking about. But if you're trying to do a quality program, then maybe you have got to go with Iraq and Iran."

--Politico's Julie Mason, explaining the amount of coverage of Anthony Weiner (CNN, 6/19/11)

UPDATE:

Jim Romenesko reports that Gannett will be laying off 700 employees:

That’s about 2 percent of the workforce, according to Gannett US Community Publishing division president Bob Dickey. “The economic recovery is not happening as quickly or favorably as we had hoped and continues to impact our U.S. community media organizations,” he says in a memo that’s posted below. “Publishers will notify people today and we will make every effort to reach everyone by end of day.” In March it was disclosed that Gannett CEO Craig Dubow received a $1.25 million cash bonus and had his salary doubled.

The item about those executive salaries is headlined:

Gannett paid CEO Dubow $9.4 million in 2010 – double his 2009 pay

And the others aren't doing too bad either:

* Chief Financial Officer Paul Saleh: $2.9 million; includes a $225,000 bonus, after joining GCI last November.
* U.S. newspapers president Bob Dickey: $3.4 million, including $600,000 bonus. (His total 2009 pay: $1.9 million.)
* USA Today Publisher Dave Hunke: $2.5 million, including $375,000 bonus. (Total 2009: $1.9 million.)
* Broadcasting President Dave Lougee: $2.2 million, including $450,000 bonus. (Total 2009: $1.3 million.)

Seriously, another one of these?

Like last year, maybe some of the reporters involved find it valuable for the people they cover to get to know them on a more personal level, away from all the tough questions and dogged investigations.

Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker (6/6/11--subscription required) that there is s virtually no evidence Iran has a nuclear weapons program, despite huge  efforts on the part of the U.S. to prove otherwise. Though Hersh's findings do not contradict the past two National Intelligence Estimates, they do fly in the face of long-held official and corporate media views.

Corporate media routinely treat the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program as a matter of fact. New York Times reporter Michael Gordon has done it at least twice (2/24/03, 10/19/04), in one case suggesting that a U.S.-friendly regime in Iraq might pressure "Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program." With little variation in wording Gordon's Times colleagues Patrick Tyler  (6/27/05) and Scott Shane (3/26/05) have done the same.  So has the Washington Post's Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung (9/28/09), and  Post editors and editorials routinely treat Iran's nuke program as a proven fact (e.g., 9/11/10, 6/17/09).

So it's not a big surprise that Hersh is coming under fire in in a corporate media which has largely internalized successive White House claims on Iran.

In a Politico report flagged by Glenn Greenwald , White House sources are quoted disparaging Hersh's New Yorker piece in a report the concludes by reminding readers that Hersh has been criticized in the past for relying too much on anonymous sources. Just a little problem with that angle though, as Greenwald points out:

That's the criticism that ends an article that relies exclusively on anonymous government sources, appearing in a D.C. gossip rag notorious for granting anonymity to any powerful figure who requests it for any or no reason.  The difference, of course, is that the Pulitzer Prize-winning, five-time-Polk-Award-recipient investigative journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib scandal grants anonymity to those who are challenging the official claims of those in power (that's called "journalism"), while Politico uses it (as it did here) to serve those in power and shield them from all accountability as they spew their propaganda (which is called being a "lowly, rank Royal Court propagandist").

One of the supposed attractions of the news site Politico is that every so often they give you a peek behind the media curtain, trying to explain how Beltway journalism works. So they don't just obsessively cover Sarah Palin--they explain why they obsessively cover Sarah Palin: "For the media, Palin is great at the box office."

John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei offer a similar piece (2/7/11) that takes aim at the supposed turnabout in Barack Obama's political fortunes after the midterm election. Part of the answer is that the White House is doing things they know the media will cheer on as a return to "centrism" and a triumph for Beltway bipartisanship:

This three-month metamorphosis says something about Obama’s survival skills, but the turnabout says even more about the mainstream media: Obama is playing the press like a fiddle.

He is doing it by exploiting some of the most longstanding traits among reporters who cover politics and government--their favoritism for politicians perceived as ideologically centrist and willing to profess devotion to Washington’s oft-honored, rarely practiced civic religion of bipartisanship.

They add:

Conservatives are convinced the vast majority of reporters at mainstream news organizations are liberals who hover expectantly for each new issue of the Nation.

It’s just not true. The majority of political writers we know might more accurately be accused of centrist bias.

While their definition of press-approved centrism seems a little off ("they believe broadly in government activism but are instinctually skeptical of anything that smacks of ideological zealotry and are quick to see the public interest as being distorted by excessive partisanship"), the larger point--that reporters are more favorably disposed towards policy that is endorsed by leading figures from both major political parties--seems right on the money.

And, for the record, a far more forceful explanation and critique of centrist media bias appeared a mere 22 years ago in Extra! (10-11/89), courtesy of FAIR founder Jeff Cohen.

Politico has a story about how congressmembers and their staffs are avoiding the Colbert Report that contains this anecdote:

"My experience with that show is like herpes. It never goes away, and it itches and sometimes flares up," said a former aide to Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, after his boss appeared on the show in 2006. The conservative Georgia Republican, co-sponsor of a bill requiring that the 10 Commandments be displayed in Congress, was skewered by Colbert in a segment of "Better Know a District" for appearing to be able to name only three of the commandments.

The episode has "haunted" the office for years, the former aide said. “I deeply regret letting him go on the Colbert Report."

Colbert gave the guy the dumbass demagogue herpes!

Seriously, Rep. Westmoreland isn't haunted by Colbert. He's haunted by the reality of his ignorant demagoguery, briefly exposed on Colbert.  (Watch the video--it's not Colbert's editing that makes him come across as he does.) The Colbert Report is one of the few places where this sort of thing can happen anymore--and that should be the key point. Politicians are avoiding Colbert in favor of more friendly and servile venues--like news outlets.

There's been a discussion (some of it neatly summarized on the Daily Show) of elite journalists' reaction to the explosive comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staffers to Rolling Stone freelancer Michael Hastings. One admission came via a Politico story, captured by NYU's Jay Rosen (6/24/10):

And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.

Rosen notes that this line in the Politico piece was subsequently removed, perhaps because it revealed too much:

Think about what the Politico is saying: an experienced beat reporter is less of a risk for a powerful figure like McChrystal because an experienced beat reporter would probably not want to "burn bridges" with key sources by telling the world what happens when those sources let their guard down.

This is revealing, perhaps, but completely unsurprising. Journalists have been admitting  to this sort of thing for years. Take one example (cited in FAIR's Extra! Update, 12/01) from an American University forum (10/1/01) where PBS correspondent Ray Suarez was asked about the failure to pose difficult questions to certain elite guests:

Well, yeah, access is like oxygen when you're a reporter. And if you're going to do something I guess that's going to jeopardize access in the future, you better be pretty sure that this person who is going to perceive what you are about to do to them as burning them is someone that you can do without in the future after you burn them. That's a tough straddle. It shouldn't be, but it is.

For an example of how a beat reporter normally operates, take ABC Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz's assessment of Gen. David Petraeus (Nightline, 6/23/10):

A warrior and a scholar, Petraeus is sometimes jokingly referred to as a water walker, since almost everything he touches seems to turn to gold.

Or recall the days when Donald Rumsfeld was considered a rock star by the Washington press corps. FAIR's Steve Rendall ran down the worst of that here:

"Sixty-nine years old, and you're America's stud," Tim Russert told Rumsfeld when he interviewed him on NBC's Meet the Press (1/20/02); Larry King informed him that "you now have this new image called sex symbol" (CNN's Larry King Live, 12/06/01). Fox News' Jim Angle (12/11/01) called him "a babe magnet for the 70-year-old set."

"I love you, Donald," Margaret Carlson announced on CNN's Capital Gang (12/23/01), where the Time magazine columnist appears regularly in the role of left-of-center pundit. Carlson's Time magazine colleague, veteran defense correspondent Mark Thompson, told the Chicago Tribune (10/22/01), "Although he has not told us very much, he has been like a father figure."

Three weeks ago, under the headline "Activists Seize Control of Politics," Politico (5/19/10) was reporting that U.S. politics may have changed forever:

The 2010 electorate has swallowed an emetic--disgorging in a series of
retching convulsions officeholders in both parties who seem to embody
conventional Washington politics.

The anti-establishment, anti-incumbent fevers on display Tuesday are not
new.... What's now clear, in a way that wasn't before, is that these results reflect
a genuine national phenomenon, not simply isolated spasms in response to
single issues or local circumstances....

This is a stark and potentially durable change in politics. The old
structures that protected incumbent power are weakening. New structures,
from partisan news outlets to online social networks, are giving
anti-establishment politicians access to two essential elements of effective
campaigns: publicity and financial support. In effect, the
anti-institutional forces that coalesced in recent years now look like an
institutional force of their own.

These epochal changes, Politico reports today (6/9/10), lasted for approximately three weeks:

On the biggest primary night of the year so far, the wild 2010 plotline took a turn for the familiar: The political center--and the conventional politicians that gravitate there--showed some enduring power.

Politico (10/14/09) published a list of top topics on Glenn Beck's Fox News show, based on a search of Nexis transcripts since the show's January 2009 debut. It's instructive to look at the placement of some individuals, groups and places in the news as an indication of Beck's sense of whom and what his audience should be informed about:

ACORN: 1,224

Van Jones: 267

SEIU: 259

Afghanistan: 97

Iraq: 95

Valerie Jarrett: 52

Mark Lloyd: 50

Al-Qaeda: 50

Bill Ayers: 46

John Holdren: 43

Jeremiah Wright: 42

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: 41

Osama Bin Laden: 40

Taliban: 38

The Drudge Report (9/16/09) is featuring this headline (in scary red type):

Obama Admin: Cap And Trade Could Cost Families $1,761 A Year...

The link goes to a CBSNews.com post, which declares:

A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration's estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.

Well, there's one problem: $1,700 is the upper estimate. The second, far more important problem: This was an analysis based on a plan that called for auctioning all of the carbon-burning permits; the bill that passed the House auctions just 15 percent of the permits, meaning that this document (FOIAed by the corporate-friendly Competitive Enterprise Institute) bears almost no relationship to reality.

The CBS report has an "update" at the bottom of the piece, from the kind of people CBS didn't bother to quote (preferring the likes of the Heritage Foundation and CEI, staunch critics of cap-and-trade):

Update 9/16/2009: The Environmental Defense Fund has responded to the documents' release with a statement saying, in part:

"Even if a 100 percent auction was a live legislative proposal, which it's not, that math ignores the redistribution of revenue back to consumers. It only looks at one side of the balance sheet. It would only be true if you think the Administration was going to pile all the cash on the White House lawn and set it on fire.

"The bill passed by the House sends the value of pollution permits to consumers, and it contains robust cost-containment provisions. Every credible and independent economic analysis of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (such as those done by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the Energy Information Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency) says the costs will be small and affordable -- and that the U.S. economy will grow with a cap on carbon."

That is kind of like saying "IGNORE THE PRECEDING REPORT."

The Politico had a brief story on this as well by Ben Smith--not nearly as bad as CBS's-- that also included a late correction:

CORRECTION: The League of Conservation Voters' Navin Nayak points out to me that the documents are a bit less than meets the eye: They refer to a version of the legislation profoundly different than the one that passed. Specifically, the original White House plan had 100 percent of emissions permits being distributed by auction; the plan that passed has just 15 percent.  "Can you say 'irrelevant analysis'? It would be like pricing the healthcare bills currently in front of Congress based on a single-payer system," he writes.

He also notes that the revenue comes directly from polluters, not taxpayers, and continues (and I'm quoting him at length because my original post was sloppy):

"Why not use the CBO analysis of the house bill? Republicans seem more than happy to use CBO when it helps their case (i.e. Against some of the health care bills). But CBO said that ACES would only cost a postage stamp a day per household...in 2020."

So the scary-sounding statistic is nonsense. Nonetheless, one can expect to hear this "It will cost you $1,700!" factoid all the time.

Somehow the Drudge-friendly news site Politico managed to write an entire piece today about pressure on the White House from anti-war left ("W.H. Fears Liberal War Pressure") without actually quoting anyone who might apply that pressure. Reporter Mike Allen did gather thoughts from Matt Bennett of the Third Way think tank (a self-consciously centrist group incoherently labeled  the "moderate voice of the progressive movement"), White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell and several anonymous White House officials. Bennett commented that Obama's supporters "are fighting a really serious political battle to keep the criticism under control." They probably don't need to work that hard at it--not with the help they're getting from establishment media outlets like Politico.

Following the growth of "a new right-wing scare tactic" that "has blossomed on conservative blogs and emails lists," Talking Points Memo Muckraker Zachary Roth (7/28/09) describes the healthcare meme as "the notion that the reform bill making its way through the House would lead to euthanasia by requiring senior citizens to submit to 'end-of-life consultations'"--and thinks that maybe

it won't surprise you to learn this is a lie. But President Obama just got a question on it at a public event. And the idea has now made it into Politico, where a straight news story asks in its headline, all even-handed: "Will Proposal Promote Euthanasia?" Since Politico thinks it'll be easier to "win the morning" by misleading readers into believing there's a legitimate debate over this issue, it's worth taking a minute to debunk it.

In fact, Politico's story contains pretty much all the information needed to do that. It's just that almost none of it makes it into the headline, or the first seven paragraphs of the piece, which focus on the fact that Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, John Boehner, Eric Cantor and other reforms opponents are raising the euthanasia alarm.

Explaining how the clause in question would really only require that regular consultations with seniors contain "an explanation by the practitioner of the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice," Roth notes that "seniors are in no way required to take advantage of this benefit."

Roth tells how "Politico renders this information as: 'It does not mandate individuals to take advantage of the benefit, proponents say'" [Roth's emphasis].

"Nor is there any reasonable basis for believing that these consultations, if chosen, would do anything to promote euthanasia," Roth writes, especially since it "is illegal in 48 states anyway."

Furthering the story of "Washington Post executives--reeling...over a flier promoting a 'salon' for lobbyists to mingle with prominent newsmakers," Politico reporters Michael Calderone and Andy Barr (7/4/09) think the suits at the Post might reasonably ask "Why us?":

The fact is the Post's clumsy effort to make money on its brand name and market its access to the powerful was a belated effort to follow in the steps of at least two other prominent news organizations: The Wall Street Journal and the Economist magazine.

The Journal, for instance, is charging a $7,500 for its two-day CEO Council in November, an elite gathering that will include the paper's top editors and high-profile speakers like Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. And for a few thousand dollars, the Economist can open the door to intimate off-the-record meet-and-greets with world leaders.

These events illustrate how the basic transaction--charging big fees to special interests to arrange private, special-access encounters with powerful people--that caused the Post this week to be excoriated is a more endemic practice than many people in political and media circles realize. Some watchdogs hope this week's Post scandal will help put an end to a hard-to-defend practice by revenue-hungry news organizations.

The quote from one such watchdog, Pew Project director Tom Rosenstiel, makes it totally clear: "He said, news organizations are 'encouraging the notion in the reader's mind that [they're] part of some insider establishment that it considers more important than public knowledge'"--now where would we ever get that idea?

The business department at the Washington Post has gotten into trouble in what may be a case of too much truth in advertising.

As reported by Politico (7/2/09), the Post circulated a flyer offering--for the low, low cost of $25,000--an "intimate and exclusive Washington Post salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and publisher Katharine Weymouth." The circular promised the participation of "key Obama administration and congressional leaders" as well as "healthcare reporting and editorial staff members of the Washington Post."

Lest anyone be confused as to why dinner at the Post's publisher's house would be worth $25,000, the flyer helpfully points out that "an evening with the right people can alter the debate." It calls the event "an exclusive opportunity to participate in the healthcare reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done." It's quite straightforward: The Post is offering to help a deep-pocketed customer an opportunity to alter the healthcare reform process by granting access to government officials and its own journalists.

Naturally, one is not allowed to be that honest about the relationship between money, power and journalism in Washington, D.C.  A Post spokesperson told Politico that the advertisement was released "before it was properly vetted," and that the "draft does not represent what the company's vision for these dinners are, which is meant to be an independent, policy-oriented event for newsmakers." Boy, that doesn't sound as much like it's worth 25 grand, does it?

Post publisher Katharine Weymouth then did an interview with employee Howard Kurtz in which she vowed they were "not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom." But she was aware "of the plans to host small dinners at her home and to charge lobbying and trade organizations for participation." And Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli said that "he had been involved in discussions, stretching back to last year, about newsroom participation in conferences"--but the good kind of conference, not the kind that makes you look like a sleazy influence-peddler.

So it looks like they're going to go ahead with these things--"We do believe there is an opportunity to have a conferences and events business, and that the Post should be leading these conversations," the Post statement to Politico said--but presumably next time they won't market them so nakedly as an exchange of money for power.  Don't worry, Post Co., your clients will still know what they're buying.

Responding to "both Likud Party members in Israel as well as their Americans supporters" who "complain that the Obama administration is unduly 'interfering' in Israeli politics"--as exemplified by Ben Smith of Politico reporting that "the administration's escalating pressure on Israel to freeze all growth of its settlements on Palestinian land has begun to stir concern among Israel's numerous allies"--Salon's Glenn Greenwald (6/3/09, ad-viewing required) likens the situation to "teenagers who tell their parents that they are not compelled to comply with parental dictates" and are told that "as long as they seek financial support, then the parents have the right to demand certain actions in return":

Identically, if Israel wants to be free of what it and some of its U.S. supporters call "interference" from the Obama administration, that's very easy to achieve: Israel can stop asking for tens of billions of dollars of American taxpayer money, huge amounts of military and weapons supplies for its various wars, and unyielding American diplomatic protection at the U.N. But as long as Israel remains dependent on the U.S. in countless ways, then Obama not only has the right--but he has the obligation--to demand that Israel cease activities which harm U.S. interests.

Continuing settlement expansions that the entire world recognizes as illegal--what Time's Joe Klein accurately calls "taking territory that the rest of the world, without exception, considers Palestinian"--clearly harms U.S. interests in all sorts of ways, as Obama himself has concluded. He would be abdicating one of his primary responsibilities in foreign policy--maximizing U.S. national security rather than those of other countries--if he failed to demand that Israel cease this activity and if he failed to use U.S. leverage to compel compliance with those demands.

Writing that "Israelis are taking Obama's pressure quite seriously, as are many of his Israel-centric supporters in the U.S," Greenwald encourages "those who want Obama to continue to depart from the Bush administration’s blind support for Israeli actions" to "continue to make themselves heard, since those who desire a continuation of that blind Israeli support certainly intend to"--and we all know which group is sure to get unquestioning encouragement from the big U.S. outlets...