![Real men are not women.Real men are not sensitive.Real men don’t care what others think.2) [W]hen the press corps decides to abandon all restraint and go for the head shot, it usually tells us a lot more about the reporters’ bosses and what they’re thinking than it does about the reporters themselves. Your average political reporter is a spineless dweeb who went to all the best schools and made it to that privileged seat inside the campaign-trail ropeline by being keenly sensitive to the editorial wishes of his social and professional superiors.
…
And when all these people start getting in their ears about this or that guy doesn’t have “winnability,” or doesn’t have enough money to run, or has negatives that are insurmountable, all that thinking inevitably bleeds into the coverage. It’s not that the reporters are “biased.” They just don’t have the stones, for the most part, to ignore all the verbal and non-verbal cues they get from authority figures about who is “legitimate” and who isn’t.
…
To illustrate the point via haiku:
Journos are pussies
Only attack when it’s safe
Lay off entrenched pols
3) So Sarah Palin is now in that category of politician whom reporters feel safe in attacking.
Some of this is definitely her own fault — in addition to the dynamic described above, there’s an additional complicating converse that says that when a politician doesn’t kiss the press’s ass all day long, he or she can expect to get reamed in print until the next ice age. And Sarah Palin not only doesn’t kiss the press’s ass, she treats them like dogshit, openly[.]
Obama’s press people, meanwhile, behaved like a team of well-trained Starbuck’s baristas: quiet, accomodating, nonconfrontational. Then again, the reporters mostly all worshipped their boss, so they didn’t have any reason to behave otherwise. That part of the media-conspiracy narrative is definitely true. I remember one particular trip when Obama came back to our part of the plane wearing jeans and a white button-down shirt and there was audible chirping from several female reporters.
…
That said, even back at the very beginning of the campaign, before the signal came down that it was okay to start giving Obama big sloppy blowjobs on the air, when reporters were all slamming the one-term Illinois Senator for being a “lightweight” prone to “rookie mistakes” … . Obama’s press handlers observed the prime directive. They did not interfere with the reporters’ civilization. There was a “let the chips fall where they may” attitude that helped out a lot when the Beltway consensus finally shifted and the money started pouring in behind the candidate; there was no bad blood to overcome when the press had to change its mind again and embrace an “Obama is now the presumptive frontrunner/We are now at war with Oceania” posture.
Palin never had anything like that kind of attitude toward the press[.]
The press corps that is bashing her skull in right now is the same one that hyped that WMD horseshit for like four solid years and pom-pommed America to war with Iraq over the screeching objections of the entire planet. It’s the same press corps that rolled out the red carpet for someone very nearly as abjectly stupid as Sarah Palin to win not one but two terms in the White House. If there was any kind of consensus support for Palin inside the beltway, the criticism of her, bet on it, would be almost totally confined to chortling east coast smartasses like me and Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan.
What the people who are flipping out about the treatment of Palin should be asking themselves is what it means when it’s not just jerks like us but everybody piling on against Palin… . You teabaggers are in the process of being marginalized by your own ostensible party leaders in exactly the same way the anti-war crowd was abandoned by the Democratic party elders in the earlier part of this decade. Like the antiwar left, you have been deemed a threat to your own party’s “winnability.”
And do you know what that means? That means that just as the antiwar crowd spent years being painted by the national press as weepy, unpatriotic pussies whose enthusiastic support is toxic to any serious presidential aspirant, so too will all of you afternoon-radio ignoramuses who seem bent on spending the next three years kicking and screaming your way up the eternal asshole of white resentment now find yourself and your political champions painted as knee-jerk loonies whose rabid irrationality is undeserving of the political center. And yes, that’s me saying that, but I’ve always been saying that, not just about Palin but about George Bush and all your other moron-heroes.
What’s different now is who else is saying it. You had these people eating out of the palms of your hands (remember what it was like in the Dixie Chicks days?). Now they’re all drawing horns and Groucho mustaches on your heroes, and rapidly transitioning you from your previous political kingmaking role in the real world to a new role as a giant captive entertainment demographic that exists solely to be manipulated for ratings and ad revenue. What you should be asking yourself is why this is happening to you. Even I don’t know the answer to that question, but honestly, I don’t really care. All I know is that I find it extremely funny.
Matt Taibbi, “Yes, Sarah, There Is a Media Conspiracy,” Taibblog, Nov. 23, 2009 (available at http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/11/23/yes-sarah-there-is-a-media-conspiracy/).](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ktnff8tWn91qzdhk0o1_250.jpg)
Real men are not women.
Real men are not sensitive.
Real men don’t care what others think.
2) [W]hen the press corps decides to abandon all restraint and go for the head shot, it usually tells us a lot more about the reporters’ bosses and what they’re thinking than it does about the reporters themselves. Your average political reporter is a spineless dweeb who went to all the best schools and made it to that privileged seat inside the campaign-trail ropeline by being keenly sensitive to the editorial wishes of his social and professional superiors.
…
And when all these people start getting in their ears about this or that guy doesn’t have “winnability,” or doesn’t have enough money to run, or has negatives that are insurmountable, all that thinking inevitably bleeds into the coverage. It’s not that the reporters are “biased.” They just don’t have the stones, for the most part, to ignore all the verbal and non-verbal cues they get from authority figures about who is “legitimate” and who isn’t.
…
To illustrate the point via haiku:
Journos are pussies
Only attack when it’s safe
Lay off entrenched pols
3) So Sarah Palin is now in that category of politician whom reporters feel safe in attacking.
Some of this is definitely her own fault — in addition to the dynamic described above, there’s an additional complicating converse that says that when a politician doesn’t kiss the press’s ass all day long, he or she can expect to get reamed in print until the next ice age. And Sarah Palin not only doesn’t kiss the press’s ass, she treats them like dogshit, openly[.]
Obama’s press people, meanwhile, behaved like a team of well-trained Starbuck’s baristas: quiet, accomodating, nonconfrontational. Then again, the reporters mostly all worshipped their boss, so they didn’t have any reason to behave otherwise. That part of the media-conspiracy narrative is definitely true. I remember one particular trip when Obama came back to our part of the plane wearing jeans and a white button-down shirt and there was audible chirping from several female reporters.
…
That said, even back at the very beginning of the campaign, before the signal came down that it was okay to start giving Obama big sloppy blowjobs on the air, when reporters were all slamming the one-term Illinois Senator for being a “lightweight” prone to “rookie mistakes” … . Obama’s press handlers observed the prime directive. They did not interfere with the reporters’ civilization. There was a “let the chips fall where they may” attitude that helped out a lot when the Beltway consensus finally shifted and the money started pouring in behind the candidate; there was no bad blood to overcome when the press had to change its mind again and embrace an “Obama is now the presumptive frontrunner/We are now at war with Oceania” posture.
Palin never had anything like that kind of attitude toward the press[.]
The press corps that is bashing her skull in right now is the same one that hyped that WMD horseshit for like four solid years and pom-pommed America to war with Iraq over the screeching objections of the entire planet. It’s the same press corps that rolled out the red carpet for someone very nearly as abjectly stupid as Sarah Palin to win not one but two terms in the White House. If there was any kind of consensus support for Palin inside the beltway, the criticism of her, bet on it, would be almost totally confined to chortling east coast smartasses like me and Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan.
What the people who are flipping out about the treatment of Palin should be asking themselves is what it means when it’s not just jerks like us but everybody piling on against Palin… . You teabaggers are in the process of being marginalized by your own ostensible party leaders in exactly the same way the anti-war crowd was abandoned by the Democratic party elders in the earlier part of this decade. Like the antiwar left, you have been deemed a threat to your own party’s “winnability.”
And do you know what that means? That means that just as the antiwar crowd spent years being painted by the national press as weepy, unpatriotic pussies whose enthusiastic support is toxic to any serious presidential aspirant, so too will all of you afternoon-radio ignoramuses who seem bent on spending the next three years kicking and screaming your way up the eternal asshole of white resentment now find yourself and your political champions painted as knee-jerk loonies whose rabid irrationality is undeserving of the political center. And yes, that’s me saying that, but I’ve always been saying that, not just about Palin but about George Bush and all your other moron-heroes.
What’s different now is who else is saying it. You had these people eating out of the palms of your hands (remember what it was like in the Dixie Chicks days?). Now they’re all drawing horns and Groucho mustaches on your heroes, and rapidly transitioning you from your previous political kingmaking role in the real world to a new role as a giant captive entertainment demographic that exists solely to be manipulated for ratings and ad revenue. What you should be asking yourself is why this is happening to you. Even I don’t know the answer to that question, but honestly, I don’t really care. All I know is that I find it extremely funny.
Matt Taibbi, “Yes, Sarah, There Is a Media Conspiracy,” Taibblog, Nov. 23, 2009 (available at http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/11/23/yes-sarah-there-is-a-media-conspiracy/).
