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Mediagate

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If the legacy media is sending stories like this down the memory hole, then prospects for real economic recovery will be poor and the results of future elections will be "fruits of the poisioned tree". It shouldn't take much thought to see this is probably the intended result...

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/three-big-stories-three-media-disappearing-acts/

Three Big Stories, Three Media Disappearing Acts

Posted By Tom Blumer On December 4, 2009 @ 12:00 am In . Column2 01, . Positioning, Media, Money, US News | 26 Comments

Have you heard about the $80.7 billion “reorganization gain” General Motors posted in its recent release [1] of financial information?

I’ll bet not. Specifically, that gargantuan sum is the positive portion of a net amount of $79.672 billion that “old General Motors” — now known as Motors Liquidation Company — recognized as “special items” during the first nine days of July. You read that right.

To reach the details of this most extraordinary gain, the company forces you to download and open a 14-page Word document; I guess the news about that marvelous invention known as Portable Document Format [2] (PDF) has yet to reach Detroit. Finally, the reader sees the line-by-line treatment on page 6:



Allow me to translate:

After writing off $53.639 billion in “loans,” the federal government has a majority stake in “new” General Motors supposedly valued at $2.505 billion. The difference of $51.134 billion represents the direct amount U.S. taxpayers have lost thus far as a result of bailing the company out.

The third item is the total of the debts and other general obligations the bankruptcy court in essence allowed GM to walk away from.

This astounding and precedent-breaking set of transactions is news by any reasonable definition of the word. At first, the Associated Press treated it that way. Relatively brief versions of AP reports issued during the first hour or so after GM’s early morning November 16 release noted the $80 billion pickup (pun not intended). But by 9:30, the $80 billion disappeared and never returned; it is nowhere to be found in the final version of the wire service’s coverage [3]. The focus in later revisions moved to further discussion of the “new” GM’s reported “managerial net loss” of $1.2 billion and to the company’s intention to begin repaying some of the additional money that Uncle Sam lent to it after it emerged from bankruptcy. To be clear (which AP wasn’t), the loans targeted for payback are over and above the $50-plus billion already written off.

Although it doesn’t involve huge sums of money, a second recent establishment media disappearing act involves hundreds of thousands of Americans who have always received prominent mention in the run-up to Thanksgiving whenever Republicans have occupied the White House. I am of course referring to the homeless.

Let’s see. Is the economy worse or better than it was two Thanksgivings ago? October 2009’s unemployment rate of 10.2% [4] was 5.5% higher than October 2007’s 4.7% [5]. The U.S. economy in the third quarter of 2009 was smaller than it was two years earlier [6], and home foreclosures have dominated the economic news for quite some time.

Given the obviously worse and still deteriorating employment and housing situations, one would think that to the extent the homeless problem is truly serious [7], it has almost certainly gotten worse overall, and definitely so in certain parts of the country. One might therefore conclude that homelessness would have received more media coverage just before and after this year’s Thanksgiving than it has in previous years, and that enterprising reporters would have rushed out of their comfortable offices to breathlessly tell their audiences how awful the plight of the homeless has become.

That didn’t happen. A Google News search I did on November 29 on “homelessness rising” (not in quotes) returned all of 22 unique listings [8]. I repeated that search on December 2 [9] and got the same results. As far as I could tell, none of the listings were from national establishment media sources and virtually none of them addressed overall national or local trends. Similar searches done two or more years ago while George W. Bush was president would certainly have retrieved far more results.

A third disappearing act has to do with Christmas and Christmas shopping, and has two aspects. Since 2005, I have chronicled the decline in media use of the term “Christmas shopping season” in favor of “holiday shopping season” (typed in quotes in each case). Four years ago, in searches done just before Thanksgiving, “Christmas shopping season” references made up about 15% of the total results of all “shopping season” searches. This year, those references were only 6% [10] of the total. At that rate of shrinkage, we won’t see any references to the “Christmas shopping season” within three or four years.

The other angle disappearing from journalists’ Christmas reporting lists is the one where they go all gloomy telling us what a mediocre selling season retailers will have, are having, and finally did have. This commonly played out at the New York Times during the Bush 43 years of 2001-2007.

This year, it seems that they’re turning into Pollyannas. In Tuesday’s Times, reporter Stephanie Rosenbloom waited until her 15th and final paragraph [11] to tell us that two retail associations predict that overall Christmas shopping season sales will come in 1-2% below last year’s objectively dreadful, bailout blues-induced result.

As I prepared this column, it seemed that the establishment media’s dogged effort to keep Climategate under wraps was starting to unravel. But if they can successfully hide $80 billion, ignore hundreds of thousands of homeless, make the Christmas shopping season disappear, and pretend that Christmas retail business really isn’t that bad, I wouldn’t bet against them on Climategate just yet.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/three-big-stories-three-media-disappearing-acts/

URLs in this post:

[1] in its recent release: http://publish.media.gm.com/content/media/us/en/news/news_detail.brand_gm.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2009/Nov/1116_earnings

[2] Portable Document Format: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.html

[3] the final version of the wire service’s coverage: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33961851/ns/business-autos

[4] of 10.2%: http://www.bizzyblog.com/2009/11/06/the-october-employment-situation-report-110609/

[5] October 2007’s 4.7%: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/history/empsit_11022007.txt

[6] two years earlier: http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=1&ViewSeries=NO&Java=no&Request3Place=N&3Place=N&FromView=YES&Freq=Qtr&FirstYear=2007&LastYear=2009&3Place=N&Update=Update&JavaBox=no#Mid

[7] the homeless problem is truly serious: http://pajamasmedia.com../../../../../blog/cooking-the-books-on-homelessness-stats/

[8] returned all of 22 unique listings: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2009/11/29/how-make-homeless-problem-disappear

[9] repeated that search on December 2: http://news.google.com/news/search?um=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&as_q=homelessness+rising&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_scoring=r&btnG=Search&as_qdr=a&as_drrb=b&as_minm=11&as_mind=24&as_maxm=11&as_maxd=28&as_nsrc=&as_nloc=&geo=&as_author=&as_occt=any

[10] were only 6%: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2009/11/24/searching-christmas-case-missing-layoff-stories

[11] waited until her 15th and final paragraph: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/business/02shop.html



 
Andrew Breitbart launches the counter offensive

http://www.mediaite.com/online/andrew-breitbart-launching-new-sites/

Exclusive Interview: Andrew Breitbart Announces Launch of New “Big” Sites
by Colby Hall | 12:42 pm, December 10th, 2009» 26 comments

exclusive

When Andrew Breitbart launched Big Government in September, we asked if he was gearing up to be the next Arianna Huffington: An opinion blog rainmaker with a one-stop digital powerhouse, but presented from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Three months later, hyperbole has become reality as Breitbart is adding to his network of vertical blogs. The newest site to join the Breitbart network is “Big Journalism,” which will launch in January of next year. His target is much bigger than HuffPo — or any other website for that matter. Breitbart is gunning for the institution of mainstream media, or what he calls “the Democratic-media complex.”

In an exclusive interview with Mediaite, Breitbart shares his vision for his expanding network of “Big” right-of-center sites:


Though he’s not exactly a household name, Breitbart has long been a power player in the sphere of Internet influence and opinion. While he may be best known for serving as an editor for The Drudge Report, he also served as an early researcher and developer for The Huffington Post. Since setting out on his own, he’s created a number of sites: Breitbart.com is the core site, aggregating countless headlines from dozens of sites and newswires in real time; BreitbartTV performs a similar function with videos; and Big Hollywood and Big Government are conservative group blogs which cover entertainment and government policy, respectively.

Breitbart: “If these traditional media outlets can’t be shamed into telling the truth, diverted for doing the wrong story, for simply running defense for one party, and mocked away from creating journalistic rules that only hold those on the right accountable, then it puts us in a position to do more than we’ve done in the past with talk radio and web aggregation.”

In a phone interview with Mediaite, Breitbart says that his new sites will continue to “fight the mainstream media – New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN — who have repeatedly, and under the guise of objectivity and political neutrality, promoted a blatantly left-of-center, pro-Democratic party agenda.” Each site will focus on a different topic, but will follow the same groupblog-like model, which is currently employed by Big Hollywood and Big Government. Each will have a central editor who coordinates contributions, many from current and former journalists around the world.

Big Journalism will be run by former Time Magazine staffer Michael Walsh, who is also a former journalism professor and film & television professor at Boston University. Walsh and Breitbart met at a casual gathering of like-minded people and hit it off. When Breitbart made the decision to launch a new site covering journalism, he says that Walsh was first person that came to his mind. The fact that Walsh is a media veteran going back to the early 70s didn’t hurt, he said.

Walsh and Breitbart share a similar distaste for the day-to-day work of “institutional journalists.” In an interview, the new editor of Big Journalism boiled down the mission of the site thusly: “Our goal at Big Journalism is to hold the mainstream media’s feet to the fire.  There are a lot of stories that they simply don’t cover, either because it doesn’t fit their world view, or because they’re literally innocent of any knowledge that the story even exists, or because they are a dying organization, short-staffed, and thus can’t cover stuff like they did before.”

“Big Journalism will be the go-to site for solidly backed-up stories, sharp points of view, and really great writing,” he said. “We are defenders of the First Amendment and resolute enemies of political correctness. That’s the key to the site’s philosophy.”

Breitbart feels that “if these traditional media outlets can’t be shamed into telling the truth, diverted for doing the wrong story, for simply running defense for one party, and mocked away from creating journalistic rules that only hold those on the right accountable, then it puts us in a position to do more than we’ve done in the past with talk radio and web aggregation. The market is wide open to go on the offensive, to tell truths that aren’t being told. The center-right alternative media has been playing a passable prevent defense, constantly saying ‘that’s not right’ for consistently biased reporting. Now we aim to offer more aggressive journalism and to give the mainstream media a little dose of its own medicine.”

So while Big Journalism is the next “big” thing, it’s only one part of what Breitbart hopes will become a much larger empire. He plans, in the not-too-distant future, to unveil new sites as part of his “Big” network, including Big Education, Big Tolerance, Big Jerusalem, and Big Peace, among others. Each site will be a mix of aggregation and group blogging. There will be overlap among the sites’ contributors: For example, if an Israeli politician wants to offer his perspective on a Hollywood film, he will be able to post something on a number of relevant sites.

Next page: Breitbart explains these new sites.
 
The real stories of 2009. Oh wait, you never saw them?

http://biggovernment.com/2010/01/01/the-most-underreported-stories-of-2009/

Its a Wrap: The Most Underreported Stories of 2009
by Dana Loesch

This year saw the birth of the tea party movement, the rise of administrative radicalism, and a suppression of information unlike ever before seen. Were it not for the new penny presses, blogs and the investigative citizens who author them, much of this information would be six feet under. When the media goes state and becomes nothing more than an echo chamber for the government, the task of sharing truth falls to the original keepers of liberty: the American people.
These are the most Underreported Stories of 2009:

1. CLIMATEGATE
Al Gore needs something to sustain him and his big pimpin’ life down at his ginormous, energy-sucking mansion in Tennessee. Thus the green market was born, a made-up market chock full of products like carbon credits and other Willy Wonka (but not as cool) ish items for people to buy as a way to feel good about themselves and their contribution to the planet without having to actually do anything. They don’t need a God! They need a Prius!

Celebrities Botoxed within an inch of their lives began popping up in PSA’s about global warming, about how we need to drive inefficient clown cars that run on electricity (which is still produced in coal-powered plants but hey, whatever) to save the planet. Musicians like Sheryl Crow crowed about using just a square of toilet paper to remove waste that has a greater street value than her latest album. All the hubris manifested in regulations handed down from Congress upon the automobile industry, the coal industry, et al., until finally! Cap’n Trade appeared in the House.

Cap’n Trade will rape and pillage your energy bills and even boss you around when it comes to remodeling or rehabbing a home. It’s almost like … congress has nothing better to do.

Then … there was Climategate. Russian hackers revealed emails from a British university (whose edicts on global warming are included in the U.N.’s decision-making process on climate) which showed that the scientists basically had no idea what they hell they were talking about but they did know that their original assessment of increased global temperatures was unsupported by data, thus, “hide the decline.”

2. THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT
I feel bad for the staffer that had to check Nancy Pelosi’s pants after over a million tea party protesters marched past her window on September 12, 2009.

The tea party movement sprung from plain old disenchantment, disappointment, and outright anger at being fleeced by a government who mistook their primary job as being “spend cash mon-nay” rather than execute the Constitution. What began as a few groups of several hundred people gathering in the cold back in February morphed into a movement so big that now talk of PACs and third parties (total crap idea, that latter) are commonplace and a Republican candidate has no hope of winning an election without the tea party support.

The most misreported and misunderstood thing about the tea party is its political leanings. The tea party has no political leaning. It stands straight for limited government, low taxes, and liberty for all. Disagreement with those tenets is an accidental admission of socialism on the part of the antagonist. The beauty of the tea party movement is that it is independent and thus a true check and balance of the Republican and Democrat parties. It’s not a pawn of the GOP, thus untouchable in criticism of the Democrats – I view it as an unattached conscience of the Republican party.

The tea parties have been smeared, and while some haven’t helped against the charges of astroturf due to their worship of both God and money, the movement is pure.

A new version of the Minuteman has sprung from this movement: the patriot activist with the Gadsen flag on her shoulder and a video recorder or camera in her hand.
Photo courtesy Rob Brenner.

Photo courtesy Rob Brenner.

3. FORT HOOD AND ISLAMIC EXTREMISM IN THE U.S.
A guy with a history of terrorist activity (the FBI had been watching him for months) and bent on mass murder screams “ALLAHU AKBAR!” before shooting a pregnant soldier point-blank at a military base and the media would rather cover its genitals like a dog and cower in the corner rather than define the terrorist as a terrorist.

Rather, the media interviewed people who said that shooter Malik Nadal Hasan had “trouble fitting in” and isn’t it so sad how he was treated differently because of his religion? Lightbulb moment: hey! Perhaps he was treated differently because he felt prejudiced against his fellow soldiers whom he viewed as infidels who should die?

Hasan had “soldier of Allah” printed on his business cards, for crying out loud.

Nevermind that he was a participant in Obama’s transition Homeland Security  team. Oops!

4. ACORN and SEIU
Only in America can you offer to help smuggle in underage sex workers as part of your description as a taxpayer-funded “community organizer” and still get federal dollars after the scandal breaks. James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles exposed ACORN for what it truly is: a malignancy that consumes the life out of depressed areas that it never, ever improves, ever, all in the name of making residents dependent upon the teat of government welfare so as to exploit them for votes later”neighborhood organizing.”

Michael Walsh explains the repurcussions of the dynamic duo’s work:

    The Senate voted 83-7 in favor of de-funding the controversial group. The House voted 345-75 to cut ACORN’s funding, and more than 20 states have demanded either a full investigation of ACORN or that they lose their funding. The IRS also ended up cutting their connections to the group.

O’Keefe and Giles made a mockery of the media who retaliated by refusing to cover the story, further hammering the last nail into their own coffin.

Despite all of this, Big Government wrote how after this egregious corruption, Democrats like Roland Burris still found a way to push for continued ACORN funding by slipping a provision requiring such in Harry Reid’s senate fauxcare bill.

SEIU shares #4 with SCORN (typo and it stays) after several of its purple people beaters attacked Kenneth Gladney (a black street vendor who I’d previously seen selling pro-Obama buttons at Obama’s Arnold, MO townhall) at Russ Carnahan’s townhall in Mehlville, Missouri after profiling him and assuming him to be a black conservative. One of the country’s most shocking and underreported race-provoked attacks grew worse when his brother, Keith Gladney, spoke out in his brother’s defense and is said to have been canned from his job two days before Christmas as a result.

At the time of this writing neither Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, or President Obama have offered to arrange a beer summit between Kenneth Gladney and Andy Stern.

5. HCR COVER-UP
The majority of the country opposes Harry Reid’s Senate bill but nevertheless, Reid bribed it through. Government media served as a mouthpiece for the administration and its policy on fauxcare, giving the President multiple hours of free network prime-time hours to peddle his snake oil on the airwaves.

The Senate vote marks the turning point in our government where those elected to represent the constituency failed to do the jobs for which they were placed in office. It was a vote of tyranny, not of representation.

6. NEAPicture 5
The White House is attempting to mimic Leni Riefenstahl by rounding up those in the arts and entertainment industry and using them as the vehicles through which President Obama can peddle his agenda, I wrote back in September. Big Government combed over this scandal which went completely ignored by the media. Union baby Buffy Wicks, from the Office of Public Engagement and Serve.gov, the NEA, and others joined a variety of artists and promoters on a conference call, the goal of which was to figure out how to create propaganda to support Obama’s policies.

Big Government Editor Mike Flynn expounded further on the scandal and reminded readers how Wicks used the Serve.gov portal as a way to funnel volunteers to ACORN and other pro-Obama organizations, at taxpayer expense.

Jinkies! Looks like artists are going to have to work harder and nab more photos that other people have taken so that they can do cheesy, tri-color alterations to them that pass as pretentious, overrated and quasi-Photoshop Level 1 “art” to the people whose discernment went off the rails.

7. DHS, NAPOLITANO TARGET DISSENT
While the Department of Homeland Security and Janet Napolitano were busy marking down the names of veterans, grandmas, and college kids who waved the military-authorized Gadsen Flag or questioned Obama’s policies in public as “possible domestic terrorists,” real terrorists were already in our country, shooting up our military bases and attempting to detonate planes. Michael Savage, himself the target of the British government based upon his dissent, filed suit against Napolitano in April over DHS’s “right wing extremist” report. The charges stated:

    “It is a civil rights action brought under the First and Fifth Amendments to the United States Constitution, challenging the policy, practice, and custom of the United States Government that targets for disfavored treatment those individuals and groups that are considered to be ‘rightwing extremists.”

Under the Obama administration, the government has brazenly trained its eye on those who respectfully question the government. Liberals who complained over the Patriot Act demonstrated their devotion to party over liberty by going silent as their American brethren were targeting for doing no more (less, actually) than they the liberals did under Bush.

7. KEVIN JENNINGS – FISTGATE
It wouldn’t be right if our current administration broke tradition with nominating completely inept radicals to high positions of power (gotta pay off those political favors!) and lucky for you betting types, that streak wasn’t broken with Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings.

Ah yes, the Three Rs and One F of education: Readin, Ritin’ and ‘Rithmetic. Oh, and Fisting. The required credentials for such a post:

    Jennings was appointed to the position largely because of his longtime record of working to end bullying and discrimination in schools. In 1990, as a teacher in Massachusetts, he founded the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which now has over 40 chapters at schools nationwide. He has also published six books on gay rights and education, including one that describes his own experiences as a closeted gay student.

Behold, the comedy gold:

    “Jennings was obviously chosen for this job because of the safe schools aspect… defining ’safe schools’ narrowly in terms of ’safe for homosexuality’,” Peter Sprigg, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, told FOXNews.com.

    “But at least half of the job involves creating drug-free schools, and we’ve not been offered any evidence about what qualifications Jennings has for promoting drug-free schools.”

    Jennings’ detractors note that he made four references to his personal drug abuse in his 2007 autobiography, “Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son: A Memoir.” On page 103, discussing his high school years in Hawaii in the early 1980s, Jennings wrote:

    “I got stoned more often and went out to the beach at Bellows, overlooking Honolulu Harbor and the lights of the city, to drink with my buddies on Friday and Saturday nights, spending hours watching the planes take off and land at the airport, which is actually quite fascinating when you are drunk and stoned.”

Er … oops? Nobody’s perfect, but it just seems practical to maybe not glorify drug use in your book while trying to get a job which requires you to keep schools and kids drug free. Too obvious?

Oh, but then came the revelations as to what GLSEN’s recommended reading actually included and Katy-bar-the-door. It was discovered that at a GLSEN conference (in conjunction with the MA Department of Education no less) elementary school kids were taught how to engage in sex acts.

Gateway Pundit reported mercilessly – as I’d hoped that anyone who cared about the well-being of our schoolchildren would do – about the “recommended reading” list Jennings chose for GLSEN and young schoolchildren which included graphic descriptions of rest-room sex and more.

State media was silent and liberal sites, such as Media Matters, defended Jennings.

8. VAN JONES
Van Jones signed his political death certificate when he signed a 9/11 truther petition stating that he believed that our own government took down the Twin Towers and not terrorists, the petition brought to light by Gateway Pundit. Of course, under an administration that refuses to even use the language because it may hurt the feelings of suicide bombers and be judged as “divisive,” one can see how Jones might not understand that the terrorists are actually our enemies.

The radical environmental czar (a one-time STORM participant, a Marxist organization) and admitted communist in the Obama administration was forced to resign, further tainting the judgement of the administration, who later admitted to not having vetted Jones well enough.

The disparity between the eerie silence from state media and the raucous exclamations from the blogosphere was expected but sad nonetheless.

9. OBAMA’S LACK OF SUCCESS
Don’t expect to see much media criticism – even if it’s objective and deserved – of our infant Messiah president. The media has a lot invested into him and they unofficially hung the last shred of their validity on his success. It’s not to say that conservatives don’t want a successful president; we define success differently than liberals. Conservatives want the United States to be successful in foreign relations, we want a thriving economy, success in maintaining individual liberty, all the good stuff of which America is made. Conservatives don’t want to see plans to nationalize and thereby socialize the private sector because the very irony of such economic strategy is that it hasn’t been successful in multitude of countries in which it’s been implemented.

Conservatives aren’t the only ones questioning Obama’s trajectory; he’s been sliding in the polls since spring; the majority of Americans disapprove of his march on health care reform; yet the media downplays all of this because they’ve gambled it all on the success of this political neophyte who quit his job as a senator so he could hightail it to Washington. (What was that the left said about quitters?)

The media’s complicity in shoring up a failing president has given an excuse for the current congressional body to repeatedly ignore the will of the people. Blogs are the new penny press; corporate media is dead.

Happy New Year!
 
I'm sure regular listeners of Rush Limbaugh or visitors to Free Republic have hashed these over for days, if not months. Do you have an even more deranged right-wing list, or is this the most insane you could find? I see no mention of Barack Obama being a Kenyan-born SEEKRIT MUSLIN, for example.
 
40below said:
I'm sure regular listeners of Rush Limbaugh or visitors to Free Republic have hashed these over for days, if not months. Do you have an even more deranged right-wing list, or is this the most insane you could find? I see no mention of Barack Obama being a Kenyan-born SEEKRIT MUSLIN, for example.

Well, counter with your own left wing list, if you must.
 
40below said:
I'm sure regular listeners of Rush Limbaugh or visitors to Free Republic have hashed these over for days, if not months. Do you have an even more deranged right-wing list, or is this the most insane you could find? I see no mention of Barack Obama being a Kenyan-born SEEKRIT MUSLIN, for example.


Seek, and ye shall find.

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail, is an essay that offers a counter to some of Thucydide’s oft-cited websites:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/paranoid-style-is-in-again/article1416113/
Paranoid style is in again
The Republican 'purity test' is a symptom of the movement's hyperbolic right turn – but this isn't the first time it's reared its head

Konrad Yakabuski

Washington

Saturday, Jan. 02, 2010
Think back a year, and it seemed no one had a way with words like Barack Obama. He could fill a stadium – and did, at the 2008 Democratic national convention – with prose that blew through your doublespeak detectors as you surrendered to its splendour.
It went downhill from Inauguration Day. As they settled into the West Wing, Mr. Obama's vaunted speechwriters somehow lost their touch and their boss lost his. The U.S. President now often seems as stiff as the teleprompter on which he has developed such an acute dependence.

No, Americans looking for evocative language from their public figures in 2009 had to turn to the anti-Obamas. It wasn't hard to find them – they have dominated the national soapbox since mid-year, outdoing each other in their preposterousness.

Picking the choicest quotes of 2009 is, hence, not quite the uplifting affair it might have been in 2008, when Mr. Obama was still compelling and Republicans still aspired to more than the political equivalent of demolition derby. The past 12 months have served up more sinister stuff.

Take Glenn Beck, the Fox News host who emerged last year as the U.S. right's conspiracy-theorist-in-chief. Government ownership of General Motors, he warned, enables the Obama administration to spy on Americans by way of the OnStar GPS devices installed in GM products: “I just don't believe in giving that kind of technology to this government.”

Sarah Palin launched her crusade against Obamacare with this: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's death panel so his bureaucrats can decide … whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

And Michele Bachmann, another syntactically challenged Republican politician on the rise, greeted a Dec. 15 rally against the Democrats' proposed health-care reform by crying: “That is our wish for fellow citizens here in the United States – for freedom, not for government enslavement.”

It would be easy to dismiss this trio as harmless hewers of ill-considered hyperbole, were it not for their supporting roles in the most pervasive and potentially consequential phenomenon to emerge in U.S. politics in 2009. Paranoia, it seems, has become the U.S. right's stock in trade. It is not the first time this has happened, of course. Conspiracy theories have been such a recurring theme in U.S. political discourse that there is something almost archetypal about it. Yet there is also something just a little more unsettling about it all, this time around.

In a seminal essay published 45 years ago, Richard Hofstadter chronicled the long history of the “paranoid style” in U.S. politics. It is typically, though not exclusively, the preserve of the right. It stretches from early Americans' obsession with rooting out Freemasons (is it any wonder Dan Brown's books are so popular?) to the Ku Klux Klan's hatred of Catholics. It ranges from Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt against Communists in the 1950s to Barry Goldwater's improbable 1964 presidential bid to “stop a government establishment that is preparing to nationalize our society.”

American politics, Mr. Hofstadter observed, has long been “an arena for uncommonly angry minds” in which substantial leverage “can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.” Mr. Hofstadter was a historian, not a psychiatrist. He was not diagnosing Mr. McCarthy or Mr. Goldwater when he labelled them as purveyors of the “paranoid style.” Rather, he explained, he used the term as an art historian “might speak of baroque.”

GOLDWATER BEGAT REAGAN ...

Mr. Goldwater, of course, was a spectacular flame-out, a conservative Cassandra whose claim that “the moral fibre of the American people is beset by rot and decay” must have seemed laughable to young Americans liberated at last by the pill. Yet Mr. Goldwater begat Ronald Reagan, “who would bring to pseudo-conservatism the warmth and optimism it had lacked,” noted Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University political historian, in the foreword to a 2008 re-edition of Mr. Hofstadter's essays.

Mr. Hofstadter called Mr. Goldwater a pseudo-conservative because he thought his ideas were actually quite radical. That same radicalism is at the core of the politics practised by the current crop of paranoid stylists. They too call themselves conservatives. But unlike Messrs. Goldwater and Reagan, Mr. Beck, Ms. Palin and Ms. Bachmann actually seem to believe their own paranoid rhetoric.

“Goldwater, not unlike Reagan, was a regular politician … They would exploit the paranoid style,” Prof. Wilentz explained in an interview. “Now we're down to the real thing.”

In other words, for Ms. Palin et al., it's not an act.

The paranoid spokesman's “sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic,” Mr. Hofstadter wrote, “goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and moral indignation.” When Ms. Bachmann accuses Mr. Obama of holding “anti-American views,” or when Ms. Palin decries “the agenda-driven policies being pursued in Copenhagen,” they feed into the same anger that drives thousands of Americans to show up for “tea parties,” where they give voice to many who feel dispossessed. “They refuse to listen” is the slogan of the Tea Party Patriots. It expresses the frustration of those who feel their country and their government have been usurped by Mr. Obama and his “socialist” cohorts.

The tea party movement has sent the Republican establishment (what's left of it) into a state of panic. You know what they say about imitation? A recent Republican National Committee Internet ad against Mr. Obama's health-care reform features a series of speakers uttering, in succession, the same plea: “Listen to me!”

That such a volatile and vitriolic faction as the tea party movement is now influencing the conduct of the party of Lincoln is indicative of the desperate state of Republicanism, which has embraced the paranoid style in a manner that would make even Mr. Goldwater cringe. At the party's meeting this month in Hawaii – which, at least if you believe what's written on his birth certificate, is where Mr. Obama came into the world – Republicans will decide whether to impose a “purity test” on prospective candidates seeking the GOP nomination in the 2010 congressional elections. If adopted, those who fail to profess their faith in at least eight of 10 core beliefs would be deprived of RNC backing and money.

When Mr. Hofstadter wrote, it was the assertion that Communist elements had systematically infiltrated the U.S. government that was most emblematic of the paranoid style. But although the labels have changed, the diatribes directed at Mr. Obama are merely variations on the same theme. In the words of Rush Limbaugh, who was the uncontested king of the right-wing media until Mr. Beck invented himself: “We want [Mr. Obama] to fail because we want to preserve our country as we found it. We do not want to see a successful attack on capitalism.”

Mr. Limbaugh made that comment at last year's Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual event where the U.S. right's leading lights either commiserate or celebrate, depending on whether their side is in power. This year as last, commiseration will be on the agenda next month when 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Mike Huckabee take to the stage to show off their paranoid style alongside the pros: Mr. Limbaugh, Anne Coulter and Ron Paul.

Among the event's sponsors is the John Birch Society, which students of the McCarthy and Goldwater eras of Republicanism might be shocked to learn still exists. The group, named for a Christian missionary who was allegedly killed by Communists in China, once labelled Republican president Dwight Eisenhower “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” (Suddenly, the RNC's consideration of a purity test starts to make sense, doesn't it?) It called for the impeachment of the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, “one of the most important agencies of Communism.” It considered the fluoridation of drinking water to be a plot worthy of Soviet socialism.

IMAGINE THE RIGHT WING IS A RUG

The JBS is still alive, and apparently kicking a little stronger since Mr. Obama's election. It still fights to “halt legislation and federal policies that threaten the independence of our country and our people.” But instead of U.S. Communists, its targets of predilection these days include the United Nations, NATO and the U.S. central bank, which it would like to see dismantled. It strives, according to its website, “to warn against and expose the forces that seek to abolish U.S. independence, build a world government or otherwise undermine our personal liberties and national independence.”

Rachel Maddow, the anti-Glenn Beck who plies her progressive politics on the rival MSNBC network, recently took a swipe at the Birchers in a way that, fair or not, helps to situate the group on the U.S. political spectrum. “Imagine the right wing is a rug, right?” she began. “And on the far edge of that rug is a fringe. Now imagine that that fringe also has a fringe. The fringe on the fringe of the right wing of the American conservative movement – that's the John Birch Society.”

That “fringe on the fringe” is also a proud sponsor of one of the most important gatherings of conservative thinkers in the United States, an event that will undoubtedly set the tone for Republican discourse in 2010 as the party aims to reclaim control of Congress in the November elections.

If that seems hard to fathom, Mr. Hofstadter would not be at all surprised.

The paranoid style “represents and old and recurring mode of expression in our public life,” he wrote six years after the John Birch Society's 1958 founding. “Our experience suggests too that, while it comes in waves of different intensity, it appears to be all but ineradicable.”


There are always several sides to every argument.

 
The luster wears off at the Globe and Mail. It will be interesting to see how (or if) the rest of the Legacy Media climbs down:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/why-time-passed-obama-by/article1415232/

Rex Murphy
Why Time passed Obama by
U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has been named Time's Person of the year.

U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has been named Time's Person of the year. AFP/Getty Images

The magazine's choice for Person of the Year says it all
 
Rex Murphy

Time magazine picked Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, as its Person of the Year. He gets the accolade for presiding over a “weak economy” that could have been “much, much weaker.” Pretty feeble. I can't imagine someone being named Athlete of the Year because while he “lost a few games” he could have lost “many, many more.”

It's a puzzling choice, even for a magazine that has previously hailed “you” as its Person of the Year. (No offence – I think “you” are pretty good, just not prince of the planet.) Some of the runners-up were pretty odd too: The Chinese Worker and Nancy Pelosi.

I suspect Time knew just as well as everybody else that the real person of the year, whether you worshipped him or were a critic, was – how could it be anyone else? – Barack Obama. Was not Barack Obama sworn in as President in 2009? Was he not – the descriptors are now bonded to his name – “the first black man to occupy the White House?” Was this not a “historic milestone?” Did he not, almost immediately, also win the Nobel Peace Prize? Was he not the predominant politico-celebrity figure of the entire world this year?

What was Time waiting for before it would name him as person of the year? Did he have to win Wimbledon with one hand tied behind his back while simultaneously directing repairs to the Large Hadron Collider?

I think Time went to the relatively faceless functionary Bernanke mainly not to name Barack Obama. Time, like a lot of its fellows in the wild world of the contemporary U.S. media, is in an awkward place with regards to Mr. Obama. Having devoted so much incense to his remarkable ascendancy, a great swath of his country's press is looking for a convenient and not too noticeable off-ramp while it – shall we say – recalibrates its enthusiasm.

It's an uncomfortable pivot from the audacity of hope to buyer's remorse. Very uncomfortable for those in the media who played the cheerleader for Mr. Obama, who skated by controversies that would have sunk other candidates or abandoned the ruthless investigations they would have pressed on less congenial candidates.

The ferocity they applied to the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, in contrast with the timidity they brought to his campaign, will in time come to be seen as one of the most shameful episodes in American journalism. Not so much for what they did to Ms. Palin, but for what they neglected to do in examining the candidate for the office that really counted. In some curious way, the U.S. media's bulldogging of Ms. Palin was kind of an inverted compensation for what they weren't doing to him.

Well, the bands have stopped playing for Barack Obama. At the end of 2009, the poll numbers have dropped mercilessly. He may yet get his health reform package, but only in the teeth of great public resistance. More Americans simply don't like what he's doing with health care than do. The great “cool” of Mr. Obama – essentially all those qualities that marked him as the non-George Bush, the anti-George Bush – is wearing a little thin now that Mr. Bush is really no longer a figure in play. That cool now is seen as a troubling lack of affect, an unsettling passionlessness. What really, in his public role, captures or commands the fundamental energies of Mr. Obama? What are his core convictions and aspirations? It's very hard to tell.

His eloquence is fading, more people now find it more a trick of rhythm and cadence – a mannerism – rather than felt thought in memorable language. His recent statement to an anxious America after the Christmas Day bomb plot was flat, off-key and utterly unpersuasive. He went to Copenhagen, played the frantic for the better part of a day and came home essentially empty-handed. Hugo Chavez is mocking him in precisely the same terms as he mocked poor Mr. Bush.

Most of all, Mr. Obama has exploded his own credentials as the agent of (genuine) hope and change. The promise to remodel the essentially harsh nature of modern politics, to seek transformation in the tone and substance of public life, to end Washington's buying and selling, is seen now, and seen very reluctantly such was the real hope he inspired, as empty. His White House is as dagger partisan as Richard Nixon's.

Almost a full year into his presidency, Mr. Obama is at a dangerous point. His ability to inspire has all but departed. The novelty of his historic ascension is over. And, late though it be, there are now questions about his effectiveness. As there are also doubts about whether that magnificently cool presence – his much-touted ability to distance himself from the turbulence and passions of those around him – springs from a fear of being overwhelmed by events rather than a confidence in mastering them.

No wonder Time gave him a pass.
 
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