FRAMESHOP

Segregation & Friends

Recently, Glenn Beck sat on the comfy couch of FOX's morning show "FOX & Friends" and declared that President Obama is a racist who hates white culture.   Of the three hosts who convened this broadcast gem, the one who disagreed with Beck--Brian Kilmeade--had recently declared on air that the white race in America had been weakened through interbreeding with non-whites, a statement for which he apologized after it sparked wide-scale outrage.  So on this particular morning, viewers who tuned into FOX & Friends watched a host who espouses white Aryan eugenics mixed it up with a guest inciting white anger at blacks, followed by some tips on summertime grilling. 

The fact that brand management rules broadcast media--particularly at FOX--leads me to question whether the segregationist flavor of FOX's morning could possibly be accidental.  Is it possible that nobody at FOX had an inkling about Kilmeade's belief in racial purity prior to his blurting it out on air?  They had to know.  A man who gleefully turns to the camera and bemoans racial mixing is also a guy who spouts off eugenic theories at parties and office meetings.  FOX knew about Kilmeade's views and they kept him on air anyway. 

The same is true of Beck's foolish idea that President Obama hates white culture.  The only way the bookers and marketing folks at FOX & Friends could not know Beck plays to segregationist fears of blacks when talking about the President is if they have all been in a coma for the past year.  And yet they booked him anyway, putting him on set for a chat with a guy who thinks that white blood in America has been contaminated by miscegenation. 

A morning show that positions itself to appeal to whites uncomfortable with the idea racial integration in America? So long as the numbers are solid, the media brand experts would say, why the heck not.

When media marketing and segregation mix, the result is not segments about burning crosses, but something that might be described as: segregated content.  Imagine what media content would look like if the broad social efforts to rid American society of persistent racism never happened and the result would be segregated content.

But there is no need to imagine. Just take a look at FOX & Friends homepage and  you will see segregated content in action.

The FOX & Friends homepage, this morning, included 41 photographs of faces.  Of those 41, 37 are of people who are racially white, 3 are African American, 1 is Asian.  Of the 41 faces, 11 are women, all are white.  10 out of eleven women have blond or light hair (the only dark-haired woman was in an ad).  Of the 3 black males pictured on the FOX & Friends homepage, 2 were criminals: a boy accused of stealing and a football player jailed for dogfighting (Michael Vick).  The third black male depicted was a "Grill Sergeant"--a soldier offering tips on barbecue.

To call this kind of content "racist" and leave it at that would be to miss the key point.  The FOX & Friends homepage on this day was not merely offensive or callous towards African-Americans in a thoughtless way on the order of "Whoops!  I didn't mean to say that."  Rather, it was a consciously structured media product: an internet platform populated with segregated content, tailored to meet the expectations of an audience that enjoys seeing a segregated vision of America as white men and blond women, with a few black criminals, athletes, and short-order cooks thrown in for color.  

Apologizing for a few comments on air did not change FOX & Friends' brand identity. And it will not change.  In the media business, the only time a brand changes is when it stops earning.

In this brand context it was inevitable that the political ideas which give rise to white segregation would occasionally find their way onto the FOX & Friends set.  As offensive as Kilmeade's and Beck's comments were to hundreds of millions of Americans, those kinds of segregationist comments did not offend the segment of the public that matters to FOX & Friends: the demographic the brand has been crafted to please. 

In the Twentieth Century, when the Civil Rights movement began, segregation in America was on the streets.  To confront it, anti-segregation activists used lunch counters sit-ins, and highway protests.  But what should Americans do to combat Twenty-first Century segregation manufactured by the branding machine that drives market differentiation in the media?  Not much.

The sad fact is that while legal segregation might have ended in the streets of America, media segregation is alive, kicking, and delivering to the bottom line in the FOX boardroom.  And as long as there are enough Americans who like what they see (e.g., blond woman, blond woman, blond woman...black male criminal), enough ad revenue to be mopped up doing it, and virtually no choice as to how we get our cable content delivered--that segregation will continue to thrive. 

So, welcome to the 1950s.  Segregation is alive and well on cable TV.

On Healthcare, Obama Needs More Drama

Given the widespread fear that has spread throughout the national healthcare debate, I was surprised by the virtual absence of emotion in President Obama's press conference performance, yesterday.  As a candidate, his speeches about "change" were so powerful that they spawned a pop culture industry.  And yet, now that he is President and talking healthcare "change"--a national policy that will end the daily suffering and humiliation of tens of millions of Americans--Obama's rhetorical passion has been displaced by the soporific drone of a mid-grade federal accountant.  Where is the passion, Mr. President?

I bring up the question of "passion" because the facts that Obama presented to the nation in his press conference were ghastly and shameful:  47,000,000 Americans without healthcare coverage, 14,000 people losing their health insurance every day, dozens of letters each day from parents with children who are dying from cancer and cannot get treatment. The combined level of human pain and anguish hidden in those statistics should be enough to make anyone tear out their own eyes, let alone raise their voice.  Instead, the President gave us this:

This is not just about the 47 million Americans who don't have any health insurance at all. Reform is about every American who has ever feared that they may lose their coverage if they become too sick, or lose their job, or change their job. It's about every small business that has been forced to lay off employees or cut back on their coverage because it became too expensive. And it's about the fact that the biggest driving force behind our federal deficit is the skyrocketing cost of Medicare and Medicaid. (link)

It was dull stuff.  Ho, hum at best.

OK, sure.  Health care reform is about all those things the president described.  The cost of inaction is greater than the cost of action, true.  I agree.  But healthcare reform is also about:  the infuriating inhumanity of the current system all! 

People are living lives in fear--children are dying, for goodness sakes.  This is about injustice and the anger that tens of millions of people have been trapped in lives of fear as a result of  health insurance business model that Congress has been too cowardly to confront for decades. And this is about the very real, very legitimate fears that people have as a result of thinking about the social and cultural shift that will result from having a public healthcare system that did not exist before.

These are legitimate fears, and people are talking passionately about them all over the country. 

What worries me about Obama's "no drama" approach to the healthcare debate is not that he simply refuses to raise his voice when necessary.  The problem is that most Americans are engaged in a deeply passionate argument about this issue, but when we tuned in to the President's press conference, it was as if the President was completely outside those emotions. 

Obama's words seemed to be governed by the logic of balance sheets rather than the emotion of lives in the balance.

What are the emotions in the healthcare debate? They seem to fall into three main topics: denial, access, and money.

Tens of millions of Americans are outraged by the current culture of health insurance coverage and claim denial to the point that they can no longer speak in a reasonable tone about the issue.  While there are 47,000,000 people without insurance in this country, I would hazard a conservative guest that there are at least that many people each year who have legitimate health insurance claims denied each year.  These people are sick and tired of being fleeced by a system that makes them pay up front only to be denied coverage when they need it. They are shouting at the top of their lungs about healthcare reform.

But they are not the only people raising their voices.

There are also millions of people who are truly afraid that a new healthcare system dominated by a big public competitor will suddenly make it very difficult to see the doctors and get the procedures they need.  These people are very concerned about having to wait months just to see, for example, a kidney doctor should they need one.  They are scared to death about rumors they hear about other national healthcare systems where people die waiting for procedures that people with insurance in the U.S. get without waiting.  These people are sick and tired of being told that everything will work out fine for them in the new system without being told how it will work.  They are shouting at the top of their lungs about healthcare reform.

But they are not the only people raising their voices.

There are also millions of people who are truly worried that a new public option will bankrupt the United States government, leading to public deficits that will undercut any chance we have at a better life from better health insurance. These people are very concerned that the new public approach to healthcare will be a failed program like some of the over budget, overly bureaucratic failed public programs in the past.  They believe that a public option will just lead to the healthcare equivalent of million dollar wrenches and thousand dollar washers--the sort of government spending horror stories we used to hear so often.  These people are sick and tired of being told that the new system will not cost any money more than we are already spending.  They are shouting at the top of their lungs about healthcare reform.

Now, given all this shouting, the White House seems to believe that the best way for the President to chart a path through the noise is to focus on the relative cost effectiveness of reform versus the continued high cost of inaction. 

The White House has chosen, in other words, to turn the Commander in Chief into the Accountant in Chief.

Bad decision.  Very bad decision.

Listening to the President roll out massive, tangled descriptions of one set of expenditures "incentivizing" the cost differential of a second set of expenditures was the political equivalent of clipping off a birds wings and then pushing it out of plane and telling it to fly.

Obama's single greatest strength as a politicial has been his ability to speak in such a way that it makes Americans feel that we are soaring to new heights together.

Franklin Roosevelt had that gift.  John Kennedy had that gift.  And Barack Obama has that gift, too.  And needs to use it.

To find his passion again, this is where I suggest President Obama start: with his own words.

About midway through his press conference, the President was asked why he was in such a hurry to pass healthcare reform, to which he said the following:

I'm rushed because I get letters every day from families that are being clobbered by health care costs. And they ask me, "Can you help?"

So I've got a middle-aged couple that will write me and they say, "Our daughter just found out she's got leukemia and, if I don't do something soon, we just either are going to go bankrupt or we're not going to be able to provide our daughter with the care that she needs."

And in a country like ours, that's not right.

That is the scenario on which a passionate appeals to a caring nation can be built.  Helping parents provide care for their children and protect them from the injustices of the healthcare system--that is the essence of a passionate approach to the kind of reform we need.

And then, having set the stage with real voices expressing real concern, the President should drop the accounting rhetoric and state simply how much each of us can expect to have deducted from our paychecks to pay for healthcare coverage: 2 percent of our take home pay?  3 percent? 5 percent? 

Just tell us.

And then tell us what kind of social and cultural change we can expect in our experience of healthcare. If we take the new public option, will we be able to go to our current doctor or will there be new clinics and new doctors we need to see?

Just tell us.

Even all  the details are not in place, yet:  just tell us the basics. 

The President needs to lay out the principled, passionate reason why we need healthcare reform, and then he needs to answer the few big questions that everybody wants to hear.

When it comes to healthcare reform, we need more drama, not less drama, from Obama.

Sotomayor Post-Game: GOP Must Get Real or Get Dead (at the Polls)

Watching the media coverage of the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, two things struck me as clear political conclusions : (1) the Bronx native was politically prepared to prove she was qualified to be a Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States; (2) the Republican Party must either get real on the issue of race in politics or face certain death in national elections from here on out.

Whoever was in charge of the so called "murder boards" charged with drilling Sotomayor until she was prepared did a great job.  The lesson from the Alito and Roberts hearings was simple: be humble, sound scholarly, show deference when confronted by ideological opponents.  Sotomayor passed this test in flying colors. 

Beyond that, Sotomayor set a politically pleasing human tone for the hearings--something neither Alito nor Roberts managed to do (Roberts sounded like a robot; Alito came off like a sour robot).  From the room filled with happy family members, to the side stories about her fascination with baseball, to her million-dollar smile: Sotomayor gave Democrats a real personality to play up, and the cameras loved it. 

While there is rarel a "knockout" punch thrown in a judicial nomination hearing, Sotomayor won almost every round on points. And in the end, it was obvious she had weathered the storm.

The same thing cannot be said for the GOP, whose emphasis on the "wise latina" turned the hearings into a public display of an out-of-touch Republican campaign strategy: racially divide and conquer.

If one thing will be true about America over the next 10 years it will be this:  we will be more diverse ethnically and racially, not less.  How the GOP imagined they would make electoral gains at the polls by using a judicial nomination hearing to air old resentments about "reverse discrimination" is beyond comprehension.

But air old resentments they did.

Over and over again, every single Republican Senator in the hearings pretended in public not to understand what Sotomayor meant when she told a group of young Latina students that she hoped a "wise Latina" would make the best judge.

Expressions of ethnic pride are not only commonplace in America, today, but they have been commonplace for roughly the last 20 years.  And yet, somehow, this group of white men enshrined in the last relatively unintegrated private club of American public life--the United States Senate--pretended not to understand the difference between, on the one  hand, a public call for ethnic and gender pride issued to inspire young people and, on the other hand, a public display of racist and sexist prejudice hurled with the intention of malice and injury.

How sad for these Senators that they could not understand.  How very sad indeed.

The difference between expressing pride in one's identity and expressing hurtful prejudice is so simple that, nowadays, most American children under the age of 10 can explain it.  That is because the American system of education teaches children two fundamental lessons at a relatively early age:  How to recognize and avoid being cruel to others in racist and sexist terms, and how to celebrate the increasing diversity of American life. 

I am in my early 40s, so I remember when these two key concepts started to be taught aggressively on my college campus.  The time was, roughly, the mid-1980s.  We read books that reflected on an author's ethnic or gender identity, talked about the langauge we used in writing and conversation, and looked for ways to move beyond a general culture rife with intentional  and accidential cruetly on the basis of race, class and gender.  They were difficult lessons politically and emotionally, but they were not difficult intellectually to get.  I did not agree with 100% of the points made in those college classes, but I got the general idea and it made a difference it my life, as it did with everyone in my generation.

At the same time--the mid-1980s--these lessons quickly made their way into all levels of education in America.  By the 1990s, most school children in the country were familiar with a distinction that had not generally been visited on their parents:  being a good citizen meant celebrating cultural diversity, and trying one's best not to be racist or sexist.    Even if they do not all agree, there are few kids between the age of 15 and 21 in America, today, who do not understand that our society generally frowns on racism and looks proudly on celebrations of ethnic diversity.

Enter the Senate Republicans who questioned Sonia Sotomayor.

By their questions, the Republicans suggested time and time again that they did not understand--not at all--why a successful, woman judge of Puerto Rican ancestry might stand up in front of a room full of young Puerto Rican girls and express pride in her gender and ethnicity.  To them, it was "no different" than racism (e.g., labelling a bathroom 'whites only'). "I hope a wise latina makes a better judge" and "move to the back of the bus"--no different, all the same. Or so the Senate GOP wanted Americans listening to the hearings to believe.

Rather than sounding like a credible challenge to Sotomayor's credentials, the Republican questioning of her "wise latina" remark sounded like a blast from America's racist past--as if by some wonderous trick of science, these men in the Senate had walked out of 1974 and straight into the hearings of 2009.  Ethnic identity? Racial diversity?  Prejudice vs. pride?  What strange words all of these!  We've heard nothing about this.

Of course, by the end of this antequated form of racial political theater, the real reason for the Republican attention to the "wise latina" comment was revealed.  Writing in his weekly column, outspoken Latino-phobe Pat Buchanan revealed that the whole attack on Sotomayor's comment was really just an attempt to get votes by rallying white men to fear a Latina judge:

What they must do is expose Sotomayor, as they did not in the case of Ginsburg, as a political activist whose career bespeaks a lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males to the degree necessary to bring about an equality of rewards in society.

Sonia is, first and foremost, a Latina. She has not hesitated to demand, even in college and law school, ethnic and gender preferences for her own. Her concept of justice is race-based.

("How to  Handle Sonia")

Of course, this is exactly what the Senate GOP seems to have done, even though Buchanan lambasts them for not doing it.  Rather than actually pursuing Sotomayor on the basis of her career, they focused on the "wise latina" comment with an eye towards stoking the fear and resentment of "white males."  Sotomayor is  not an American like other Americans, was the case they made.  She is incapable of rendering any kind of judicial temperament that is not "race-based," was the implication.

Ironically, even before Sotomayor's nomination, Buchanan had been selling this kind of fear of a hostile Latino invasion of America via his best-selling books.  While he offers relatively benign commentary on MSNBC, Buchanan's books are on fire with horrific predictions about the "death" of white American culture at the hands of "militant" Latinos hell-bent on reconquering America. Buchanan predicts that America culture will die in a great breeding war, and lambasts liberals as being too drunk, too high, and too concerned about ethnic poetry to do anything about it.  He predicts the same for Europe at the hands of Arabic speakers.

For almost 20 years Buchanan has been making these predictions of doom about the death of white culture, while for the same 20 years America has been transformed into a culture that celebrates diversity.

Pat Buchanan's views of on the great race war of the 20th Century have not only been proven wrong by time, but they have been demonsrated wrong more recently at the national polls.  In the 2008 election, vast millions of diverse Americans helped elect the first non-white President, many driven by a deep conviction that ethnic and cultural diversity at the highest level of public office was a good thing for the country--a convinction nurtured by the fudnamental lessons about racism and diversity taught widely in schools since the 1980s. 

Given all this--why would the Senate GOP possibly follow this losing strategy of racial divide and conquer in the Sotomayor hearings?  The answer, most likely, is that things always seem darkest right before the dawn of political shift in a party.  

While it is impossible to make any predictions about a Republican Party that collectively cannot decide if it wants to keep or jetison the political travesty that is Sarah Palin, the Republican Party is certainly on the edge of a profound realization when it comes to the politics of race:  get real or get dead (at the polls).

For decades, now, the GOP has been following the racist advice of people like Buchanan with great success.  Racially dividing and conquering the electorate has worked at both the local and national level.  But that time is over and it does not take a genius to figure out that a new set of ideas will soon emerge in the GOP--or else.

Now, this does not mean that suddenly everyone in the GOP is going to start attending classess on gender-neutral language and come out in support of affirmative action.  Not a chance.  A new position on race politics for the GOP does not mean a sea change of ideas.

It does mean, however, that the voices at the top of the GOP pecking order who have been pushing racial divide for decades will slowly start to fall to the side. New voices with new strategies will emerge.  Those in the GOP who know in their hearts that racial division will not win elections anymore will start to find new ways to make that case persuasively and offer new ideas that actually can win elections.

What will be a sign that this change has started to happen?  Stay tuned for the mid-term elections in 2010.  Pat Buchanan will still be on MSNBC telling everyone who will listen that the Democrats are the party that hates white men and loves "militant Latina judges," but there will also be a new crop of commentators who will have more  conservative ideas crafted with 2016 in mind instead of 1970.

Or at least there better be a new crop. Because if Pat Buchanan is still the leading media voice offering GOP advice by the 2012 election, the GOP may not be around for 2016.

The Post-Mortem Politics of Sarah Palin

In the short time since her odd and still unexplained resignation, most journalists will admit that Sarah Palin will never, ever be President of the United States, let alone launch anything vaguely resembling a successful bid for the nomination.  Nonetheless, Americans can expect a summer full of repetitive, insipid media improv on the theme, "What caused the political death of Sarah Palin?"  The fact is, few in the media can resist a ripping good political autopsy, and Sarah Palin inspires the best postmortem politics this country has seen in decades.

Bright Lights, Big Campaign
The first whiff of postmortem Palinology started right after her resignation "speech."  Catching up with the Governor on an amateurishly staged "traditional family fishing outing," during which Palin donned size XXL red rubber gloves, yanked at nets, and gazed off square-jawedly into the 10:00pm Alaska sunshine.  Dressed smartly in Weather Channel hand-me-downs, Andrea Mitchell had the scoop and used it to officially kick of the political autopsy:

MITCHELL:  Some people said you saw the bright lights of the national campaign and you came back, and it was very hard to readjust to the nitty gritty work of being--

PALIN:  The "nitty gritty," like, you mean the fish slime and the dirt under the fingernails and stuff that is me.

MITCHELL: No, no, no.  Juneau:  The state capital.  The hard, legislative slog.

PALIN:  No...that's not...I am a fighter. I thrive on challenge.

(full video here)

Palin's plan, clearly, was to clean up her public image with a generous application of "fish slime and dirt under the fingernails and stuff," which she assures Mitchell is her true self. But Mitchell would have none of it.  The forensic pathologist performs the autopsy, not the corpse. So, Mitchel pushes a "bright lights, big campaign" theory of Palin's failure, asking her to comment on what "some people said."

Check out my
new column at
Mediaite.com--
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Putting aside for a moment Palin's weak attempt to reinvent her family as common fisher folk, Mitchell's theory of a rural state governor being overwhelmed--politically crippled--by her short time on the national stage does not hold much water.   Is Mitchell really claiming that Palin was a strong and capable leader until--zap! The bright lights, big sounds, and big audiences of the national stage made her reticent and weak?  It makes little sense.

Realistically, the failed logic in Mitchell's theory of Palin's political death mattered little in the interview.   Mitchell's shoreline examination was seized as an opportunity to whip up the forensic frenzy. And the Today Show, where the interview premiered, likely saw a bump up in its dailies as a result of the effort.

Show Me The Money!
Andrea Mitchell's "Dances With Fish" interview showcased the willingness of the elite-of-the-elite in the broadcast media to roll up their sleeves and stick their hands right into the guts of the Palin political corpse.  The Associated Press then took it down to the mucky depths.

In a recent AP piece filed by Mary Pemberton, once-and-future son-in-law Levi Johnson is cited as the lone source of the theory that makes it into the article's headline:  "Palin Resigned Because of Money."

Suffice it say that citing a talking fish as a source would be more credible than Levi Johnson, particularly since Johnson is working on a tell-all book about the month (one whole month) he claims to have lived with the Palin family: "Johnston says he lived with the Palin family from early December to the second week in January."

After laying out Johnson's impeccable credentials as an expert in postmortem Palinology, Pemberton then gives the lad full license to expound at length, yielding this expansive insight:

"I think the big deal was the book. That was millions of dollars," said Johnston, who has had a strained relationship with the family but now says things have improved.

(full story)

Sure.  That settles it, then.  Looks like Johnson is also suffering from the aftershock of the bright lights.

One has to wonder,  here, not just about the writing of an article that cites a disgruntled not-quite-son-in-law with a book contract as an expert, but also about the perilous journey the piece must have made through the entire editing and fact checking system of one of the world's most sterling contributors to the daily news fact base.  Editors, fact-checkers--interns--all must have seen this quote from Johnson and signed off on the piece. 

The Horror, The Horror
Pieces like the AP Levi Johnson post get published for a simple reason:  Once the postmortem gravy train gets rolling, what passes as a credible "expert" on the dead political career in question can range from the ridiculous to the absurd.   Kiss-and-tell boyfriends? Other Presidential candidates?  A Salmon caught on the family outing? If it can offer up a timely sound byte on the demise of Palin--why the heck not.

And thus, lacking any further comment from the fish: enter Mike Huckabee.

"In a primary this is going to be an issue she'll have to face. Will she be able to withstand the pressure?" Thus spoke Huckabee, who went on to declare that Palin's political corpse will rise again.  Without pause, dozens of respected journalists quoted him--as if Huckabee were in anyway qualified to comment on Sarah Palin.   Huckabee's comment was a transparent attempt to use the story to remind the public that he was going to run for president, but for now he was play acting as a forensic anthropologist.

Huckabee and Johnson aside, though, the standout Palin postmortem to date was an op-ed penned by Peggy Noonan for the Wall Street journal ("A Farewell To Harms"). 

The sense one gets from reading Noonan's analysis of Palin is similar to what one might feel if famed French gastronome, Curnonsky, had published an op-ed decrying the culinary horror of a Filet-O-Fish sandwich. "Mon dieu!"

"Horror" is precisely the word that Noonan lights upon to describe--not so much the political career of Sarah Palin--but her own feelings when listening to Sarah Palin perform political rhetoric (Noonan's "horrifying" punchline comes at the end of a long set up):

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.

Why did Sarah Palin fail as a politician?  Because, old chap, there just are not enough gin gimlets in the world to get us through one more minute of her rambling.  Distasteful stuff.

Noon's op-ed is little more than a high-brow Palin autopsy for the investor class. To her credit (Noonan is no slouch), she deftly dismisses 99% of the other theories of Palin's demise floating about in the media.  What remains, however, is a very odd notion:  if Noonan finds Palin distasteful, that alone can serve as an explanation for her downfall.  As if to lend her theory more credibility, Noonon also admits that she found George W. Bush dreadful, too.  There's never enough gin when you need it.

Dying, Dying...Alive
It is not hard to predict where all this is heading, even if staring into the political crystal ball does not sell quite as many tickets as staring into a political corpse on a slab.

Having hit journalistic rock-bottom, postmortem Palinology will now make the rounds on the late night comedy shows.  We can expect her reappearance on Saturday Night Live and Mad TV, if not a long term stay on each.  She will make cameos in those farcical movies that make fun of other movies, and show up in a couple thousand YouTube videos.

The postmortem banter will continue through the summer, die down a bit, then re-emerge with a vengeance with the publication of books by Levi Johnson and Palin herself.  Suffice it to say that every book published about Palin from this point out will contribute to the general postmortem theme. 

I am 100% confident in predicting that Sarah Palin's own postmortem on herself--her book--will return to the theme she pushed on Andrea Mitchell:  fish slime.  Palin's own theory of what caused her political death will no doubt be that politics took her too far away from her true, trawling self.  This daughter of a school secretary and a high school coach, will spend hundreds of pages making the case that she has family roots in the simple life of throwing a net into the water and pulling it back.  Her true love, she will assure us, was always the people and the land of Alaska.  Politics might have dirtied her image, but there is nothing she likes more than dirt under her nails.

I guess some of the dead do tell lies after all.

Is postmortem politics bad for the media or bad for anything else?  One could say it is bad in that by its sheer volume it keeps other stories out of the public mind.   Ask 100 Americans this week what the word "Uighur" means, and there is a good chance some will ask, "Is it a kind of fish?"  Ask those same 100 what "public option" refers to and a few more might be following the story enough to explain it.  Many Americans for sure are following the important news about ethnic strife in China's provinces or the healthcare debate here at home.  The postmortem Palin coverage does not silence these stories, but they are harder to follow with so much Palin, Palin, Palin pumping through the political media.

The other harm is that the vast amount of money that can be made by churning a good political postmortem story is enough to lead people to strange conclusions.  Despite a dead career, Sarah Palin  might just choose to insert herself back into politics if her book sells, say, 5 million copies.  Or she might get an offer for a radio show, which would add her voice to the drumbeat of right-wing political talk radio.

Time will tell, but one thing is for sure:  Palin has a lot more dying to do in the media if she ever wants to come back from the dead.

Making Sense of the Pitney-Millbank Spat

The recent kerfuffle between Nico Pitney (Huffington Post), Dana Millbank (Washington Post) about a clumsy exchange in a White House Press briefing brings to mind two media mavens rarely mentioned in the same sentence:  Marshall McLuhan and Thomas Jefferson.  Taken together, they remind us that a tiff between a blogger and a journalist is about more than questions at a press conference or off-color comments whispered above a closed mike. It raises ethical issues about the role of the press in our democracy and about the need for ethical leadership in a media environment where government, new media, and traditional journalism are increasingly interlaced.

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(Check out my new column at Media-ite http://mediaite.com--a great new site!)

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McLuhan: The Medium was the Message in Iran

Amidst all the journalistic gate keeping and blogger ballyhoo over whether or not the White House seeded a question--the coverage has largely neglected to ask why we got here in the first place:  because the medium was message.

What medium and what message?  The social media that gave shape to the Iran election crisis set the stage for what happened in the June 23, 2009, White House Press Conference. 

The White House would not have reached out (seeded, elicited,whatever) and then asked Pitney a question; Millbank would not have criticized Pitney; and nobody would have created the Twitter hash tag "#dickwhisperer," if the Iran election crisis had not been so thoroughly intertwined with new social media. The "medium" of the Iran election crisis really was "the message," and that was not merely one reason the White House sought out Pitney--it was was a huge reason.

In the days prior to the his press conference, as the President watched the Iran crisis unfold, someone if not everyone in the White House must have realized that all traditional broadcast media would soon be cut off by Ahmadinejad.  The only way to get an unfiltered message from to the Mousavi supporters would be to somehow leap into the white-water rapids of the Twitter coverage--to take Obama's enormous political cache as a global figure and use it to create a 'push' in the social media, a wave of momentum and hope amidst the ebb and flow of Tweeting moving in and out of the protests.  And so, the idea must have been hatched to get a message out to the Iranian people by taking aggressive steps to insert the President directly into the medium of the protests via an unorthodox press room maneuver.

It was a brilliant move by the Obama White House for several reasons.

Even if Obama did not want to formally back Mousavi, by asking Pitney for a question from the Iranian people that he collected via Twitter and the blogs, Obama implicitly endorsed the medium and message of the Mousavi protests.  By bringing the key Iran coverage aggregator (Pitney) onto the White House stage, Obama gave voice to the very movement Ahmadinejad sought to silence. It was brilliant political theater and while it did not lead to a turnabout in Iran, it stuck a craw in Ahmadinejad's side and let the world know that the White House was not a dinosaur that shuts down the presses when people are communicating via cell phone.  This was a U.S. President who "gets" the medium driving change on a global scale.  This was a U.S. President who reads what bloggers put out there.  Ahmadinejad, by contrast, came across as a petulant Grand Inquisitor: brutal in his ways and brutally out of touch with contemporary ways of doing politics.  From the grave, McLuhan applauded the White House.

Jefferson:   A Free Press Must Be Independent

Having been asked to dance with the President so the White House could walk a delicate line between diplomacy and political manipulation, the Huffington Post--fairly or unfairly--was tripped up by the tangled ethical web that now constitutes the relationship between the press and government.

To understand these ethics--what is right or wrong in this situation--we are compelled to return to Jefferson's compelling principle that a free press is one of the crucial pillars of our Democracy.

Here, we have to say that the bone of Millbank's contention was sharp, but misguided.  The ethical question was not whether Pitney allowed the White House to seed a question, but under what circumstances does the ongoing interaction between the press and the executive branch of government diminish our ability maintain the principles of a Jeffersonian free society?

As Pitney's defenders have pointed out, the previous administration cultivated a kind of interaction with the press that significantly undercut Jefferson's principles.  In particular, when the time came for the American public to inform themselves as to whether or not an invasion of Iraq was warranted, the White House had so co-opted the national press corp that the media coverage was unable to provide citizens with the basic information they needed to make informed decisions. 

In response to that breakdown, the blogsphere emerged as a counterbalance to what was widely seen as a national media that had lost its way during the Bush administration--for good and for bad.  Rising out of the ashes of a free press was a new citizen-driven, open source media that, while only occasionally capable of generating the initial fact line of a story, was extremely nimble at ferreting out political manipulation and forcing counterpoints into the headlines.

Largely free from the institutional constraints and salaries of formal journalism, bloggers became a much needed check and balance to help re-establish a free press that could, in the Jeffersonian sense, help citizens inform themselves and make decisions.

Multiple mid-term elections and an historic presidential campaign later, bloggers are a lot more institutionalized than they once were. 

The Huffington Post in particular, with readership numbers that can compete against most major media outlets, now occupies a gray zone between institutional journalism and new media.  And like it or not, Huffington Post is now faced with the very same ethical questions concerning interaction with the White House that tripped up traditional journalism just a few short years ago.

Conclusion: Stepping Up to Civic Leadership

As all but a few producers at CNN have figured out by now, the solution to the spat caused by the White House pushing a blogger to the front of the press room is not to stage on-air shouting matches between supposedly "old" and "new" media.  Keeping in mind that the truth is sometimes factual and sometimes philosophical, there is truth to both sides of the debate between Pitney and Millbank. 

The solution is for everyone to stop hiding behind the pretense of gate keeping, on the one hand, and naivete on the other. 

If formally trained reporters would stop drawing a chalk circle around the word "journalist" just so they could push bloggers outside of it, then they could finally realize that a healthy civic sphere in the year 2009 requires a few evolutionary steps forward in the idea of the quaint Jeffersonian conception of the "press."  In an era where politicians have become nimble at manipulating the press, we need voices in the media who concern themselves with preventing the damage politics can cause to the civics. That does not mean journalism dies. It simply must grow.

Likewise, bloggers who already have a foothold in the grand-daddy of all plum assignments--the White House Press corp--and who have far-reaching and varied access to government and broadcast media at all levels, need to stop pretending that just found a way in the back door. If the Iran election protests teach us anything it is that bloggers are firmly at the core of politics and media on a global scale and now is the time for bloggers to show leadership on big civic questions. 

Of course, so long as shouting matches make good ratings, both journalists and bloggers may have a hard time stepping up.  But the time is now and the talent is there to drive the public sphere forward.