GOP Primary Show: Non-Stop News And Noise In The Age Of Twitter

Huff Post- Posted: 2/7/12  |  Updated: 2/7/12

Michael Calderone

Last week, Jon Ralston, a veteran Las Vegas Sun columnist, dared reporters to ignore Donald Trump’s unveiling of his presidential endorsement — with low expectations about how that might play out.

“I suggest media boycott of @RealDonaldTrump event in Vegas,” Ralston tweeted. “Anyone with me? That’s what I thought.”

Ralston knew, of course, that the nation’s political reporters — the same tribe who breathlessly covered Trump’s half-hearted flirtation last year with a presidential run, his “birther” sideshow and his thwarted plans to host and moderate a GOP debate — wouldn’t ignore the real estate huckster’s “major announcement.”

And, indeed, they didn’t, thereby sparking the latest mini-drama in the reality show otherwise known as the 2012 Republican presidential primaries.

While any campaign reporter you meet will say it’s ridiculous to give any more oxygen to Trump in this election cycle (and some of them will even go so far as to mock the primaries’ circus-like atmosphere on Twitter) many of them still raced to cover the Trump endorsement.

In their haste, several major news organizations — including the Associated Press, The New York Times, Politico and CBS News — erroneously reported that Trump planned to endorse former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Countless others, including The Huffington Post, repeated those reports. All had to backtrack when it became clear former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would get the Trumpster’s nod. Come showtime, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News all had Romney live, standing at a podium featuring a Trump plaque, in a Trump hotel, accepting a Trump endorsement.

Reporters swarmed the Trump event for the same reason they have pursued and then coughed up almost every other bit of minutiae, no matter how irrelevant or meaningless, around the primaries. In a media landscape replete with Twitter, Facebook, personal blogs and myriad other digital, broadcast and print sources, nothing is too inconsequential to be made consequential.

Political junkies, political operatives and political reporters consume most of this dross, and in this accelerated, 24/7 news cycle, a day feels like a week, with the afternoon’s agreed-upon media narrative getting turned on its head by the evening’s debate. Candidates rise, fall, and rise again, all choreographed to the rat-a-tat background noise of endless minutia.

MORE HERE

Read Full Post »

Michael Moore On Occupy Wall Street: We’re The Majority, ‘Never Forget That’

MEDIAite

by Alex Alvarez | 9:21 pm, September 28th, 2011
» 181 comments Filmmaker Michael Moore, who continues his vigil at the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protest in lower Manhattan, dropped in on The Last Word to let host Lawrence O’Donnell know how things are going.

Moore kicked things off by giving a synopsis of what the protest is not about:

We’re not down here to support Senate bill 2567. We’re beyond that. They had their chance a long time ago to try and fix this. They didn’t fix it because they’re in the pocket of these people down here on Wall Street. So this is not about supporting some piece of legislation or “let’s get behind some politician.”

“It’s not about ‘policy wonkness’ or ‘Beltway bullshit,’” he continued, to the delighted soundless clapping of those around him. He also noted that he cannot believe he lives in a country where people on Wall Street haven’t had to face a single arrest while 100 peaceful protesters are arrested.

“Well, you live in a country where that kind of thing has to be protested and is being protested,” offered O’Donnell. He then turned the conversation over to a question he’d received on Twitter — a question that many have had since the protest’s inception: “I wonder if mmoore could articulate some specific, tangible goals 4 this protest, as I’ve yet 2 hear any & really would like to.” Indeed, @leenie909!

Moore said that this protest is unlike others because “there’s no membership form, there’s no one person who comes in here and says ‘Now this is our agenda and this is the way it ought to be!”

He also added that there were a whole variety of Americans participating (even “Ron Paul people”), and that they had strength in numbers:

This is our country. We’re the majority. The majority. We’re the majority. Never forget that, that the people who work for a living in this country, we are the people. Not the people up here who are taking people’s pensions and their bank accounts and ruining it and destroying their lives. They are not running this country anymore. They think they are, but that’s gonna come to an end right now.

Have a look at the video, via MSNBC. And please take note of the “Fox News camera person” behind Moore:

source: MEDIAite

Video credits: thesecretstore

Read Full Post »

Occupy Wall Street will not be Televised on M$M

Olbermann calls out media hypocrisy on ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest

RawStory posted 09.21.11

By Eric W. Dolan

Keith Olbermann pointed out Wednesday night on Countdown that the major newspapers had been ignoring the five-day-long “Occupy Wall Street” protests, but would have scrambled to cover a similar-sized tea party protest.

“Why isn’t any major news outlet covering this?” he asked. “If that’s a tea party protest in front of Wall Street about Ben Bernanke putting stimulus funds into it, it’s the lead story on every network news cast. How is that disconnect possible in this country today with so many different outlets and so many different ways of transmitting news?”

His guest, author Will Bunch, suggested the disconnect was caused in part by the news networks being out of touch with the pain of the 25 million Americans who are unemployed.

Read Full Post »

CNN media $pin in Libya ~Business as usual

NATO allow weapons to Rebels OPENLY

Telegraph August 12th, 2011

By kingsley

Arms controls continue to be flouted in the context of the Libyan armed conflict. Both France and Qatar have openly admitted to supplying arms to the rebels as a complementary strategy to the NATO-led air strikes. Such actions not only undermine the United Nations arms embargo regime, but may also violate contractual obligations between arms-exporting and arms-importing states.

When arms are officially exported from one government to another, the recipient government is usually required to endorse an end-user certificate. This is a written commitment from the arms-purchasing government that it will not transfer the arms to other parties, especially if such a transfer is in violation of a UN arms embargo. However, there is no international end-user monitoring and enforcement process in place. Monitoring is the sole preserve of the exporting state, but such monitoring is typically under-developed, with the US ‘Blue Lantern’ programme being the most advanced.

Qatar’s arming of the Libyan rebels is particularly problematic as Qatar imports the vast majority of its arms, and hence would have been required to endorse end-user certificates. Over the past five years Qatar’s main arms supplier has been the United States (in monetary terms), but it has also imported arms from many other states, such as France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands and South Africa. The key question to be asked is, to what extent has Qatar reneged on end-user agreements?

Article

Video of smuggled armaments

Read Full Post »

George Soros Responds To Glenn Beck, Fox News Attacks (VIDEO)

George Soros Responds To Glenn Beck, Fox News Attacks (VIDEO)

HuffPost- First Posted: 02/19/11 09:04 AM Updated: 02/19/11 09:13 AM

Liberal billionaire George Soros responded to Glenn Beck’s frequent attacks on him during an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that is set to air on this Sunday’s episode of “Fareed Zakaria GPS.”

Beck has repeatedly cast Soros as the “puppet master” and chief architect of a shadowy group of left-wing people and organizations who are determined to destroy the current geopolitical system and replace it with a “new world order.” Beck’s statements about Soros’ experiences during the Holocaust have proved so controversial that 400 rabbis signed a letter asking Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to “sanction” his host for making them.

Speaking about Beck, Soros told Zakaria, “I would be amused if people saw the joke in it,” adding that he thinks Beck is “projecting” the views of Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News, and who Soros accused of “telling the people some falsehoods and leading the government in the wrong direction.”

Soros said he thinks Fox News “has imported the methods of George Orwell, you know, newspeak, where you can tell the people falsehoods and deceive them.”

WATCH:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

MORE HERE

Read Full Post »

Obama To Send Troops To Arizona Border: McCain Still Not Happy

Obama to Send More National Guardsmen to AZ Border: McCain of Course Still Not Happy

Crooks and Liars- By Heather Wednesday May 26, 2010 6:00am

How’s that pandering working out for you President Obama? Sen. Get-Off-My-Lawn McCain is never going to be happy even if he sent the 6000 troops he’s demanding. As Digby pointed out “it’s paranoid, wingnut crap that has no bearing on reality”. I agree with her here as well:

Mean Old Man McCain says we need 6,000 troops on the border, so I’m guessing President Goldilocks will say his “compromise” on this is “just right.” But hey, ratcheting up xenophobia is so good for everyone right now, why not just pretend there’s a huge problem that doesn’t really exist? We don’t have enough real ones apparently. After all, there are some Democrats who apparently think they need to show how much they hate Mexicans in order to win, so it’s all good.

(Oh, and remember that while there’s a huge “appetite” for expensive, stupid bullshit like this, there’s none for extending unemployment benefits to the lazy bums who want to live like kings on 250 bucks a week from government rather than get a non-existent job.)

That money would be better spent doing something about this disaster in the Gulf as well. Arizona’s Attorney General Terry Goddard on the other hand seemed pleased with the decision and was critical of the tone of McCain’s rhetoric. I’m sure he knows full well we wouldn’t see McCain acting like this if he didn’t have wingnut J.D. Hayworth for a primary challenger.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

Read Full Post »

Greenspan And Paulson: Pure Hypocrites On Bush Tax Cuts vs. Deficits? (VIDEO)

Calling out Greenspan and Paulson for Pure Hypocrisy on Bush Tax Cuts vs. Deficits

Crooks & Liars– By bluegal Monday Feb 15, 2010 8:00am

I still can’t understand why David Gregory has a job, when it takes another reporter from another network to show the hypocrisy Gregory’s own guests are displaying right at his Meet The Press desk.

Fareed Zakaria argued on February 4 that the budget Obama inherited was completely broken in the first place, first by the Bush tax cuts and secondly by the prescription drug plan for the elderly and two wars that were “off budget.” The Bush Administration set the next several generations up with a massive budgetary mess that will not go away with politics running the governmental show.

But Zakaria points out that even those who are NOT elected officials, including Hank Paulson and Alan Greenspan, are so subservient to the corporate overlords that they will not hear of rescinding the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy even after they wail over the horrible-ness of the deficits.

Until some grown-ups run the show in Washington, our Federal financial house will be a condemned hovel.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Read Full Post »

Seymour Hersh Explains Dick Cheney’s “Executive Assassination” Squads

Seymour Hersh: Secret U.S. Forces Carried Out Assassinations in ‘a Lot of’ Countries, Including in Latin America

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted March 31, 2009.

The investigative journalist for The New Yorker explains his recent bombshell revelation about Dick Cheney’s “executive assassination” squads.

Amy Goodman: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh created a stir last month when he said the Bush administration ran an executive assassination ring that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney. Hersh made the comment during a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10th.

Seymour Hersh: Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination wing, essentially. And it’s been going on and on and on. And just today in the Times there was a story saying that its leader, a three-star admiral named McRaven, ordered a stop to certain activities because there were so many collateral deaths. It’s been going in — under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.

Amy Goodman: Yesterday, CNN interviewed Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser, John Hannah. Wolf Blitzer asked Hannah about Sy Hersh’s claim.

Wolf Blitzer: Is there a list of terrorists, suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?

John Hannah: There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.

Wolf Blitzer: And so, this would be, and from your perspective — and you worked in the Bush administration for many year– it would be totally constitutional, totally legal, to go out and find these guys and to whack ’em.

John Hannah: There’s no question that in a theater of war, when we are at war, and we know — there’s no doubt, we are still at war against al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and on that Pakistani border, that our troops have the authority to go after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy.

Amy Goodman: That’s John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser. Seymour Hersh joins me now here in Washington, D.C., staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His latest article appears in the current issue, called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace.”

OK, welcome to Democracy Now!, Sy Hersh. It was good to see you last night at Georgetown. Talk about, first, these comments you made at the University of Minnesota.

MORE HERE

Read Full Post »