Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Resource: The Center for American Progress debunks Bush’s many false claims in last night’s State of the Union address.

Obama Turns Away from Clinton (The Swamp, Baltimore Sun)
Obama returned to stand by his seat next to Sen. Edward Kennedy who endorsed Obama today in a widely watched event that reverberated across the political world. As Clinton approached, Kennedy made sure to make eye contact and indicated he wanted to shake her hand. Clinton leaned towards Kennedy over a row of seats and Kennedy leaned in towards her. They shook hands. Obama stood icily staring at Clinton during this, then turned his back and stepped a few feet away. Kennedy may’ve wanted to make peace with Clinton but Obama clearly wanted no part of that. As president, Obama has said he would meet with the U.S.’s enemies without precondition. But making nice with Clinton apparently is another mattter after the increasingly angry fight the two have waged, with charges and countercharges, for the Democratic presidential nomination. The sense in the press gallery was that Obama didn’t cover himself in glory. Someone even used the word “childish.” (Not this writer.) Judging by how much conversation there was about this brush off in the press gallery, Americans will be hearing a lot more about this tomorrow and in coming days.
Note to the age impaired: John Kennedy waffled on civil rights. And it wasn’t John, or even Bobby, Kennedy who got civil rights legislation passed.  It was that bare knuckler Lyndon Johnson.

A frown for Clinton
Taylor Marsh

Senator Kennedy Betrays Women by Not Standing For Hillary Clinton for President (New York Chapter of the National Organization for Women)
Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard.  Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him… We are repaid with his abandonment!  He’s picked the new guy over us.
And this is nonsense, too.

Seeing the Light in South Carolina (by Gal Beckerma, Columbia Journalism Review)
[W]hen I … read the Times’s assessment of the Democratic field, I realized that the editorial board understood something the rest of us consumers of daily media have missed, but which was obvious to me after just one Obama-in-the-flesh event: what the Illinois senator excels at is packaging himself for the press (and, consequently, the public). I imagined, seeing him speak in person for the first time, that I would hear more of a discussion of policy than I’ve heard in the coverage of his campaign. I was sure that the sound bites that his stump speech produced about unity and change may pepper his talk, but could not possibly be the sum total of his message. But, basically, they were. There was very little sense that he was standing in North Charleston talking to a specific community of people. His transcendent talk was just that, transcendent. It’s not that this didn’t have a strong effect on the people who had waited to see him. It did. But there was something slightly gimmicky about his presentation. In my notebook, I wrote twice, “How will he make change?”

Chris Matthews: Condi Rice Could Counter Obama’s “Ethnic Excitement” (by Logan Murphy at Crooks and Liars)
Chris Matthews as been sticking his foot in his mouth (more so than usual) a lot this primary season and during MSNBC’s coverage of the State of the Union address tonight, he stepped in it again. Tweety made the suggestion that because Barack Obama has created an ethnic excitement in America, if he doesn’t get the nomination Condi Rice would make a great VP choice for a GOP candidate because black people might still be hopeful of putting an African American in higher government.
Because Condi engenders so much excitement.  Click through to watch the video.

Why doesn’t Bush get economic credit? (by Paul Krugman)
[Monday’s] Times asserts as fact: “Mr. Bush has spent years presiding over an economic climate of growth that would be the envy of most presidents. Yet much to the consternation of his political advisers, he has had trouble getting credit for it, in large part because Americans were consumed by the war in Iraq.” OK, I don’t want to make too big a deal of this, but although many people say this, it’s a theory, not a fact. And the evidence suggests that this theory is wrong.
Click through for the specifics.  It’s good to see that Krugman isn’t afraid to correct errors in his own paper.

The US economy, Pravda style (by Dean Baker, writing at Comment is Free, The Guardian)
[W]e know from a recent Washington Post editorial that “everyone agrees the economy needs a government boost.” However, just eights days earlier, the lead editorial in the Post told readers that “fiscal stimulus may eventually be needed,” but warned against jumping the gun… Rather than acknowledge that the experts on whom they rely had badly misunderstood the problems facing the economy, the Post just acted as though nothing had changed… Just as the Soviet press wanted the public to trust the wisdom of the party bosses, the Post and other pillars of the elite media want the public to believe that the experts who are the insiders on the decision-making process in Washington are uniquely qualified to craft policy. Of course this is true for all areas of public policy, not just economic policy.

The Real Recession Problem: Consumers Are at the End of Their Ropes (by Robert Reich)
Perhaps the silliest part of an already silly stimulus bill is a provision giving corporations big tax deductions this year on the costs of new machinery… This tax break exemplifies the illogic of what’s called supply-side economics. If you reduce the cost of investing, so the thinking goes, you’ll get more investment. What’s left out is the demand side of the equation. Without consumers who want to buy a product, there’s no point in making it, regardless of how many tax breaks go into it. Which gets us to the real problem. Most consumers are at the end of their ropes and can’t buy more.

A history lesson: The great fiscal stimulus package … of 1929 (by Michael Kitchen, MarketWatch)
Herbert Hoover — only nine months into his presidency — assembled leaders from the public and private sectors to create an economic-stimulus package. Among the measures, Time magazine reported at the time, was a promise from Congress to offer bipartisan support for a tax-cut package… Also on the table was an assurance from the Federal Reserve that it would provide cheaper credit… Of course, there were a litany of public-works projects, plans for new corporate investments, and even a promise by Henry Ford to raise wages at his auto plants. None of this worked.

A more recent history lesson: Crashing the Subprime Party (by Nicholas Bagley, Slate, thanks to Economist’s View)
As the federal government scurries to prevent the subprime mortgage crisis from sending the economy into a deep recession, many of us are asking why it waited so long to intervene. As it turns out, the government wasn’t exactly sitting on its hands. Instead, for reasons that now appear hopelessly shortsighted, an obscure federal agency torpedoed legislation from a handful of states that would have made institutional investors far charier of buying mortgage loans that were likely to go belly-up. If the legislation had been permitted to go into effect, the crisis we now face would probably look a lot less grim. The right question, then, is not why the feds did so little. It’s why they did so much.
And why would the Bush administration enable a crash?  See Naomi Klein, below.

Why the right loves a disaster (by Naomi Klein, writing in the Los Angeles Times)
Moody’s, the credit-rating agency, claims the key to solving the United States’ economic woes is slashing spending on Social Security. The National Assn. of Manufacturers says the fix is for the federal government to adopt the organization’s wish-list of new tax cuts. For Investor’s Business Daily, it is oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, “perhaps the most important stimulus of all.”… If this kind of crisis opportunism feels familiar, it’s because it is. Over the last four years, I have been researching a little-explored area of economic history: the way that crises have paved the way for the march of the right-wing economic revolution across the globe. A crisis hits, panic spreads and the ideologues fill the breach, rapidly reengineering societies in the interests of large corporate players. It’s a maneuver I call “disaster capitalism.”
And don’t forget how the right took advantage of 9/11, and continues to do so.  It’s almost as if they had a laundry list ready, before the twin towers were even attacked.

Subprime Obama (by Max Fraser, The Nation)
As the subprime mortgage debacle drives a recession that threatens financial markets around the world, the Democratic presidential candidates are pushing plans to address the crisis. John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are pledging substantial federal resources to stabilize the mortgage market and intervene on behalf of borrowers. Barack Obama’s proposal is tepid by comparison, short on aggressive government involvement and infused with conservative rhetoric about fiscal responsibility. As he has done on domestic issues like healthcare, job creation and energy policy, Obama is staking out a position to the right of not only populist Edwards but Clinton as well.

Fair Lending a Necessary Part of Global Fair Trade
The credit crisis may be fouling up billion-dollar takeover deals, but if you’re a poor African seamstress who needs a loan for a new sewing machine, you could not ask for a better borrowing market to expand your business. Anyone with $25 to spare and an Internet connection can now become an international microfinancier through Kiva http://www.kiva.org , an organization that matches individual lenders with impoverished entrepreneurs in the developing world.
This is exactly the kind of mechanism that I’ve recommended as part of a coordinated progressive media effort.

Media Matters for America headlines

Limbaugh compared Bill Clinton to segregationist “Bull” Connor

NY Times called McCain “the maverick flyboy of the Republican Party”

Mitchell falsely suggested Giuliani “decided to skip all of the early primaries”

Wash. Post falsely claimed “three leading Democrats” in presidential race have “refus[ed] … to acknowledge the indisputable military progress” in Iraq

Fox News’ Hill: Sen. Kennedy “is” the “hate speech and the partisanship that you’ve seen in Washington”

Russert let McCain mislead on Clinton’s Iraq withdrawal proposal

CNN’s Borger on McCain’s mother: “[N]ow we know where [he] gets all the straight talk from”

USA Today editorial revived false claim that Obama “said he’d invade” Pakistan

Ariz. Republic, Fox News, WSJ repeated McCain’s defense of vote against Bush tax cuts

York asserted that SC white men who did not vote for Clinton “voted against” her

Beck said “to be consistent,” Clinton should give Obama “5 percentage points” because of affirmative action

Joe Klein on Bill Clinton in the White House: “[T]here’s a kind of, something that’s spiritually skeevy about it”

Boston Globe’s Canellos on SC primary: “[A] lot of black women voted as blacks rather than as women”

Wash. Post falsely claimed government authority “to [s]py” will “expire” on Feb. 1

Hannity exaggerated Reagan’s record on jobs, federal revenue

Old media meets empowered customers
Blogger and old-media refugee Jeff Jarvis, on a great panel [at the DLD tech conference] called “Exploding Media,” said “Media companies should stop complaining and ask themselves ‘What would Google do?’” He said today’s mandate is to help people distribute both their own creations and what they receive from professional media in their own way.

Lawmaker Seeks ‘Do-Not-Deliver’ Registry for Free Papers
Complaints about free home-delivery newspapers in Maryland have inspired State Del. Tanya Shewell to propose a “Do Not Deliver” registry that would work similarly to the “Do Not Call” registry for telemarketers. If approved, would be the first of its kind in the nation.

WT editor Solomon pooh-poohs liberal bloggers’ complaints
Media Matters claims that new Washington Times executive editor John Solomon “has been a frequent purveyor of conservative misinformation.” The former Washington Post newsman responds: “All the stories the liberal blogs have attacked have never been questioned by my own editors. They stood by them. The blogs point to no factual errors but complain that I highlighted something they didn’t care for or preferred that I would have focused on something else.”
The problem with Solomon’s articles has been that he makes outlandish assertions at the beginning of the article, and you have to read all the way down to the bottom before finding out there’s nothing to those assertions.

New York Times launches no-charge text messaging service
The Times now delivers news, features and columns from the newspaper to cell phones and mobile devices. “We intend to use every available platform to disseminate The Times’s quality news and information,” says Rob Larson, NYTimes.com product development and management veep.

Strike Driving $100 Million in Ads From TV Biz to Big Screen
MediaVest Talks With Cinema-Ad Networks Called a ‘Proactive Approach’ to Ratings Erosion

Grammys in Deal to Get Writers
Striking film and television writers agreed on Monday to allow next month’s Grammy Awards program to be written by members of the writers guild.

ABC Show Will Go on, Over Protest by Doctors
A drama’s plot links autism with childhood vaccinations.
This is wrong.  I don’t know what the answer is, since I don’t believe in censorship, but this is definitely wrong.

New Site Has Users Wager on News Stories
Nigel Eccles, a news junkie and former online betting site employee, wanted to try pursuing both interests at once. Thus was born Hubdub – a new Web site Eccles and three colleagues in Edinburgh, Scotland, assembled – where customers will bet for fun, not money, on the outcomes of real news stories.