Media

The president brought forth his birth certificate not because he was more “adult” than Donald Trump but because the press took Trump’s cue and for two days straight followed up. Where is the long form? Why don’t you deliver? Why didn’t you deliver two years ago when you were required? It was an uh-oh moment. They, the administrators, sensed a sea change in the press. No longer would Nobel Prizes be given out after eight days in office. No longer would the most fawning and accommodating journalists get the Pulitzers. There is even the complaint by a Washington Post columnist that the “journalist prom” on Saturday night — hosted by Hollywood celebs and lobbyists and influence-seekers — got out of control.

I begin with this: Except for CNN, which makes an honest effort to report real news, cable news in America has let the nation down. If Joe McCarthy had a reality television show on NBC, I wonder if NBC would have promoted McCarthy then the same way it promotes Donald Trump and his campaign for birthers and bigots now?

Cable news in general has turned American democracy into a freak show, where bigots and nuts receive a free megaphone, where shills and hacks parade to the cameras to treat the audience like idiots dishing out spin that many of them don't even believe, where serious issues are not treated in serious ways while celebrity fluff is force-fed to small audiences who often turn elsewhere for news and information.

And the Mario Savio “wake up America” award goes this year to Brad Watson, a reporter who had the audacity to ask Barack Obama why he was so unpopular in Texas. When the pharaoh unclipped his mic, he bruskly said to the reporter, “Let me finish my answers next time we do an interview, all right?”

The run-up to the 2008 election may in hindsight be seen as journalism’s darkest hour in recent times. But there was something happening in the global psyche then, evident in the giving of a Nobel Peace Prize to a president who had only been in office eight days. Even the recipient felt it was absurd. But he didn’t give it back.

WASHINGTON — In a stunning rebuke to President Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and 111 House Democrats voted to kill a budget compromise that funded the government for the rest of the 2011 fiscal year.

Steny Hoyer (Md.), the House minority whip, supported the president’s budget, as did 80 other Democrats, far less than half of the Democratic Caucus.  

The measure, which pays for homeland security, national defense, food safety and education support, was supported by an overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans and easily passed the Senate. The president signed the measure Thursday night.

The New York Times obit today reported the death, at 100, of Hedda Sterne, a member of the group of abstract expressionist, avant-garde artists of the early 20th century. Sterne escaped Bucharest and fled to the U.S. when the Nazis rounded up and massacred Jews in her home city. She worked prodigiously “at the margins of art history,” the Times noted, less famous than her movement contemporaries such as Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning. She stands out as the only woman in a famous 1951 Life magazine photo of the movement’s leaders.

Why write about her in a political-oriented blog, readers may wonder? It is because her observation about her art struck this author as especially revealing. “Every drawing teaches me something,” Sterne wrote. “Leonardo drew things to explain them to himself.” For writers, that observation is central. Forget writer’s block. We often do not know precisely what we think about a subject until we try to express our thoughts about the subject with pen on paper (or, today, electronically on computer).

NBC should fire Donald Trump for the same reason I have suggested Fox News should remove Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and any other candidate or potential candidate. I think it is disgraceful for NBC to promote Trump's show to make money for NBC while Trump uses NBC to promote his candidacy and make money for himself.

However, since the media appear to be wholly corrupt and incestuous, let me make the counterproposal that NBC, CNBC and MSNBC should give Ron Paul his own show, as they give Trump his.

Ron Paul's ratings, given a cable show, would be huge. Far more than any show on MSNBC and probably more than most shows on Fox! Paul has millions of devoted supporters who would surely watch the Ron Paul show. It would be a ratings smash! I mean this literally. It would be.

President Obama spoke Wednesday to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network’s 20th Annual Keepers of the Dream Awards gathering in New York.

Obama addressed an increasingly critical fact of American life — that the price of a gallon of gasoline is pushing $4. (In Chicago, where I live, and where Obama still keeps a house, even “regular” has topped the $4 mark.) The president knows that the unemployment rate might creep down toward 8 percent and make his reelection likely, but rising gas prices can trump all that and make him a one-termer.

So President Obama told his audience, "I don’t pump gas now, but I remember what it was like pumping gas.”

Well, that was fuel for Limbaugh’s Thursday morning radio rant.

When Michael Kinsley left “Crossfire” in 1996, I jumped into the pool of liberals competing to take his seat. And, lucky for me, I won the job.

Well, actually, I only won half the job. Because, I was informed, I would share the position of co-host on the left — alternating, every other week, with Geraldine Ferraro.

And I was thrilled. Not only to join CNN and “Crossfire,” which was by far the best debate show on television, then or since. But, especially, for the chance to work with one of my real heroes.

I just saw a segment on CNN that defamed its own brand by airing the edited anti-NPR video that Glenn Beck and others have now successfully debunked, without any mention by the CNN anchor or correspondent that the segment CNN aired gave a dramatically false misrepresentation.

This embodies everything that is wrong in our media, and everything that has gone wrong with low-rated CNN. For CNN to air a false and dishonest excerpt of an edited video shortly before a vote in the House on NPR funding is a disgrace to the news organization so brilliantly founded by Ted Turner.

Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday morning unleashed a rant ranging from excoriation to ridicule on the subject of President Obama taking time today, while Japan burns and Libya suffers, to discuss with ESPN’s Doris Burke his NCAA basketball bracket picks.

The usual Limbaugh, I thought, clever but unfair, and yet ... It reminded me of something that has been bugging me lately. Why is Barack Obama so silent on events that are wracking the world? (He did suggest while talking to Burke that people go to USAid.gov for a list of charities providing help to the Japanese people.)