It’s been a long time since Michelle Obama has been attacked like this.

The first lady’s lavish Spanish vacation was the lead story in the Drudge Report for days. Political columnists and commentators lampooned her as a 21st-century Marie Antoinette, unwinding at a luxury resort while unemployment lingers near 10 percent and President Barack Obama’s poll numbers fade. And headlines set off political sirens: Scandal! Tone deaf! Elitist!

Tone deaf? Elitist?

Yet still, those mean conservatives just won’t let the poor woman have her umpteenth vacation before the First Family, you know, goes on vacation again:

The attacks from right-wing commentators — and a handful of left-leaning pundits — produced the first harsh critiques against the first lady since the heated days of the 2008 presidential campaign when she told an audience that America had finally improved: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.”

The outrage from conservatives could foreshadow how Republicans might treat the first lady when she sets out to stump for Democrats during midterm elections. When Obama returns to the campaign trail, it could expose her to attacks by Republicans and jeopardize her new, more polished image as a modern woman balancing a career, children and marriage to the leader of the free world.

Ya think?

Yet at the same time, the GOP must walk a fine line in dealings with Obama, whose popularity rating is at 50 percent and whom many working women admire. It’s a risky move, Republican strategists say, to resurrect the fist-bumping, militant caricature of Michelle Obama that at times overshadowed her husband’s presidential race campaign.

Which Republican “fist-bumping, militant caricature” could Politico possibly be thinking of?  This one, from that hateful, radical wingnut publication, the New Yorker?

If this is the level of fact-challenged political analysis Politico now deals in, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei might as well go back to the Washington Post, if the kiddie corps now running the place will have them back.

Obama’s Spanish holiday triggered a feeding frenzy among conservatives. The New York Daily News’s Andrea Tantaros claimed “Michelle Obama is a modern-day Marie Antoinette on a glitzy Spanish vacation.” Fox News’s Greta Van Sustern suggested the first lady was “trying to torpedo” her husband with a “fancy foreign vacation.” Rush Limbaugh ridiculed her as “Mooch-elle.”

Even Joe Scarborough, the former GOP congressman-turned-MSNBC-television-host, said the controversy was “part of a bigger narrative … about Michelle Obama.”

John Feehery, a Republican strategist, told POLITICO the first lady brought it on herself.

“I do think that taking very expensive trips without [the president] is not particularly good judgment, especially when the country is kinda going broke,” Feehery said. “That’s fair fodder.”

Somehow, you know — you just know — that Politico doesn’t believe that at all.

]]> http://bigjournalism.com/fross/2010/08/16/stop-press-item-politico-shills-for-michelle-obama-warns-republicans-of-dangers-of-attacking-her/feed/ 73 http://bigjournalism.com/mwalsh/2010/04/12/time-for-the-msm-to-take-a-good-long-hard-look-in-the-mirror/ http://bigjournalism.com/mwalsh/2010/04/12/time-for-the-msm-to-take-a-good-long-hard-look-in-the-mirror/#comments Tue, 13 Apr 2010 01:25:09 +0000 Michael Walsh http://bigjournalism.com/?p=48278 For the Mainstream Media, the news is not good.  A new Pew Research Center study is out today as part of its ongoing Project for Excellence in Journalism.  Here’s the headline:

NEWS EXECUTIVES, SKEPTICAL OF GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES, SEE OPPORTUNITY IN TECHNOLOGY BUT ARE UNSURE ABOUT REVENUE AND THE FUTURE

Just about nothing is going right.  Things are so bad, in fact, that after years of denial, editors are now wondering openly whether their publications are going to survive, especially in an age of widespread cutbacks and trying to do more with less.  Ad revenues are down, circulation is off, newspapers are filing for bankruptcy and, for some cable networks, ratings are plummeting. The good news is that the execs are “openly skeptical” about the prospect of government support; the bad news is that they basically have no idea what to do.  From the Pew study:

America’s news executives are hesitant about many of the alternative funding ideas being discussed for journalism today and are overwhelmingly skeptical about the prospect of government financing, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in association with the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) and the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA).

Many news executives also sense change for the better in their newsrooms today, despite cutbacks and declining revenue. Editors at newspaper-related companies praise the cultural shifts in their organizations, the younger tech-savvy staff, and a growing sense of experimentation. Many broadcast executives see so-called one-person crews—in which the same individual reports, produces and shoots video—as improving their journalism by getting more people on the street.

But the leaders of America’s newsrooms are nonetheless worried about the future. Fewer than half of all those surveyed are confident their operations will survive another 10 years—not without significant new sources of revenue. Nearly a third believe their operations are at risk in just five years or less. And many blame the problems not on the inevitable effect of technology but on their industry’s missed opportunities.

Among the study’s findings:

Many of the new revenue options being debated today receive only limited or divided support from news executives. When it comes to the often-discussed option of pay walls for online content, for instance, only 10% say they are working on them, though that could change…

There is significant resistance, however, to other discussed revenue streams, particularly from the government or from groups that engage in advocacy. Fully 75% of news executives have serious reservations about receiving government subsidies, and 78% have significant resistance to financing from interest groups. Roughly half have significant worries about funds from government tax credits and more than a third have significant doubts about private donations.

Broadcast news executives are noticeably more pessimistic about journalism’s future than editors at newspaper-based operations. Broadcasters think their profession is headed in the wrong direction by a margin of nearly two-to-one (64% versus 35%). By contrast, editors working at newspapers were split (49% wrong direction versus 51% right direction).

And most news executives think the Internet is changing the fundamental values of journalism. Six out of ten feel this way—though executives from broadcast operations (62%) do so more than executives from newspapers (53%). And their biggest concern is loosening standards of accuracy and verification, much of it tied to the immediacy of the Web.

Overall, most news executives are worried about journalism’s future. Nearly six in ten, 58%, believe the profession is headed in the “wrong direction,” while 41% see things moving in the “right” one.

Where to start?

Instead of looking into the future, maybe those news executives surveyed need to start by taking a good hard look at the past, which has delivered them to this sorry present.  Since the time I was a young reporter on the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, nearly 30 years ago, an inordinate amount of editorial attention has gone into non-productive, non-newsgathering activity, including an endless amount of worrying about the “future” of journalism, instead of its actual practice. Now we have seen the future, and it doesn’t work.

In an age of instantaneous electronic transmission of digital information, other industries are facing many of the same problems, including the music business, Hollywood, and book publishing; to a greater or lesser extent, they’re all floundering, if not actually foundering. But the news business has been especially hard hit, and not because the public suddenly lost its appetite for its product. It’s because — through a combination of moral weakness, ideological aggression, a lack of intellectual diversity and a dinosaur-like unwillingness to adapt to technological change and challenges, the MSM has gone completely off the rails.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we’re going to be laying out the causes for the MSM’s demise and suggest what, if anything, it can do to save itself before it is entirely replaced by the internet and the citizen-journalist.  In the meantime, please read the Pew study, then come back here with your thoughts.

The first time the media heard Barack Obama use the phrase “Hope”, they were hooked.

It explains what caused NBC’s Chris Matthews to get the “thrill up going up my leg”, as Barack Obama spoke. It explains why ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and his wife cried on Inauguration Day. Maybe it explains what Evan Thomas of Newsweek was thinking when he proclaimed Obama is, “sort of god.” Here’s the full quote so you have the context:

I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.

Timothy Leary would love this. That’s some powerful stuff. High on hopeium.

The first step towards rehab is recognition. If you don’t KNOW you have a problem, how can you begin to solve it? This is where Scott Brown comes in. The new Senator from Massachusetts might have caused a few media people to drop the needle, flush the pills, or at least think about it. Paul Krugman, lib writer at the New York Times even said the other day, “I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama.” Wooooah! Calm down Paul, don’t go cold turkey on us!

Krugman is mad that Obama is not moving fast enough on his liberal agenda, but whatever the reason, we’re trying to save lives here. CBS asked the question on its Evening News Wednesday night, “Does Obama lack a political identity?” What? Could they have not asked that question during the campaign? Guess not, but we are trying to get them off the junk with baby steps. Baby steps.

This rehab for the media, if it ever happens, will be long and hard. Rehab is always hard, and most will never make it through. Keith Olbermann is Keith Olbermann. He mainlines hopeium during commercial breaks.  Matthews puts it up his leg. I’m guessing the nightly news anchors each have a hopeium flask at the news desk. Ed Schultz said he was sick to his stomach after Brown’s victory. It’s not pretty watching people start coming down from a two year “high.” But, it’s important to note, the media has become the dealer of this smack and that is not likely to stop any time soon.

There is some good news here, polls show the people are putting down the pipe. Like all dangerous drugs, Hopeium had its hold because of shallow promises of ecstasy, but thanks to a heavy dose of the internet, doctors of talk radio and Tea Parties, the spoons are being kept in the drawers, users are kicking the habit.

A warning here, some dealers may try to push the junk even harder as they get more desperate for a fix, but the market for hopeium is drying up. The dealers will be the last to know.

Despite the loss of “Teddy Kennedy’s seat” in Massachusetts, the collapse of “health-care reform” and really ugly poll numbers, some members of the official Media Cheerleading Squad apparently still do, and nothing to the contrary is going to convince them otherwise.  Here’s Frank Rich over the weekend in the New York Times, head still firmly in the sand:

It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated (with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the toilet. Brown had the good sense not to identify himself as a Republican in either his campaign advertising or his victory speech.

Pivoting to the new, Axelrod-dictated meme — that the people are still angry about the Bush years, which accounts for their lashing out for yet more “change” — Rich ladles on the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger new criticism, which is that Obama’s problem is that he’s not progressive enough:

Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.

Meanwhile, bubbling down below the mandarin heights of Eighth Avenue, in the strange and wonderful precincts of the Internet, this video has gone viral.  Pace Frank, it looks like many of the people who drank the Obama Kool-Aid 15 months ago now want their “Change” back:

So who are you going to believe — Frank Rich or your lying eyes?   The former theater critic or your fellow citizens, the voters of Massachusetts?

Do you have Obama buyer’s remorse yet?