As a communications professional, my assessment of the Obama Administration’s communications strategy is that it may be the most inept performance I have ever seen of any political regime.

Crisis communications is not a silver bullet.  Some thing simply cannot be repaired.  The whole point of communications in general, however, is that the job should never be challenging if the entity the communicator works for doesn’t provide fodder for the opposition.

The Obama Administration has repeatedly handed its opposition ammunition — not 9mm bullets, but everything from Stinger missiles to bunker-busters.  The result is the appearance, to this citizen, of a White House on the verge of panic.  I’m not the only one.  When legendary far-left blabbermouth James Carville tells the White House it’s time to panic, it’s time to panic (That’s no diss on Mr. Carville.  I love watching him.).

Almost none of this has to do with the truth or facts of any given situation.  It has to do with how it all appears.  Generally, it makes Mr. Obama appear like an amateur politician.

It Started Out So Well!

The Obama campaign had it made in 2008.  The GOP had put up the Grumpy Old Troll against a PR juggernaut — the first viable Black presidential candidate.  Young and slick vs. old and creaky.  The backlash against the Bush presidency had peaked — people were tired of the war in Iraq, gasoline had hit $4, and the mainstream media so controlled the political narrative that it would’ve taken a literal disaster to push the Obama campaign off-message.  Not only did the GOP face an uphill battle anyway, but now they were facing a wave of messaging that was hard to ignore: hope and change.  So powerful was this message that, despite it and the candidate it spoke for being utterly lacking in substance, it swayed enough of the electorate to create an historic moment for America.  The country had elected a God.  I don’t need to tell you how this photo comes off:

(more…)

As the protests in Egypt have raged on now for more than a week, President Obama and members of his administration continue to practice restraint in their communications and careful selection of the words that are spoken.  Hillary Clinton has cautioned against anything that could increase chaos.  U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told television networks that the “complex, very difficult situation in Egypt requires careful progress toward a peaceful transition to democracy rather than any sudden or violent change that could undermine the aspirations of the protesters.”

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs echoed the sentiments that while Egypt needs to change, it’s not the place of the United States to publicly support or oppose the removal of Mubarak.  Likewise, most Republicans are also on the same page as the Obama administration, speaking out in support of democratic reforms in Egypt, yet taking great care not to back or oppose Mubarak either way – at least not publicly.  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “I don’t have any criticism of President [Barack] Obama or Secretary [Hillary] Clinton at this point.  It’s important for U.S. officials “to speak as one voice during this crisis.”  As many have noted, Egypt is perhaps one of the only issues that’s rendered an overwhelmingly bi-partisan response.

But one man in particular is not exactly in agreement with that bi-partisan response:  George Soros.  And he’s warning us to toe the line – his line, that is.

The leftist billionaire who made his fortune on the back of US capitalism is taking aim at all the “rigid and ideological supporters of Israel” and “the religious right” for standing in the way of democracy for Egypt.

(more…)

After weeks of negotiations, the United States government announced that they would no longer try to force Israel to extend its settlement freeze.  Almost unanimously the media placed the blame for the impasse on Israel.

One of the settlements near the West Bank.

….. after the administration acknowledged its inability to persuade Israel to halt construction of Jewish settlements in disputed areas for 90 days. The failure embarrassed the White House, which had offered Israel various incentives, and left the administration scrambling for a new way to coax the two sides to the negotiating table. (LA Times 12/11)

Politico described the situation by comparing Israel to North Korea and its relationship to China:

Israel, in ways similar to North Korea’s national profile, depends on Washington’s guarantee of its key economic and strategic circumstances. But unlike North Korea, Israel is no longer the supplicant, and realizes that Washington has decided it must acquiesce to Israel’s recalcitrance on Middle East peace, as well as the evolution of an increasing structural division of Palestinians from Israelis within its borders.

If the LA Times, Politico and the other liberal outlets wanted to give a truthful account of what happened to the freeze extension they might have said something like:

Israel offered a ten month freeze to help the US out of a problem caused by our President’s naiveté, but the Palestinians ignored the freeze until it was too late, and any extension of the freeze was sabotaged by Hilary Clinton’s bait and switch tactics and a her refusal to put the agreement in writing.

But the truth doesn’t fit the liberal media’s agenda. They do not want to recognize that this entire settlement issue was caused by this Administration as was the failure to come to an agreement on an extension of the freeze.

(more…)

Read Part One here.

Another reason for the spotty media coverage of the war along our southern border is manpower.  Local media simply doesn’t have the resources to investigate and  cover all of the stories in their area — even when they are aware of them.

The reliably liberal Mainstream Media has more resources, but is hamstrung by ideology.  Amnesty proponents have spokesmen ready to downplay any news story that hurts their cause and the national media makes ample use of those spokesmen.  The battles along the border don’t fit the MSM narrative.

Money and fear are the cartels’ big weapons–and they use them both.  Journalists are a favorite target of the Mexican cartels.  According to Reuters, they’ve already succeeded in silencing journalists along much of the Mexican side.

Hitmen from the Gulf cartel based over the border from Texas are paying reporters around $500 a month and showering them with liquor and prostitutes to intimidate and silence colleagues at radio stations and newspapers in towns near the Laredo-Brownsville area, journalists and editors say.

“Our newsrooms have been infiltrated by these reporters, they monitor what we write, they know where we live. With this system, the narcos have direct control over us,” said a local newspaper editor who declined to be named for safety.

(more…)

This just in from the New York Times.

The Obama administration is planning to expand opportunities for Americans to travel to Cuba. The policy… is meant to loosen restrictions on academic, religious and cultural groups that were adopted under President George Bush and return to the “people to people” policies followed under President Bill Clinton… Those policies, officials said, fostered robust exchanges between the United States and Cuba, allowing groups … to share expertise as well as life experiences.

In fact, these groups shared much more than “life experiences.” The Times is much; too bashful in detailing just how “robust” these exchanges with Cuba had gotten during the Clinton administration.

Mr. and Mrs. Kendall Myers, Cuban spies in the State Dept.

No mention by the Times, for instance, that the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Defense Department by an enemy agent resulted precisely from all that “sharing” by the Clinton administration with Stalinist Cuba, a regime Obama’s very State Department lists as a State Sponsor of Terrorism. Schizophrenia by any other name

“Castro poses no significant threat to the U.S. or any of his hemispheric neighbors. No evidence exists that Cuba is trying to foment any instability in the Western Hemisphere,” asserted the Clinton Defense Department’s “National Intelligence Estimate on Cuba.”

From Havana Castro immediately hailed the report as “an objective report by serious people.” (more…)

Michael R. Blood, AP Political Writer, files this report:

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Andrew Breitbart strips off his blazer, windmills it over his head and lets it fly to the stage with a matador’s flourish. He booms into a microphone, sneering, taunting. Breath sprints to keep up with words.

A Breitbart boil is under way, before a cheering throng of tea partiers on a moonlike strip of Nevada desert back in March.

A finger stabs overhead as the conservative online publisher declares Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a racist. An arm lances outward as he decries Republican leaders as apologists. Voice rising, Breitbart pledges $10,000, then $20,000, then $100,000 for the United Negro College Fund if proof is found to corroborate claims of racial name-calling during tea party protests on Capitol Hill.

“They decided to play lowball, hardball tactics,” Breitbart seethes. “Well, we’re going to have to play it right back at them.”

You could argue he has done just that. (more…)

There’s a lot of buzz on the Internet about what has been called the JournoList. This was a private e-mail list maintained by Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein of about 400 journalists, bloggers, and academics who may have colluded in aiding the election of Mr. Obama. Mr. Breitbart is the king of the alternative media and created his “Big” sites to report what was being unreported by the mainstream media. Big Journalism and Big Government are two Breitbart sites that have uncovered scoops that took weeks for the mainstream media to report. The Acorn scandal would never have come to light without this exposure. On May 10, Brad Thor posted on Big Government the capture of Taliban leader Mullah Omar in Pakistan, yet to date we haven’t heard a ripple in the mainstream media.

Mr. Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could provide the complete Journolist e-mail sessions and while no one has claimed that reward yet, Tucker Carlson, the editor of the DailyCaller.com, has released copies of some of the e-mail correspondence. These have been reported on the “Big” sites and Fox News. What they reveal is very disturbing to those who still naively believe that the Fourth Estate is incorruptible. Uncovered is an egregious conspiracy to slant the news for an ideological motive rather than journalistic integrity.

The mostly white, liberal, leftist group correspondence suggested ways to cover the 2008 presidential campaign that would benefit Mr. Obama and vilify the McCain/Palin team. Of course, this media bias is not news to anyone on the right, but for the first time there is concrete proof that Mr. Obama was the choice of the mainstream media, which aided and abetted his campaign. (more…)

Last week, the DNC announced the launch of “The Accountability Project,” a new website volunteer project “to hold Republican candidates accountable for their claims, their public statements, and their campaign tactics.”  To call the project “grassroots” while a banner at the bottom of the page states that the site is paid for by the Democratic National Committee is surely pushing the frontiers of shamelessness; but desperate times call for desperate measures.  For citizen journalists have been making the news as well as reporting in recent weeks, and not in ways favorable to the left.

On the reporting front, the career of far-left journalist Helen Thomas was ended by a camera-wielding Rabbi posting footage of her anti-Semitic rantings on his website.  Meanwhile, conservative citizen journalists have been physically assaulted, notably by Democrat representative Bob Etheridge and at a campaign event for Illinois senatorial candidate Alexi Giannoulias.   It seems that, when it comes to citizen journalism, liberals can dish it out, but they can’t take it, and in considering just why they are apparently so touchy with respect to this particular manifestation of “new” media, we need to look at the a bigger picture, one which goes beyond the significance of the stories broken, or the merits or otherwise of the tactics employed; what is really remarkable is that conservative “citizen journalists” exist at all, and that they are reaching an increasingly wide audience with their exposure of the antics of liberal activists and Democrat politicians.  You see, it was not supposed to be like this. (more…)

There’s an old saying that when you scratch a person you see what lies beneath their skin. People are defined under pressure. The press, the Administration and its allies are under pressure and what we’re seeing under their skin is something similar to the scaled aliens in the TV show “V”. The methods being employed in recent days is borderline fascist. Take that Frank Rich.

There’s an attempt to brand any dissenters of this administration as being crazed and dangerous radicals. CBS made the claim that the Tea Party is made up almost entirely of older white people, which is media code for “racist”. Apparently, having a group of white people is equal to the Klan or a Nazi march. Which is fascinating because CBS, MSNBC, et al. are groups made up mostly of older white people. Bust out the schnapps!

Of course, CBS has a poor record of polling, as theirs tends to be skewed. Gallup did a poll of Tea Partiers that found they were very close to the American mainstream except for having fewer Democrats. And this is what scares the establishment. The mainstream is against them. So they’ve decided to attack the Tea Party — and, by extension, ordinary Americans — as never before. (more…)

As a scientist, I have long been troubled by the way the mainstream media covers science in general and the environment in particular. Long before “global warming” became a watchword and Al Gore started burning tens of thousands of gallons in aviation fuel to lecture people around the world about their profligate energy use, journalists routinely butchered scientifically-focused stories so badly that it would make a high school physics teacher cringe. While many people have been shocked to learn how close the ties between leading global warming alarmists and some environmental reporters are, the only surprise for many of us in the scientific community is that it has taken this long to reveal those connections. For the truth is that global warming coverage in the mainstream media is merely a symptom of a larger disease.

The latest boil to burst forth upon the body of environmental journalism began to fester on Thursday, January 7, when the USEPA announced that it was proposing the latest, greatest and most-badly- needed-ever smog standard. (Officially the pollutant is “ground-level ozone”, but we’ll stick with “smog” for convenience). Mainstream media outlets everywhere fell over themselves to heap praise on the EPA for imposing a standard that administrator Lisa Jackson described as “long overdue.” This lead, from the Chicago Tribune’s lead environmental reporter/head Sierra Club cheerleader Michael Hawthorne’s January 8 story, was typical:

“Chicago and other urban areas across the U.S. would need to clamp down harder on air pollution under tough smog limits proposed Thursday by the Obama administration, which scrapped a George W. Bush-era rule that ignored the latest scientific advice.”

(more…)