Commercial media and elected officials have the same paymasters and those paymasters don’t need any one outlet or any single politician to maintain their power and riches. So the threat of a publicity-seeking pol may be empty but the threats of a group of business tycoons, coordinated through the US Chamber of Commerce or whatever stalking horse they’re riding at the moment, are very real and bring serious consequences for those who disobey.

I hope Mark Whitaker is sincere and has the guts to challenge the powers that be. But all history to this point suggests that if any threat is empty right now, it’s probably Whitaker’s.

Imperial Presidency Bush vs. Obama Calling it as you see it.

media treatment/marginalization Bush vs Obama
boy there must have been at least 10 post here vs. what 0 about Obama? Calling it as you see it.

I would suggest you hold everyone’s feet to the fire including your own, otherwise are you any better than CNN?

There is more than one way of “leaving It there”

On Twitter, Jeff Simon, a producer at State of the Union with Candy Crowley, informed me that John King is the host of a weekly show, not the Sunday am program State of the Union. He also told me that the link to King’s quote wasn’t working.

http://twitter.com/#!/jjsimonCNN/status/88322172157833216

I in turn informed Mr. Simon that at the time of the quote John King was the host of Sunday morning’s State of the Union and that the link (to a Politico piece) worked just fine.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/23118.html

He said he understood.

Yes, they could. Full stop.

But they have to call it where they see it and not decide to artificially balance the BS calling in the same way that they formally balanced the debates they left there.

I agree that on the biggest political questions settled truths are hard to find. And like you, David, I don’t want journalists asserting fact where it doesn’t exist. That is, I don’t want them taking what is a political question, a matter of judgment and falsely framing it as a factual question. We don’t want what has to be settled by a vote to be framed as something that can be settled by a “check.”

But in the same way, I don’t want them finding balance and equivalence where none exists.

What I was trying to point out in this post is that the issue of taking sides has been used by CNN to dodge the problem of “leaving it there.” But Mark Whitaker ended that last week. That’s much more important than anything a press critic has to say.

I like your framing of the “Leave It There” problem. I, too, want TV interviewers to challenge politicians on the spot when their assertions stray from fact. It seems to me a bit more of this is happening, though impossible to know. In any case, it should, and I hope that it will.

CNN could do this, couldn’t it, without taking the “ideological turn” you say it’s now resisting? It may be that an ideological turn would draw a bigger audience, a la MSNBC, and so perhaps CNN will find this irresistible. But couldn’t CNN and others entirely solve the “Leave It There” problem, calling BS where they see it, and still avoid an over-arching side-taking position?

I ask this hopefully because as a news consumer I don’t want a news-generating landscape made up entirely of journalists who’ve chosen sides. Also, in the world of political rhetoric, my experience is that there are fewer “truths” than all of us would wish. We’ve seen this in the ways that fact-checkers are routinely challenged these days with their findings of facts.

Journalists must deliver stronger acid tests to politicians making assertions. (I think, by the way, that this can happen and does happen in news organizations without the onset of cognitive dissonance.) But, again my observation, on the most central questions — What is the likely effect of a given government action? What will happen to the economy if the government raises taxes on the rich? — settled truths are hard to find. I don’t want TV journalists asserting fact where it doesn’t exist.

I’d like CNN to go more aggressively at politicians’ assertions. It might be a plus for ratings. I’d also like them to follow your good suggestion of revealing more about their journalists’ inclinations and leanings. But I’d prefer they didn’t choose up sides.

2.) “The anchors would need to know a lot about the issues.”

You mean they might have to actually, you know, think for themselves and start to become involved in the news, instead of acting as teleprompter-driven stenographers?
What a shame…

3.) The pols would get pissed at being called out and threaten never to return.

The politicos and their minders can threaten all they want. The bottom line is that all politicians are attention whores. They need visibility and publicity like the rest of us need oxygen. If CNN retains any sort of market share, politicians will still want to get on the network. All CNN has to do is to cross out their list of pre-conditions and send it back to them with a footnote “you will answer the questions”, then hold ALL politicians and commentators to the same standard. If the leaders at CNN want an example, let them watch a couple of Jeremy Paxman interviews from the BBC (including the one where he sank Michael Howard without trace after Howard refused to answer a question 14 times).

Because CNN has never really gotten beyond “Wolf in a war zone” and “white Broncos”, in its best days, I think we should hope that BBC finally makes the World Service available on all major US cable systems. That would elevate television news in a minute.