Notes on Politics: Jon Stewart, Anthony Weiner & Bill Clinton; Plus Local News on Decline

'The Wangover’

How is it possible to laugh at this sad, sad Weinter-Gate situation that's so patently and bizarrely insane?

Watch The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart take a stab at what his staff is calling, “The Wangover,” and place the hullabaloo into its surreal context. (Note: Stewart was once a quasi-roommate of Rep. Anthony Weiner's, actually Stewart shared an apartment with Weiner’s then-girlfriend.)

Measly Local News Coverage = More Gov’t Power, Potential Abuses

On a more serious note . . . When I was but a mere cub newspaper reporter and was assigned to cover a small town, I was given this advice: Get to know the people who work in the various departments in the town, particularly the administrative assistants, back then called secretaries. So I routinely checked in with departments and chatted folks up. I made sure to find out what happened at all the public meetings the boards/departments had if I hadn’t been able to attend them in person. In essence, I covered any given town to which I had been assigned, like the proverbial blanket.

That’s no longer the case for newspaper reporters as their staffs shrink and resources are pulled away from local newsgathering. Plus, many local newspapers have shied away from having their reporters write stories about government meetings because they don’t think it makes for interesting reading in a hyper-competitive, 24/7 media landscape.

The result? People don’t necessarily know what the heck is going on inside Town Hall any more. Local elections get barely any coverage and information about candidates for elected offices is sparse while local newspapers’ space for news stories contracts. We, the voters, are left largely in the dark as to what our local elected officials are doing. Think about what happened in the city of Bell, California where, until a Los Angeles Times story last year, its city officials were receiving oversized salaries, like $100,000/year for part-time City Council positions and nearly $800,000 for the city manager. And this was in “one of the poorest cities in Los Angeles County,” the Times reported. If a local news reporter had been covering that city on a regular basis -- scouring proposed municipal budgets and attending budget hearings like reporters used to do -- the public outrage about what officials were proposing would've likely prevented those salaries from being approved in the first place.

Which brings us to a new study from the Federal Communications Commission which found, “Coverage of state governments and municipalities has receded at such an alarming pace that it has left government with more power than ever to set the agenda and have assertions unchallenged,” the New York Times reported.
The paper quoted the study’s author as saying, “The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism – going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy – is in some cases at risk at the local level.” The FCC report cited the Bell, California case as an example of what happens when regular local reporting is cut.

I heartily concur that the dearth of local reporting will result in an ill-informed electorate and unchecked government power. Maybe folks like a local blogger I know -- who covers her hometown much more thoroughly and in depth than the local newspapers -- will step in and do the job that trained journalists used to do: Providing updates on what’s transpiring at Town Hall.

Suburban Mom's Political Fix: Seriously, What's Up With This Prez. Beefcake Cover?

When I saw the cover of the May issue of Washingtonian Magazine online -- with an artificially glowing, unethically Photoshopped image of the president bare chested and in his swimming trunks -- I was disgusted. How in the heck could the magazine's editors have thought this particular image would be a wise choice, except if they were only seeking a lot of negative buzz? (No doubt the number of hits the magazine's web site has received spiked this past week.)

Certainly the editors, in their "reasons to love Washington" issue, could've used a different, albeit still attractive cover image highlighting President Obama or the photogenic Obama family. They didn't need to resort to the salacious. And they shouldn't have. (Doesn't this simply feed the notion that the media are totally in the tank, Obamified lapdogs?)

This image simply diminishes President Obama, reduces him to some tabloid personality akin to a Hollywood celebrity, an object at which to gawk. (Remember the McCain campaign's "celebrity" ads? This plays into that argument.)

Throw in the fact that the cover was doctored -- a la Time Magazine's infamous OJ cover and Newsweek's Martha Stewart cover, as the color of Obama's swimming trunks was changed, as was the lighting on his chest (see the original photo here) -- and it was just a bad move all around. When I taught a journalism ethics course to undergraduates last year, we dedicated an entire class to the discussion of altered magazine covers and made the distinction between magazines that supposedly abided by news oriented-journalistic ethics (under which I would think the Washingtonian would fall) and those that didn't (like Redbook's Faith Hill cover).

We've got serious problems to address with our economy in a precarious condition and an ongoing two-front war, with troubling stories emerging from Afghanistan. And a respected monthly in the nation's capital put the president on the cover of their magazine while he's in his bathing suit accompanied by the headline, "Our New Neighbor is Hot." What is wrong with this picture?

Image credit: Washingtonian Magazine.

'Daily Show' Massacre: Jon Stewart as a New Brand of Media Critic

It was so brutal last night, when Jon Stewart absolutely destroyed CNBC's Jim Cramer's will to live during his Daily Show interview that I almost felt badly for Cramer. Thought he'd burst into tears at any moment. He was reduced to a quivering shell. (The first part of the three-part interview is below, link here.)

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Several interview post-mortems have called Stewart a new kind of fearless media critic who's doing the work that the "real" journalists won't do, which is holding pundits accountable for what they say on the air and for the impact of those words on others. In the case of the CNBC analysts (Cramer, et al), Stewart's point was that when they urge people to "Buy! Buy! Buy!" stocks in certain companies, people listen because CNBC bills itself as the place for insightful business news from experts in the field. But when their prognostications go awry, the commentators don't own the responsibility for their words . . . until Stewart skewers them, as was Cramer's case last night. THEN they finally admit that mistakes were made.

The Atlantic's James Fallows, author of a fantastic book on the media called Breaking the News, likened Stewart's interview with Cramer to interviews by the ground-breaking Edward R. Murrow, noting, "I thought Stewart, without excessive showboating, did the journalistic sensibility proud."

The New York Times' media reporter Brian Stelter observed: "Mr. Stewart questioned Mr. Cramer about the perception that CNBC acts as a cheerleader for the investment community. 'The financial news industry is not just guilty of a sin of omission but a sin of commission,' Mr. Stewart said. Mr. Cramer agreed that he made a number of faulty predictions over the years."

The Associated Press described Stewart as "hammering" Cramer and telling the commentator that the fall-out from his and his colleagues' bad predictions was no joke. AP reported:

"Stewart said he and Cramer are both snake-oil salesmen, only The Daily Show is labeled as such. He claimed CNBC shirked its journalistic duty by believing corporate lies, rather than being an investigative 'powerful tool of illumination.' And he alleged CNBC was ultimately in bed with the businesses it covered -- that regular people's stocks and 401Ks were 'capitalizing your adventure.'"

This interview harkened back to Stewart's obliteration of CNN's Crossfire in 2004 where the comedian called the political pundits on the carpet for contributing nothing but negativism and bile to our national political discussions and asked them to just "stop." He was as ruthless then as he was last night. (FYI: The quality of the video below isn't great.)



I'm a regular viewer of political chat shows. Morning Joe. This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Fox News Sunday. Meet the Press (a shell of its former self from the Russert years). Hardball with Chris Matthews. But this particular interview, aired on COMEDY Central, was one of the toughest and on-the-money interviews I've seen in some time, even tougher than Katie Couric's Sarah Palin piece. When I turned off my TV last night, I was still stunned by what I'd witnessed.

Suburban Mom's Political Fix: The Bleeping of Blagojevich

The news coming out of Illinois is absolutely ripe for satire, and the late night comedians haven't let that go unnoticed. Just as they were feeling blue about the departure of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin from the national scene, in walks Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and all his hair.

The Late Show's round-up of TV news coverage of the "Who Wants to Buy a Senate Seat?" scandal made me laugh. (Link here.)



I can't wait to see how Saturday Night Live handles this.