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Cross Posted at Rip and Read

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but was last night’s State of the Union Address a crock of crap or what?

We have heard from the media all about his “plea for unity” but you didn’t have to listen very far into the president’s speech to hear the message he was really sending- about 2 minutes and 57 seconds to be exact. A nice, subtle “up yours” to the good folks across the asile.

If you READ New York Times transcript, the President says:

We enter the year 2007 with large endeavors under way and others that are ours to begin. In all of this, much is asked of us. We must have the will to face difficult challenges and determined enemies, and the wisdom to face them together.
Some in this chamber are new to the House and the Senate, and I congratulate the Democratic majority.

But if you LISTEN to the NPR recording, (there is a link on this page the President says:

We enter the year 2007 with large endeavors under way and others that are ours to begin. In all of this, much is asked of us. We must have the will to face difficult challenges and determined enemies, and the wisdom to face them together.
Some in this chamber are new to the House and the Senate, and I congratulate the Democrat majority.

If you are not a political junkie, you probably missed it, it was that subtle…just one little part of one little word. DemocratIC vs. Democrat. But it spoke VOLUMES. And what it said…wasn’t very nice.

What did it say? Well, here’s a quote from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_%28phrase%29)

Democrat Party is a political epithet used by some conservative commentators and by some past and present leaders of the Republican Party (including the Republican National Committee, the White House, and President George W. Bush) in speeches and press releases instead of the name (or more precisely, the proper noun) Democratic Party.

Many members of the Democratic Party object to the term. Liberal commentator Hendrik Hertzberg writes, “There’s no great mystery about the motives behind this deliberate misnaming. ‘Democrat Party’ is a slur, or intended to be – a handy way to express contempt. Aesthetic judgments are subjective, of course, but ‘Democrat Party’ is jarring verging on ugly. It fairly screams ‘rat’.”

One Republican to use this term widely was Joe McCarthy, according to the Wikipedia article, others have included Tom DeLay, and, of course, Rush Limbaugh fires it off quite often.

So, even while the President- the well known Uniter not Divider- stood on the Rostrum last night, pleading for Unity, he shot a very definite, but subtle bird at the new DEMOCRATIC Majority. Using the word “Democrat” was just a nasty little gesture made when the teacher wasn’t looking.

So, all the talk of unity was, in the end, just more smoke and mirrors…but then, you knew that already, didn’t you?

Cross posted from Rational Resistance:

I refused to watch Bush on TV, as I do pretty much every year. The Democratic response, however, is another story. I was very happy when Jim Webb defeated George Allen for the U.S. Senate seat from Virginia, although I think it’s pretty clear that he’s not really my kind of Democrat (too conservative). Still, you can’t discount his eloquence here:

The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command, whose jurisdiction includes Iraq, the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable – and predicted – disarray that has followed….

The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military. We need a new direction. Not one step back from the war against international terrorism. Not a precipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos. But an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq’s cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.

Here’s the link to the video of his whole speech.

Is Bush pulling another Niger yellowcake on us? Check out this post from Democrats.com and see what you think.

Submitted by Bob Fertik on January 22, 2007 – 11:24pm.Bush’s Lies

The incomparable Joseph Cannon has once again scooped the media by discovering the Big Lie that will be the centerpiece of Bush’s SOTU: the fictional tale of an Al-Zarqawi plot (under direct written orders from Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri) to send 19 terrorists into the U.S using student visas.

After reviewing the three published versions of this story (below), it’s perfectly clear there are no credible facts – no independently verified documents, no identified witnesses, and no suspects. The whole story hinges on a single document, which was not seen by any of the reporters and probably does not exist.

Josh mentions these “plot” stories at 00:52 of his video response.

While Vermont Press Bureau reporter Darren Allen typically takes long breaks from his media blog before providing several rapid-fire posts, the reason for his most recent absence turns out to be a career change. From Hall Monitor::

Allen, who started this blog two legislative sessions ago as this paper’s first venture into the blogosphere, has decided to leave his post as chief of the Vermont Press Bureau to become the communications director for the Agency of Natural Resources.

He will start his new job — where he will be responsible for letting the public (and us) in on what the more than 600 people in ANR are doing — on Feb. 5.

Allen joins fellow (former) reporter Anson Tebbets in signing on with the Douglas administration in recent weeks. Although I’m sure several former Scudder Parker campaign staffers are sending “I knew it all along!” emails back and forth by now, the move does bring up some meaningful questions (including the question of just how crappy reporting must pay in Vermont to make jumping ship so attractive, given that most people hardly get rich on the State payroll…)

As a discreet discrete incident, it does come as a bit of a surprise. With his graduation from reporter to reporter-slash-columnist (a problematic combination at best), followed by his recent first person narratives of now-US Rep. Peter Welch’s federal transition (including jaunts to DC that suggest his employer had no idea a departure was in the offing), Allen was clearly trying to fashion himself into a media personality rather than a “mere” chronicler (despite what seemed to be a surprisingly thin skin).

But the big question it raises of course, concerns more than one guy’s career change; specifically, just how cozy are some of these reporters with the subjects they are reporting on? It is the same question raised by Chris Graff’s post-AP-expulsion soft landing with National Life, and former Rutland Herald reporter Brendan McKenna’s poor career move to the Communications position for Republican US House candidate Martha Rainville.

We on the left are perhaps a bit too quick to ascribe diabolical intentions to right wing administrations, politicians, and corporate entities (I’m speaking theoretically here… I honestly don’t feel like we’re too quick to do that, but I’m trying to have an open mind…). As such, we assume that if a reporter is truly doing his or her job in ferreting out the truth, they wouldn’t possibly be welcome being employed by such an entity. Neither would they themselves feel comfortable working there. As such, when we see this sort of casual crossover (which seems to be becoming routine, looking at the rapidly diminishing Vermont press corps), we get our hackles up. When it’s just one person, we become dubious of that particular person and feel retroactiviely validated after scrutinizing their biases. When it seems to be a trend, it looks for all the world like proof of institutional collusion between the fourth estate and the power structures they are supposed to be investigating, and thereby (to some extent) protecting us from.

But even if Republican administrations and Insurance Companies aren’t as diabolical as we tend to shorthand them to be, it still seems to me that a reporter doing their job is going to be an annoyance, as the act of journalistic investigation must almost inevitably become annoying to the subject at some point – at least insofar as those subjects are governmental or corporate entities that deal in secrects and message-control. Even if the reporter turns up nothing but butterflies and puppies in their digging, the subject can hardly be expected to be comfortable with them, let alone chummy enough to provide for such a routine back-and-forth on the career train.

But the unfortunate truth is more often that chumminess leads to access, and access leads to stories. Stories lead to attention, readers, raises and job security – which ultimately makes the reporter somewhat dependent on that chumminess to stay on the front page. And who beats up on their chums? If you do, the chum slams the door in your face. No more access. No more story. My latest favorite radio show is NPR’s On the Media which last weekend had a terrific segment on this very subject:

(Host) BOB GARFIELD: Can you cite some examples of times when reporters too immersed in those institutions were unable to cover their beats properly?

(Journalism Professor) EDWARD WASSERMAN: Well, I think that most reporters who have covered beats will tell you that over time, they create a store, repository of stories that they can’t tell. I mean, what do you do when you’re the White House reporter and you know that the president falls asleep during cabinet meetings? Well, you know, that’s a terrific story. The American public would like to know that. And you also realize that your longevity as a White House reporter is going to be severely shortened once you’ve written that story.

And the next thing you know, no matter how supportive your editors are and no matter how pleased you are that you’ve broken that story, over the next few weeks, when all of your rivals are getting the leaks and the interesting plants and stories and are beating your pants off on that beat, they’re going to start to think about moving you off the beat.

Fighting this dynamic depends on an honor system, but it’s a nebulous honor system at times- one that seemingly must bend to the realities of building contacts. Wasserman argues for a serious re-assessment of the very concept of “beat” reporting, noting that some of the biggest stories of the last century (such as Watergate) were broken by reporters coming in from the outside, rather than being beat reporters for the topical sphere from which the story was broken.

It’s hard to imagine the system ever being perfect, but it’s hard not to look at this dynamic (and the revolving door between reporter-and-reported which seems to be spinning wildly in Vermont) and not see a real need for improvement.

You’d think traditional media institutions themselves would be first in line demanding real paradigm shifts in order to maintain their integrity and credibility – especially given their declining reader/viewership and the onslaught of the “new media” and citizen journalism. Unfortunately, traditional media practitioners are a notoriously insular lot who are generally loathe to engage in any meaningful self-critique. From On the Media again, this time a segment by Marketplace correspondent Dan Grech:

ERIC NEWTON: Newsroom cultures are one of the most defensive cultures there are.

DAN GRECH: Eric Newton is the vice-president at the Knight Foundation, a grant-giving nonprofit that outlived its namesake corporation, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain.

ERIC NEWTON: You’ve got hospital emergency rooms, you’ve got the military, you’ve got nuclear power plants and you’ve got newsrooms. Three of those are life-and-death operations and one of them just thinks it is.

If the email exchange I’ve had with one of the local editors recently (as well as the previously linked exchange with Allen) is any indication, this dynamic is alive and well among the Vermont media corps, unfortnately.

This is not only a shame, but a fairly suicidal shame at that. From the same segment, here’s Grech again:

Newspapers themselves face a life-and-death situation. The scariest end game is what’s called the “death spiral.” Newspapers continue to lose readers, which drives away advertisers, which cuts into revenue. That forces job cuts, which erodes the quality of the paper, which chases away more readers and advertisers – on and on until the paper collapses. As reporters recognize the dire situation, their defensiveness has given way to fear.

In the fluid world of today’s media, all traditional venues (not just newspapers) would do well to look at the deteriorating public impression of their industry that is only fed by the appearence of a revolving door between the reporter and the reported-on. After all, the “new media” alternatives are not going away anytime soon.

But with everything in motion, traditional media venues that can examine their own practices and paradigms with a critical eye can find opportunity. Here’s the Knight Foundation’s Eric Newton:

Fifty years from now we’ll look back on this as the Wild West period and the crazy pioneering era in which nobody knew what was going to happen and everything seemed possible, and opportunity flowed from every street corner. It is a wildly exciting time, as long as you’re not pining for what was.

I would argue that this doesn’t just mean looking at the nature of the media themselves, as Newton was suggesting, but the very nature of journalism as Wasserman suggested.

Consider: ethics reform in political circles has included restrictions on how long a US Congressperson must wait after leaving office before they are legally entitled to work as a lobbyist. The point is to increase public trust and enhance the integrity of the process by avoiding the appearence of a revolving door between the Legislature and the powerful monied interests who work the Capitol Halls to influence legislation. Perhaps professional media venues would be well-served by a similar code that established a comparable waiting period before a reporter could accept a job for the very interests he or she has been tasked to report on.

It’s something to kick around, at any rate.

Here’s a miscellany of pieces that I came across tonight while not watching the Chimp in Chief:

MIAMI, Florida (AP) — E. Howard Hunt, who helped organize the Watergate break-in, leading to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon’s presidency, died Tuesday. He was 88.

And from the left-wing media: JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) — Allegations that Sen. Barack Obama was educated in a radical Muslim school known as a “madrassa” are not accurate, according to CNN reporting.

Insight Magazine, which is owned by the same company as The Washington Times, reported on its Web site last week that associates of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, had unearthed information the Illinois Democrat and likely presidential candidate attended a Muslim religious school known for teaching the most fundamentalist form of Islam.

MONTPELIER – A new report prepared for the Legislature raises question about whether Vermont’s tax burden is as bad compared to other states as is often suggested.

Sen. Claire Ayer, D-Addison, said the report was welcome. “It destroys the myth that Vermont is such an unfriendly place for business and families,” she said.

MONTPELIER – Vermonters could save nearly a half-billion dollars over the next decade by more efficiently using heating fuels, according to a study by the Department of Public Service.

The state would have to invest about $149 million over that period, but residents could save $486 million and significantly cut the production of gases responsible for global warming.

Rich Little won’t be mentioning Iraq or ratings when he addresses the White House Correspondents’ Dinner April 21.

Little said organizers of the event made it clear they don’t want a repeat of last year’s controversial appearance by Stephen Colbert, whose searing satire of President Bush and the White House press corps fell flat and apparently touched too many nerves.