Google

Google, and all that it navigates us to, is not making us stupid. President Bush uses Google. As he famously said in a 2006 interview, "…one of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps.'' Enough said.

With the evolution of the Internet, reading has become a multi-media experience. The book or newspaper has morphed into a more complete information package of prose, imagery, sound and sources, with the potential to be re-written as necessary. What was once limited by the physical page is now nearly infinite, punctuated with multiple points of departure leading you to still more relevant information. What years ago might have taken hours or days of research can be accomplished in minutes.

When I was an undergraduate, there was no Google. There was no Wikipedia. As a matter of fact, there was no internet, no personal computers, no cell phones. Reading was by default ‘old school’ and research was conducted in the library. The Information Age, like no other in our history, has provided us with unlimited access to information and new mediums. The individual challenge is for each of us to have the discipline to not be distracted by every link and pop-up we encounter, while working as fast as we can to absorb as much as we can from a medium designed for maximum efficiency.

There's an ever-present Taylor's stopwatch in all of us.

So Jack, Tell Us How You Really Feel

CNN's Jack Cafferty is apparently not a fan of Sarah Palin, as this posting clearly illustrates.

With the wildfire burning through conservatives like George Will and Kathleen Parker, can the experience meme that the McCain campaign wants to weave through his campaign withstand the inexperience criticism that every Palin interview invites?

The Debate Goes On

The first presidential debate is over and now the debate about the debate begins. The McCain camp wasted no time editing some of Barack Obama’s remarks and launched a nearly immediate post-debate web ad declaring “John is Right”.



Imagine the powerful message that the Kennedy camp might have sent in 1960, immediately posting clips of a flu-ridden, 5 o’clock shadowed Richard Nixon after their historic debate, with a banner “Is Richard Nixon Fit To Lead?”

The New York Times has a piece that frames the contest as a meeting of generations. "One candidate cited Churchill and Eisenhower, and described George Shultz, who served in Ronald Reagan’s cabinet, as a 'great secretary of state.' The other promised anxious voters a federal budget that could be examined on a 'Google for government' and accused his opponent of having a '20th-century mindset.'"

Politico’s Roger Simon calls the debate for McCain. "But McCain seemed to get it Friday night. He certainly knew enough to try to turn his age into a plus and not a minus. 'There are some advantages to experience, knowledge and judgment,' McCain said."

A CNN poll shows Obama with the win, along with the CBS poll of undecided voters.

And the debate continues.

Mighty Maverick

Leave it to Barney Frank to define John McCain's return to Washington:

"I was afraid that his dropping in here, like Andy Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse—'here I am to save the day'—I thought that would slow things down. I didn’t see any sign of our Republican colleagues paying any attention to him whatsoever."



As partisan as Frank's remarks may have been, the Andy Kaufman reference is right on target.

The Next Vice-President?

Here's one blogger's perspective on the McCain campaign suspension, suggesting that Sarah Palin's Katie Couric interview yesterday was in need of a diversion. The interview in its entirety is at the bottom of the page. Katie asks the right questions and catches Sarah very unprepared.

Talking Points

Who and what is driving the Straight Talk Express? Politico asks the question of professionals on both sides of the aisle: "Is the McCain campaign's decision to "suspend" campaigning and the Friday debate smart or not smart?"

With the polls shifting in Obama's favor and the economy now the number one issue in the campaign, McCain needed a game changer. The Daily Kos inadvertently received a copy of the campaign's internal talking points memo. Has the campaign really been suspended, or is the suspension part of the campaign? McCain has built a career out of being a different kind of politician; is this an unselfish act of leadership or McCain as Don Quixote?

I've been wondering when the Keating Five story was going to start to make its way into the news.

There is no question that our ecomomy is in crisis, but the "suspension" of McCain's campaign, the suggestion that tomorrow night's debate be postponed, the new proposal to postpone the vice-presidential debate (to give SP more time to prepare?) has given me my first Lewis Black moment of the campaign!

Right Turn

George Will has questioned McCain now on at least two fronts, raising questions about his temperament and his decision-making abilities - "...a visceral judgment by one who is confidently righteous." An April 2008 Washington Post article earlier raised the question of temperament. A former McCain Senate colleague is quoted saying:

"His temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him."

Who will the most conservative voters vote for, if they, too, become disenchanted with McCain? Bob Barr? The Barr and Nader vote in this year’s election may in fact help Obama; conservatives who pass on McCain and make a third party choice will reduce the Republican tally; in the 2004 election, 1% of the vote went to candidates other than Bush or Kerry.

Media 2008

Today’s media landscape is far more crowded than it was as recently as 8 years ago, when George W. Bush was running for President with the promise that he was a “uniter, not a divider” and the Gore campaign was the first to be communicating via Blackberry. There are significantly more media choices today than ever before, both for the consumers of information and entertainment, and for the advertisers who want to reach them.

As new and developing technologies create opportunities for expansion and growth, the control (ownership) of the media, through mergers and acquisitions, consolidates into fewer and fewer media giants. A glance at five of the largest media companies in the United States can be found here. A pdf of what Advertising Age has named Media Family Tree 2007 can be downloaded by going here and then by downloading the Digital Family Trees 2008 poster (copyright protected; otherwise I would have tried to embed it). This provides a snapshot of the country’s largest media companies, based upon 2006 revenues.

2007 was a busy year for mergers and acquisitions across all media (from The State of the News Media 2008):

Two notable newspaper transactions: “Sam Zell took Tribune private in an $8.2 billion deal, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp successfully bid $5 billion for Dow Jones and its Wall Street Journal.”

Online media ownership changes: “The first three quarters saw more than 637 transactions, matching the number for all of 2006. What’s more, these deals totaled more than $95 billion in value, surpassing last year’s total of $61 billion by 56%.”

The Federal Communications Commission and its rules of ownership, which have gone through periods of tightening and relaxation, regulate the expansion of these media giants, and their fewer and fewer not-so-giant competitors, on a market-to-market basis. As stated under the heading of media ownership “The Nation’s media regulations must promote competition and diversity...” The risks are too great for the emergence of a monopoly in terms of their editorial product and the information they choose to deliver (or withhold), and the elimination of competition in the advertising marketplace.

While all forms of the news media are aggressively competing with one other to get the story out, they are also competing on the business side for the limited advertising budgets, that 1. Need to be spread over a more diverse media landscape and 2. Constrict every time our economy contracts. Ironically, the evolution of cable technologies and the 24-hour news cycle coupled with the technologies of digital media production have created the potential for a revenue vacuum, as the competition to deliver the news sometimes supplants the campaign’s need to buy air time. An excerpt from this article supports this point:

“VandeHei asked McKinnon how campaigns could “exploit the new habits of the media” (which brought a sly grin to the consultant’s face), where commercials as soon as they are released will get distributed, instantly, at no cost to the campaigns, via the twenty-four hour cable networks and Web sites like Politico.”

As the introduction of The State of the News Media 2008 clearly observes:

“… it appears the biggest problem facing traditional media has less to do with where people get information than how to pay for it — the emerging reality that advertising isn’t migrating online with the consumer. The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising.”

Along with the mergers and acquisitions, there has been a willingness to create partnerships or strategic alliances, that bring traditional print sources, such as the New York Times or Washington Post, together with cable broadcast partners to share resources (content) with a broader audience at a lower cost (it is more efficient to let the New York Times tell the story on MSNBC than for NBC to break the story).

“In broad terms, the fundamental trends transforming how people acquire news continued in the last year. More effort keeps shifting toward processing information and away from original reporting. Fewer people are being asked to do more, and the era of reporters operating in multimedia has finally arrived.”

The Major Trends in the media are identified as:

1. News is shifting from being a product - today’s newspaper, Web site or newscast - to becoming a service - how can you help me, even empower me?

2. A news organization and a news Web site are no longer final destinations.

3. The prospects for user-created content, once thought possibly central to the next era of journalism, for now appear more limited, even among “citizen” sites and blogs.

4. Increasingly, the newsroom is perceived as the more innovative and experimental part of the news industry.

5. The agenda of the American news media continues to narrow, not broaden.

The balancing act of packaging and delivering the news, while serving the public good and meeting ownership objectives for profitability is the fundamental challenge of the media, regardless of whether they are traditional or new.

Latest Release: Just the Facts!

Here is the latest video installment from factcheck.org. It's noteworthy that the McCain camp went from dismissing them as a source in early August to citing them as a source (albeit erroneously) this past week.

McCain, Spain, Explain

We’ve all heard the interview or read the transcript by now. Was he confused, or taking an aggressive foreign policy position? “It's Not the Crime, It's the Cover-Up” comes to mind when trying to make sense of the McCain camp’s response.

Andrew Romano of Newsweek summarizes the response in the last two paragraphs of his posting and offers two ways to look at what happened.

I’ll file this one under gaffes.

Once…Twice…Three Times A Meme?

There seems to be an odd Republican talking point about our nation’s recent history of a governor winning the White House (Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush) - two different McCain surrogates made the same point today in separate interviews on MSNBC (apparently MSNBC didn’t think much of the remarks as I was not able to find either video on their site). While the focus of both campaigns and the media has finally shifted to the Economy, the wisdom of the Palin pick continues to be questioned, today from within the Republican Party by Senator Chuck Hagel.

Hearing these remarks the fist time caught my attention. Hearing the same remarks a second time made me curious. A brief web search took me to a post on a DNC blog, headlined “Record of Republican Governors as Presidents” which I was more surprised to see was dated yesterday than that it was there at all. Was the DNC posting part of an attempt to control the Qualification Narrative and were today’s remarks the Republican response? Were the remarks independent of the posting and only an attempt to futher the myth of Governor Palin’s political experience and qualifications to be next in line to the Presidency?

The Message and the Messenger

Yesterday’s response by Carly Fiorina to the question of Sarah Palin’s qualifications to run a Fortune 500 company, specifically Hewlett-Packard, went from bad to worse when she added John McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden to the list of unqualified hypothetical CEOs.

The radio interview spawned a series of TV interviews later in the day; of particular note is the Andrea Mitchell interview that aired yesterday afternoon. Mitchell, NBC Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, has been regularly involved in campaign coverage on both NBC and MSNBC. As afternoon anchor on MSNBC, she was in the role of reporting the news, a distinction worth noting since MSNBC’s evening programming shifts from news to opinion.

The Fiorina story was picked up in the evening on MSNBC’s latest entry, The Rachel Maddow Show, in which, interestingly, Fiorina’s references to Obama and Biden also being unqualified were edited from the clip. Maddow also hosts a program on Air America, and is unequivocally recognized as a liberal voice.

Earlier this month, in the wake of ongoing criticism and uneasiness within its own news division about the objectivity of its campaign coverage, NBC pulled back its two lead MSNBC hosts from election coverage. Clearly, the line distinguishing “news” from “opinion” can be very thin. However subtle, when the media chooses to deliver only a part of the story, they do little to counter the claim of bias.

All The Lies Fit To Print

Here's a compilation I found of last week's lies, big and small, for those of us who are keeping score, which apparently includes all of us except John "It is True" McCain and Sarah "Pinocchio" Palin.

Free Ride?

Free Ride: John McCain and the Media devotes its 200 or so pages to describing how John McCain cultivated his place in American politics, from War Hero to Maverick. The Myth of McCain, the authors contend, has three foundations: Vietnam, Campaign Finance Reform and what they refer to as “I Love You, You Love Me” – the mutual love affair with the American Media. The new chapter, though a bit dated as it only takes us into the primary season, provides more insight into the man and the myth (apparently, Reverend Hagee is also a proponent of lipstick- sorry).

Newsflash: McCain Wants to Win!

John McCain has adopted essentially the ‘Barack made me do it’ defense for the negative tone his campaign has taken. McCain recently told the audience of The View, as he did the national audience one night earlier at the Columbia forum, “If we had done what I asked Sen. Obama to do, because I’ve been in a lot of other campaigns where I have appeared with the opposition with the people and listened to their hopes and dreams and aspirations, I don't think you’d see the tenor of this campaign.”

The bottom line is McCain wants to win. Every campaign’s most elemental goal is to win. Without the win, your agenda becomes dust, and you are left wondering where it all went wrong. With 51 days until the election, the longer McCain can avoid the real issues by making his opponent and the media the issues, the better his chance for victory.

“Every day not talking about the economy, the war and how to fix a broken system is a victory for McCain,” said John Weaver, a former top strategist to the nominee who left the campaign last year. “They’re going to ride it as long as they can and as long as the mainstream media puts up every ridiculous charge.”


Back to the Campaign.

Planned Parenthood has responded to the recent McCain ad that suggested Obama supported a bill to teach sex-ed to kindergarteners.

We'll see as they day progresses how this response from outside the Obama camp plays.

Additional clarification is provided by FactCheck.org as they set the record straight on this and several other current claims.

Tough Business.

My friends, the Straight Talk Express pulled into the station yesterday. I hope you saw it, because it will likely depart in a New York minute after the campaigns resume today. Yesterday’s truce between the Obama and McCain camps was laudable in respect of the anniversary of the attacks of September 11, and the forum held at Columbia University was a refreshing reminder of what a campaign could be if the candidates were regularly engaged in intelligent conversations about their vision of the America they wish to lead.

When asked about Sarah Palin’s remarks diminishing Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer, McCain responded “Of course I respect community organizers, of course I respect people who serve their community, and Senator Obama’s record there is outstanding.” What is notable is McCain’s initial response "This is a tough business." It would have been an interesting moment, in light of this admission, if this were followed-up with “Do you think Barack Obama called Sarah Palin a pig?”

It was refreshing to have at least one day in the midst of a long campaign in which the rhetoric was at rest.

Could Somebody Hold the Pig?

When I was visiting a college with my son last winter, we had an impromptu meeting with the Vice-President of Admission. When the question of my son’s academic record came up, I quickly offered, “To be honest, you can put lipstick on a pig…” - you know the rest. This controversy between the two camps amounts to nothing other than another example of personalities, not issues, capturing the attention of the media and those who follow the stories (the VP of Admission loved the metaphor and my son was accepted).

Attack. Counter Attack.

One of the biggest problems of the Kerry campaign in 2004 was the lack of an effective response to charges from the opposition…this should be one of the great lessons for 2008. An attack dog for the Democrats has surfaced, and it is not Hillary Clinton, who was fairly restrained in Florida on Monday on behalf of Barack Obama. A Clinton-Palin skirmish does not seem likely.

Ed Rendell has charged the McCain campaign with “The Big Lie Strategy” – a strategy the McCain campaign certainly did not invent, but seems determined to implement.