It was the moment in last Wednesday’s presidential debate when you knew it would be a did-not-did-so affair.
From there, it’s been right to the dueling TV spots.
Air Romney:
Air Obama:
Pick your poison.
-
Click to subscribe to RSS
Let The $5 Billion Rumpus Begin! (Media Execs Say Yay! Edition)
Over the past year the hardguessing staff has reported any number of estimates of the overall spending for the 2012 election: $4 billion, $6 billion, $9.8 billion, and etc.
Now comes the latest guesstimate, via AlterNet:
Advertising on Television Rockets, as Super PACs Pour in the Dough: Total Spending $5 Billion
Are owners’ profits conflicting with newsrooms’ public interest obligations?
After the votes are counted in November, there will be a big winner in the 2012 election who is not Mitt Romney, Barack Obama nor their top donors. This winner does not want to change anything about how America’s latest national election was run.
The unadvertised victors are media businesses that are seeing political advertising profits reach into the billions. There is no one estimate that combines all of 2012’s campaign advertising across all media, but one of the biggest winners clearly will be local TV stations and regional TV networks in 10 presidential swing states—and in California because of its costly statewide ballot measures.
These TV stations alone will earn $2.8 billion in the 2011-12 election cycle, according to a forecast by Moody’s Investors Service, with a big slice of profits coming from shadowy political groups that sprouted like mushrooms after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in early 2010. They are part of media landscape that last month surpassed the 2008 presidential campaign’s spending record.
The problem is, according to AlterNet: Is there an inherent conflict of interest for news organizations to profit wildly from an enterprise they should be scrutinizing?
This story has many dimensions, but one that particularly stands out concerns a conflict of interest at the heart of being a media business. The local television stations that are reaping this advertising bonanza are largely not covering the biggest sponsors of the political ads on their airwaves.
“While many TV stations are covering local and national races, they are ignoring the ever-expanding role money and the media are playing in these contests,” a new report by the progressive media reform group, FreePress.org, found. “It’s clear that the election’s biggest winners are the conglomerates that own local TV stations in battleground states. And the biggest loser? Democracy.”
It’s easy to dismiss these concerns as knee-jerk liberal handwringing, but it’s a question worth asking: Can the watchdogs simultaneously be cash cows?
Or are some animals more equal than others?
The Skunk At The Yanks’ Garden Party
Mr. September is back.
Yes yes – the Yankees beat the Orioles 7-2 last night, but no thanks to Alex Rodriguez, who once again proved he’s not up to the post-season challenge, despite telling the Daily News the other day that (headlinespeak here) “he will be fine in MLB playoffs” and “no one should worry about his stumble to finish of regular season.”
Uh-huh.
Should we also not worry about his 0-fer performance last night, during which he struck out three times and stranded four?
Rodriguez has been an October no-prize with the notable exception of 2009, which the hardsuffering staff duly noted at the time:
• From our Ministry of Retractions©: The hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider has since 2004 said that the New York Yankees would never win anything (and by “anything” we mean the World’s Serious) with Mr. September Alex Rodriguez on the team. We were wrong. Rodriguez didn’t exactly carry the Yankees in the Serious, but he did a lot to carry them to it.
From our Ministry of Re-Retractions©:
Alex Rodriguez is about as reliable as the Pakistani government.
Don’t ask for him by name.
NYT’s Gail Collins: Brown & Warren ‘Two Angry Squirrels’
New York Times curMidgeon Gail Collins did a Saturday drive-by of U.S. Senate races, and here’s what she said about our Bay State bakeoff:
Nobody in Massachusetts could have missed the fact that there’s a Senate race going on. In their last debate, Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren sounded like two angry squirrels trapped in a small closet. A high point came when the candidates were asked to name their ideal Supreme Court justice. “That’s a great question!” said Brown brightly, in what appeared to be a stall for time. He came up with Antonin Scalia. Then, after boos from the audience, Brown added more names, until he had picked about half the current court, from John Roberts to Sonia Sotomayor.
That’s Scott Brown (R-All of the Above) all over.
But this Senate race is not over by a long shot.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged curMidgeon, Elizabeth Warren, Gail Collins, New York Times, Scott Brown, two angry squirrels
2 Comments
Weekly Standard: Factchecking The Factcheckers
The hardworking staff freely admits that we’ve often relied on sites such as FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com, and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker to question the campaign ads currently swarming the TV airwaves like gnats at a summer barbecue.
But we also freely admit we’re having second thoughts after reading the series of articles the Weekly Standard’s Mark Hemingway has written recently.
His first piece (“Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking'”) took on the factcheck-industrial complex in general.
His latest examines one fact check in particular: Whether Mitt Romney’s claim that Barack Obama has “gutted welfare reform’s work requirement” is true.
Hemingway makes an effective case that Romney’s claim is true, and that the fact check hall monitors have been derelict in actually checking the facts.
Check it out, and decide for yourselves.
Ads ‘n’ Ends From The Massachusetts Congressional Races
Once around the Public Garden, James, and don’t spare the horses.
Sean Bielat: Hits and Missus
Fourth Congressional district repeat candidate Sean Bielat (R-I Won’t Be Frank) has launched his first TV spot in the race against Joe Kennedy III (D-I Will Be Frank).
Narrator: The ideally named Hope Bielat.
There’s no Mrs. Joe K.3, and don’t hold your breath waiting for the fiancée to weigh in.
Tierney Will Tisei Anything
Vying for Most Dishonest Ad of the Year is this new TV spot from John Tierney (D-All Bets Are Off) in the 6th Congressional district bakeoff:
As Stephanie Ebbert reported in yesterday’s Boston Globe, the ad is entirely deceptive.
With a recent poll showing him trailing his opponent, US Representative John F. Tierney has launched a scathing new television ad that tries to tar his moderate prochoice Republican challenger as a conservative who wants to restrict access to abortion and birth control.
The ad says Richard R. Tisei “defended the Tea Party Republican platform,” with a constitutional amendment banning abortion, even in cases of rape or incest or a threat to the life of the mother.
As evidence, the ad points to Tisei’s comment about the GOP platform in August: “It is what it is.”
But those comments are incomplete, and, like other elements of the ad, misleading.
Tierney’s district might be on the North Shore, but you can smell the desperation as far south as Washington.
Trail-Mixed Reviews for Elizabeth Warren
The hardworking staff has been doing some fall cleaning at the Global Worldwide headquarters, and we came across this piece in the Weekly Standard of October 1:
The Natural Versus the Phony
Can a politically gifted Republican survive in Democratic Massachusetts?
Elizabeth Warren is opening a new campaign office in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury. The 63-year-old Harvard law professor is wearing a pink jacket, white blouse, and black pants. After shaking hands with everyone around the parking lot, she chooses a low spot in the pavement in front of the office door to speak to the crowd. Warren is noticeably shorter than the local community leaders who introduce her. She clutches the microphone in her right hand and gestures with her left as she works through her stump speech.
“I don’t kid myself. I know it’s going to be a fight,” Warren says. Her voice is flat, her rhythm slow and deliberate. “I know it’s going to be tough. I know they’re going to throw everything they possibly can at me. I know this. I know this. But here’s what I want to tell you. I am not afraid.” Warren’s voice gets louder. “I am not afraid.” And more piercing. “I am not afraid!”
But she is in a tossup race in a deep blue state for, the article says, one simple reason: “Scott Brown is one of the most gifted natural politicians in the country, and Elizabeth Warren simply isn’t. ”
In fact, in the Weekly Standard telling of it, she’s downright terrible on the stump. That stands in marked contrast to the glowing reviews she got recently in BuzzFeed, as the hardworking staff noted:
Beyond extolling Warren’s “nerdy charm” and “quirky appeal,” the Buzzfeed post included this observation:
[S]pending time on the trail with Warren last week showed there’s a wrinkle in the narrative that she’s cold and unapproachable. And voters BuzzFeed spoke with seemed remarkably attached to Warren not just for her ideas, but for her “compassion” and “warmth.”
We’ll try to go find a tiebreaker.
It’s Good To Live In A Two-Daily Town (Globe And Herald Editorial Cartoonists Agree!)
Stop the presses! The Boston Globe’s Dan Wasserman and the Boston Herald’s Jerry Holbert had the same line on the first presidential debate. Details at IGTLTDT.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Dan Wasserman, IGTLTDT, Jerry Holbert, presidential debate
1 Comment
It’s Good To Live In A Two-Daily Town (Red Sock Of Courage Edition)
Curt Schilling has officially hit sock bottom. Details at IGTLTDT.
It’s Good To Live In A Two-Daily Town (The Herald Heralds Itself . . . Again)
The feisty local tabloid gets all double-jointed patting itself on the back. Details at IGTLTDT.
Brown/Warren Senate Race: We’re Number Ugliest! (II)
First, as the hardworking staff duly noted the other day, it was the Daily Beast and MSNBC’s First Read.
Now it’s BuzzFeed:
The Ugliest Campaign In America
A plan to keep it civil has backfired badly in Massachusetts. Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren can’t keep their hands clean.
LOWELL, Mass. — The poison that runs through this state’s Senate race seemed to spill over into the traffic Tuesday night: Everyone was paralyzed, furious, and headed to the same place, the University of Massachusetts-Lowell’s Tsongas Center.
Hundreds of people, their ranks deepened by union activists, held blue signs along the road for Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren. A small band played for her, and Warren arrived in a blue SUV to enthusiastic cheers from her public.
But they had a problem: a smaller, but equally vocal group of Scott Brown diehards with enormous signs bearing the name of their candidate. Warren and Brown supporters tried to stand in front of each other with their signs. An older woman with one of the massive Brown signs snapped at a young man with a Warren sign who was trying to break up her visual. More than one Brown supporter did a taunting war whoop — mockery of Warren’s claimed Native American heritage — that some of the senator’s staffers were caught on tape doing a couple weeks ago.
A crew of young men circled a row of Warren supporters with their signs, yelling “Brown Town! Brown Town!” as police watched from the sidelines.
A man with a Warren sign elbowed through them, grumbling. “Fucking assholes.”
The debate itself was, if anything, even uglier.
Can we agree that the vaunted People’s Pledge has blown up in Brown’s and Warren’s faces, forcing them to do the dirty work that former House of Bush consigliere Karl Rove or former House of Obama gunsel Bill Burton would otherwise be doing?
And can we agree that we’ll never see its like again?
Not to mention, we might not even see it itself through Election Day.
Wake us on November 6th.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Bill Burton, Buzzfeed, Daily Beast, Elizabeth Warren, Karl Rove, MSNBC First Read, People's Pledge, Scott Brown
9 Comments
Campaign Outsider 