Please tell me which creative director (ahem, Jason Berry) has the biggest cojones in the business. Oh wait, I really did not want to know! If this is what they call “cognitive dissonance,” please make it stop!
The hardreading staff has just started digging into Taylor Branch’s monumental October 2011 Atlantic piece The Shame of College Sports (described by Frank Deford in an NPR commentary as “the most important article ever written about college sports”).
Excerpt:
With so many people paying for tickets and watching on television, college sports has become Very Big Business. According to various reports, the football teams at Texas, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, and Penn State—to name just a few big-revenue football schools—each earn between $40 million and $80 million in profits a year, even after paying coaches multimillion-dollar salaries. When you combine so much money with such high, almost tribal, stakes—football boosters are famously rabid in their zeal to have their alma mater win—corruption is likely to follow.
Joe Paterno, come on down!
Read Branch’s piece with Michael Sokolove’s New York Times Magazine feature last March on Baylor University basketball phenom Perry Jones.
And weep for the lost promise of so many college athletes.
There’s a pretty good kibitzerpalooza taking place around the pending Scott Brown/Elizabeth Warren bakeoff for the U.S. Senate.
In this corner: The League of Conservation Voters, which has launched a $1.8 million ad campaign targeting Brown over his alleged connections to Big Oil. (Hardworking staff coverage of the group’s first ad here.)
Now there’s a second ad, which depicts a guy in a barn jacket leaving oily footprints and handprints wherever he goes.
Meanwhile, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS is dropping 600,000 large on Warren’s head with this spot:
Ad By Crossroads, Karl Rove’s Outfit, Yanked Off Air For Being False
WASHINGTON — An ad by Karl Rove-backed Crossroads GPS was yanked from rotation on a Montana cable show because it made claims that the network deemed false.
Recently a number of ads by the well-funded conservative outfit have been declared misleading and false, but the spot targeting Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) is apparently the first pulled from the air. The Associated Press reported that other outlets are still running the ad.
In it, Tester is accused of supporting an Environmental Protection Agency rule — a rule that was never in fact proposed — to regulate farm dust. But the vote that the ad cites actually had nothing to do with dust or the EPA; it was a procedural vote on a measure aimed at cracking down on China for manipulating currency.
The offending ad:
A Crossroads spokesman told the Huffington Post, “It was a very small cable system. The four largest broadcast stations in Montana reviewed the facts supporting the ad and will continue airing it.”
Regardless, this comes in the wake of what’s purportedly Hormone Cain’s first TV spot (which the hardworking staff duly noted two days ago) that’s also about EPA dust-related regulation.
It’s all the bunk, says MSNBC’s First Read, calling Cain’s allegations a “false claim.”
Just when the hardworking staff was thinking Seamus might be in the doghouse with New York Times columnist Gail Collins, he shows up in two consecutive columns, Thursday’s and today’s:
The antipathy toward Mitt Romney is the most fascinating part of a deeply fascinating political season. What is it about this guy? Is it just because he once drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car? The smile? Does the Christian right hate him because, until he flipped over, he used to insist he was strongly in favor of a woman’s right to choose? Because he once said he was more pro-gay rights than Ted Kennedy?
It’s a sign that Seamus Sweepstakes The Sequel™ is overdue.
So do . . . play. (See here for rules.) Even the Twitterific @dbernstein is on the case:
If you need even more motivation: Michael Pahre, grand prize winner of the original sweepstakes, gets his gala free lunch this Friday.
The Wall Street Journal did no favors for presidential hypeful Mitt Romney (R-Newt Gingrich? Really?) in this Friday front-page piece:
To win election as governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Mitt Romney made a truce with liberal activists and cast himself as a moderating force within the Republican Party. If he becomes the GOP nominee for president, it may be because of steps he took to change those alliances during a few months of 2005.
Mr. Romney had once said he didn’t “line up” with the National Rifle Association, but in May 2005 proclaimed “The Right to Bear Arms Day.” He had rejected the label of either pro-choice or pro-life, according to an abortion-rights activist, but in July 2005 wrote: “I am prolife.” He helped lead talks on a pact to control emissions but in December 2005 surprised some staff members by pulling out.
A “flip-flopper” tag has long dogged Mr. Romney. Less known is that his reputation as ideologically elastic was cemented over a 10-month stretch in the second half of his term as governor. Conservative interest groups that had once received a cold shoulder were extended a glad hand, while liberal groups often got iced out.
Money quote:
“You have to understand, Mitt Romney is very pragmatic, and I think what happened was the issue became, ‘How do I win the presidency of United States?'” said Rob Garrity, a Republican environmentalist and Romney supporter who served in his administration. “Positions changed.”
Actually, it isn’t really fair to single out the New York Times, but this characterization of Herman Cain sexual harassment accuser Karen Kraushaar is emblematic of the news media at large:
Mr. Cain has said he does not know [Sharon Bialek, who was the first woman to publicly accuse Cain of sexual harassment]. But her decision to step forward contributed to Ms. Kraushaar’s decision to go public the following day, after a week in which she was known publicly only as a former restaurant association employee who had received a $45,000 settlement after accusing Mr. Cain of harassment.
That’s true-but-misleading, as the Fact Check Hall Monitors might say, because Kraushaar only decided to “go public” after she was publicly outed by The Daily, The Daily Caller, and the New York Post.
DES MOINES, Iowa — Herman Cain released his first television ad of the presidential cycle today, not surprisingly, in the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa.
Unlike Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who have been running TV ads on local stations in Iowa, Cain’s 60-second ad began airing on cable — FOX News Channel to be exact.
“The new television ad is a result of the strong fundraising that has occurred over the last ten days,” Steve Grubbs, Cain’s Iowa chairman, told NBC News. “Our supporters are rallying to Herman Cain’s defense and that means we will be able to take our message directly to voters.”
Former House of Bush consigliere Karl Rove has morphed into the GOP’s chief gunsel as head of the Super PAC American Crossroads and the 501(c)4 Crossroads GPS – both of which are front groups for the Republican Party and the latter of which has established a pattern of plucking the Democratic Party’s low-hanging fruit in attack ads.
Earlier this week it was a TV spot that cleverly used Bill Clinton to attack Barack Obama’s jobs bill. Now Crossroads GPS has launched an ad campaign yoking Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren to the Occupy Wall Street crowd:
The GOP-aligned super PAC Crossroads GPS is launching a wave of new television ads against three of this cycle’s most vulnerable Democratic Senate incumbents and two of the party’s strongest recruits.
In total, $1.8 million dollars is being spent over two weeks on the ads, which attack Sens. Jon Tester, D-Mont., Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., as well as former Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine and consumer advocate and Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren.
The hardbetting staff is laying plenty of 8-to-5 that this will get a lot uglier and more expensive over the next few months.
Campaign Outsider Official Sidebar™: The Wall Street Journal is entirely delinquent in identifying Rove in his weekly WSJ op-ed column as “the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush,” thereby failing to note Rove’s Crossroads connection.
Then there’s Bill Clinton. In his new book, “Back to Work,” he spells out his own jobs plan and then undercuts the president. While Mr. Obama obsessively demands higher taxes, Mr. Clinton says, “Right now, in this fragile economy, I don’t favor raising taxes.” Mr. Clinton is right on substance but is complicating Mr. Obama’s life.
As is Crossroads GPS.
As is the Wall Street Journal in staging Rove’s Potemkin column.
A Republican official sends over two recent headlines from the Boston Globe that, he says, are evidence of an effort by editors at the Globe to support Elizabeth Warren in her Senate race against Scott Brown.
Oct. 25: “Ad targets Senator Scott Brown on pollution.”
Nov. 10: “Karl Rove group attack ad targets Warren’s support of Occupy Wall Street”
“Just like when they ran a poll days before the January 2010 special election claiming Martha Coakley was up 15 points, it seems certain editors at the Boston Globe are still doing what they can for the Democratic cause,” the GOP official said.
(Hmmm – days before the January 2010 special election? Technically, everything is days before a subsequent event. In this case, it was 10 days.)
Jennifer Peter, the Globe’s deputy managing editor for local news, told Politico:
“To read bias into our coverage based on the use of a word — and an accurate word for all this realm of advertising — in a headline, is perplexing, especially without taking into account the totality of our coverage.”
“I think they’re both attack ads. We use the word target in both headlines.”
But attack in only one. I think that’s their point.
Campaign Outsider 