The Day has Come

I never thought or expected to see the day that the collective press/media would become a chief adversary, even an enemy, but that day is here.

Well, it is just happened to really hit me that way. Regardless of all our problems, government corruptions and failures, the “press” has now positioned itself in such a way that it is a chief adversary (if not the foremost one) and just a tool of the power.

Sort of scary. One can look at all the reasons and motivations. That is one hell of a revelation to come to terms with. I thought I had witnessed many problems before.

We know all that stuff about the idea and main purpose of the press — the ideal. However, it made itself into this hyper-politicized, bias oriented institution in general. They’ve picked their side, the battle lines have been drawn. We’ve defined the battlefield and the strategy is unfolding before our eyes. It not only applies to politics but it is an ideological adversary — even a radical one.

Not a scenario I had expected to this operational level. The saying is know your enemy. What happens when the press/media finally becomes a determined enemy of the people? Couple that predicament with the most critically import election of our time.

This was on top of another observation a while back that we don’t really have a free press. So I wondered, after these many years, maybe the press did not want to be free after all? Not anymore anyway. That used to be a major difference we had to other places.

RightRing | Bullright

Filthy “Pool” for O-regime, what do you expect?

The column did not need a subtitle, but the author supplied one anyway.
Dirty “pool”(report) in China? Big surprise.

Dirty Pool

Column: The rise of secretarial journalism

BY: Matthew Continetti | Free Beacon
December 6, 2013 5:00 am

It was a sunny day in Beijing on Thursday—refreshingly sunny, to be more precise—when Vice President Joe Biden met Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. I know this because I have read the pool report of the occasion, a pithy and practically content-free piece of journalism that is nevertheless one of the more entertaining things to enter my inbox in recent days. The pool report confirms the lingering suspicion—if it hasn’t been confirmed a million times already—that the line between journalism and Democratic Party cheerleading has more than faded. It has become invisible.

Pool reports are summaries of official events distributed to reporters, who then use the information to write articles or produce news packages. The building blocks of journalism, involving basic details such as names, places, and local color, pool reports are typically written by members of the periodical press. But the Internet has thrown open the question of what the periodical press is. And in the case of Vice President Biden’s visit with the Chinese collective oligarchy at the Zhongnanhai Leadership Compound, the pool report was composed and issued by someone who is not a member of the periodical press, someone who is not really “a journalist,” as the term is broadly understood, at all. His name is Steve Clemons.

Clemons is a Washington hand and bon vivant who has spent a long career working for a Democratic senator, working for think tanks, and working in the interstices of online journalism, event programming, and D.C. social climbing. For some time he has been parked at the New American Foundation—a center-left think tank that recently hosted an event for an anti-Israel screed written by the son of a top Clinton confidante—and at the Atlantic Monthly, where he is “Washington editor at large.” Politico has described him as a “foreign policy ‘super-agent,’” and the foreign policy for which he flacks lines up remarkably closely with the “realist” policy of the Obama administration: eager to negotiate with traditional adversaries, convinced that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the cause of Middle East turmoil, and determined to prevent neoconservatives and the dastardly Israel Lobby from committing America to foreign entanglements. Clemons was a key player in the campaign to install as America’s secretary of defense the embarrassingly stupid Chuck Hagel. He is not, let us be clear, a “disinterested observer.” I look forward to Sean Hannity’s pool reports from President Ted Cruz’s state visit to France.

Clemons’s prose is clichéd. “Good morning from refreshingly sunny Beijing where the skies are robin egg blue,” began his first report. Biden did not just greet his Chinese counterpart, Clemons said. Biden “warmly greeted” him. After an exchange of pleasantries, “your pool was then escorted out to brisk air, sunny skies, and a momentary look at the gardens and other pavilions of the exclusive Zhongnanhao Compound.” I hope your pool made the moment count, since he got closer to the center of Chinese authoritarian decision-making than most Chinese ever will. Dan Balz can rest easy: Clemons is not coming for his job anytime soon. Biden Deputy Chief of Staff Shailagh Murray, on the other hand, who used to be a “journalist” herself—well, Shailagh, you better watch out.

“An awkward thing happened in which your pool inadvertently became part of the story,” Clemons reported. The awkward thing was this: The vice president, in conversation with Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao, began gesturing at Clemons and saying, “He is a very important man. Seriously he is important.”

“Your pool demurred as best he could”—I’m sure he did—but Biden continued, telling Li that he should bypass the diplomatic niceties and talk directly with Clemons. “He is the one you really want to speak to. Seriously.” Later Biden bought Clemons a Magnum ice cream bar. But do not assume that the gift of delicious ice cream from a powerful admirer would affect our correspondent’s reportage. “Your pool decided to find out how much the Magnum bar cost and return that amount of yuan to Vice President Biden.” And the First Amendment endured.

Remarkably, no one in the traveling press corps seems to have thought it weird, much less wrong, to assign pool reports to a Beltway player so in sync with the administration’s foreign policy, so beloved by the vice president. “Thanks again to @SCClemons of @The Atlantic for a colorful pool report from the Biden trip,” tweeted CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller. “Colorful” is one word for it. “Useless” and “self-indulgent” are others. The vice president himself, by continually referring to “your pool,” seems to have understood better than the traveling press the conflict of interest presented by Clemons. Or perhaps the press, in giving Clemons the pool assignment, sought to show to the world, in a passive-aggressive way, just how phony and strained the coverage of this White House is. Whatever their reasons, neither Clemons nor anyone else in the press corps traveling with Biden seems to have asked what the vice president’s son Hunter, a former lobbyist with manifold business interests, was up to while accompanying dad on his East Asian tour. Or would asking that question hurt one’s future job prospects?

Adversarial journalism has been replaced by secretarial journalism. Obamacare’s glitches have not slowed the trend. While Robert Pear of the New York Times has been skeptical and critical of the Obamacare rollout, his colleagues on the paper’s political team are eager to return to boosting the program’s namesake. “Democrats’ Latest Campaign for Health Care Law Begins,” read the front-page headline on Thursday’s paper. “Seizing on the good news of an improving health care website and rising enrollments,” write Jonathan Weisman and Michael D. Shear, President Obama and his allies on Wednesday “highlighted parts of the law that are popular with the public and reminded Americans, and the law’s opponents, of what would be lost if the Affordable Care Act were repealed.” […/]

Continue reading more> http://freebeacon.com/dirty-pool/

Leave it to Biden to perfectly demonstrate the purpose of a free press, especially in China. (Not) Well, go Joe, show ’em just how it’s done! What better place to roll out your expertise in pool reporting control? The other non-surprise is how all this seems to go over rather well with the press “corpse” in general — alas, the errant word fits here.

All this irony is lost on Biden and, naturally, on Clemons. Both he and Biden continually refer to “your pool”, like some British Lord. “Lord of Pressland” maybe?

Compare the salutation to “your honor” — “your pool”. Or maybe he could be dubded “your Pookie“, since Obama is fond of the name — like a composite reporter?

RightRing | Bullright

What if Romney won

If Romney had won, we would be a few weeks into a new administration and the questions would be flying fast and furious from the media. There would be so much to harass criticize Romney over. Media would have to hold secret group sessions just to decide which of the many criticisms they would attack Romney on, since his taxes were published and still fodder for attack dogs. (no shortage of them) “Is he a certified criminal?” Why even ask?

They would no doubt ask, “what are you doing about the sputtering economy?” … “and what exactly are you going to do about the debt CRISIS? You cannot ignore it.” They would chant about bringing the troops home from Afghanistan.  His innaugural speech would be labled one of the worst, completely lacking content or specifics.

By now we would be still going through a massive list of pardons and a final of flurry executive orders Obama left. All irreversible they say.

Of course, mad dog media would be all over the initial appointments, looking for every minority. The word “controversial” would be attached to everything Romney says or does.  They’d tell him he has no mandate for judges or anything else.

The Senate would be in denial and telling him they will not rubber stamp anything he wants.  And they’d be making sure he understands the limits of executive power. They would lecture us on the “Advice and Consent” responsibilities of the Senate. The word “bipartisan” would be used in every other paragraph just to remind us how partisan Mitt is.

Everyone who remotely knew Romney would be interrogated to find the “secrets” and “truth” Mitt is hiding.

They would debate on how many weeks of a honeymoon he deserves while they aggressively go after anything he says or does. And they’d pick apart any White House trappings or changes the first lady makes. And all the stories about his family they stumbled across over the campaign would be lined up and ready to hit the front pages — after a brief, invisible honeymoon of course.

Oh, what a different story it would be, from the Marxist left.

There suddenly is a whole ot of front page material with all the issues they’ve been ignoring for four years. There had better not be any vacations planned soon with all this urgency about the economy, debt, and this mountain of issues to deal with.

And then the first lady “is no Michelle Obama…how will she ever manage – if she can?” Basically, the media declares they’ve been given a mandate to challange everything.(its a whole different world now) After all, Mitt had no mandate for anything.

Of course there’s always the blatant racism…. so much to write and say about that. All those disenfranchized voter suppression problems to have months of hearings on. “Racism” would be a byline in news broadcasts and echoed from street corners. “Remember, he’s a Mormon too.” So much to say about that.

And we would be less than a month into his term. Who knows what they’d be like in the second year.

Oh well, back to an even uglier reality.