For those who loathe the creeps that sat on their hands for Colbert, read:

[Gabi Hayes]

best skewering of the media I've read in a long time, and it's about how the media did it to Kerry during the last election. Matt Taibbi is one of the few real journalists aroundm, and he just nails 64 of the very worst "journalists extant.

this is insightful commentary, and VERY VERY vicious

from Dana Milbank to Elisabeth Bumiller to Howard Fineman to Cal Thomas to....well, most of the worst are there, on display.

"http://www.nypress.com/17/40/news&columns/feature.cfm

WIMBLEHACK!
The search for America's worst campaign journalist has begun.

By Matt Taibbi
[e-mail]


THESE LAST FEW WEEKS of the presidential election campaign season are turning out to be not a whole lot different than the last peaceful hours before a prostatectomy. That is, a brief moment of fatalistic calm before something painful and unavoidable, something you were dreading when it was far off, but something that is easier to face now that you know it will all soon be over.

................

It is hard to imagine anything more meaningless, underhanded, vapid, shameless, pointlessly vicious, embarrassing, uninspiring, degrading and even unentertaining than this billion-dollar daily exchange of sneering teenage accusations between the Bush and Kerry camps. And it is hard to imagine anything more galling than the unspoken media subtext of the election—the idea that this slime-fest somehow represents an important moment, a landmark memory, in our own lives. The implication that we're such losers that we would actually want to watch this crap 24 hours a day for 15 or 16 months is almost more appalling than the behavior of the candidates themselves.

Though we're tempted to blame the politicians, it's time to dig deeper. It's time to blame the press corps that daily brings us this unrelenting symphony of horseshit and never comes within 1000 miles of an apology for any of it. And it's time to blame the press not only as a class of people, but as individuals. We must brand anyone who puts his name or his face on credulous campaign coverage an eternal Enemy of the State. Hopefully, over time, this will have a deterrent effect.

........

>>>>on Debra Orin, New York Post:

IT'S ALWAYS A LITTLE surprising to remember that the New York Post has a "Washington Bureau Chief" filing ostensibly factual stories from the Hill about the movements of the president and other real, breathing government officials. The effect of reading these touchingly earnest impersonations of credible journalism is a little like watching Koko the gorilla play with a kitten, or punch the "buttons" on a toy telephone. My god, you think. It's so human!

I urge you resolutely to read this. you'll be glad you did

maybe if somebody else put it up under their name......

[Gabi Hayes]

1. later "rounds" as I find them

http://www.nypress.com/17/41/news&columns/taibbi.cfm

http://www.nypress.com/17/42/news&columns/taibbi.cfm

http://www.nypress.com/17/43/news&columns/taibbi.cfm

http://www.nypress.com/17/46/news&columns/taibbi.cfm

[Mabus]

2. Talk about a rogue's gallery k&r

As soon as I saw "Karen Tumulty" I got hooked. Then I saw names like Sammon, Woodward, Milbank and Bumiller. :puke:

Good find. Yes, please keep us posted on further rounds.

[Gabi Hayes]

3. I first read this in his most excellent book, whose title I can't recall,

during which he covered the 04 campaign

lots of HST like antics, but some very good journalism, and much hilarity

he REALLY has no respect for these people, and they deserve none

I hold them more responsible for what's happened since The Hunting of the President than the thugs

make that since Jimmy Carter

read some of this and it'll make you sick to your stomach:

Walter Karp. ever heard of him? an actual journalist

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Democracy_America/AllCongressmen'sMen_BA.html

David Broder, in his recent memoirs, recalls that while covering the Democratic Party for The Washington Post in the late 1960s he learned that the grass-roots rebellion against President Johnson and the Democratic Party establishment, as he then put it, "degrades the Democratic Party"-having been told so by his sources, that is, by members of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic leaders in Congress, and local party officials. Covering Congress means talking to the most powerful legislators and their legislative aides.

For years, recalls Broder, the Associated Press covered the House of Representatives for scores of millions of Americans through daily chats with Representative Howard W. Smith, a conservative Virginia Democrat who chaired the powerful Rules Committee. Covering the White House means dancing daily attendance on the President's aides and spokesmen. "We're in small quarters with access to only a small . number of official people, getting the same information.

So we write similar stories and move on the same issues," says a White House correspondent interviewed in The Washington Reporters. A dozen great venues of power and policy-Defense, State, Justice, Central Intelligence, FBI, and so on-form the daily beats of small claques of Washington reporters "whose primary exercise is collecting handouts from those informational soup kitchens," as Alan Abelson once put it in Barron's.

Sources are nearly everything; journalists are nearly nothing. "Reporters are puppets. They simply respond to the pull of the most powerful strings," Lyndon Johnson once said. Reagan's secretary of state, Alexander Haig, explained to an interviewer in March 1982 that "even if they write something that I think is terribly untrue, I don't consider that it was a writer who did it. It's always someone who gave that writer that information." So pervasive is the passivity of the press that when a reporter actually looks for news on his or her own it is given a special name, "investigative journalism," to distinguish it from routine, passive "source journalism." It is investigative journalism that wins the professional honors, that makes what little history the American press ever makes, and that provides the misleading exception that proves the rule: the American press, unbidden by powerful sources, seldom investigates anything.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=walter+karp&btnG=Google+Search

[Mabus]

12. I just started "Republican Noise Machine" again

I bought it when it came out but didn't get much of a chance to read it, everyone kept borrowing it. Brock's history of what happened is absolutely incredible.

Thanks for the head's up on Walter Karp. Definitely worth learning more about and reading. Unfortunately I will have to wait until morning. I took my puppy in to get her spayed this morning and it was an early drop-off. Right now I'm operating on very little sleep but this post I'm making will remind me where I need to look after my coffee in the morning. Thanks, for the info and the link (I printed out the bracket). :hi:

[Gabi Hayes]

14. check out the Liberty Under Siege stuff...about Carter vs. dems/media/

wingnuts/wash DC establishment

great book

second part is about Reagan, and how TRULY terrible he was

[Mabus]

19. LOL - I've always hated Reagan

I got/get criticism for this but... when Reagan was shot I headed to my favorite bar and bought rounds. I was joined shortly thereafter by several good friends of mine who also hated Reagan. We took off and ended the evening with a couple of bottles of expensive champagne. I know how terrible Reagan was. Back then I knew how dangerous he was.

I will check it out. Thanks so much Gabi.

BTW, first thing this morning I showed my husband the brackets and he got excited. He went through the brackets making comments about the "reporters" listed that would make a sailor blush. Thanks, he's in a great mood today and has promised to take me out to lunch!

[Mr_Spock]

20. Reagan was a POS in my book

From the moment he laid of the ATC's on he was a piece of shit in my mind...

[Gabi Hayes]

26. same here, and my GF at the time MADE me go to the inaugural

she didn't like him but was into the historiness of it

[Extend a Hand]

4. This is Great!!!

bahahahaha :rofl:
Here's some more from the second link in reply one:
http://www.nypress.com/17/42/news&columns/taibbi.cfm

Now, I've been in filing rooms with that same crowd of campaign journalists Fineman is talking about. I can report that the campaign press will gasp at a lot of things: empty buffet trays, poor hotel accommodations (the cut-rate motel choices of the Dean campaign elicited astonishment among some regulars), the face of Dennis Kucinich, the presence of alternative media, the platform of Ralph Nader.

About the only time the national political press doesn't gasp is when the illiterate president of the United States stands up and for two fucking consecutive years says that we have to invade Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from attacking us with "weapons of mass destruction."

Then, they don't gasp. Then they stiffen up in their seats like altar boys and say, "Really? No shit, Mr. President? Call on me, Mr. President! I'll ask you how your faith guides you in this difficult time! How long should we let the inspections drag on, Mr. President? What about those goddamned French, Mr. President?"

The press room gasps at things like the Kerry lesbian-baiting ploy because it's the kind of vicious celebrity twaddle they're sensitive to, twaddle they consider themselves experts and authorities on. If someone makes what they consider a "mistake" on that turf, they dive on it like pigs converging on a watermelon rind. But if a politician drives the country off a cliff, they sit on their hands, waiting for Zogby and the Brookings Institution to give them their gasping cues. A gasp in the press room is as meaningless as a standing ovation at an Amway convention.

[Gabi Hayes]

8. told ya! and the best thing is how EASY it is to come up with sections

like that

I'm amazed he doesn't get quoted here more often


he was at Camp Casey last summer, and did some exquisite writing about that. I think that's where I first heard of him

[Nostradammit]

15. "meaningless as a standing ovation at an Amway convention."

K&R on that comment alone!

[Gabi Hayes]

17. seriously, this guy's a good a writer as there is on the political scene

maybe he got a little of the HST spirit as it passed

[Sydnie]

5. kicked and rec'd Gabi sweetie!

Good work!

[Gabi Hayes]

6. thanks!....I posted this awhile back to crickets.

glad I thought of it again, cause it's the most entertaining campaign coverage since Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail: 1972.

If you haven't read that, put it up high on your list

[Sydnie]

10. read it in '74

for a high school English class ... what a great progressive teacher she was too!

Ever see the movie "Where the buffalo roam"? It's Bill Murry doing Hunter ... a good afternoons watch if you can find it.

[Gabi Hayes]

13. hight school? what a teacher! I'm jealous

haven't seen that for years.

Peter Boyle, too, right?

I really liked Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. the other guy, too. the one who won an Oscar (Oscar! the brown buffalo!)

and I really like have to go to bed!

C Ya

[wizdum]

7. What else could they do but sit on their hands?

They couldn't applaud their own failures. That would be insane, even for those corporate lackeys. They resented having their dirty laundry aired in public, but that's too damned bad. I am glad Colbert rubbed their face in it. He is truly the man of the year for that.

BTW, was that lame brain Campbell Brown there kissing her neocon looney tune husband, Dan Senor?

[Gabi Hayes]

9. ooooh...I have the tape. thanks for the headsup...will check

have I told you lately how much I *#%* these people?

[Gabi Hayes]

11. On Kitty Kelly and the abject M$M response

Kitty Kelley's "explosive" nearly 700-page tome on the Bushes, The Family, has been barely out on the streets for a day, but the early news reactions have already made it plain: The sprawling biography simply doesn't matter. The predominant media take on this book is likely to go something like this: In Bush tome, unreliable menopausal scandalmonger again misses mark; world waits out irritating media buzz. But that doesn't mean the book isn't worth a read – far from it.

Kelley's book is – unintentionally I think – a surprisingly tender portrait of a small, loyal group of vicious undead fiends, persevering against all odds in a world of the callous, uncomprehending living. Kelley does what no other writer to date has really done for the Bushes: she actually makes you admire them for their remarkable ability to remain consistently cold, calculating, predatory and unscrupulous in generation after generation after generation.

In one of the great laugh lines of this or any other biography, Kelley sums up the Bush charm by quoting (third-hand, mind you – there's that damn credibility thing again!) none other than Richard Nixon:


....The writer Gore Vidal recalled a conversation with his friend Murray Kempton shortly after one of the journalist's periodic lunches with Kempton. Kempton had mentioned George Bush , and according to Vidal, Nixon had responded: "Total light-weight. Nothing there – sort of person you appoint to things – but now that Barbara, she's something else again! She's really vindictive!" Vidal characterized the comment as "the highest Nixonian compliment."

But then Richard Nixon hadn't met W.

>>>>this me....we all here know that the real quote is something like: "she really knows how to hate"

http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/19888/

more here

http://www.alternet.org/authors/6535/

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/04/taibbi.html

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=matt+taibbi&btnG=Google+Search

[kittenpants]

21. "she really knows how to hate" -- her one gift.

Thanks for posting this.

[Nostradammit]

16. About Novak:

Nonetheless, Novak advances. He advances because of that dreary purse-lipped sadist's face of his. (You've seen that face before: the prison warden meets high school vice-principal of your nightmares, shitting on your wife's back.) He advances because his outing of Valerie Plame is suddenly being upheld as a free-press issue. He advances because he recently told an audience of Penn State students that he is only able to stand James Carville because "CNN pays me a lot of money."

But here's the worst thing about Novak. Six years ago, Novak's column was the favored destination of anonymous leakers from the office of special prosecutor Ken Starr. They gave him such nuggets as the revelation that it was their "educated guess" that Hillary Clinton would be named as an unindicted coconspirator in the Hubbell case ("Clinton's Woes Far from Over," Nov. 26, 1998). At the time, Novak had no problem being the submissive love-slave of an overzealous independent prosecutor seeking, in a clearly inappropriate manner, to try his case in public.

Now Novak is going to sit back and let people like William Safire blast special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald for going too far in hammering Novak for his sources in the Plame case. Live by the leak—die by the leak, you fucking dog.

[Gabi Hayes]

18. thanks....this bears frequent rereading, just to keep the fires burning,

WRT to JUST HOW BAD for democracy these Vichy fourth estaters are

and it's FUN to read, too

[Jacobin]

22. Kicking because this article is so good

:thumbsup:

Nice description, one by one, on what's wrong with the 'jouralists' in this country

[Nostradammit]

23. Tuesday Kick

This guy deserves a large audience.

[Gabi Hayes]

24. absolutely right!

[Gabi Hayes]

25. some g'night reading

g'night

[Gabi Hayes]

27. in Crawford, TX

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7581585/bush_vs_the_mother/

Crawford, the home of President George W. Bush, is a sun-scorched hole of a backwater Texas town -- a single dreary railroad crossing surrounded on all sides by roasted earth the color of dried dog shit. There are scattered clumps of trees and brush, but all the foliage seems bent from the sun's rays and ready at any moment to burst into flames.
The moaning cattle along the lonely roads sound like they're begging for their lives. The downtown streets are empty. Just as the earth is home to natural bridges, this place is a natural dead end -- the perfect place to drink a bottle of Lysol, wind up in a bad marriage, have your neck ripped out by a vulture.

It is a very unlikely place for a peace movement to be born. But that's exactly what happened a few weeks ago, when an aggrieved war mom named Cindy Sheehan set up camp along the road to the president's ranch and demanded a meeting with the commander in chief.

Sheehan's vigil began on Saturday, August 6th, and was originally a solitary affair. Her twenty-four-year-old son, Casey Sheehan, was killed way back in April 2004, when he was one of eight Marines struck down in an ambush in Baghdad's Sadr City.

[Gabi Hayes]

28. on skunky Jon Alter, pushing a book on FDR, while he helped

keep this junta in power

''Both Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter and Time’s Karen Tumulty–using language suspiciously similar to that of earlier Democratic Leadership Council memos about the burgeoning Dean disaster–focused heavily on the "anger" theme, openly concluding that the chief "problem" of Dean’s candidacy would be convincing voters to get past his "anger," "testiness" and "pugnacity."

Alter, who along with fellow Newsweek butt-buddy Howard Fineman is among the worst swine in the business, went so far as to say that voters simply don’t like people like Dean: "Dean’s pugnacity might not wear well with voters, who usually favor buoyant, warm personalities."

Alter went on to hold a formal knighthood ceremony for the second great Howard Dean myth, that he is unpopular with journalists: "In truth, Dean is no favorite of working reporters who tend to like their candidates funny and solicitous. So do voters."

Tumulty echoed Alter’s theme, noting that "Washington insiders" thought that Dean’s candidacy early on had "all the resonance of a temper tantrum." Like Alter, Tumulty described Dean as "testy" and "angry." Neither piece, incidentally, did anything more than briefly touch upon Dean’s actual positions on the issues; both were frankly and excessively focused on the electability/horse-race aspect of the story.''

http://www.nypress.com/17/1/news&columns/cage.cfm

[seabeyond]

29. daily exchange of sneering teenage accusations between the Bush and Kerry

same thing. isnt this doing the same thing. what so many dems yelled at kerry about is he did not act like the bush campaign. the only talk of bush was his policy, that was his bad mouth. that he didnt personally attack. and then as repugs did their smear campaign the media and repug would sya both parties are doing it. both parties wasnt doing it. kerry campaign worked hard at integrity cause polled that is what the poeple said they wanted. yet... the media continually protrayed kerry campaign the same as bush and it wasnt. kerry walked in integrity and he didnt get the credit for it because of media like this person lumping them together as both teenager behavior. kerry didnt do it. kerry got bashed by dems on this board for not doing it. kerry gave americans what they said they wanted, yet they didnt pay kerry back for it, rewarding him. and media continued to lump them all hte same. and repugs loved it, becuase if both parties were doing it they didnt pay the repercussion for their filthy campaigning