Category Archives: Media

Tennessee, Tennessee, Tennessee

Media, Politics

 

Many of you will remember the picture on the right of NBC News political director Tim Russert and his now-famous, low-tech white board.  Early in the evening, Russert predicted the 2000 election would hinge on the outcome in Florida.  And after weeks of recounts and legal challenges, everyone was congratulating Russert for his foresight.

There’s just one problem.  The election should never have come down to Florida.  The Sunshine State only mattered because Democratic candidate Al Gore lost his home state of Tennessee by four percentage points.  And unlike Florida, where Nader and a poorly designed Broward County ballot contributed to George W. Bush’s margin of victory, the three independent candidates–Ralph Nader, Harry Brown and Pat Buchanan–tallied just 1.3 percent of the total vote.  In other words, the people who knew him best, rejected Gore in 2000.  Flip the Volunteer State’s 11 electoral votes and Gore carries the electoral college 277 to 261 even after losing Florida.

In 2004, Garrison Keillor suggested, during Prairie Home Companion’s annual joke show, John Kerry had a similar problem.  “People outside the Northeast don’t know Kerry, and people from the Northeast know him too well.”  Whether this was a factor in the election is not important.  What Tennessee voters and Keillor are telling us is maybe we should pay more attention to people who have real experience with presidential candidates.

Which brings us to 2016 and a fairly unique situation.  For the first time since 1940 when Franklin Roosevelt ran against Wendell Willkie (though born in Ohio, Willkie lived in New York at the time of the election), both major candidates reside in the same state.  This is only the fourth time in the history of presidential elections this has been the case.  And they are more than mere residents.  Hillary Clinton served New York as U.S. Senator for eight years.  And the Trump Organization headquarters are located in Manhattan and most of his early real estate projects were built in the tri-state region.

So what are Empire State voters telling us.  Remember, when he announced his candidacy, Trump boasted he was going to flip New York which is among the bluest of the blue states in presidential elections.  Yet the average of 30 polls in New York show Clinton with a 17.3 percent lead as of September 21.  Why is this important?  According to Nate Silver’s 538 Now-Cast, if the election were held today, Clinton would win with 280 electoral votes to Trump’s 250.  And the pundits will be focused on Ohio and Florida.  But the fact is the outcome would be reversed if Trump carried his own state.  If New York’s 29 electoral votes shifted to the Trump column, the final tally would be 279 for Trump and 251 for Clinton.

Only twice in American history has a candidate lost his home state and still won the presidency–James K. Polk in 1844 and Woodrow Wilson in 1916.  There’s probably a good reason for that.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

 

The Case for Due Process

Culture, Media, Uncategorized

 

In a previous post, I shared The Daily Show host Trevor Noah’s observation you can both support Black Lives Matter AND be pro-police.  I still believe that.  In fact, my pro-police side was affirmed several times over the weekend following the largely unsuccessful terrorist bombing in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City.  (NOTE:  Though this is hardly a laughing matter, it did remind me of a segment from the early days of Saturday Night Live titled “Dangerous, But Inept” which profiled among others Gerald Ford’s attempted assassins Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sarah Moore.)

For the three days following the bombing, life again imitated art as the arrest and arraignment of accused bomber Ahmad Khan Rahami could just have easily been episodes of  CSI and Law and Order. Through meticulous detective work and forensics, law enforcement officials quickly identified Rahami as a suspect and issued an all points bulletin which generated a tip as to his whereabouts.  On Monday Morning, Rahami was taken into custody following a gun battle in which one officer and Ramani were injured.  Within 24 hours, Rahami was charged in federal court on several criminal counts including use of weapons of mass destruction and bombing a place of public use.  Additionally, he faces state charges including attempted murder of a law enforcement officer.

This is EXACTLY how our system of criminal justice was designed to work.  Everyone involved from police to prosecutors to first responders who tended to the injured deserve our praise and gratitude.  Now that the primary suspect is in custody, one would hope those appointed to try Ramani for these crimes continue to adhere to constitutional principles.

No one should be surprised that Donald Trump immediately questioned whether Ramani was entitled to medical treatment and due process.  At a Ft. Myers, Florida rally he told his supporters:

But the bad part, now we will give him amazing hospitalization. He will be taken care of by some of the best doctors in the world. He will be given a fully modern and updated hospital room. And he’ll probably even have room service, knowing the way our country is.

And on top of all that, he will be represented by an outstanding lawyer. His case will go through the various court systems for years and, in the end, people will forget and his punishment will not be what it once would have been. (Source: NPR, September 19, 2016)

Contrary to evidence dozens of terror suspects have been tried and convicted in U.S. courts since 9/11, CNN sadly took the bait and raised the question, “Does bombing suspect deserve due process?”  Viewers were quick to counter this inquiry including a tweet from @goddamnedfrank  which read, “CNN is now normalizing fascism, questioning the rule of law and the civil rights protections enshrined in the US Constitution.”

But Arlo Guthrie is again whispering in my ear, “That’s not what you came here to talk about.” Here are the questions I have concerning the response to the Chelsea bombing.  There is no doubt Ramani was armed and dangerous.  He proved it by engaging in an exchange of gunfire prior to his capture.  He wounded a law enforcement officer.  He resisted arrested.  I doubt anyone would have felt authorities where unjustified in using “deadly force” in response to this perceived threat.

But they didn’t.  In this case, where the suspect posed a far greater risk than many of the individuals now being championed by Black Lives Matter,  he was disarmed and taken into custody.  And unlike the young black men who have died due to the use of “deadly force” whether justified or not, Ramani will have his day in court.

Here are my questions.  “If law enforcement officers can disable and capture the most dangerous among us, why is this not the case in instances associated with traffic violations and petty crimes? Although I have not seen a detailed medical report, Ramani appears to have been wounded in the right arm and right leg.  Are police officers involved in the shooting deaths of some of these black men so poorly trained  marksmen they are not capable of incapacitating a suspect short of death?  And why doesn’t CNN focus on the denial of due process in cases where law enforcement, in addition to its legitimate and necessary role in the criminal justice system, also becomes judge and executioner?”

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

 

Emily Litella Revisited

Media, Politics

 

Imagined transcript for “Weekend Update”: September 17, 2016.  All of the material in italics in this post are documented quotes about President Barack Obama’s country of birth.

ANCHOR:  Like all of you, we miss Gilda Radner.  In hopes of recapturing just a smidgen of her comic magic, Saturday Night Live has invited Republican President candidate Donald J. Trump to sit in as a guest commentator.

TRUMP:  Thanks.  We have a problem. Our current president came out of nowhere.  Came out of nowhere.In fact, I’ll go a step further, the people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is.” (Source: Politicifact, February 2011)

TRUMP: If Obama was born in the United State, why doesn’t he show his birth certificate? And you know what? I wish he would… Nobody from those early years remembers him… There’s something on that birth certificate he doesn’t like. (Source, The View, March 2011) Right now, I have some real doubts…His grandmother in Kenya said he was born in Kenya and she was there and witnessed the birth. He doesn’t have a birth certificate or he hasn’t shown it. (Source: NBC Today, April 7, 2011)

TRUMP:  I know he has showed us a copy of his birth certificate, but  a lot of people don’t agree with that birth certificate. A lot of people do not think it’s authentic. (Source: CNN Situation Room, May 29, 2012)

TRUMP: Instead of questioning whether the President is legitimate, the media keeps questioning me.  Just last week the media again asked me whether I was convinced Obama was not born in Kenya. I have no idea. I don’t know. Was there a birth certificate? You tell me. … Nobody knows. (Source: ABC This Week, August 2013)

TRUMP:  And I’m not alone.  Just the other day, a supporter at my rally in New Hampshire said, ”We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American.”  We needed this question. (Source: C-SPAN, Rochester, New Hampshire Town Hall, September 17, 2015.)

TRUMP: You tell me.  How did we end up with a President for eight years who was born in Kenya.

ANCHOR: (leans over)  Mr. Trump, his grandmother said he was born in Kona, not Kenya.

TRUMP.  Kona?  (long pause)  NEVER MIND.

Magic? Maybe.  Comic magic?  Definitely not.  Maybe this is what Donald Trump would call “black magic” (pun intended). Instead of making objects disappear like most magicians, Trump makes non-objects materialize at will.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

 

When One Head Is Better…

Media

 

I am trying to figure out the moment in time news programs became game shows.  I’m not sure exactly when this transformation took place.  Maybe it was May 11, 2001.  That was the date of Lynn Russell’s last broadcast as the anchor of CNN Headline News.  Russell’s program consisted of a recap of current events which was updated every fifteen minutes, reminiscent of the CBS nightly news before it became a half-hour newscast on September 2, 1963.

You might think the expansion of broadcast nightly news to 30 minutes and the addition of three 24/7 cable news networks would make it easier to “get the news.”  Unfortunately, you would be wrong.  This was never more evident than September 4, 2016.  An AP wire story reported a 5.6 magnitude earthquake in Oklahoma.  Interested in learning more, I turned on cable news. On CNN, instead of news, I encountered six talking heads discussing the impact on the presidential election of the latest “sound bite du jour.”  In another era, the image would have been mistaken for an episode of Gene Rayburn hosting The Match Game.  MSNBC was no better.  It may be the “place for politics” but it is no longer “a place for news.”


The Sunday morning network talk shows further represent the decline of broadcast journalism.  Oh, for the days of Lawrence Spivak, the original host of Meet the Press.  When watching archived videos such as the one pictured here with then Senator John F. Kennedy, you immediately notice three things.  First, the panel is made up of credentialed correspondents from the major news services such as the Associated Press and United Press International. Second, only the principals (candidates, public officials or world leaders) are invited to appear.  No surrogates allowed. Finally, the panel members never express their own opinion.  They ask questions and trust the viewers to evaluate the guest’s response.  If they thought the guest was avoiding the question or if the answer was suspect, they would challenge the interviewee with follow-up inquiries.  Today, Meet the Pundits would be a more apt title for what is passed off as current affairs programming.

What have we sacrificed in return for the endless babble of opinion?  In a word, journalism. And there is a simple test to prove it.  Name one occasion on which a panel discussion resulted in a “breakthrough” moment in American history or politics.  Imagine it is April 13, 1954.  Instead of Edward R. Morrow hosting the CBS news program See It Now,  you have four pundits analyzing the McCarthy hearings. Committee legal counsel Roy Cohn defends Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against communists in the government. One of the anti-McCarthy pundits might echo Morrow’s now famous accusation. “The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one.  The junior senator from Wisconsin has crossed that line.”   The host concludes, “There you have it.  Both sides of the issue.”  I think it is a safe bet the program would not have won a Peabody Award nor would organizations like the Ratio Television Digital News Association or NRP name awards for outstanding journalism for the show’s host, as they have for Morrow.

Or imagine it is February 27, 1968.  Walter Cronkite’s broadcast Report from Vietnam changed Americans’ perception of the conflict.  He ended the program with the following.

We’ve been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. For it seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.

But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

Now imagine our coverage of the Vietnam war had been relegated to Hard Ball, The Situation Room or Fox and Friends. Instead of an eyewitness account, we would have been inundated with accusations likely based on false or exaggerated numbers.  Remember, support for the war turned in part when Cronkite reported that the official “kill numbers” released by General Westmoreland’s office included livestock.

There was one additional element at play as Cronkite’s broadcast approached.  He had to convince CBS News president Richard Salant to air the report.  Journalism is not just about investigating or writing a story.  The truly great reporters also have the courage to confront their bosses, urging them to take risks they otherwise would prefer to avoid.

When the history of broadcast journalism in the early 21st Century is chronicled, there will be many questions and hopefully some second guessing.  However, there is one thing of which I am sure.  Next to the word journalist, you are just as likely to find Gene Rayburn’s picture as you are to find Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer and Sean Hannity.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

 

Why Clinton’s Emails Remind Me of Watergate

Media, Politics

Image result for john deanLast February, Donald Trump and his surrogates began making a comparison between Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and the break-in at Democratic Headquarters and the subsequent cover-up by the committee to re-elect Richard Nixon president.  Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano suggested the unavailability of  every email “was far worse than an 18-and-a-half-minute gap on President Nixon’s internal office recording  equipment.”  Napolitano, who once served as a New Jersey Superior Court Judge, did not recognize the fact Nixon’s efforts to withhold information were related to an actual crime. And I still find it hypocritical those most disgusted with Clinton’s actions do not hold Dick Cheney, who failed to archive ANY of the his emails leading up to the Iraq war, to the same standard.

I thought the comparison was a stretch until this past weekend when Democrats on the house committee investigating the email issue released one of Colin Powell’s emails to Secretary Clinton.  This new information made me realize the resemblance between these two events is less about who did what but the veracity of the principals.  On June 3, 1983, White House counsel John Dean testified before the Senate select committee investigating Watergate.  He told the panel he had warned Nixon further efforts at cover-up would have disastrous results.

I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it.  

Following his testimony, other participants in the scandal vowed no such conversation took place and Dean was attempting to cover his posterior to avoid a potential jail sentence.  In other words, at this point it was just a case of he said/they said.  That is, until Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of a self-activated recording system in the oval office.  And a March 21, 1973 conversation between Dean and Nixon included the following:

…there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’re, we’ve got. We have a cancer–within, close to the Presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding, it grows geometrically now because it compounds itself.

From that point on Dean’s account of the entire scandal was viewed as the most reliable.  His accurate recollection of this conversation resulted in his being given the benefit of the doubt on other points on which he testified.

Which brings us to Hillary Clinton and her FBI testimony.  On August 31, 2016 the New York Times reported Clinton “told investigators that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had advised her to use a personal email account.”  Four days later, the Miami Herald quoted Powell as saying Clinton was “using the private email server for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did.”  One more case of she said/he said.

There is only one problem.  Last week a January 23, 2009 email exchange between Powell and Clinton, part of the record the FBI turned over to the House committee on Benghazi, was made public.  NOTE:  This is only one day after Clinton is sworn in as secretary of state, not a year as Powell had claimed.  (Source:  CNN.com January 22, 2009)

Clinton had asked Powell whether he used a BlackBerry.  Here are excerpts from his reply.

I didn’t have a BlackBerry.  What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line (sounds ancient).  So I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department servers.  I even used it to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts.  I did the same thing on the road in hotels.

However, there is a real danger.  If it is public that you have a BlackBerry and it it (sic) government and you are using it, government or not, to do business, it may become an official record and subject to the law.  Reading about the President’s BB rules this morning, it sounds like it won’t be as useful as it used to be.  Be very careful.  I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.

As with John Dean, this is no longer an instance of she said/he said.  Clinton’s recollection of the timing and content of their exchange is much more accurate than Powell’s as proven by this source document.  This in no way absolves Clinton of other instances when she and her campaign have been less than transparent.  But, when FBI Director James Comey testified Clinton had not lied to the FBI during her three hours of testimony, this element of the investigation affirms Comey’s assessment.  Like Dean, she deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Equally egregious, we learned yesterday Powell warned Clinton’s personal attorney Cheryl Mills, in a March 19, 2016 email, not to drag him into the email fiasco.  Quote: “Hillary’s Mafia keeps trying to suck me into it.”  Again, this is contrary to the facts.  When questioned about the use of private emails on 60 Minutes, Clinton said she had received advice about using non-official systems, but did not name Powell.  And based on historical precedence, Clinton assumed her testimony before the FBI and supporting documents would not be made public.  If Secretary Powell has anyone to blame, he should be pointing fingers at the House Benghazi committee which demanded the FBI turn over their notes and documents associated with Clinton’s testimony.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP