Archive for 2011

OWEN BRENNAN: The Beast That Ate The News Cycle.

Just three decades ago, network news reigned and big city papers set the news agenda. The veteran reporter John Stossel tells an interesting story about the most powerful of them all – The New York Times: “I saw this when I first went to Channel 2 (WCBS TV) and did local reporting. The assignment editor would just cut stuff out of the Times and say, ‘Here, go do that.’”

Compelling online video now has the potential for that same impact.

The New York Times still drives much of the news cycle – especially at legacy media like the CBS, ABC, and NBC. But its power has been challenged. A red-siren headline on the Drudge Report routinely shapes talk radio and cable news.

Similarly, our hapless mountain biker really reveals the ability of online video to hit the new scycle like an enraged antelope. Instead of clipping an article out of The New York Times or sending around a link to the big story, executive producers and assignment editors can now click on a video and say, “Here, go do that.”

The reason for the power of online video is simple. In the world of broadcast journalism, many live by the rule, “Show the best video first.” This means easy-to-access footage of some crazed beast in an exotic location knocking over a wayward biker is going to find a place on countless programs both national and local.

This is an important lesson as 2012 candidates, Tea Party people, think tanks and conservative media look toward November of next year. As the numbers reveal, online video has just become a mainstream medium and it is going to be a powerful weapon in this election cycle.

I think that’s right. 2008 was barely a warmup, and in 2010 the value was mostly in exploding dishonest reporting from Big Media. There’ll be more this time.

UPDATE: Speaking of this stuff: SETTING THE STAGE: #OWS Leaders Caught on Tape Orchestrating Mob Activity and Arrests (Videos).

RULES FOR A LOVING COUPLE who write at home. Not quite the same as for a loving couple who blog at home, but I get it.

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Price of Argentina’s Default. “As it happens, I had just listened to that podcast when I saw that piece. And I can’t believe that Dean Baker and Paul Krugman listened to the same podcast that I did. In fact, I find it hard to believe that they listened to it at all.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: #Occupy Protests Are An Exercise In Nostalgia. “The news that 175 people were arrested over the weekend in a Chicago OWS protest started me thinking about the ritualized nature of left demonstrations. The drums, the chants, the defiance, the arrests — and, sometimes, the glass smashing and the fire setting: it all unfolds according to a predictable pattern that in its modern form is essentially unchanged since the Vietnam War.”

They’re sure a lot less orderly than the Tea Party events.

Plus this: “Right now they are more likely to hollow Wall Street out than to change its ways. Financial businesses are already looking at ways to cut costs by getting out of the high priced glass canyons of lower Manhattan; dispersing the financial center into anonymous malls and office parks across a wider area (and perhaps in states that don’t have an income tax as zillionaires nervously eye possible changes to the federal tax code) looks much more attractive if Wall Street is going to be a target for protests.”

Related thoughts from Jeff Goldstein. “To be clear: these ‘grievances’ on parade are not the point of the protests, at least, not to those who are orchestrating all this. Instead, the point of the protests is to con weak-willed pragmatic panders like Romney, or weak-willed and frightened ‘leaders’ like Eric Cantor and John Boehner, to allow for the grievances, to sympathize with them, to begin speaking in the language of the left’s carefully crafted narrative, and to make concessions while remaining constantly on the defensive.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student Loan Debt Hits Record Levels. “The amount of student loans taken out last year crossed the $100 billion mark for the first time and total loans outstanding will exceed $1 trillion for the first time this year. . . . Students are borrowing twice what they did a decade ago after adjusting for inflation, the College Board reports. Total outstanding debt has doubled in the past five years — a sharp contrast to consumers reducing what’s owed on home loans and credit cards.” Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. This can’t go on forever.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: 900 Days Of Government Irresponsibility. “Over the weekend, Senate Democrats passed a dubious milestone — going 900 days without fulfilling their legal obligation to pass a budget. Worse is the fact that this gross dereliction of duty has gone largely unnoticed.”

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: So much for Obama’s ‘new era of open government.’

Justice Department documents made public Tuesday by Judicial Watch exposed an “accomplishment” of President Obama that his many admirers and enablers in the liberal mainstream media likely don’t want to talk about: a secret meeting on transparency in government. It happened on Dec. 7, 2009, and was convened by the Office of Information Policy in the Justice Department headed by Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder. The meeting’s purpose was to train Freedom of Information Act officers from federal agencies how to respond to FOIA requests, including tips on resolving disputes over what government documents can be made public.

Judicial Watch obtained a series of pre-conference emails in which Justice Department officials sought approval from White House media officials for closing the meeting to reporters. That the December meeting was closed was no isolated incident. In one of the emails, Melanie Pustay, OIP’s director, said she has “always held parallel meetings, one for agency ‘ees [i.e. government employees] and then one that is open.” We can only wonder what Pustay tells government FOIA officers that she doesn’t want journalists to hear. . . .

Unfortunately, keeping the meeting secret isn’t the only area in which the Obama administration’s record on this issue has proven to be woefully short of what the president promised. In both the Fast and Furious and Solyndra scandals, for example, Obama appointees have held back thousands of documents legitimately sought by congressional investigators while defending their refusal with arguments coined by President Nixon.

Similarly, Obama’s secretary of labor, Hilda Solis, has gutted transparency regulations that required labor unions to disclose information about the organizations’ financial health, including union officers’ total compensation packages. Also killed was a requirement to report on union trusts, which often function like offshore accounts for corporations in providing a means of hiding assets. And gone is a requirement that would have made unions report on “no-show” jobs — positions for which the union is paid but nobody actually does the work. The biggest losers when unions are able to conceal such information are union members.

It’s as if all that good-government talk was just B.S. to fool the rubes.

SPACE RED TAPE: Is This NASA Document Saving or Killing Manned Private Spaceflight? “NASA, which wants to send its astronauts aboard privately built spacecraft, recently released the first draft of a document detailing how it would ensure those ships are safe. The contract is a tome of legalese, but buried inside the hundreds of pages are provisions that have some private space companies worried that NASA’s oversight could slow them down.”

For the past several decades, NASA has generally been better at killing things off than boosting them . . .

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: 5 reasons why income inequality is a myth — and Occupy Wall Street is wrong. “Just think for a second: If inequality had really exploded during the past 30 to 40 years, why did American politics simultaneously move rightward toward a greater embrace of free-market capitalism? Shouldn’t just the opposite have happened as beleaguered workers united and demanded a vastly expanded social safety net and sharply higher taxes on the rich? What happened to presidents Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry? Even Barack Obama ran for president as a market friendly, third-way technocrat. Nope, the story doesn’t hold together because the financial facts don’t support it. And here’s why.”

AT THE OCCUPY SEATTLE PROTEST: Man accused of exposing self to children arrested. “Officers had been given a composite sketch of the suspect and detectives learned he had been at Westlake Park taking part in the Occupy Seattle protests.”