Why not more conservative satire?

This article from The Atlantic is certainly worth a read, but without any hard data, I think I can offer some quick answers as to why America doesn’t have more conservative satire. In short:

Reason 1 − Conservatives by and large don’t “get” or appreciate irony in quite the same way as their liberal counterparts.

Reason 2 − Liberals and progressives tend to be more irreverent, even toward leaders in their own camp. This itself is ironic because conservatives, who spend a lot of time railing against government overreach and corruption, should be the ones giving leaders the hardest time.

Reason 3 − Conservatives take themselves and their party and politics and life too seriously.

Reason 4 − Even when conservatives try to “do” comedy, it just comes off as preachy and forced for reasons inherent number three.

Michelle, the white soccer mom, ctd.

Today, Jim Romenesko posted an update to his article about a female cardboard cutout, which appears to resemble the stereotypical, white, on-the-go soccer mom, that is apparently being posted around various TV news stations as an example target audience for writers and on-screen personalities. In the original post, Romenesko was curious to know whether WSPA in Spartanburg, S.C., rolled out its cutout “mom” named Michelle on the advice of a TV consultant.

A female TV journalist responded to the question with the following rather damning critique of the type of advice a male consultant has been giving to Raycom Media-owned TV stations, which carry similar firefighters-to-the-rescue-type local coverage as WSPA. Consequently, Raycom owns WTNZ here in Knoxville; WSPA is owned a company called Media General.

The journalist had this to say about the consultant’s sage advice:

To answer your question regarding whether media consultants nationwide are giving similar advice, WSPA’s “Michelle” is a copy of the “Female Switchable” that [a consultant] has been preaching to Raycom Media-owned stations around the country for more than two years.

[He] describes her as a mother short on logic but long on social media obsession, terrified of her neighbors, needing constant updates on the weather and consumer trends, with the attention span of a fourth-grader and much less understanding of the greater world around her. She wants “lists,” wants to know how things “affect her.” She’s self-centered, myopic and terrified.

She is nothing like the women I know, and I’m glad you finally called television news out on this caricature. I’d really like to see the data that’s used to build that caricature, because as far as I can see, she’s the sexist mythology of overpaid consultants.

This consultant’s fallacy of the “female switchable” isn’t good for anyone. And it isn’t good for the company.

According to Romenesko, the consultant declined to comment other than to dispute these claims. Needless to say, if this critique is even half true, Raycom is putting forth a rather dim view of its own target audience, casting its female viewers as fearful, short-sighted and selfish. And that’s just what this consultant, or people like him, allegedly think about the target audience for local news, which apparently is the white, female, working mom demographic. I wonder what glowing traits these same consultants would bestow on black and Hispanic families, single moms and blended parental units?

In any case, I previously questioned whether white working moms should even be the target audience for a station located in Spartanburg, S.C., which isn’t exactly a mecca of affluent white suburbia. More than half of the population of the city of Spartanburg is black, after all; only parts of the county outside city limits are a majority white.

Reality has never really stopped local TV news stations from catering to stereotypes and offering shallow and trite coverage of their communities in the past; why should Michelle be any different?

A target market of white soccer moms?

WSPA, which is a local TV news station about an hour north of where I grew up in Spartanburg, S.C., is apparently intent on making its reporters pitch all of their news stories and write all of their stories for a cardboard cutout of what appears to be an on-the-go middle class soccer mom with kids.

Here is the internal memo News Director Karen Kelly apparently sent to her staff (as posted by ftvlive.com):

Subject: MEET Michelle

Via ftvlive.com

Michelle is who you want watching your newscasts, your stories.

She will be in every editorial meeting with us and in the newsroom during the day. She will likely make occasional trips to Greenville and Anderson.

When you pitch, pitch to her. When you write, write to her.

This is who we need watching in February.

Women 25-54 is her demo.

She has children and she cares about:
Their Safety
Saving Money
Recalls that have impact on her family

Even if you think a story doesn’t directly impact Michelle find a way to write it to her.

Give her additional information that is relevant to her.

Post stories and send alerts on stories she cares about.

The problem, as I see it, is that the demographics in Spartanburg aren’t exactly whitewashed with soccer moms, which belies the notion that the WSPA newsroom should be writing exclusively for Michelle here. According to the most recent census estimates, the city of Spartanburg is 50.7 percent black (!) and 44.3 percent white, while Spartanburg County is 74.7 percent white and 20.9 percent black.

Media blogger Jim Romenesko wonders if this was a recommendation from a TV consultant. If so, that person should be fired. Or, this could just be the handywork of a newsroom “leader” who feels the need to justify her job, so she whittles away at some silly ideas to try to keep the product relevant. First, she might want to work on not scaring off her staff. But then again, for an enterprising young reporter being mandated to write for Michelle, rather than for the real people walking the fair streets of Spartanburg city and county, might be a pretty disturbing experience in and of itself.

Last call for the Tea Party?

As I have said more than once in newspaper columns the last couple years — most recently here — if the Republican Party is going to continue to be a viable political option for voters in the future, it is going to have to abandon some of Tea Party and ultra-right ideals that have all but turned off significant segments of the body politic, including Hispanics and women, and adopt more centrist positions to attract younger and more accepting groups of people who increasingly have no patience with policies that promote discrimination and inequality.

Possible GOP presidential candidate and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, House Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham seem to understand this on some level, as each have both been open to an expansion of legal immigration, and Graham has even said he favored passing along citizenship to adults who have lived in the United States since coming here as children.

Enter GOP Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, whose recent election in November, according to The New York Times,

provides a template for the party on how to succeed in a battleground state with two ascendant constituencies: well-educated social liberals and increasingly assertive Hispanic voters.

Gardner prevailed by jettisoning most of his own conservative baggage. A hard-core loyalist of the right during his service in the state legislature from 2005 to 2010 and as a congressman for two terms, Gardner won a tough election against the Democratic incumbent Mark Udall by shifting left on both immigration and social issues like abortion and contraception.

These maneuvers did not cost Gardner support from the Republican Party base. Exit poll data reveals that Gardner did as well or better with core party voters than other recent Republican statewide candidates.

Running statewide for the first time after representing largely conservative rural voters, Gardner radically altered his ideological self-positioning.

He abandoned his past opposition to liberal immigration policies. On June 5, Gardner declared his support for giving undocumented immigrants who serve in the armed forces a path to citizenship. On Aug. 1, Gardner cast one of only 11 House Republican votes in favor of an Obama administration program granting work permits to immigrants brought here illegally as children.

Gardner’s most dramatic shift was to publicly renounce, on March 21, his own sponsorship, as a member of the House, of an anti-abortion constitutional “personhood” amendment. That wasn’t all. On Sept. 2, he announced his support for making oral contraceptives available over the counter without a prescription – a tactic adopted by several successful Republican candidates.

In the House, he sponsored bipartisan water infrastructure legislation and formed a rural broadband coalition – the type of policies that the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party exists to oppose.

Indeed, as The Times article pointed out, “establishment” GOP Senate candidates — contrasted with the anti-government Tea Party types — won decisively across eight states in the South and Alaska, arguably ground zero for Tea Party fervor that began in about 2008. While the Tea Party certainly still has a voice in Washington in the likes of Sens. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and others, McConnell, Rep. John Boehner and other establishment Republican leaders will have a lot of work ahead of them to moderate a party that has been steered in a less than constructive direction these last six years and then to convince the American people that meaningful reform has taken place. Because for sure, the Tea Party, on the wane as it may now be, will more than likely have to be dragged kicking and screaming into that good night.

Outfoxed again and again

I wouldn’t care whatsoever if FOX News just came out and said to their audience that they were a biased news organization with a clear agenda of castigating President Barack Obama, the Democratic Party and all progressives at every opportunity. At least that would be honest. At least MSNBC uses the mantra “lean forward” to suggest that the network is basically a progressive mouthpiece.

hannity hypocrisy

Fair and balanced

But it’s FOX News’ constant and blatant deception and sophistry, even after being exposed, that I think puts FOX beyond the pale of anything that might resemble journalism. I have actually heard FOX News officials claim that the channel draws a clear line between commentary like Bill O’Reilly and supposed “straight-laced” anchors like Shepard Smith, but this demarcation line, and as far as I can tell, has never existed.

Here is an example of one of these “straight-laced” news segments omitting a portion of Obama’s speech to imply that Obama was “blaming the troops” for the ISIS threat, and here’s another in which another supposed “straight-laced” correspondent, Ed Henry, who is FOX’s chief White House reporter, no less, fabricated a story suggesting that Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey changed his position on ISIS.

Nonetheless, Robert Ailes from an interview in 2006 addressed criticism of FOX News when he was asked, “If you reject the conservative label, is there another way you would define yourself?:”

I think conservatives were underserved, that does not make us a conservative channel. I think a lot of conservatives watch our channel, that does not make us a conservative channel. If we’re conservative, what does that make the other channels? Liberal. Reporters are very interesting, they keep coming at me and saying aren’t you more conservative, and I say yes well, you mean they’re more liberal? The answer is you see both on our channel. In the last 25 years you CNN had Bob Novack and they thought that was balanced. One half hour they had Bob and the rest of the time they had liberals. We decided to balance all the arguments and treat the conservative view with the same respect as we have for the liberal view, and that is really irritating some people.

We’re not promoting the conservative point of view, we’re merely giving them equal time and access. Why would that offend journalists, to have another point of view? We don’t quite get that. Dragged kicking and screaming the rest of the media is now saying oh my god maybe we should be a little more balanced than the way we were doing things.

He is essentially arguing, without presenting any evidence and just on pure conjecture, of course, that before FOX came along, the national media was just a hive of liberalism, and journalists were not telling the other side of the story. First, it’s not the job of journalists to tell the other side of the story. It’s the journalist’s job to report what is happening, and more times than not, news stories do not have just two sides. They could have three or four or five sides. The suggestion that the goal of journalism is to represent all sides equally is to fail to understand journalism itself, which is, in turn, a particularly unfortunate failure for someone who claims to run a news channel.

And further, if it was true that the nation somehow had a shortage of conservative viewpoints in this period, wouldn’t we have seen nothing but Democrats in the White House and in Congress before FOX opened shop in 1996? I seem to recall some folks named Reagan, Bush Sr., Ford and Nixon. Also, in 1996 when Fox News took to the air, the Republicans had a majority in both houses of Congress.

However much top FOX News officials, reporters and anchors have failed at journalism, they have proven themselves to be professionals at clinical self-delusion.

Only eight months?

This guy’s not only a terrible human being, but a stupid one:

In February, (Joe Rickey) Hundley was seated next to Jessica Bennett and her 19-month-old son in row 28 when Delta flight 721 from Minneapolis, Minnestoa (sic), began its descent into Atlanta.

When the baby began to cry, Hundley allegedly told Bennett to “shut that (N-word) baby up,” according to an FBI affidavit.

“(He) then turned around and slapped (the child) in the face with an open hand, which caused (him) to scream even louder,” the affidavit continued. The boy suffered a scratch below his right eye.

His attorney used the excuse that he was grieving for his son, who was about to be taken off life support, and thus, Hundley was not in his usual frame of mind. So, as long as a person is grieving, all the rules of decorum and decently go out the window? I was surprised he only got eight months.

Baby slapper gets eight months in prison – CNN.com.

Mark Levin: ‘Trust me.’ Sure.

Loving news talk, but not having satellite radio, I purposefully subjected myself to about an hour or so of the Mark Levin Show on the way back tonight from covering something for work. Levin, as I’ve mentioned before, is one of the many current fear-mongering talking heads dubbing themselves “Constitutionalists,” and his show is aired on this new radio station in Northeast Georgia on the 103.7 dial. The radio station airs the usual cast of Levin, Limbaugh, Hannity and Savage. This is no surprise, given the location, but several months ago, I actually e-mailed the station and said something to the effect of that, while I appreciated the fact that we now had a talk radio station in Northeast Georgia, I find the content they’ve chosen to air to be disingenuous and destructive to any kind of constructive political conversation. An official with the station replied back that, as programming manager, he must strike a balance between the kind of content offered versus what is marketable. Basically, he was saying something along the lines of, “This is what is popular right now, and this is what sells and people in this region want to listen to.” While that may be true, that fact certainly doesn’t give the station any credibility as a real news source. Of course, in radio and many news outfits today, credibility isn’t the important thing, now is it?

But back to Levin. His usual shtick, in which he condemns Obama of having some sinister socialist mind and agenda, was very much evident tonight (Actually, a taped episode from Oct. 29), as in every other episode to which I have listened. Tonight, right in line with the theme of his book, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, available in fine book stores everywhere, Levin seems to equate the Obama administration and everything certain Democrats and progressives are trying to accomplish as tyrannical efforts, efforts such as bolstering the effectiveness of government programs and, well, helping those who can’t help themselves.

Here is Levin from Oct. 29:

Conservatism is the only antidote to tyranny because conservatism is our founding principles (sic). Conservatism is a recognition of the value of the individual human being. That’s the bottom line. All these other models, all these other philosophies, political philosophies, they’re not about the individual human being. They’re about some centralized power where masterminds, whereas I decided to call them, stateists (?), decide what’s best and isn’t best, but I don’t care how they dress it up. Tyranny is tyranny.”

The audio:

[audio:http://www.jeremystyron.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Levin10292010_A1.mp3|titles=Mark Levin, Oct. 29]

Might I remind Levin that some of the most important Founding Fathers, namely Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison, would today probably have been Democrats for their belief in a strong centralized government. For what is the point of having a government at all if it’s not to be a strong one, and I think Hamilton and Madison understood this. Do we really want a weak or measly federal government? What would be the point of that? State governments surely can’t be expected to regulate international commerce, markets and provide for the common defense and welfare.

On Levin’s statement about the value of individual human beings, I couldn’t agree more, in circumstances where said individual is, indeed, capable of finding and keeping a job and engaging in entrepreneurial enterprises, but we well know that many people in our nation are not capable of exercising their supposed “value” within the job market because of disability or education or economic disparagement. So, while Levin’s theory may work with economically upright Americans, it doesn’t work with others, and indeed, it’s a slap in the face to the thousands who need help and have nowhere to turn but the government. Sure, some abuse exists within the system, but to assume that the majority seeking government help abuse the system is a heartless exaggeration. And this heartlessness is, I think, at the heart of the current wave of Tea Party, constitutionalist movement. We are not an open prairie, agricultural society anymore, and I’m not sure we ever have been, except under the clouds of slavery, indentured servitude and sharecropping. So, I’m not sure what Levin and others are trying to achieve, but it seems that the world they seek is an illusion, anachronistic and irrelevant from modern America.

News Corp. gives 1M to GOP. Surprised?

You know, the good folks over at News Corp. and FOX News really do a terrible job at concealing their unbelievably obvious bias toward the (once) Grand Old Party, almost as terrible a job as they do presenting the news in a fair and balanced format.

According to this report from The New York Times and many others, New Corp. has passed along a contribution in the amount of $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which is one of three amounts over a million given to the Republican group in the last quarter. The largest donation to its Democratic counterpart, as it happens, was $500,000 from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

According to News Corp. spokesman Jack Horner,

News Corp. has always believed in the power of free markets, and organizations like the R.G.A., which have a pro-business agenda, support our priorities at this most critical time for our economy.

Horner also said the gift would bear no impact on the newsgathering side of the company (They gather news?). Horner, seemingly anticipating the waves of criticism said, “There is a strict wall between business and editorial.”

Sure there is. I suppose that’s why there is no mention on FOX News’ website about the contribution. Only one of three largest contributions to the group this quarter and not a sentence on the donation? Enlightening.

According to The Times report,

In an e-mail to reporters, the Democratic National Committee said the donation showed that Fox News’ well-known mantra, “Fair and Balanced,” had been “rendered utterly meaningless.” Hari Sevugan, a D.N.C. spokesman, added that Fox News’ political coverage “should have a disclaimer for what it truly is — partisan propaganda.”

And when New York Times attempted to find a story on FOX’s site?

While many news organizations reported Tuesday on the $1 million gift, a late-afternoon search of Fox News’ Web site produced no mention of it.

A search at midnight on Wednesday by me produced no mention of it either. ((http://www.foxnews.com/search-results/search?q=news+corp+$1+million+GOP))