Gingrich apparently has been given a boost by the most recent Republican candidates debate.  Gingrich was asked about the recent comments of his ex-wife, who said he asked that she agree to an “open marriage” in which he could have both a wife and a mistress.  In response, Gingrich lashed out at the questioner and the media, generally, for focusing on irrelevancies and making the first question in a presidential debate one about his long-ago personal affairs.  The audience of Republicans, who apparently hate the media with every fiber of their beings, ate it up and gave Gingrich a standing ovation.

I don’t care about Gingrich’s past personal behavior — but I also don’t see why his set-piece smackdown of a question about it is such a great thing.  Some rock-ribbed conservatives seem to despise the media and love to see them publicly criticized for any reason; I don’t share that view.

To me, the little diatribe was an obvious, planned bit of political theater, and the fact that Gingrich palled around with the questioner after the debate just confirms it.  Gingrich has deep roots and connections in the Washington social milieu of politicians, lobbyists, reporters, and consultants.  When he gave his little angry performance, his inside-the-Beltway buddies no doubt leaned back, nodded to each other, and agreed that Gingrich was just doing the necessary political thing, knowing the rubes would eat it up — and they did.

Gingrich’s debate diatribe may well win South Carolina for him, but I think his performance really exposes him as just another calculated politician.

I don’t mean to downplay the importance of dealing properly with incidents of sexual harassment, nor do I mean to be insensitive to the issue of potential misconduct by a presidential candidate — but I think it is ludicrous that the Cain story has commanded more attention than, say, the ongoing debt problems in Italy that have toppled a government and threaten to send one of the largest economies in the world into a default that would be devastating for the global economy.

In America, we always seem to fixate on tawdry tales of misconduct by political figures.  Our recent history is littered with characters like Elizabeth Ray, Fannie Fox, and Donna Rice.  Once they were featured in headlines; now they are forgotten.

The Cain story deals with incidents that allegedly happened more than a decade ago. Cain himself is merely one of eight candidates for the Republican nomination who hasn’t received even one vote yet, because no primary will occur for weeks.  The Italian problem, in contrast, could cause crippling losses on the part of banks that hold Italian debt and thereby plunge the world into another recession.  Which story is more important?

If a deal is struck, news media pundits will promptly declare who came out a “winner” and who came out a “loser” in this torturous process.  They may contend that President Obama was a loser because his call for increased taxes as part of a “balanced” approach was unsuccessful.  They may argue that the Republicans were losers because they were maneuvered into a last-second backroom deal that doesn’t make enough spending cuts.  Or perhaps the mantra will be that Harry Reid and Senate Democrats were marginalized during the final hours, or that “Tea Party” Republicans looked too uncompromising and unrealistic, or that progressives in Congress have lost their clout as the debate focuses totally on spending cuts.

The insistence on declaring triumphal winners and abject losers, with no middle ground, may be one reason why it has become so difficult for Washington to reach agreements.  No one wants to be a “loser” because they know that General George Patton was right:  Americans celebrate winners and despise losers.  In this case, however, it’s hard to see how anyone comes out of this ridiculous process covered with glory.  Our political leaders have failed to govern responsibly for so long, irrespective of which party has been in power, that there should be plenty of “loser” status to go around.

Update:  As predicted (except this writer finds a lot of “winners” in the process).

In the wake of the jury verdict declaring Anthony not guilty of the crime, the media focus has become even more intense, and stories about the case seem to be unavoidable.  Jurors are talking about how they reached their verdict.  One of Anthony’s lawyers makes a vulgar gesture at members of the news media, whom Anthony’s counsel believe have engaged in character assassination.  Other observers criticize the jury for what they consider to be a bad decision.

Murder trials happen every day in this country.  Why do some trials — like the Casey Anthony trial, or the Menendez brothers trial, or any of the other criminal trials that people have obsessed about in this era of cable-TV sensationalism — command so much attention, whereas others don’t?

Right now, in Cleveland, a man accused in the deaths of 11 women is on trial.  How many people in America have even heard of Anthony Sowell, the accused killer, or the poor women he is alleged to have killed, many of whom apparently had substance abuse problems and vanished without much attention being paid to their disappearance?  Has Sowell’s trial received even a tiny fraction of the national attention that was paid to the Casey Anthony trial?

How can the death of one little girl, however tragic, command so much more attention than the horrific stories of the dead women that are being told at the Sowell trial?  Which of the two trials is likely to have more to teach us about our society?  And how much of the enormous disparity in attention paid to these two cases is due to race, class, and the perceived photogenic qualities of the victims and the defendants?

What lessons can be learned from this sordid story?  Two points seem obvious.  First, the lie and the cover-up are almost always more damning than the original misdeed.  Weiner’s behavior in sending intimate photos and messages to unknown internet acquaintances was extremely weird, but he probably could have survived it if he had not aggressively lied about his Twitter account being hacked in an attempt to avoid disclosure of his conduct.  For most people, his knowing, repeated, straight-faced lies were far more disturbing that his strange activities on the web.

Second, recognize when you are going down, then pick the time and structure the message.  Weiner’s admission that he had engaged in the unseemly conduct and lied to the public made it inevitable that he would have to leave office — particularly when Weiner must have known that other pathetic photos and internet dalliances would come to light.  By vowing to fight, Weiner only exposed himself, his family, and his party to ongoing ridicule, shame, and distraction.  If he had resigned at the outset, he would have spared everyone a humiliating spectacle.  And why publicly read a statement in a forum where you could be jeered and spoofed by shock jocks and other bottom-feeders at the media trough?  Weiner would have been well-advised to follow Jim Tressel’s lead, issue a high-minded written statement, and leave his position out of the media spotlight.

So, Anthony Weiner exits stage left.  When will the next Washington, D.C. media frenzy begin?

We’ll hear a lot about Olbermann’s departure from the pundits, the broadcasters, and the blogosphere in the next few days, with many people calling him a fearless advocate for progressive views and many others saying good riddance to a shrill voice.  I don’t really care much either way, because Kish and I stopped watching Olbermann’s show years ago.  If you wanted to view events from a consistently liberal perspective, you could watch Countdown — but no one who wanted to actually get the news, in any semblance of unbiased form, would tune in that show.  And, for us at least, Olbermann’s tiresome interactions with the pundits who always appeared on his show and shared his viewpoint, and Olbermann’s smug, absurdly self-important and self-referential commentaries, just became unwatchable.  His show not only was not objective, it also was bad TV.  Countdown wasn’t watched by many Americans, and I think that was why.

TV news needs to return to basics and get away from the kind of advocacy programming that has come to dominate the “news channels.”  The end of Olbermann’s show may be a step in the right direction.

I applaud MSNBC management for acting promptly to safeguard the network’s hard-earned reputation for objectivity and balance in its coverage of American politics.  It is hard to believe that Olbermann, who is one of the paragons of temperate commentary and unbiased reporting in the new media, would not have understood that contributing money to political candidates was grossly inconsistent with MSNBC’s high standards of journalistic integrity.  After all, it is not as if the network would allow news show hosts to routinely describe political figures of particular viewpoints as “the worst person in the world,” or to regularly launch harshly worded, mean-spirited attacks in an effort to drum up better ratings.

I’m sure that MSNBC’s other prime time news show hosts, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, have never provided any support, financial or otherwise, to any political party or movement.  Both Matthews and Maddow are universally recognized for their even-handed treatment of political news and have contributed tremendously to high esteem which every rational person must feel for MSNBC and its fair and credible treatment of opposing viewpoints.

All of the stations feature pundits, of course, but CNN seems to have an unworkably large number of them. Good Lord!  It’s unbearable!  How many are there, anyway?  They seem to be rotating them in and out, like they are players on a hockey team running two-minute shifts.

I suppose pundits are unavoidable on election nights, but can’t the media outlets pick just one or two whom they think actually have something meaningful to say and just stick with them?

When I heard that NPR had fired Williams for comments he made on Fox News, I was surprised.  When I read his full comments, I was even more surprised, and when I heard that NPR had concluded that his comments were inconsistent with their internal policies, I was shocked.  Are we really to the point where making an honest comment about feeling concern, in a much broader context, is sufficient to give rise to a dismissal?  And what exactly are the NPR policies that were violated?  As a listener, don’t I have a right to know what kind of speech codes NPR is applying to its commentators?  (And, incidentally, why didn’t those codes prevent me from hearing countless droning Daniel Schorr commentaries that inevitably circled back to the Nixon era?)

I know that many people consider NPR to be a bastion of liberal bias, but I’ve always appreciated its presentation of the news.  It profoundly disappoints me that NPR would give a long-time, respected commentator the boot for expressing honest views that cannot even remotely be construed as hate speech.  I am appalled to hear about this kind of censorship, and it causes me to lose enormous respect for NPR as a member of the news media.

I’m not sure what to make of such stories.  With Katrina, the federal government did not cover itself with glory in dealing with an enormous catastrophe, and neither did the state or city government.  People were marooned on the roofs of their homes, were not readily supplied with food and water, and could not be evacuated quickly from the hellish environs of the Superdome.  We learned that the federal government is a ponderous entity that does not move with lightning speed.  Was that unique to the Bush Administration?  Apparently not, because we recently saw a plodding, uncoordinated federal government make a similarly muddled response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.   Katrina also taught us that the Louisiana state government and the New Orleans city governments were corrupt, inept and seemingly hamstrung by politics.  Has anything changed in that regard?

If I had my way, every retrospective story on a disaster like Hurricane Katrina would focus not on what happened — we can safely leave that to historians — but on how things have changed to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.  No blame-shifting politicians or social scientists could be quoted.  Instead, facts would be the focus.  Have the levees been sufficiently strengthened?  Have cumbersome federal bureaucracies been streamlined to better deal with disasters?  Are evacuation plans reasonable and capable of being implemented?  If Katrina were to happen again today, would the results be any different?  If so, why?  Those are the tough questions that “retrospective” stories tend to leave unanswered.

It’s odd that President Obama seems to be dodging formal press conferences.  He obviously is an intelligent person, and his answers to questions typically are well-formulated.  Of course, the danger of a press conference is that an unscripted answer might gin up a media firestorm that distracts the President until it dies down.  Something like that happened at the President’s last formal press conference, when he said Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in their interaction with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  The resulting controversy was not put to bed until after President Obama hosted an awkward “Beer Summit” at the White House.  It may be that that experience caused the President to conclude that formal prime-time press conferences just aren’t worth it.

As a former journalist, I think such press conferences are worth it.  I think it is good for the President to break out of controlled environments and meetings with nodding, sycophantic followers and face some tough and even oddball questions from the media.  Presidents who are skillful in handling questions from the media — like President Kennedy — look sharp and at ease; their ability to deal with aggressive, probing questions with intelligence and humor inspire public confidence.  Press conferences undoubtedly keep the President more on top of issues that are of current interest to the country, even if they aren’t particularly of interest to the President or his advisors.  They also show that the President is not some remote, all-controlling figure, but a human being, elected to an important office, who is answerable to the public.  If Presidents duck the press, they end up being depicted as out of touch — and maybe they are.

The problem with making such explicit promises, of course, is that some trusting souls will expect you to honor them.  President Obama, however, has not honored his promise.  Instead, now that we have reached a kind of end game stage for the “health care reform” legislation, where negotiators for the House Democrats, the Senate Democrats, and the White House are trying to hammer out a final package to take to the floors of the two Houses of Congress, negotiations are proceeding in strict secrecy — even though C-SPAN has specifically requested the ability to broadcast those negotiations.  This harshly worded piece from Jack Cafferty of CNN is an example of the reactions politicians inevitably will get under such circumstances:

It seems clear to me that Cafferty is speaking not just as a reporter who is professionally disappointed by a lack of transparency, but as someone who feels personally betrayed and embarrassed that they trusted President Obama’s promises in the first place.  Cafferty thought President Obama would be different from the normal politician, and he reacted viscerally when he discovered that President Obama is a politician like any other.  My guess is that Cafferty is not the only one who feels that way, and that is not a good thing for either the President or the Democratic Party.  Trust, once lost, is almost impossible to regain.  If the President fails to even pay lip service to campaign promises once he gets elected, why should people trust anything he says?

The reaction of journalists also is a bit discouraging. With a few exceptions, members of the news media don’t seem to have raised many objections to the Administration’s harsh, public criticism of a fellow member of the news media. Whether people agree with the viewpoint expressed by Fox News shows like The O’Reilly Factor or Hannity is irrelevant. A free press is only truly free if everyone is permitted to express their opinions and views, no matter how unpopular or out of step with the majority. When you disagree with a news report, the proper response is to point out the flaws and errors, not to try to suppress the speaker. I would have thought all members of the news media would understand, and publicly express, that fundamental truth. Their failure to do so makes them look craven and politically motivated.

I was struck by the explanation of the Reuters spokesman quoted in the linked article.  The spokesman is quoted as saying:  “Reuters has an obligation to its clients to publish news and information that could move financial markets, and this story had the potential to do that.”  My old professor at the Ohio State University School of Journalism, Marty Brian, must be rolling in her grave at that one!  Consider that the quote from the Reuters spokesman equates an admitted hoax with “news and information” and suggests that Reuters’ paramount obligation is to publish whatever comes its way, without doing anything to determine its veracity first.  That concept is antithetical to true professional journalism, which values accuracy above speed and insists upon sourcing and careful fact-checking — particularly of a story that reports that a vocal opponent of legislation has abruptly and inexplicably changed its position.  Doesn’t anyone at CNBC and Reuters have a reporter’s gut instinct, or at least a willingness to take a moment to check the Chamber of Commerce website to see if the press release even is posted there?

Normally I would decry the efforts of the hoaxers, but I have come to believe that they probably are performing a salutary function for the world at large.  Why attach credibility to what you read from the news media if they don’t even bother to check press releases before publishing them?

In the past 10 days we have seen a confirmation of the extraordinary power of the newest form of “new journalism,” through the hidden camera videos exposing the rank practices and activities of ACORN employees in offices across the country. As new, ever more shocking videos are posted to websites, we have seen the Census Bureau cut its ties to ACORN and, today, the House of Representatives vote to cut off all federal funding for ACORN.

What is amazing about this story is that two young people — aged 25 and 20 — armed only with a hidden camera, an idea, and a willingness to take a few risks — have brought low a well-funded organization that was strongly supported by many politicians. Their videos were posted on a few websites and went “viral.” No established news media outlets were involved; indeed, the networks and large newspapers largely were oblivious to the story. Average Americans, however, were not oblivious. They saw the videos on the internet and were stunned by them.  Their disgust was quickly communicated to their elected representatives, who did not even attempt to defend ACORN or slow efforts to strip ACORN of government funding. It is an amazing example of how, in some ways at least, the internet has changed the world.

What does it mean? It means Americans no longer are solely dependent on established members of the news media for information. It means that individuals are far more empowered than they were before the internet made it possible for an average citizen to communicate to millions of total strangers with a few strokes of a keyboard. And finally, it means that organizations like ACORN will have to be mindful the next time a self-proclaimed pimp and prostitute walk into their offices seeking aid and advice.