Stewart/Cramer

You should really watch this interview. It's the culmination of a week's worth of brick-throwing on both sides that ends with Jon Stewart utterly demolishing Jim Cramer and CNBC, and Cramer pretty much totally owning up to his network's failures. I gotta say, props to Cramer who treated this interview as less of an entertainment showdown, and more of a chance to get serious and face the music.

At the very end, Stewart tells a story about his mother that alludes to something we really need to address: after all the years of compound interest and all the following market losses, would all of those people who trusted the financial community and conventional wisdom, all those who put their retirement savings in the stock market (or whose conventional retirement plans were phased out in favor of 401(k)'s), would they have been better off had they just left all that money in a plain jane savings account at their local bank? Because if so, then we seriously need to talk about the fact that 401(k)'s have now been shown to entail a huge amount of risk.

NBC News' complicity in, and defense of, domestic propaganda

Here is an eye-opening piece by Glenn Greenwald on Brian Williams' reaction to revelations in the New York Times that military analysts used on news shows, including NBC News, were coached by the Pentagon to give particular answers to gin up support for the war in Iraq. It's damning.

your liberal media

From Huffington Post, re: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams:

For Williams, it all went back to Sept. 11, 2001. As a citizen, he thought on that fateful day, thank God that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell were on the team.

our liberal media

For anyone with lingering beliefs that this media is liberal (that means you, Camille Paglia), here's the good people of MSNBC, not FOX, not the Wall Street Journal, and at least one of whom actually reports for NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, looking heartbroken over the collapse of their guy's campaign. And it ain't John Edwards:

Of course, he's been the media's favorite at least since 2000, when he referred to them as "my base." Tucker Carlson, typically liberal news show host, explained it well (h/t Atrios):

McCain ran an entire presidential campaign aimed primarily at journalists. He understood that the first contest in a presidential race is always the media primary. He campaigned hard to win it. To a greater degree than any candidate in thirty years, McCain offered reporters the three things they want most: total access all the time, an endless stream of amusing quotes, and vast quantities of free booze.
...
I saw reporters call McCain "John," sometimes even to his face and in public. I heard otherse, usually at night in the hotel bar, slip into the habit of referring to the Mccain campaign as "we"- as in, "I hope we kill Bush." It was wrong, but it was hard to resist.

it wasn't just FOX News

From Media Matters:

Before the November 2006 midterm elections, NBC News political director Chuck Todd predicted several times that if the Democrats won "control of Congress" and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) became speaker of the House, then President Bush's "approval rating will be over 50 percent by the Fourth of July next year." In fact, as of July 4, 2007, Bush's approval ratings are far below 50 percent. Indeed, a recent analysis by the weblog RealClearPolitics.com of national polls conducted between June 11 and June 28 placed Bush's average approval rating at 30.5 percent. Will NBC News question Todd about his inaccurate prediction?

Todd appears to have first made this claim during the October 27, 2006, edition of NBC's Today.

This is what happens now during election periods: even the mainstream news networks try to convince us that we should elect Republicans. This was the political director of NBC News making this Hannity-worthy prediction, people!

It's remarkable, too, how myopic the claim is on its own, regardless of its source. Bush's approvals had been below 50% for a year and a half at this point, and people's opinions of pretty much everything he stood for had gone completely sour. How could Democrats possibly make him look better? Presidents who had recovered before (though exceedingly few had ever had such a prolonged period of low approval ratings) had completely reworked their political strategies in the face of defeat to remake their image. Reagan replaced his cabinet, for instance, while Clinton took a sharp turn toward "the center" and became a master of compromise so as to get things done. There was no evidence that Bush was at all willing to do the former or capable of the latter, even in the face of political decimation, and history has borne that out.

As Darwin famously said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."

Perhaps the PR consequences of such rigidity were not totally obvious at the time (i.e., whether his ratings would remain the same, buoy slightly, or continue their decline), but such a dramatic rise was out of the question for anyone paying attention.

Luckily for Mr. Todd, there are no consequences in today's media for inaccurate (even dishonest) reporting or electioneering masquerading as prophesy. I have a feeling we'll be waiting for that apology for a long time.