Saturday, August 17, 2013

What Mattered This Week?

I'll go with Egypt.

What didn't matter? I guess I can plug my Salon column here: it doesn't matter a whole lot whether GOP presidential debates are on CNN or Fox or whatever.

But I'm sure there's more out there. What have you got? What do you think mattered this week?

9 comments:

  1. JB: Very thoughtful piece in Salon. I agree that it will matter little if the GOP restricts themselves only to "respectable" FOX News and dumps NBC and CBS. Most important if I were the RNC, I'd try desperately to curb the number of primary debates, although that will be tough with all the local affiliates and early-state interest groups that will be chomping at the bit to host candidate fora. Also agree they'd be foolhardy to let Rush or his like moderate, that would backfire tremendously.

    Salon might want to think about disabling comments for a bit. Every comment below your article, both liberal and conservative, was troll-tastic garbage totally non-responsive to your original post.

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    1. I guess I don't get out much - out to MSM comment threads, anyway. The same phenomenon seems to be true of the article you did on how the Tea Party effects candidate recruitment negatively, resulting in many non-candidacies, over at the Washington Post. The comments are unreadable.

      I like the self-selected pool of commenters over here at Plain Blog (with a few exceptions, of course). Reading through the threads at Salon and WaPo makes me think Andrew Sullivan may unfortunately have the wisest approach - no live comments at all.

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    2. On one hand, it looks like the GOP want to retreat even further into their media bubble, and that hasn't been so good for them.

      On the other hand, none of the MSM news orgs are that strong either, so no big loss by banning them.

      So... meh, I guess.

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  2. If the GOP comes back to power, will the networks regularly be intimidated regarding their programming?

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    1. The RNC move is a new wrinkle in press/media intimidation in that it is official. Although Dem administrations have apparently tried to influence coverage, the actual intimidation I heard talked about by media people was Nixon. Some of that was partly verified by the Enemies List. I recall the impression that a popular NBC reporter and one of the first women to cover politics, Cassie Mackin, was forced out by Nixonian pressure.

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    2. "The RNC move is a new wrinkle in press/media intimidation in that it is official."

      Yes, official, public, and unapologetic.

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    3. Well, it was a good sign that NBC and CNN withstood the intimidation. I'm all for those networks continuing to reflect on whether their plans for partly fictionalized Hillary Clinton productions are a good idea and perhaps change their minds in the future for good reasons related to broadcast identity or business or appraisal of the quality of the final products, but decisions shouldn't be made in response to an RNC ultimatum.

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    4. We never had these problems with Reagan and broadcasts of "Bedtime for Bonzo."

      Or did we?

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  3. PA's voter ID law was enjoined for the third straight election, largely because the GOP is that state is not only post-policy but post-competence: The political appointees at the relevant state agencies have proven utterly unable to put together a system to make free photo IDs available, and until or unless they do, the law will likely continue to be enjoined.

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