Media -- Progressive Silence on Television

September 19, 2008

by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ali Frick, and Ryan Powers

MEDIA

Progressive Silence On Television

Last week, MSNBC debuted a new prime-time political show hosted by Rachel Maddow, a progressive radio host on Air America. The debut attracted more viewers than both Larry King and Glenn Beck's programs, on CNN and CNN Headline News, respectively. After one week on air, Maddow's was MSNBC's highest-rated show on Tuesday, with Keith Olbermann's Countdown in second place. When Olbermann announced Maddow's new show last month on the progressive blog Daily Kos, he wrote to its readers, "Yes, you had something to do with it." Maddow's show is one of the few success stories of the efforts by progressives to see more progressive voices on TV. In fact, the day before Maddow's debut, MSNBC announced it was pulling Olbermann and Chris Matthews from its election coverage -- a move the New York Times said was a "direct result of tensions associated with the channel's perceived shift to the political left." Despite Olbermann and Maddow's rating successes, MSNBC and the other networks still don't seem to be getting the message: Americans want to hear progressive voices on television.

ANTI-WAR VOICES SHUT OUT: After 9/11, and particularly in the lead-up to the Iraq war, news programs purged their ranks of several voices seen as remotely hesitant about President Bush's foreign policy. After political commenter Bill Maher criticized the war in Afghanistan, "he was quickly alerted that he had gone beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse -- even though that's his job. (Remember, his show is called 'Politically Incorrect.')," David Talbot at Salon.com noted. In fact, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer declared ominously, "Americans need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is." At MSNBC, progressive host Phil Donahue was fired in February 2003 for his anti-war views, despite the fact that his show was the network's highest-rated program. An internal NBC memo said Donahue presented a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. ... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." The memo outlined a possible nightmare scenario in which the show would become "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." The same week Donahue was fired, the network brought on Jesse Ventura and right-wing shock jock Michael Savage.

'IF IT'S SUNDAY, ITS CONSERVATIVE': In early 2006, Media Matters for America published a study showing the overwhelming dominance of conservative voices on the most influential Sunday political talk shows. Analyzing guests on the shows between 1997 and 2005, Media Matters found that -- though the balance between progressives and conservatives was relatively equal during President Clinton's second term -- "conservatives held a dramatic advantage" during Bush's first term, "outnumbering Democrats/progressives by 58 percent to 42 percent." Counting only elected officials, the conservative advantage during Bush's first term was 61 percent to 39 percent; in the late 1990s, by contrast, the progressive advantage was only 53 percent to 45 percent. What's more, during both the Clinton and Bush years, journalists who appeared as guests were far more likely to be conservative: "In Clinton's second term, 61 percent of the ideologically identifiable journalists were conservative; in Bush's first term, that figure rose to 69 percent." Finally, the study found that "congressional opponents of the Iraq war were largely absent from the Sunday shows, particularly during the period just before the war began." These shows often "define the people and arguments that represent 'reasonable debate' in the nation's capital," and so the conservative bent affects a far wider audience than those who are watching the programs.

DOUBLE STANDARD FOR FOX NEWS: MSNBC's decision to pull its outspoken progressive host Keith Olbermann from its election coverage received wide play throughout the media and the blogosphere; Fox News and right-wing blogs celebrated the silencing of Olbermann's "disgraceful," "hard-left views." But for the last 12 years, since its inception in 1996, Fox News has presented a strong and unabashed right-wing perspective -- with hardly a peep of protest from the rest of the mainstream media. It's no secret that Fox News both caters to and generates a hard-right, conservative audience. An August poll showed that 67 percent of Fox News viewers planned to vote for the Republican candidate for president, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). The poll "lines up neatly with a poll that showed that in the 2004 election, 88 percent of those who watched FNC supported George W. Bush over John Kerry" -- making Fox News viewers Bush's most loyal demographic. A 2003 New Yorker piece described the network as "opinionated and conservative, and its news is delivered by people who themselves are often unabashedly opinionated and conservative." With dominion over Fox News, conservatives own an entire third of the cable news programs, and yet CNN and MSNBC are perpetually concerned about being perceivedeven slightly to the left -- or they ignore their success when they do present progressive views. Conservative views are consistently accepted as being mainstream. Progressive opinions are therefore outside of the norm and more risky. As the New Yorker's Ken Auletta noted, "Fox found its niche; MSNBC hasn't, and CNN seems to have lost the one it had."

JUSTICE -- PODESTA: TOO MUCH SECRECY PUTS OUR NATION AT RISK: This week, John Podesta, the President and CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and Mark Agrast, Senior Fellow at CAPAF, testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution. In his testimony on Secrecy and the Rule of Law, Podesta explained that "most Americans appreciate the need to keep secret national security information whose disclosure would pose a genuine risk of harm. But as the 9/11 Commission concluded, too much secrecy can put our nation at greater risk, hindering oversight, accountability, and information sharing." "Over the past seven years," he said, "the Bush administration has increased secrecy and curtailed access to information through a variety of means." He cited the slow pace of declassification of government records, the withdrawing of previously unclassified documents, failure to preserve White House communications, excessive invoking of executive privilege, and the threatening of journalists and whistleblowers. Agrast explained that "it is time to consider how Congress and the next administration can begin to turn the page on this appalling chapter in our history." Podesta made many recommendations for the next administration, including the establishment of "a presumption against classification," tightening the standards for preservation of electronic records, and enacting protection for whistleblowers. Yesterday, Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) introduced legislation that "would require the U.S. Attorney General to tell Congress whenever the executive branch decides it is not bound by federal law."

ECONOMY -- BUSH TAX CUTS LOOK EVEN MORE RECKLESS IN LIGHT OF FEDERAL BAILOUTS: On Tuesday evening, the Federal Reserve announced that it would lend troubled insurer AIG $85 billion in return for a 79.9 percent stake in the company. This move comes on the heels of the bailouts of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and just months after the bailout of Bear Stearns. CNBC has put the total tab for the recent government rescues by the Fed and the Treasury Department at $900 billion. The rescues, while necessary to prevent a wider financial meltdown, will cause the already near-record federal deficit of $407 billion to explode. Before the bailouts, the projected federal deficit for 2009 was $546 billion. When President George Bush came to office eight years ago, it was projected that America would have a budget surplus next year of $710 billion. So what happened? As an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows, 42 percent of the "fiscal deterioration" was due to the Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003. For FY2009, roughly $1 trillion of the $1.3 trillion deterioration in the nation's fiscal finances stems from policy actions. Tax cuts account for 42 percent of this $1 trillion deterioration.

RADICAL RIGHT -- VIRGINIA GOP RALLY REACHING OUT TO MINORITIES WILL FEATURE FMR. SEN. GEORGE ALLEN : The Washington Post reported this week that "Northern Virginia Republicans, realizing they need to improve their appeal among the region's large ethnic population, will stage a 'unity' rally Saturday that they say will draw 1,000 people." Yet the rally will feature former Republican Virginia senator George Allen, who, when running for re-election in 2006, famously called a young man of Indian decent the racial slur "macaca." When Talking Points Memo checked in with the state GOP to ask if Allen is "really an effective front-man for the party's efforts to win over minorities, communications director Gerry Scimeca said, "George Allen has an excellent record on issues of diversity, reaching out to people...his whole career, his whole life have been a testament to a guy who's treated people equally across racial lines, across every kind of line."

Homeless advocacy groups and city agencies across the country are "reporting the most visible rise in homeless encampments in a generation." These tent cities -- reminiscent of Hoovervilles during the Great Depression -- continue to grow with "with foreclosures mounting, gas and food prices rising and the job market tightening."

Though it was near completion a month ago, an agreement to extend the American military mandate in Iraq beyond this year "has stalled over objections by Iraqi leaders and could be in danger of falling apart." The major point of contention is whether American troops and military contractors will be "subject to the country's criminal justice system for any crime committed outside of a military operation."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit yesterday against Bush administration officials, "seeking to halt what it describes as illegal surveillance of Americans’ telephone and Internet traffic." The lawsuit parallels legal action EFF sought against AT&T in 2006 that was derailed this year when Congress granted immunity to telecom companies that had assisted the surveillance program.

Federal officials told the Associated Press that after a "lengthy investigation into his lurid messages to underage congressional pages," no charges will be filed against former Republican congressman Mark Foley.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne "pledged yesterday to squelch the 'ethics storm' exposed by investigators who said agency workers rigged bids, accepted gifts, and had sex with energy company officials doing business with the government." Inspector General Earl Devaney told Congress he was disappointed that two now-retired employees were not prosecuted by the DOJ.

The federal government is now "embracing the need for a comprehensive approach to the financial crisis." Regulators are considering a number of proposals that would "take bad assets off the balance sheets of financial companies." Congressional leaders and regulators met yesterday to discuss the plan which would “require what several officials said would be a substantial appropriation of federal dollars."

And finally: "People who startle easily in response to threatening images or loud sounds seem to have a biological predisposition to adopt conservative political positions on many hot-button issues," according to a study published yesterday. It concludes that people "who adopt political views you disagree with are not be stupid or irrational. Rather, they may arrive at their positions in part because they are predisposed to be more or less worried about risk."

"Women have entered politics in greater numbers than ever in the past decade, accounting for 18.4 percent of parliament members worldwide, according to a study released Thursday by the United Nations Development Fund for Women."

THINK PROGRESS: Laura Ingraham: Lawmakers who worry about the economic crisis are "girly."

WONK ROOM: March 2008: Conservatives were for deregulation before they were against it.

YGLESIAS: The differences between Americans and Canadians in terms of knowing other countries' political histories.

GRISTMILL: GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz denies anthropogenic climate change.

TEXAS: State attorney general is helping advance a program to prevent teen dating violence.

ENVIRONMENT: "Environmental officials from several states that have tried to force the Pentagon to clean up polluted military sites say the Defense Department has retaliated by reducing or withholding federal oversight dollars."

ECONOMY: In the long term, states fear that "a prolonged financial crisis that further reduces already shrinking tax revenue."

"[M]ore and better and earlier communication between us [Congress and the White House] is always a better thing."
-- White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, 9/18/08

VERSUS

"House Minority Leader John Boehner said his conference was forced to cancel a meeting Thursday morning after the administration 'refused' to send over a representative to brief House Republicans on the federal government's response to the latest financial turmoil."
-- Politico, 9/18/08

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