It’s like Pravda, only without the inherent Russian masculinity. NYT:
The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative.
They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name.
Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president’s top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review.
The verdict from the campaign — an operation that prides itself on staying consistently on script — is often no, Barack Obama does not approve this message.
The push and pull over what is on the record is one of journalism’s perennial battles. But those negotiations typically took place case by case, free from the red pens of press minders. Now, with a millisecond Twitter news cycle and an unforgiving, gaffe-obsessed media culture, politicians and their advisers are routinely demanding that reporters allow them final editing power over any published quotations.
Quote approval is standard practice for the Obama campaign, used by many top strategists and almost all midlevel aides in Chicago and at the White House — almost anyone other than spokesmen who are paid to be quoted. (And sometimes it applies even to them.) It is also commonplace throughout Washington and on the campaign trail.
The rest, naturally, tries to draw equivalence: the Romney camp doesn’t want his kids quoted without approval, etc. — but what’s happening here is that we are being run by a gamed media, and we have been since Obama was introduced to us. His autobiographies — which are likely more biography than not — are fabrications meant to create a candidate and an image, one that was constructed along the lines of institutionalized leftist tropes meant to prepare us for the ascent of a stealth “progressive” socialist: America needs racial healing, and Obama can offer that! America is looking for a pragmatic centrist, and Obama is fairminded and brilliant and can bridge any divide, conquer any foe by sheer force of personality, intellect, and trouser crease! He’s a new breed! A fresh thinker! A charismat upon whom we will pin our Hopes and achieve our Change!
In reality, however, his “soaring oratory” is filled with vague promises of some grand Utopian future, while his imperial presidency has worked diligently to undermine the free market system and destroy the middle class. And the mainstream press — which started out on this journey a willing conspirator — now realizes they’ve been played in the same way they themselves once played the American electorate.
In fact, that’s the big con here: take over the message and the means of transmitting it, and the information stream, necessarily polluted, will create just enough uncertainty to convince voters to maintain the status quo. And to do that, the Obama people needed to own the press. Which they now do.
In a constitutional republic, an informed electorate is a necessary condition for the healthy functioning of government. Conversely, if what you are after is an expansion of governmental power and a system wherein citizens are reduced to managed subjects under a centralized technocratic state run by administrators and bureaucrats, keeping the populace confused, divided, and misled is a prerequisite.
The activist, pro-“progressive” left are finding out that, in the final analysis, they’re less soldiers for the revolution than they are pawns of the tyrants.
(h/t JWF)
Many journalists spoke about the editing only if granted anonymity, an irony that did not escape them.
::facepalm::
A recent example comes ready to hand:
Government by FRAUD will not work.
That’s its aim, sdferr.
Well, see? Either we regulate the son of a bitch or we manicure what’s posted on it.
And yet, even which these draconian control measures, the Obama campaign steps on its dick every day. They control the message and the messenger, and still they can’t help screwing things up!
Add that arrow to your quiver of examples of how a life managed by these Titans Of Smart(tm) would actually turn out.
politicians and their advisers are routinely demanding that reporters allow them final editing power over any published quotations.
Demanding? Bite me, politicians and advisors.
Squid, does a POTUS dickstep around a reporter who refuses to report it really dickstep in the first place?
If some stuff does get through, what the hell else have they been hiding?
Related:
Part II.
Response to “journalists” and their demands.
What is new is that we are learning about these “demands” since usually the first “demand” is that the existence of the “demands” themselves be on the down low.
Sowell on a roll:
I love stories like this. If there’s ever a Republican administration with the balls to revoke the majority of the legacy media’s White House press credentials, they can point to this, and other stories like it, as their justification.
Excellent point Ernst. I hope they are making a list and checking it twice. Or perhaps repeat this story anytime someone asks whatever happened to real journalism.
The majority of “reporters” are simply press agents for the DNC.
Dead serious, I want MSM outlets investigated for illegal campaign donations, over the last 30-40 years, totaling trillions.
I think I just heard a silly fallacy repeated in a clip on Levin’s radio show, asked in a canned question from some MSM drone to Obama: namely, that ‘outsourcing’ destroys jobs (the premise being ‘destroys jobs on net’, if it’s to make any sense at all). But this is ridiculous on its face, is it not? The aim of any outsourcing, we should presume, is a more efficient allocation of funds, gaining a discount rather than paying a premium, thus providing more funds to put to work forming more jobs, rather than having fewer funds to form fewer jobs. Is this wrong somehow?
“Is this wrong somehow?”
That depends on perspective. You are correct that discounted jobs leave more room for investment that will create more (discounted) jobs, those jobs aren’t of much utility to you and i unless we are the ones filling those jobs.
However if your stipulation is that outsourcing menial jobs allows for greater expansion in R&D and innovation which requires a higher skill set employee then outsourcing does in fact aid in the creation of high paying local jobs.
thus providing more funds to put to work forming more jobs,
in the organization core competency
The term “core competency” is relatively new. It originated in a 1990 Harvard Business Review article. In it, the authors suggest that business functions not enhanced by core competencies should be outsourced if economically feasible.
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David Ricardo’s articulation of comparative advantage as the source of wealth creation isn’t all that new though, at least relative to the founding of the US, as opposed to the sweep of human history.
Its a lot easier to control the proletariat if you have plenty of mind numbing assembly lines and sweat shops to crush their souls.
oh my
Few now remember that the claim to one’s labor underpins the claim to freedom. We are free because we own ourselves and the fruits there from. It is also the reason why no man can be a slave. For nobody, not even the King owns you and your labor from the git-go. So how could slavery exist? By declaring slaves to be non-men or subhumans. But no one could own another human being.
Well now they can, at least in principle. For what does it mean when the fruits of your labor are not yours? They are whose then? You are whose then? How ironical it is that now, in the name of compassion and other lofty feelings, the Fair Economy people make so bold as to say, “you don’t own the fruits of your labor since it’s really not yours.” It must be the King’s then, for if it is not mine then whose? This is the arrangement that people tried to escape in the first place.
President Obama’s ideas are truly derivative. Just how unoriginal they are is what is surprising.
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