Advice to the Times: Get Noonan

As William Kristol's year-long gig (Why does it seem so much longer?) runs out, the Gray Lady should go after the stylish Peggy Noonan to replace him.

Those of us who have been gagging over Kristol's dopey, fact-free New York Times columns would welcome Noonan as a reminder of the days when conservatives had a way with words as well as ideas (see Will, George and Sullivan, Andrew). In the coming era of Sarah Palin, they will be needed more than ever in the national political discussion.

Today's Noonan effort in the Wall Street Journal is a sweet sample of her talents, parsing yesterday's Obama speech about the economy:

"He spoke of 'our capacity for future greatness' and argued 'the very fact that this crisis is largely of our own making means that it is not beyond our ability to solve.' This was a relief. It's time someone began to speak of the current crisis with optimism, as if it can be handled and got through. This is not a nation of 300 million people in extremis and on a morphine drip; it's a nation of 300 million people who are alive, alert and ready to go."

Looking at the mug shot of five presidents in the Oval Office, Noonan observes:

"The Founders, who were awed by the presidency and who made it a point, the early ones, to speak in their inaugural addresses of how unworthy they felt, would be astonished and confounded by the over-awe with which we view presidents now...It's no good, and vaguely un-American. Right now patriotism requires more than the usual candor. It requires speaking truthfully and constructively to a president who is a man, and just a man. We hire them, we fire them, they come back for photo-ops. They're not magic."

If the Times needs any further incentive to go after Noonan, it would bring the added satisfaction of taking something valuable away from the media's mad acquirer Rupert Murdoch.

Fox News' Push Polling

Hillary Clinton is the candidate who would "do anything," including something unethical, to win the presidency and, if elected, the most likely to embarrass the country by her actions in the Oval Office.

You can take Fox News' word for it. Nobody asked them, but their pollsters have been questioning voters in what looks very much like a push poll, designed to score points against a candidate rather than elicit information.

"These results," says Ernest Paicopolos of Opinion Dynamics, "suggest that Clinton still faces the challenge of shedding the image of a politician who puts electoral victory ahead of everything else." His organization also solicited voter opinion about such core issues as the bickering between Bill Clinton and Obama and the injection of race into the South Carolina primary.

If Rupert Murdoch's minions are impartial in their studies of candidates' images, they might next ask which candidate is seen as most likely to blow his top in the White House and nuke everybody, which is most willing to falsify his previous stands on every issue, which would hold revival meetings in the Rose Garden and which might take drugs and give the State of the Union address in a ghetto stupor.

In its previous polling for Fox News, Opinion Dynamics unearthed such trends as the 2006 pre-Surge public perception of "victories in Iraq," leading to a sharp rise in the approval ratings of President Bush and Don Rumsfeld.

Fox News' social science is as fair and impartial as its news coverage, telling us everything the godfather of "American Idol" wants us to know.

Rupert Murdoch's Funny Valentine

Who knew that the Fox News media mogul had such a sense of humor? His New York Post's editorial endorsing Barack Obama should become a comedy classic.

"For all his charisma and his eloquence," the Post writes, "the rookie senator sorely lacks seasoning: Regarding national security, his worldview is beyond naïve...

"His all-things-to-all-people approach to complicated domestic issues also arouses scant confidence. 'Change!' for the sake of change does not a credible campaign platform make."

But what sterling qualities does Obama possess that would make him a good choice for president on Super Tuesday? "(H)e is not Team Clinton."

Not being a Clinton is a supreme virtue: "His opponent, and her husband, stand for déjà vu all over again--a return to the opportunistic, scandal-scarred, morally muddled years of the almost infinitely self-indulgent Clinton co-presidency...

"A return to Sen. Clinton's cattle-futures deal, Travelgate, Whitewater, Filegate, the Lincoln Bedroom Fire Sale, Pardongate--and the inevitable replay of the Monica Mess?

"No, thank you."

From this guarded assessment of the Clinton years emerges a ringing endorsement: "At least Obama has the ability to inspire. Again, we don't agree much with Obama on substantive issues. But many Democrats will."

With friends like Murdoch, a candidate could go far. Did Bill O'Reilly get the memo?

Damming the Mainstream Media

Alberto Gonzalez, Monica Goodling and others of the Bush Brigade who worked so hard to subvert American freedoms are gone, but their mission is moving forward. After chipping away at our legal rights, next on the agenda is control of our minds through mass media.

A House Committee will turn the spotlight today on FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, who has been busy trying to concentrate ownership more than ever before into the hands of Rupert Murdoch and a few other corporate chieftains.

Like all loyal Bushies, Martin has not let legal niceties get in his way.

Citing "complaints from the public and professionals within the communications industry," Rep. Bart Stupak, who heads the Energy and Commerce subcommittee that is investigating the FCC head, says, "It is one thing to be an aggressive leader, but many of the allegations indicate possible abuse of power and an attempt to intentionally keep fellow commissioners in the dark."

Martin and other FCC members will testify about his efforts to bulldoze through the easing of rules limiting cross-ownership of newspapers and TV stations in the same city as well as "cooking the books" to push through regulations to crack down on cable TV which, outside of Fix News, has not been as servile as the Administration would like.

To do so, Martin has used what media watchdogs call "a rigged process" designed to produce a "predetermined outcome."

The FCC chairman came to his position of overseeing free speech in America at the age of 33 with no communications experience whatsoever after working on the legal team that blocked the 2000 Florida vote recount to put Bush in the White House.

In 1961, President Kennedy's FCC chairman, Newt Minow, famously called commercial TV a "vast wasteland" and worked to expand its range of content by enabling UHF stations and public television.

His 2007 counterpart is less interested in what's on than who controls it. "America Idol" and reality shows are high art as long as the right people profit and keep the medium from sending the wrong political message.

Media Sellouts

From right and left, critics accuse the nation's media of selling out the American people but, while the debate rages, the real selling is not by the media but of them.

On PBS last night, Bill Moyers highlighted the latest attempt to consolidate television, radio, newspapers and magazines even further into the hands of half a dozen conglomerates, Rupert Murdoch's among them.

This time the effort is being rushed along by FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, who as a 33-year-old lawyer worked on the Bush legal team for the 2000 Florida vote recount and, with no media background, was appointed to the commission less than six months later.

In 2003, an attempt to concentrate media ownership was beaten back after a public outcry by interest groups ranging from the National Organization for Women and Common Cause to the National Rifle Association and the pro-life Family Research Council.

Now, in the waning days of Bush's Administration, his 3-2 majority on the FCC is trying to rush through similar relaxing of cross-ownership rules by next month, but again the public and Congress are trying to head them off at the pass.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" was a slogan in the mid-nineteenth century when Americans were trying to abolish slavery. It's still applies now when a radical White House seems determined to enslave our minds.

The Souring of America

Solid majorities of the public criticize them for “political bias, inaccuracy and failing to acknowledge mistakes” with the “harshest indictments...from the growing segment that relies on the internet as its main source for national and international news.”

That’s the conclusion of the Pew Research Center, not about the Bush Administration but the nation’s news organizations. Americans are losing faith not only in the politicians who govern them but the people who report what they are doing.

In the last century we believed truth would be found, as Supreme Court Justice Learned Hand put it, in “a multitude of tongues.” Now that so many voices can be heard, the result is not “truth” but distrust.

George W. Bush and Rupert Murdoch share much of the blame, with those who rely on Fox News as their main source of information leading the way in damning the media, with 63 percent saying news stories are often inaccurate as opposed to less than half of those who cite CNN or network news as their main source.

At the other end of the political spectrum, the report says, “People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance.”

In the past five years, this bipartisan divide between press and public has grown much worse, and it reflects a larger loss in American life.

In another Pew poll in 2002, 74 percent felt that "As Americans, we can always find a way to solve our problems and get what we want." Five years later, the number is 58 percent. Other polls show erosion of public confidence in the government's ability to respond to terrorist attacks, natural disasters and health crises over that period.

In all the gabble to come over today’s evidence about growing distrust of the mainstream media, it might help to remember that it may also reflect a loss of faith in ourselves.