The media hates Obama?

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 1:44 PM - 14 Comments

The Pew Research Center released a survey of which U.S. candidates have received the most positive and negative coverage during the primary season so far, with Rick Perry and now Herman Cain getting particularly positive coverage and Newt Gingrich getting a particularly tough time. But the big news from the survey is this bit of information, which has people arguing over what exactly “positive” and “negative” means in this context: Continue…

Mr. Burns and Smithers go to Parliament

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 12:13 PM - 14 Comments

As I write this, I’m still watching the live stream of Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch testifying before the UK Parliament. And so the pie attack happened right in the middle of my writing it. That was weird. The effectiveness of pie throwing as a political act has always escaped me; since it’s inspired by the Three Stooges and other slapstick comedy, it seems to be a way for ordinary idiots to get close to wealthy dowagers (or whatever you call a male dowager) and invade their space. But Three Stooges shorts don’t have much political significance and neither does this.

All the pie thrower succeeded in doing was changing the focus of the conversation from “Rupert and James Murdoch aren’t doing so well” to “Rupert Murdoch is a victim and his wife is cool.” He helped the Murdochs tremendously, while thinking he was hurting them. The pie throwing was sort of an act of narcissism, which will have the opposite effect from what the pie-er probably wants. If it weren’t for him, the cable news chatter today would be about the scandals. Now it’s about pie.

Before the Pie Man became the star of the proceedings, the thing most people seemed to be talking about was that Rupert and James acted a lot like two of News Corp’s most beloved pieces of Intellectual Property, C. Montgomery Burns and Waylon Smithers. Continue…

Rupert Murdoch’s day of reckoning

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 3 Comments

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

The most telling story in Michael Wolff’s biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, didn’t appear in the original 2008, 400-plus-page hardcover. It’s the tale of the media mogul’s reaction to the book, appended as a forward to the paperback version two years later. Eight weeks before the first edition hit the streets, the News Corporation proprietor somehow obtained a copy—“purloined,” writes Wolff, from a rival British newspaper that was bidding on the serialization rights. And as he read the product of the more than 50 hours of candid and profane interviews he had given, Murdoch got upset. Over the course of a single day, he left the author a dozen increasingly agitated voice mails, quibbling with ancient details, and complaining about tone and interpretation. Then he went ominously silent.

For three months after its publication, Wolff’s book received exactly zero mentions in, or on, News Corp.’s globe-spanning network of media properties, which includes the Australian, the U.K.’s Sun, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Then the Murdoch-owned New York Post splashed news of the fiftysomething “bald, trout-lipped” writer’s extramarital affair with a 28-year-old “hot blond” intern all over its gossip pages. For weeks, the Post kept at it, chronicling his crumbling marriage, accusing Wolff of trying to evict his 85-year-old mother-in-law from an apartment he owned, even lampooning him in highly unflattering editorial cartoons. The attacks only ceased when he threatened to post the recordings of his interviews with the paper’s owner on the Internet, in all their unedited glory.

For the author, the painful episode confirmed something he already knew—scandal and bullying are both Murdoch’s trade and passion. The obsession is partly about gathering business intelligence, Wolff writes in his forward: “who is saying what to whom; who might be buying what; who has less money than he says he has.” But the 80-year-old titan also just really delights in the dirty details. “He especially likes to know which liberals are sleeping around (but he will take conservatives, too). It is a prurient interest, but it is also about leverage. He refers to having pictures and reports and files.” At the time, Wolff assumed such claims were part of Murdoch’s trademark hubris, designed to fuel his cultivated image as a villainous billionaire. Now it appears they may have simply been the truth.

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The Palin family fishbowl

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 3 Comments

iStock; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

“You know, she definitely knows,” Bristol Palin said when asked if her mother had made up her mind about running for the highest office in the U.S. “We’ve talked about it before. Some things just need to stay in the family.” The daughter of Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and possible U.S. presidential candidate, said this on Fox News, as part of a countrywide media tour to promote her book, Not Afraid of Life. It seemed appropriate somehow that she would say that only the decision to run for president was private and off-limits. Everything else with the Palin family is open to the public in a way we haven’t seen since English aristocratic families allowed tours of their houses. We’ve seen the Palins on reality shows, and in tabloids fluffy and ferocious alike, and soon they’ll be starring in the upcoming documentary The Undefeated, a film director Stephen K. Bannon created to defend Palin against her enemies. The Palin blitz even involves a case of duelling books: Bristol’s just-published memoir, in which she trashes her child’s father, Levi Johnston, will be followed in September by Johnston’s own book, Deer In the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs. Sarah Palin is famous for her dislike of what she calls the “lamestream media,” meaning every news outlet except Fox News. But when it comes to other types of media, she and her whole family have built up an empire that most political families can’t compete with.

No one knows if this kind of media attention will translate into a presidential campaign, particularly with recent polls showing President Barack Obama beating Palin even in her home state. It might not even matter. Sarah Palin is considered popular enough with ordinary Republican voters that she can still be a formidable presence in the nomination race if she chooses to enter. Still, some of her thunder has recently been stolen by Michele Bachmann, another former beauty contestant with ties to the Christian right. Though the Palin family seems to consider her an upstart (“I think she dresses a lot like my mom,” Bristol told Popeater.com), Bachmann is more popular with journalists, holds a full-time political job, and can recite political talking points more fluently. That loss of the spotlight may have made it harder for the Palins to sell books, the tool a political dynasty uses to promote itself. Jessica Lussenhop of Minneapolis City Pages reported that when Sarah and Bristol showed up in the heart of Bachmann’s native Minnesota to promote Bristol’s book, “one estimate put the number of autograph seekers at about 300 people,” and the autograph signing session ended “at least a half-hour early.”

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Bachmann goes into overdrive

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 13 Comments

Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images

So extreme was the caricature of Michele Bachmann as a kooky wild-eyed right-wing harpy that by the time she turned in a polished performance at her first candidates’ debate in New Hampshire in June, speaking in smooth, fully formed paragraphs and delving into details of national policy, you could almost hear a national gasp.

Without any Palin-esque winks at the cameras or “you-betchas,” the 55-year-old third-term congresswoman and mother of five from Minnesota has emerged as a serious force in the Republican presidential field, surging into second place behind frontrunner Mitt Romney in polls of Republican voters—and in at least one poll, ahead of him.

At a time when former Massachusetts governor Romney is repenting for past moderate positions, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty can’t quite bring himself to attack Romney head-on, and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman entered the race by describing his opposition to Obama as a genteel “difference of opinion on how to help a country we love,” Bachmann, who formally announced her candidacy on Monday, gleefully serves generous helpings of partisan red meat. On health care: “As president of the United States, I will not rest until I repeal Obamacare.” On Obama’s intervention in Libya: “Absolutely wrong.” On financial regulation: “An over-the-top bill that will actually lead to more job loss.” On reducing corporate taxes: “I’m a former federal tax lawyer. I’ve seen the devastation.” On energy efficiency: “President Bachmann will allow you to buy any light bulb you want.”

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Bachmann goes into overdrive

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, July 5, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images

So extreme was the caricature of Michele Bachmann as a kooky wild-eyed right-wing harpy that by the time she turned in a polished performance at her first candidates’ debate in New Hampshire in June, speaking in smooth, fully formed paragraphs and delving into details of national policy, you could almost hear a national gasp.

Without any Palin-esque winks at the cameras or “you-betchas,” the 55-year-old third-term congresswoman and mother of five from Minnesota has emerged as a serious force in the Republican presidential field, surging into second place behind frontrunner Mitt Romney in polls of Republican voters—and in at least one poll, ahead of him.

At a time when former Massachusetts governor Romney is repenting for past moderate positions, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty can’t quite bring himself to attack Romney head-on, and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman entered the race by describing his opposition to Obama as a genteel “difference of opinion on how to help a country we love,” Bachmann, who formally announced her candidacy on Monday, gleefully serves generous helpings of partisan red meat. On health care: “As president of the United States, I will not rest until I repeal Obamacare.” On Obama’s intervention in Libya: “Absolutely wrong.” On financial regulation: “An over-the-top bill that will actually lead to more job loss.” On reducing corporate taxes: “I’m a former federal tax lawyer. I’ve seen the devastation.” On energy efficiency: “President Bachmann will allow you to buy any light bulb you want.”

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Sun News Network's big mouths, small-town look

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 24 Comments

Getty Images; Photo illustration by Taylor Shute

Sun News Network expected to be attacked for its politics—not its professionalism. But the reviews of the conservative-leaning news channel have pointed out that it looks amateurish: “The sets and lighting are Spartan,” wrote Brad Oswald of the Winnipeg Free Press; Globe and Mail critic John Doyle called it “cheap, cheesy, terrible television.” That’s not a charge often levelled at Sun’s U.S. model, Fox News, whose high production values are acknowledged even by people who hate it. If Sun has trouble looking classy, it has nothing to do with the rather modest short skirts and sleeveless dresses; it may be because of the unexciting scenes behind them.

The hyper-patriotic Sun turned to the Toronto-based AKA Creative Group to design the sets. Andrew Kinsella, AKA’s president, feels they created “a style that Canadians have never seen before,” but adds that it would be “a lot more expensive to work with the big-name [design] competitors south of the border.” But on screen, the American competitors sometimes look more spectacular. Ezra Levant’s The Source is modelled on Glenn Beck’s soon-to-be-cancelled Fox show; it has the host do wacky conservative things like destroy a bush to show his contempt for Earth Day. But Beck’s program has an elaborate set and there’s creative use of camera angles and lighting. Levant’s set, dominated by two fairly small TV screens with his name on them, looks much more low-tech. And like many of the Sun shows, the backgrounds are often monolithically blue, which can give news shows a feeling of sameness: U.S. set designer Jim Fenhagen, who designed shows like ABC World News Tonight, hasn’t seen Sun but told Maclean’s that as a general rule, “doing blue sets is pretty old-fashioned now.”

While some Sun programs make good use of space—Kinsella is proud of the main news hub, with a “retractable rear-projection screen as well as flexibility for the host to move freely from one area to another”—others don’t look much more big-budget than the average local newscast. Some of the daytime shows feature the familiar sight of announcers at a desk with a drab-looking newsroom in the background, the kind of thing Fenhagen tried to avoid when he created the newsroom set for ABC: “Usually the main shot is all the people back there and you can’t get rid of them, which I think is a mistake.” Conservative TV host Michael Coren, who has appeared as a guest on Sun, considers the overall look “sharp and modern” but added that “because of the number of linked interviews with guests around the country, there is always going to be a certain limitation to the overall look.” But those limitations may mean the Sun hosts can’t compete with a Fox personality like Megyn Kelly, the network’s aggressively blond daytime star, who yells at guests against a stylish background of glass, metal and flickering screens.

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Glenn Beck to end his show (again)

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 12:56 PM - 16 Comments

Glenn Beck will “transition off” his daily Fox News show later this year. He’ll still be under contract to do specials and things for the network. Somewhat amazingly, the Fox show will end having lasted only a little longer than his CNN Headline News show.

This comes after a long string of rumours in major publications (i.e. stories that are based on leaks from anonymous people behind the scenes) that Fox was trying to find ways to get Beck away from that valuable piece of daily real estate, fearing that he’d become too wild even by comparison with the other hosts. There was also some fear that he might go off the reservation; he was getting some criticism from foreign policy conservatives for his pronouncements about Egypt.

But personally, I don’t think much of the idea that he was a loose cannon or a bad fit at Fox. While I don’t care for Glenn Beck, I don’t see any great difference between him and Sean Hannity; both believe and argue pretty much the same things. And virtually all Beck’s talking points (George Soros, sharia law) are pretty bog-standard on the entire network. It’s just that Hannity or Gretchyn Megson (I can’t always tell Fox’s female hosts apart) seem to take everything they say very seriously, whereas Beck brought some influences of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to Fox — in other words, the shows that made fun of people like him — by doing nutty, often deliberately comedic bits that seemed to raise the question of whether he was serious or not.

I don’t think it was what Beck said that got him into trouble at the network, since everyone on the network says the same things he does. He just said it the wrong way: too hysterically, or too silly, or without the veneer of sophistication affability that Bill Kristol uses. It’s all about Tone and Style, not about Substance.

Mostly, of course, it’s about ratings. Now that the frenzy of 2009-10 is over and the Republicans are in control of one house of Congress in Washington D.C., Beck’s apocalyptic messages have lost some of their spark. This may be what makes Beck less durable than Hannity or, especially, Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh is very good at crafting a message that is effective no matter who is in power: even when the Republicans controlled the entire government, Limbaugh was able to say that the real enemy was liberalism and that liberalism needed to be fought elsewhere (or that the Republicans, when they did something wrong, were secretly liberals). Limbaugh’s tone is meant for the long haul: it’s angry, but not apocalyptic. Beck, on the other hand, attracted a lot of viewers who genuinely believed that Democratic power was a unique, unprecedented and terrifying threat, and that’s the tone he prefers: something really bad is about to happen and everything may collapse at any minute. Once one of the bad things (complete Democratic power in Washington) no longer existed, it was inevitable that some of his viewers would drift away; unlike Limbaugh, his messages at such a high pitch of excitement and fear that they can’t be effective for very long. Yesterday he even admitted on the air (as usual, half in jest) that his formula is getting a little played-out. He’s like the Billy Martin of TV pundits: he starts big but burns out fast.

The rabbis versus fox

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 2:23 PM - 2 Comments

A coalition of 400 U.S. rabbis took out a one-page advertisement in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal to chastise the media mogul for “unacceptable” references to Nazis and the Holocaust made by employees at Murdoch’s other News Corp. outlet, Fox News. “We share a belief that the Holocaust, of course, can and should be discussed appropriately in the media,” read the Jan. 27 open letter. “But that is not what we have seen at Fox News.”

In particular, the offenders worthy of sanctioning were Fox News head Roger Ailes and conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who has compared U.S. Democrats to Nazis, and referred to George Soros as a “Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps” during a series on the liberal billionaire. “It is not appropriate to accuse a 14-year-old Jew hiding with a Christian family in Nazi-occupied Hungary of sending his people to death camps,” the letter stated. “And it is not appropriate to make literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis when characterizing people with whom you disagree.” Ad space for the letter was paid for by the Jewish Funds for Justice, a non-profit advocacy group that has previously received money from Soros.

Oh, Roger Ailes, You Wacky Godwin's Law Breaker

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 5:18 PM - 3 Comments

You may have heard that Fox News creator Roger Ailes said that NPR is run by “Nazis.” That wasn’t a mistaken choice of words or a one-time slip of the tongue. The full quote, based on their decision to fire his friend Juan Williams, was: “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism.”

He semi-apologized for using the term, mostly to continue his friendly relations with the ADL (which has been less than pleased with Fox News lately due to the “international bankers” reporting on George Soros becoming too much for even Abe Foxman to take) but replaced “Nazi” with “nasty, inflexible bigot” and engaged in a strange combination of vicimology and self-congratulation: my friends never have to worry about me sticking up for them‚ even if I’m occasionally politically incorrect I never leave any doubts about my loyalty.” The term “politically incorrect” isn’t always a way of trying to excuse choices of words that are unacceptable by any standard, but it is here: he says something awful, and claims it was “politically incorrect” as a way of making it sound like the real problem is not with him, but with the language police who are trying to keep him down.

What I don’t get is why Ailes has been trying to make himself more of a public figure lately. He is a genius in his own way — as a TV executive. No one can deny he’s created something successful and influential, a network that at once makes money and helps Ailes fight against the “mainstream media” that he blames for destroying his idol Richard Nixon. But he has achieved this success by signing up people who are effective media personalities: talk radio jocks, veteran broadcasters, sportscasters, good-looking women. People who don’t fit the stereotype of conservatives as fat-cat businessmen. Ailes fits the stereotype perfectly, and he doesn’t have the gift of saying outrageous things in a way that allows him to deny he said anything wrong. The “Nazi” thing is something that Ailes’ employees would do in such a way that they could later claim they were joking or that their words were taken out of context. Ailes just isn’t as good at that; that’s why he’s running the network and they’re on it.

Yet you do see him more often lately; he used to be a shadowy figure, and lately he’s been going on This Week or giving long interviews to Howard Kurtz. When he started being increasingly visible, I wondered if he was trying to shore up his position at Fox in anticipation of what might happen if Murdoch ever reduces his role (Murdoch likes Ailes and Fox News; Murdoch’s family does not). Now I wonder if he’s just tired of being the power behind the power, if he wants to be recognized as a personality in his own right. If so, it’s the first mistake he’s made in a while. If he were on Dancing With the Stars, no one would vote for him. He represents the type of personality that he deliberately tried to avoid in staffing his network.

The War For Late Night book, by the way, mentions that Ailes’ opposition was one of the reasons Conan O’Brien didn’t go to Fox after leaving NBC; Ailes, who handles the Fox affiliates, didn’t want their time taken away and given to Conan. That’s defensible, since after seeing what a talk show did to NBC affiliates I can well understand why someone might not want something similar to happen to Fox stations. But it’s not going to do much for Ailes’ personal popularity, assuming he cares about it — and for some reason, it seems like he does.

Stardom and politics

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Rush Limbaugh; Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin; Christine O'Donnell/ Mark Peterson/Redux/ Nicholad Kamm/AFP/Getty Images/ Jessica Kourkounis/The New York Times

Politics and entertainment have always been close cousins—both pursuits require a measure of charisma and a talent for self-promotion. Ronald Reagan was an actor before he was a president. So was Arnold Schwarzenegger before he was “the governator.” Hollywood stars have long made appearances on Capitol Hill—where Angelina Jolie has testified about the plight of refugees and where in 2002 the House of Representatives education appropriations subcommittee took testimony on funding for school music programs from the Muppet Elmo. But this political season has seen the rise of a new hybrid of celebrity politics that blurs the lines between politician and entertainer, and the line between hustling for votes and hustling for dollars.

Exhibit A is Sarah Palin, who, after rising to celebrity on a failed vice-presidential bid, resigned her job as governor of Alaska to become a full-time celebrity. She looks and sounds like a politician, and raises money (her political action committee, Sarah PAC, raised $1.2 million in the last quarter). But since leaving the $125,000 (all figures in U.S. dollars) per year governor’s office, Palin is making a bigger personal fortune—an estimated $12 million—selling books, appearing as a commentator on Fox News, hosting her own reality television show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, and giving speeches for up to $100,000 a pop.

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The secret script for ‘Fox News North’

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 3:41 PM - 73 Comments

iStock/ Illustration by Taylor Shute

Sun TV News—which instantly acquired the nickname Fox News North—says it will begin broadcasting at the crack of dawn on Jan. 1. A few hours later, it is expected to name Stephen Harper as its Man of the Year for 2011.

Run by the former chief spokesman for the Prime Minister, the “populist” news channel promises to offer a right-wing perspective, combative personalities and a catchy, non-partisan slogan like “We report, you decide” or “Michael Ignatieff: Just visiting.”

Will Fox North turn a profit? It’s got a good shot, especially when you consider that the network’s flagship talk shows will likely recycle the exact same script night after night.
Sun TV News: Talk Show Script

Graphics. Martial music. Fade in on the Sun TV News logo: an angry beaver holding a flag and brandishing a shotgun.

Introduction of program host. Description by host of new political development. Expression of outrage at said development. Furrowing of brow ensues. ABRUPT INCREASE IN VOLUME.
Investigation of recent remarks made by opposition politician. Question raised as to intellectual capacity of said politician. Inquiry made as to what planet said politician is living on. Strong implication put forth that said planet is not Earth.

Heroism of military troops confirmed. Confusion registered as to why opposition politicians openly rooting for our troops to be butchered. Sad day for Canada declared.

Softening of host’s demeanour commences. Deep affection for Canada stated. “Average Canadians” revered. Blanket assertion made as to what “average Canadians” truly value and desire. Striking similarity achieved between said desires and those of host. ABRUPT INCREASE IN JINGOISM.

John Baird’s charisma alleged.

Introduction of first guest. Establishment of guest’s credentials as a) a member of the Fraser Institute, b) a past member of the Fraser Institute, or c) a person named “Fraser” (after the Fraser Institute).

Assertion made by host as to the failure of liberals and lefties to get “it.” Enthusiastic agreement by guest as to the lack of “it” being in any way gotten. Synchronized shaking of heads in dismay.
Starbucks assailed.

Commercials. Claim advanced as to convenience and comfort of adjustable beds. Avowals made regarding merits of reverse mortgages, cholesterol drugs and bran.
Return of host. Assertion put forth as to the grave nature of climate-change crisis. Prankish nature of assertion revealed by exaggerated wink of eye. Laughter directed by host toward own mastery of mirth.

Hippies derided.

Creation of straw man. Refuting of straw man’s flawed perspective. Triumph over straw man dwelled upon.

Need for relief from day’s solemnity claimed. Video shown of mouse riding atop a duck, which in turn is riding atop a kitten. Hilarity alleged. Reference made to video as documentation of NDP caucus meeting.

Introduction of second guest. Warning to audience that second guest holds Alternative Point of View.

Solicitation of said point of view. Commencement of eye-rolling. Aspersion cast upon Alternative Point of View. “Go smoke another doobie” facial and hand gesture executed.

Patriotism of guest called into question. Absence of Canadian flag on lapel remarked upon. ABRUPT INCREASE IN CONSERVATIVE TALKING POINTS.

Elitists assailed.

Voice of host lowered. Dark conspiracy alleged. Dubious motives suggested. Host’s own blog referenced as being uncannily representative of public opinion.

Spectre of coalition raised. Grim picture of Canada under Liberal-NDP rule painted. Return to barter system predicted. National butter knife registry deemed likely.

Way of life of “average Canadian” defended by host. Canadian children revered. Several national landmarks cited. Moisture fills eyes at mention of love of country. Spontaneous recitation of lyrics of national anthem. (English only.) Quivering of chin. Immigrant hugged.

Time on clock noticed. Papers collected and shuffled. Own performance as host praised. Hugged immigrant instructed to go warm up car. ABRUPT 10-PART KEN BURNS RETROSPECTIVE ABOUT THE LIBERAL SPONSORSHIP PROGRAM.

Speaking of hyperventilating

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 8:46 AM - 219 Comments

Nicholas Roberts/The New York Times

Fox News? Oh, c’mon, everyone knows it’s a “minaret for America First prejudice” and “hyperventilated extremism” “screeching to the converted” with “the none-too-bright persona of the schoolyard bully.”

So says Christopher Dornan, director of something called the Arthur Kroeger College of Public Affairs at Carleton University, writing in the Toronto Star.

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How do you feel about Quebecor’s plan to launch a conservative news network in Canada?

By macleans.ca - Monday, June 14, 2010 at 5:59 PM - 94 Comments

Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 23, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 1 Comment

Those guys in green
It was Denis Lemieux, the crazed goalie in the old-school hockey movie Slap Shot, who described the penalty box experience best: “Two minutes by yourself. You feel shame, you know. And then you go free.” In Vancouver’s GM Place, the cost of an infraction against the Canucks also includes the unwanted antic companionship of Sully and Force, two spandex-clad Green Men. The two anonymous local college students dance, play-fight and otherwise annoy the opposition from their seats behind the penalty box. “You’ve got to get in their heads,” says Sully. Their antics aren’t sanctioned by the team, the greenies stress. Their tickets are donated by a local roofing company.

Olympic outtakes
John Furlong, CEO of the Vancouver Olympic organizing committee, eased toward unemployment Friday by offering a sold-out crowd at the local board of trade an inside look at the Games. He told of a panicked phone call from David Atkins, the Australian producer of the opening ceremonies. Rick Hansen was to climb a steep ramp in his wheelchair to deliver the torch to those lighting the cauldron. Atkins got in a chair for a trial run and failed miserably. “I’m incredibly fit,” he said. “Rick Hansen will never get up that ramp.” Furlong replied: “I’m not phoning Rick Hansen to say he can’t do anything.” Hansen went to B.C. Place at 2 a.m. for a secret trial run. “Up he went the first go,” Furlong says of the man who rolled 40,000 km around the world for spinal cord research. Expect that anecdote to make the book Furlong wants to write before he starts job hunting in earnest.

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This Week: Good news/Bad news

By macleans.ca - Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

A week in the life of simon cowell
The upcoming season of American Idol (the reality hit’s ninth) will be the last for snarky British judge Simon Cowell. But don’t worry, he’s not going far. Cowell’s moving on to produce an American version of his own hit British competition show, The X Factor, which is pretty much the same thing as Idol, to be aired in the U.S. on Fox, which—you guessed it—is the same network that carries Idol. And guess who he may be bringing along with him? Former Idol judge Paula Abdul.

Hope in Afghanistan
Canadian Forces in Afghanistan had a bad year in 2009—32 of our soldiers died and many more were injured. A Canadian journalist, Michelle Lang, also lost her life. But there is hope that with a troop surge and new commitment on the part of NATO troops to live and work among ordinary Afghans, 2010 could bring better news. Plus, a new poll suggests that Afghans are more supportive of NATO’s mission there and less supportive of the Taliban. This is an important step in the fight to rid Afghanistan of extremists: unless Afghans themselves are on our side, all the peacekeeping and anti-terror missions in the world will not bring peace and democracy to the country. NATO relies heavily on Afghans—for goodwill and information regarding terrorists. With them on our side, the fight against the Taliban could take a turn for the better.

The war on salt
New York is at the forefront of the war on unhealthy foods. The city famously banned trans fats and forced restaurateurs to post calorie counts on their menus, a move that has been largely successful. Now the Big Apple is planning to stick it to another food foe: salt. It has set a goal of reducing the amount of salt in packaged and restaurant food by 25 per cent over the next five years. The city may have more difficulty convincing citizens to go easy on the sodium—while high levels of salt intake can cause strokes and cardiovascular problems, consumers have traditionally been wary of low-sodium products, fearing that they won’t taste as good. New Yorkers may soon be carrying salt shakers in their pockets.

Beware Kim Jong-Il
North Korea has said it is open to new talks about nuclear disarmament, in exchange for a peace treaty with the U.S. and an end to crippling sanctions. While we are wary of any platitudes that come out of Kim Jong-Il’s mouth, we are still encouraged that peace with North Korea may indeed be a possibility. If ending the awful human rights crisis in the Hermit Kingdom means dealing with a two-faced despot, we’d say it’s worthwhile. As long as we remain wary of Kim and his cohorts.

Medal domination
Our athletes are winning medals left, right and centre in the run-up to the Olympics. Snowboarder Jasey Jay Anderson has won his last two races; Pierre Lueders won two bobsled events last week, and our long-track speed skaters are dominating their sport. Combine that with the technological advantages (profiled last week in Maclean’s) developed for our athletes, and it looks like we may very well own the podium in Vancouver.

The return of Palin
She’s baaack! Sarah Palin has signed on as a regular contributor to Fox News, where she will also host occasional series. We don’t expect “her rogue-ness” to contribute anything worthwhile about serious news topics and politics—she’s more likely to offer shrill, empty jabs at the left-wing mainstream media, mixed with cringe-inducing memories of aw-shucks Alaska. A new book about the 2008 presidential campaign claims that John McCain’s advisers warned of Palin, “She doesn’t know anything.” That sounds just about right.

Ironic academics
On Monday, a group of over 100 Canadian university professors sent a letter to newspapers voicing their discontent with Stephen Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament. They accused the Prime Minister of violating “the trust of the Canadian people [and] thus acting anti-democratically.” Recent polls suggest many Canadians support that statement, but we find the professors’ stance more than a little ironic, given that Ontario community college teachers are currently threatening to strike. That would be another blow to Ontario’s post-secondary students, who have endured countless walkouts and strikes by faculty and teaching assistants in recent years. Academics in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Another wall?
Israel is planning to build another separation barrier—this time on its border with Egypt. Unlike its other security fence in the West Bank, which has successfully kept out terrorists, the Egyptian wall will mainly be used to keep illegal migrant workers from entering the country—much like the barrier Saudi Arabia built along parts of its border with Yemen. Egypt has said it has no problem with the barrier—as long as it is built on Israeli land—but we wouldn’t be surprised if the wall produced a sour relationship between Israel and one of its stronger regional allies. More walls don’t make for better neighbours.

Junk snail mail
More woes for those Canadians who still rely on the post office to send and receive mail. Canada Post has upped the price of domestic stamps to 57 cents, a rise of three cents (the largest hike in the Crown corporation’s history). As if that weren’t bad enough for post office users, the infamous “419” online scam—wherein a wealthy African attempts to access bank accounts by promising a massive payout—has made its way to snail mail. There is one alternative that we can think of—it’s cheaper, faster, and you don’t need to leave your couch to send or receive. You’ll still have to deal with 419 junk mail, though.

Palin In Nixonland

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, January 11, 2010 at 1:44 PM - 21 Comments

Who saw this one coming:

Former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has signed on as a contributor to the Fox News Channel.

The network confirmed that Ms. Palin will appear on the network’s programming on a regular basis as part of a multi-year deal. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Ms. Palin will not have her own regular program, one person familiar with the deal said, though she will host an occasional series that will run on the network from time to time.

Though the article says the deal will “give her room for other pursuits,” this decision might make it harder for her to run for President in 2012 — unless, of course, the thinking is that her rapport with Fox News viewers might help her in the primaries.

It’s a perfect signing for Fox, though: they get the person who’s most popular with their core viewership, and someone whose every pronouncement is treated as big news. David Wiegel had a piece on how her Facebook posts are covered: “she is allowed to shape the public debate without actually engaging in it.” Since her semi-regular show will allow her to exist in a sealed-off world just like her Facebook page, it’s a perfect format: she’ll say something, it will be covered endlessly, and the debate will revolve around “did you hear what Sarah Palin said on Fox News?”

She has something else that makes her a perfect fit with Fox: her famous tendency to portray herself as beseiged by “elites,” who hate her for who and what she is. It’s something that has been taken up by her fans, most recently in this article that uses all kinds of dubious Jewish stereotypes to explain “Why Jews Hate Palin.” (In that article you will learn that Jewish women only admire “frumpy” women. Wha’?) This is all very much in the Richard Nixon tradition that Fox has perfected.

The Times had an article on Fox News creator Roger Ailes this weekend, a piece known mostly for its revelation that Rupert Murdoch was considering endorsing Obama (Ailes talked him out of it, and he was probably right from a business standpoint: it would have killed the Fox political brand). But the most important take-away from the piece, and any piece on Ailes, is that his whole worldview has been shaped by days working for Nixon.

Joe McGinniss, who wrote about Mr. Ailes in his 1969 book, “The Selling of the President 1968,” keeps in touch with him. “Success never made that chip on his shoulder go away,” Mr. McGinniss said. “He holds onto what he envisions to be the values of the heartland and is suspicious of people on either coast.”

The odd thing about Nixon is that he is the clear ancestor of the modern conservative movement, even though he wasn’t particularly conservative in the policy sense. His health care plan, which the Democrats foolishly rejected, was way to the left of Obama’s, and indeed Nixon was to the left of every subsequent U.S. President on domestic policy. He didn’t really seem to care much about policy at all. What was important was that chip on his shoulder, his tendency to rail — publicly and privately — against liberal elites. There was some truth in Nixon’s belief that elites looked down on him (no President until Clinton received such scornful coverage from the Beltway insiders, the “village” as they’re called). But he took the belief to extremes, and his followers believed that he had been driven from office for no better reason than spite.

Ailes has taken that idea and turned it into a network. Fox News does support the two post-Nixon pillars of the conservative movement: opposition to taxes and — as Brit Hume just demonstrated — a mixture of Christianity with conservative politics. But a lot of its programming is not about policy at all. It’s about a suspicion of elites and a feeling that the host and his audience are victims of those elites. (Again, Brit Hume is the latest poster boy here: he instantly claimed that the criticism of his Tiger Woods comments was an example of anti-Christian bigotry. The point is that the host/commentator is always the victim.) Sure, it can be silly to watch millionaires in suits portraying themselves as victims of the very elites they schmooze with after the show. But it works. It’s connected, in a way, to the commentators like Chris Matthews and the late Tim Russert, wealthy elites who pretend that they’re still working-class Joes. They’re not, but it suits them to pretend they are.

Tigerology Institute, comparative religion department

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 11:20 PM - 19 Comments

A Beltway colleague attempts a contrarian defence of Fox News panelist Brit Hume, who aroused widespread wrath a week ago by suggesting that troubled Tiger Woods should abandon Buddhism because it doesn’t offer “the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith.” The Hume imbroglio is funny when viewed from the standpoint of the convinced atheist: if you regard the major religions as a buffet of indistinguishably nonsensical self-help regimens, Hume’s “proselytizing” appears no more dangerous than recommending some particular book about sex addiction or suggesting that Tiger go on a program of Graham crackers and cold showers. Hume was asked what he thinks Woods ought to do, and gave his best answer. What is objectionable about this?

We do have a strong social taboo, double-reinforced on television and radio broadcasts, against defaming particular religions. But as Carl Cannon points out, it’s not clear that Hume said anything untruthful or unfair about Buddhism. Every great religion has particular practical strengths, and “forgiveness and redemption” are rightly recognized as very strong suits of Christianity. Buddhism offers no escape from the accounting of accumulated karma: “redemption” is foreign to it. In Buddhism, you can’t declare bankruptcy. You work off your debt, in this life or the next.

If Tiger were choosing a new faith to believe in sincerely starting today, and Christianity and Buddhism were the available choices, he would be crazy to choose the latter and thus take a thousand pounds of karma onto his shoulders at the outset of his spiritual trek. He should obviously take the Get Out of Jail Free card. This is not really how anybody chooses a religion, or it is not supposed to be. We are not supposed to hold beliefs because they are pleasant or convenient or conducive to our happiness: we are supposed to believe that which is true about the world. But if you’ve got a belief to sell to others, as Brit Hume does, it is easier to take the low road. Get ‘em with the “forgiveness” pitch when they’re down! Tell them they can be “born again”! They can talk themselves into the theology and the cosmology and the tall tales later! Perhaps it’s the case that when Christians tell stories about the Devil trying to trick vulnerable humans into signing away their souls, they are projecting their own behaviour onto a fictitious adversary.

The real irony is that if we were choosing a faith for Tiger as a practical guide to his future behaviour, instead of a source of comfort, we might see distinct advantages in Buddhism. The ethical doctrine of the Buddha does not depend on what pleases some divine being; it is founded on the idea that suffering is caused by desire. Does it seem likely that Tiger would argue with that one?

The Fox and Cheney sideshows

By John Parisella - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 7:01 PM - 102 Comments

The Obama White House recently decided that Fox News is biased and that it should be called out for its distortions and mistruths. White House strategists have apparently concluded that the Beck-Hannity-O’Reilly crowd is getting traction. Even though recent polls put Obama’s approval ratings over the 50% mark—the latest CNN poll put his popularity at 55%—the White House is growing increasingly concerned about the impact his opponents will have on major upcoming legislative proposals like health care, cap-and-trade, and the consumer protection agency. As a result, Obama will still do interviews on Fox, but his staff has clearly labeled the network media non grata.

Meanwhile, former vice-president Dick Cheney is continuing his crusade against Obama’s foreign policy, going so far as to label the president a “ditherer.” Cheney’s statements get wide media coverage, if only because they stand in such contrast with the reserve shown by former President George W. Bush. Again, the White House has reacted and taken to reminding voters about Cheney’s role in the last administration. Given Cheney left with a popularity index of less than 25%, the Obama people have taken to portraying him as the face of the Republican party. Since the inauguration, Obama strategists have been blessed to have Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and, once again, Dick Cheney as embodiments of the Republican party. Going after them seems to be working, too, as voter identification with the party is at 20%, its lowest point in 26 years. So far, their attacks have paid off. But is it the best approach in the long run?

Continue…

Obama, Fox News, and You

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 3:56 PM - 16 Comments

Just some quick points about the Obama Administration’s strategy of bashing Fox News:

1. The easy rejoinder to the claim that Fox News is a “wing of the Republican party” (for which Anita Dunn, who made the statement, is Fox News’s target for tonight) is that, well, the rest of the media is liberal. Except it isn’t. Even MSNBC, which is often considered the liberal Fox News, is only considered liberal because it has the only openly partisan liberal hosts on cable news, along with conservatives like Joe Scarborough, and Chris Matthews, who is just a crazy person prone to man-crushes. (He has a man-crush on Obama, but he also had one on Bush.) The conservative argument about liberal media bias is that it’s unconscious, that because media personalities skew liberal/Democratic, they have certain unexamined liberal assumptions that they incorporate into their work as if they’re “objective.” Liberals actually agree with conservatives that TV media personalities incorporate unconscious biases into their work, but liberals see these as the biases of elites, which are not necessarily liberal at all (particularly on issues like the Iraq war). But whichever way you look at it, it’s different from what Fox News does. Fox News is a combination of partisan outlet and entertainment, and its genius is the way it has made partisanship into entertainment — for example, bringing on the most pathetic, beaten-down liberals imaginable so that the audience can enjoy watching them lose the argument. (That was the whole point of teaming freakish-looking Colmes with handsome, all-American Hannity.) Other networks, terrified of being called liberal and constantly bending over backward to prove they aren’t liberal (MSNBC famously canceled Phil Donahue’s show, despite decent ratings by their standards at the time, to prove they weren’t liberal), simply aren’t in the same league either as partisanship or as entertainment.

2. Jacob Weisberg’s article on why Fox News is “Un-American” is pretty hellaciously silly. Which is too bad, because he’s raising a point that probably should be discussed seriously: given that Fox News is slanting the news to favour a particular political party, should journalists treat it as if it’s the same exact thing as a non-partisan outlet? But the idea that news has “a century-old tradition of independence” that is being destroyed by that nasty foreigner Rupert Murdoch is, as many people have noted, kind of weird. Even if you assume that openly partisan news ended after the collapse of the Hearst empire, that would still would be less than a century ago, and of course the tradition of partisan news persisted for much longer than that, particularly at the level of local newspapers. Apart from that, his assumption that the American approach to news is better than anybody else’s is, really, pure jingoism, on the level of saying that the U.S. has the “best health care system in the world.” It’s telling that his biggest worry is the presence of “a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news,” i.e. shows with opinions in them. This is silly. Fox’s opinion shows are just talk radio on TV. The more problematic thing about the network is that its “objective” news reporting, which it defends to the death, tends to be increasingly indistinguishable from the opinion shows in terms of what issues it considers important. If Fox News dropped the U.S.-style pretense of objectivity, it would be a lot less problematic, and might help pave the way for a genuine liberal alternative. Bashing Fox for pretending it isn’t conservative makes sense; bashing Fox for being conservative doesn’t.

3. As to why the Obama administration is picking this fight, I think Fox News pundits are correct in comparing this to Nixon and Agnew’s media strategy. It’s partly about playing to the base (since liberals hate the media even more than conservatives nowadays). But mostly, it’s about pushing the media in a certain direction. Nixon picked up the “liberal media” strategy, at a time when these complaints were closer to the truth than they are now, as a way of guilt-tripping the media into examining their assumptions. There were many editorials and articles written asking whether the media was out of touch with what would now be called “Real America,” the silent majority that elected Nixon. Reporters and pundits began trying to make sure they didn’t descend into knee-jerk liberalism. Today, the Obama team is trying something similar. His aides are telling CNN and other networks that they shouldn’t be like Fox News. This won’t and shouldn’t hurt Fox’s popularity any, but it could help jolt CNN et al into wondering if they’re out of touch with the majority that elected Obama, and re-check for conservative assumptions (anti-tax protests are the most important things ever) in their work. Call it the Nixon strategy in reverse, which makes sense after 40 years of the U.S. media being spooked out by the original Nixon strategy.

Target: Chicago

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 8:40 AM - 5 Comments

Move over, San Francisco, there’s a new town for conservatives to hate: Chicago. President Obama’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get the 2016 Olympics for his hometown has caused an explosion of anti-Chicago commentary from U.S. conservatives, while John Boehner, the leader of the Republicans in Congress, played to his base by saying that Obama seemed to be forgetting that “he’s the President of the United States, not the mayor of Chicago.” Conservatives still find time to attack Hollywood for defending Roman Polanski, or New York for just being New York, but their heart isn’t in it these days. The new enemy is Chicago, which, as Fox News’s Sean Hannity put it, may not be “a city where we want the Olympics taking place.”

These pundits weren’t just arguing that, as Michelle Malkin said on Fox News, Obama’s quest for the Olympics was “all about paying back” his Chicago “cronies.” They argued that the city itself is the violent epitome of liberalism gone wrong. A typical headline on Matt Drudge’s popular conservative website read “CHICAGOLAND: Another boy critically beaten: ‘Blood all over street.’ ” Malkin posted a video of a gang war among mostly African-American teenagers in Chicago, and warned that “Community organizing has not stopped Chicago’s teen violence epidemic. The Olympics will not solve this long-festering problem, either.” The message is that Democratic liberal politics have turned Chicago into hell on earth. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Fred Siegel summed up the current view of Chicago when he described it as a “mix of black-nationalist, gentry-liberal, machine- and mob-connected politics.” Continue…

Am I The Only One That Gets It?

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 11:56 PM - 13 Comments

You may have seen this Kids In the Hall clip making the rounds recently, because Dave Foley, sitting in a studio in Canada in the ’90s, bears an eerie resemblance to a number of television pundits who existed only in embryonic (or radio) form at the time. He even ends the sketch by emphasizing the word “FOX!” But what it really shows is not that the Kids anticipated the future, but that they were satirizing the state of TV punditry at the time. Maybe things haven’t changed so much after all.

I get the feeling that part of the Kids’ inspiration for that sketch was this Monty Python bit, but the Kids’ version is better; with the obvious exception of Gilliam (who didn’t perform that much), the Pythons were always at their weakest when playing Americans. (Whenever any of them did an American accent, their regular style sort of fell away and they wound up doing the corniest, most obvious routines about war-mongering generals and film producers with lots of yes-men, the kind of sketches you’d see on any U.S. variety show.)

'Common Sense' by Glenn Beck

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 4:54 PM - 16 Comments

Glenn Beck’s new book Common Sense is literally two books for the price of one. Sure, it’s a diatribe of Beck’s conservative rants, but almost half of the short volume is given over to a re-print of Thomas Paine’s famous Revolutionary pamphlet of the same name. This is meant to bolster Beck’s argument that his crusade against Obama Socialism is just like the American Revolution; he’s already made the argument on his Fox News show, The Glenn Beck Program, by having a guy dressed up as Paine (apparently Ben Franklin impersonators cost too much) as a recurring character. And, as an added benefits, it pads a very short book out with material that you can find for free on the Internet.

Most of the book is based on the standard theme of any Fox News show, not just Beck’s. Anything he doesn’t like is “tyranny.” Anything he likes is an example of “freedom.” Among the threats to freedom are government debt, Social Security (“a legal Ponzi scheme”), medicare, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To restore freedom, he demands term limits for all politicians, and a recognition that “Capitalism isn’t only about money, it’s about freedom.” And the book is full of his trademark nostalgia for the day after September 11, 2001, when for one brief shining moment everybody was terrified and jingoistic: “we began to remember our heritage and the power of sacrifice.”

The idea of the book, and it’s one that is clearly shared by many people, is that government services interfere with freedom to a greater extent than anything else in the world. (You will not, for example, find Beck considering the notion that universal health care promotes freedom by increasing mobility and personal security.) And all attempts to provide services through government are anti-freedom and slightly scary: “The environment is just a vehicle toward the Progressive ideal of total government rule.”

The blogger “Digby” recently summed up the message being delivered to Fox News viewers: “the tangible, real life benefits they receive for their tax dollars in the form of social security and food safety and roads and schools and health care are called ‘entitlements’ or ‘government waste’ and they believe that their tax dollars go into a black hole of special interests in ‘the fleecing of America.’ ” Add in a dash of religiosity, in the form of Beck’s lament that we now “have plenty of room for everything—except God,” and it’s a book whose vision of an ideal society is a Megachurch.

Still, the book is less over-the-top and hysterical than you would expect if you’ve watched Beck’s show. Instead he tries to appeal to history to give weight to his argument; that’s part of the point of linking his text to Tom Paine’s. Over and over again, Beck invokes history as a way of backing up whatever he’s saying, or drawing a straight line from the bad things in the past to the—we’re led to assume—equally bad things in the present. He reminds us that “in 1913 the income tax was applied only to the wealthiest 1 percent,” and uses this as proof that tax increases on the rich will surely be applied to his non-rich readers as well. The public school system is comparable to Robespierre and Hitler, who “wanted all children to be nurtured and taught by the state.” He even draws an overwrought parallel between those who are inconvenienced by gun-control laws and “the victims of Presidential Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible relocation of 150,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes to internment camps.”

So after informing us that every tyrannical act in the history of the world is exactly the same as gun control, health-care programs and deficit spending, Beck doesn’t even attempt to explain why British colonialism and American democracy are exactly the same. They just are. We can read Paine’s famous pamphlet in the right/Beck frame of mind: as a warning against carbon offsets, “class warfare,” and the martyrdom of Joe the Plumber.

In fairness, Fox has way cooler sound effects

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 2:13 AM - 14 Comments

The Prime Minister talks to Neil Cavuto about what to do when your house is on fire and how best to ensure that increased border security does not limit the ability of little league baseball teams to pass freely between our two great nations.