Yonkel: There is a firewall between the news room and the corporate board room. Not only can the board not influence the news, in most cases they don’t even have any contact with them. The only real exception is with family-owned news outlets (like the NYTimes). Here the board can and does set editorial policy. And, in the case of the NY Times, it’s where the most outrageous liberal bias appears.

In true publicly-owned corporations, the News Departments of the major media outlets are often viewed as loss leaders. They are there to bestow “prestige” on the brand, not to make money for it. Therefore, the fact that they are spewing liberal bias and costing advertisers isn’t as critical as it would be to the ongoing broadcast of a sitcom. Just look at CBS. Their news broadcast is in third place (and has been for years), and is bleeding money daily. Yet, they stay with Katie Couric (and I believe even extended her contract) because having here there serves a higher agenda. It’s not about the money. It’s about the message/ideology.

One related anecdote to demonstrate this. I made a presentation to the Kellogg’s Foundation once with a marketing plan that would help a charity and help the Kellogg’s brand sales. We lost specifically because of this. There was a firewall between the two, and any attempt by corporate to influence the foundation was summarily rejected. Even though Kellogg’s corporate had nothing to do with our plan, we pitched it as their brand would benefit from it. That was all that was needed to kill it.

I see you have another thread going. It is interesting, but I probably wont step out on that minefield at this point.

Back to Powell. Did you read his entire message in full text. I did track it down at:

http://www.clipsandcomment.com/2008/10/19/transcript-colin-powell-on-meet-the-press-endorses-barack-obama-october-19/

What I found uncanny is how much he reflected my own viewpoint.

I have the premium content on Election Projection and tracking Rasmussen and Sabato, and do believe that we are going to see a blue tidal wave of 1980 proportions with really the most significant question remaining whether the Dems reach 60 in the senate.

Obama needed to pick up the three weakest Bush states- Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorodo to win and he has those about locked with about 7 states leaning blue. McCain cannot lose any of Ohio, Florida, Virginia, or NC and granted he has an even shot in those, it is unlikely he can take them all. Pennsylvania was an end run, but that is now 20 points to the blue.

What is interesting, is what this will portend for the Republican party and wonder what you think on that.

I believe there will be a fight for the soul of the GOP that will be quite heated. You have McCain setting an agenda for a more liberal GOP with a break from the strong right ideologues of the Gingrich Era vs the Palin supporters who wish to return to the orthodoxy and then a smaller but fractious group of Ron Paul libertarian global non interventionists.

Interestingly I watched the local congressional debate here in the Raleigh area which is a pretty safe seat for Dem David Price, but the Republican challenger is quite the maverick a la Paul and was arguing with the Dem that we should pull out of Afghanistan. That was unusual.

Phil and I had a back and forth before on the Palin effect at the time in which she was riding high and seemed responsible for the GOP post convention bounce and definitely had energized the traditional wing of the party.
Now most polls show her as a liability and I think the myopia on the GOP side is that just because she is throwing the red meat to the base and satisfies them, it does not necessarily connect with the American public. Scott at Election Projection did an interesting piece, and he is a staunch conservative, in which he posited that Palin may have actually caused the GOP to go south.

It certainly disturbed Colin Powell and if you read his whole piece, he was deeply offended by things like people shouting traitor and Husein at GOP rallies. I was too.

I think McCain is a decent fellow who has shown himself above the type of slander and smear but he has wedded himself to a party that are still in the Atwater/Rove slash and burt methodology which does not seem to reach a new generation that have not bought into the culture wars.

Granted when your back is against the wall, one will try anything, the front runner has the luxury of being more magnanimous, and HRC was certainly willing to hit below the belt when her options were disappearing.

Lastly on the Ayers thing. There was an IC post that laid out every talking point available to link Obama and Ayers and I don’t believe it but would not have the time or interest to refute it, and have found those who are into conspiratorial theories are impossible to argue with, right or left, because they will come up with endless data, but all cherry picked to support their viewpoint. I suggest going to http://www.factcheck.org and read their take on Ayers which supports my general belief that it is largely guilt by association. As you posited in your recent post, Obama is not going to nationalize the auto industry or have radical 60s people in his cabinet. Expect Warren Buffet and Colin Powell to have strong influences. Hopefully the more conservative Dems in congress will be able to check liberal excesses, and Dems don’t usually have the level of discipline that Gingrich could muster.

I think a regrouped GOP which espouses small government, lower expenditures, personal responsibility, but also comes up with credible solutions for the environment and health care and drops the culture war antagonism, would have a chance assuming liberal excesses backfire, but a return to Reaganism I see no more likely than a return to WIlliam Jennings Bryan and the silver standard.

I will grant you a liberal bias in the media, though I see it as more of a case by case instance than a grand conspiracy. The stockholders of NBC, CBS, and Fox’s main agenda is making money, and at that level there is no political agenda.

The oft pointed figure of a large majority of journalists (though much less so of editors and publishers) being liberal is well documented, but where do you go from there. Why don’t conservatives go into journalism? You say because the universities are biased. Why don’t conservatives produce great universities?

The odd thing about the conspiratorial theory is that it runs counter to a belief in the free market. Can conservatives not compete. Certainly, I have seen enough intelligent thought on this blog that there would be the capability of putting together a newspaper with as much in depth content as the Washington Post or the New York Times, but instead the answer seems to be more inflammatory AM radio that is like the kid in the back of the room throwing spitballs, it feeds the ideologues and those that like to hate other people, and gives all the talking points of one particular side, but does not particularly satisfy the rest of the 75% of the population that are not diehard right of center and want a more neutral viewpoint even if it has some liberal bias, and I don’t know if you put Fox in that category.

What the people intuitively understand is one thing. How history is “recorded” is another.

but, bear with me, and feel no compulsion to respond. I am making a point about the media and you seem to dismiss it out of hand — well if it doesn’t disqualify Obama, why bother. Well, why did the media bother abou Palin’s clothes, the trooper story, the travel story, the Couric interview, etc. The public can decide — the media has an obligation to fairly report. When I said it might not be a disqualifier, I was simply saying that each of us must decide — that does not give the media a pass to not cover a story that is far more serious than most of the stories they have done on Cindy McCain, Gov. Palin and McCain.

I don’t disagree with your economic take — but I am not an economist. Perhaps Phil has thoughts on that as well.

I am just amazed that you are going to vote for a guy whose agenda is so decidedly left — and Brookings itself as done an economic analysis of his plan that is fairly critical because of its redistributionist approach.

Anyway, I want to be clear on one thing — one can disagree passionately with folks and still have a dialogue, provided the discourse is professional and not persona. See my series on William Buckley on this site — he was a master that way. So, while I like Obama and would probably greatly enjoy talking to him and debating him, I can’t in good conscience vote for him based on what I know now. But I an assure you that if he is elected, I will be fairer to him than his party was to president bush.

My whole point stated was that the attribution of credit or blame is too partisan and that the economic cycles are too strong that any policy is going to overide those changes.Politicians are proverbally poking an ocean liner with a stick and will not supercede the tides of the economy.

You sarcastically portray the media as giving all the blame to the GOP and then you attribute all the blame to the Dems.
If the media is showing a selective blaming of one side, you are doing the same thing the other way.

Reagan ran on the “are you better off than you were four years ago” and the electorate has always been quick to dump the party that got stuck in bad times, from Hoover on, of both parties. You can’t selectively credit Reagan’s good economies and then ignore Clinton’s. My point is that neither were the cause of those times any more than they were responsible for the good weather.

That is not to say that one can’t fault their policies, but one cannot guess the timing or magnitude of their success or failure and it is very easy to tout one’s side by inventing those figures. The stock market has long been an index of investor confidence and historically it has little been effected by which side held the presidency.

Actually, it’s “Democrat presidents”, not presidents in general.

Reagan transformed the economic landscape that Carter ruined. However, Reagan was an idiot. Any success he had was just pure luck, so Clinton has been given the credit for the “great economy” post-Carter.

Bush 41 had a fairly goood economy, except for a slight decline in the last 6 months that became “the worst economy in 50 years”. When Clinton took office, all our economic troubles magically disappeared. [FYI: That slight decline all but disappeared when the figures were later refined. But by then the election was over].

Clinton’s economy began to collapse in late 2000 before Bush took office. The dot com bubble burst (fed by Clinton administration policies that looked the other way during the build up, all but guaranteeing that the bubble would burst.) Bush 43 got the blame.

Bush 43 dealt with both the Clinton recession and the 9/11 attacks, restoring the economy. Things kept improving until 2006, when the Democrats took control of Congress. The sub-prime/Fannie Mae/Freddie Mack fiasco is the direct result of Democrat policies (both promoting these insane policies, and preventing reform of the system despite the Bush Admionistration’s efforts.)

So who is to blame for the present state of the economy? The Republican party, of course.

There’s reality, and then there’s the media.

I will give you a few points.

First, I think there is always an overattribution of both credit and blame for things that are often random or beyond anybodies control weather the economy or 9/11.

So presidents with good economies like Reagan and Clinton get praise where Carter and Bush II look bad. The reality is that, although there are good and bad economic policies, none of them will overide the normal cyclical economic cycles and most wont have effects until years afterward. So I don’t blame Bush for the economy, and I also think it an oversimplification to blame the Dems for the housing failure.

“The housing failure was a Democratic failure and a Wall Street greed issue — and Bush and McCain fought to contain it, while Obama and his party did nothing. In any case, a lot of the economic”

Personally, I think most of the fault lies with the people in our country who insist on living beyond their means, of which there appears to be a bipartisan effort.

The politicians pander to the general public and like to blame Wall Street, but Wall Street only serves up the exhorbitance and greed of Main Street, they don’t invent it. People living off of refinancing their houses in a bubble and equity loans and credit cards are a reflection of a moral decline in standards, and I was quite pleased that Obama spoke to this, if but briefly, in the last debate. That is a true conservatism and we need more good moral leadership and less pandering to a public that wants to blame everybody but themselves.

The fact that Standard and Poors and Moodys overated trillions in mortgage backed securities as Class A instead of junk bonds was not up to the Dems. I know the case about efforts to push the lenders towards mortgages to the poor, there is some culpability, I’ll give you that, but I think it is just one part of a much larger picture.

It is easy to blame the other party or the fat cats, but we as a society need to stop living on credit or our great grand children may join the third world and have to sneak into China to make a living as waiters at American restaurants. Our current situation with credit card debt is as dangerous as the housing. The idea that we can shop ourselves out of the problem is nuts, that is what got us there. If a stimulus is needed, build more windmills.

Back to Bush. I am a confirmed defecit hawk and would support a balanced budget ammendment. I can abide by a conservative belief in lower expenditures, I am a cheapskate myself, but I can’t believe in just lowering taxes and building up a defecit because it is more politically expedient to advocate lower taxes than reduced expenditures.

In this I can support McCain more than Bush. When economic times are good we should be putting in fodder for leaner times, that is what Clinton did. But during the better days of the last 8 years we ended up increasing the defecit, which now given an imminent recession, it will rise even further to record proportions. Do we really want to be up to our ears in debt to the Chineese and Saudis.

On Iraq, I think that Bush wanted the war early, pushed it, sold it with information that later proved false. In this, I wont claim that he deliberately lied, but I can’t put Pelosi and HRC up as equally culpable, because they bought the spin. I think Bush, Bolton et al were persuing a policy of using the military to effect regime change, and that is a break from most prior American policy, Democrat and Republican, and is bad policy.

We need a clear doctrine for using military force. My belief is that military force should be limited to direct threats to our country (e.g. Afghanistan), the iminent loss of many human lives if intervention isn’t done (Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda) or in defending a weaker power unfairly invaded (Kuwait).

One of the reasons I am supporting the Dems this time is that I have only heard that from them, Biden specifically addressed that.

“BTW, Ayers was a totally legitimate story, whether it disqualified Obama or not is beside the point.”

To me, it is the point. The story was reported, it just doesn’t mean anything to me, any more than the Lefts conspiracy theories about Diebold.

“The nature of his relationship and his views about Ayers philosophy would have been frontpage news for weeks had the issue been on the other side. You are too smart not to know that.”

Thanks on the smarts.

There is some unfairness in the MSM, as on the AM dial. Personally, I don’t feel Ayers should get much play. Obama’s views on Ayers philosophy is relevant, but that never was an issue. Obama does not advocate violent revolution.

I felt that the NYT stories on McCain’s possible lobbyist tryst were biased and bad journalism and perhaps had an agenda. I also saw a lot of bias in CBS 60 minutes, when they lobbed Obama soft pitches and interrogated McCain. I am not oblivious to liberal bias and political correctness and don’t like it any more than conservative bias on the AM-maybe we can agree on that.

I would love to see more conservative commentarry on NPR news instead of listening to Daniel Schorr all the time. Dianne Rehm’s show does a pretty good job of having balanced commentary. BTW, the NYT has also had multiple stories about good things happening in Iraq.

I read the NYTimes and listen to NPR because nobody else provides that level of coverage. If conservatives want a better media, they need to start one, beyond just editorial magazines like National Review and AM harranguers. There are conservative newspapers like the Washington Times or the NY Post, they just are not that good. Wall Street Journal is not bad, but more of a specialty paper.

It also is very simple to blame everything on the MSM. Mugabe does that himself. Reagan won twice and Gingrich prevailed with same media, so methinks there are many other factors at play and the MSM complaint gets overdone.

One thing though that was said at the top of the piece, that struck me, was the implication that Powell was supporting Obama from an emotional point of view and I think there is something there. My own politics are somewhere between McCain and Obama. I thought at the outset that Obama lacked experience and supported McCain for the GOP and Richardson then HRC for the Dems, and then initially McCain for pres.

Having seen these guys go through their political decathalon, I am impressed by the younger man’s chops. The public is aware of his lack of experience but they have seen a strong, thoughtful, unflappable demeanor and he has sold himself more than any media is capable of. And it is nice to have a president who speaks the language well.

George, I am overblogged and my wife is becoming a blogger’s widow so I will give it a rest for at least a few days, but have enjoyed the conversation and thanks for the civility.

In turning so sharply and maliciously on Bush, the party and the so called elite intellectuals on the right handed a gift to the Democratic left, which never turns on its own — witness the rallying around Clinton back when he was disgracing his office. I do agree with you about talk radio at times, but frankly it is not nearly as bad as folks portray. And when you are subjected to CNN, Katie, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, all bashing Palin nonstop, it is nice to have one voice or two out there balancing the bias.

BTW, Ayers was a totally legitimate story, whether it disqualified Obama or not is beside the point. The nature of his relationship and his views about Ayers philosophy would have been frontpage news for weeks had the issue been on the other side. You are too smart not to know that. This man is and remains an avowed enemy of our country and the Democratic party has allowed him to shape education policy and supplied him with millions of dollars. Wright was a hatemonger. It would have been news for weeks had the shoe been on the other foot. Investigations would have been launched to find out if Obama really didn’t hear the sermons, people would have been interviewed, etc. They spent months investigating Bush’s honorable natioanl guard service, for God’s sake, and Palin’s travel, which wasn’t even a violation of anything. And look what they did to Joe the plumber in a week. Yonkel, wake up my friend. The media is a wing of the Democratic left. But what can one expect from a party that is basically a European socialist party — witness the rise in reputation of Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Clinton, Paul Krugman, etc.

The dems have come along way since JFK. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be dialogue, but with all respect Limbaugh is important, but he is not a government official — he is an entertainer who happens to love talking politics. The people attacking Bush and our troops have been the mainstream Democratic leadership. They hated Bush the minute the Supreme Court ended the charade in Florida in 2000 and while I agree Bush could have done some things better, he has actually conducted himself in a way that has been honorable and respectful of his opposition and the office he held. but more on that later. all the best, gs.