The Five Hosts Battle Over ‘Media Bias’ in Shutdown Coverage: ‘Are You Kidding Me?’

Here is an article from Matt Wilstein of Mediaite.com outlining the opinions of the hosts of FoxNews program "The Five" on media bias in the government shutdown:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/the-five-hosts-battle-over-%E2%80%98media-bias%E2%80%99-in-shutdown-coverage-are-you-kidding-me/

On day one of the government shutdown, Fox News’ The Five examined any media bias that may exist in the initial coverage, with a focus on anti-Republican, pro-Obamacare messages coming from such outlets as ABC and CBS News.
Eric Bolling cited ABC’s John Parkinson’s blog post about the “all white male” House Republican caucus and Face The Nation host Bob Schieffer’s claim that most Americans favor Obamacare as examples where the press is unfairly siding with the Democrats.
Greg Gutfeld responded by saying he did some “calculations” and “figured out the only way to balance the favorable Obamacare coverage of the last five years is for me to repeat that Obamacare sucks until 3142 AD.”
And Dana Perino summed up the mainstream media’s take on Obamacare by saying that “most of these people are employees so they have health insurance, and they think that Obamacare was a good idea and that Republicans are being ridiculous.”
For his part, Bob Beckel fought back against the notion that the media is “in the tank” for Obamacare, saying many outlets have been highly critical of the law, especially in recent weeks leading up to the October 1st launch date. Andrea Tantaros singled out that MSNBC host who had trouble signing up for the exchange on air as an unexpected instance of “fairness” from that network, but said she does see bias elsewhere.
“I think they can cover up the headlines as much as they want to or choose not to report them or fudge whatever polls they want,” Tantaros said. “But, again, I think the American public is so savvy when it comes to health care even if they never cover Obamacare again, I think people can see their premiums going up.”
“Are you kidding me?” Beckel shot back in seeming disbelief that Americans have any idea what is happening when it comes to health care in this country.
And, for the record, there was no mention of the FoxNews.com website, where the term “government slimdown” has replaced “government shutdown” across the homepage.

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Legalized pot would mean more addiction

Here is an article from Kevin Sabet, director of Project SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana) and a former White House drug policy adviser, from CNN.com that states legalizing marijuana would not solve the problem but instead would lead to more use of the drug:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/02/opinion/sabet-war-on-drugs/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7

"The war on drugs has failed" is a mantra often heard in policy and media circles these days. But not only is the phrase outdated (the 1980s called -- they want their slogan back), it is far too simplistic to describe both current drug policy and its outcomes.

The latest incarnation of this ill-advised saying can be found in a report arguing that since cannabis and heroin prices have fallen while their purity has increased, efforts to curb drug use and its supply are doomed to failure. This leads some to highlight the possibility of alternatives in the form of "regulation" (e.g., legalization) of drugs.

But a closer look at the data -- and the implications for a policy change to legalization -- should give us pause if we care about the dire consequences drug addiction has on society.

Globally, drug use has been stable over the past decade, though it is difficult to paint such a broad brush across countries and substances. But in the U.S. alone, there has been a 40% drop in cocaine use since 2006 and a 68% decrease in workplace positive cocaine tests. Overall in the U.S., all drug use has fallen by about 30% since 1979.

There are likely numerous reasons for this drop, but we can't ignore the fact that the world's top supplier of the drug -- Colombia -- has greatly improved its security situation over the same period.

With help from the United States, Colombia has managed to reduce the amount of land dedicated to coca growing by nearly two-thirds from 2000 to 2010.

Potential production of cocaine has also fallen more than 60%, though in places without such security enhancements -- namely Bolivia and Peru -- cocaine production has picked up. Still, this shows that progress is not only possible, it is happening.

As for the opiates and cannabis, trends vary widely in different regions around the world. While critics are right to say that prices have fallen while potency has risen generally, globally the picture is much more mixed (the global cultivation of poppy has actually fallen since 1997 worldwide).

In policy analysis, the key question that must follow any sentence that says "X policy is good/bad" is: "Compared to what?"

Some have offered legalization as a possible alternative. But we know from our experience with currently legal drugs -- prescription drugs (which are now the leading cause of accidental deaths in the U.S.), alcohol and tobacco -- that legality means commercialization, normalization and wider access and availability that lead to more use and addiction.

Legalization in the United States is likely to accompany a bombardment of promotion, similar to our other three classes of legal drugs. These industries will stop at nothing to increase addiction since their bottom line relies on it. In fact, we know that 80% of the profit from addictive industries comes from the 20% of users who consume most of the volume of the substance.

According to internal documents that the government forced Big Tobacco to release during its historic court settlement, those companies are ready to pounce on the golden opportunity of drug legalization.

It is no wonder that the parent company of Phillip Morris, Altria, recently bought the domain names "AltriaCannabis.com" and "AltriaMarijuana.com." If this sounds frightening, it should be.

Big Tobacco tried for decades to conceal the harms of their drug, and millions of lives were lost as a result. We are naive to think that this wouldn't happen with any other drug that is legalized.

Where does that leave us? That legalization is not a solution does not mean we have to be content with the status quo. Proven interventions such as community-based drug prevention efforts, drug treatment courts, offender re-entry programs and probation reform should be more robustly implemented and taken to scale. It is shameful that the richest country in the world can't figure out a way to make drug treatment available to all who need it, and we must stop relying on incarceration to deal with the drug problem.

Interestingly, though, according to criminologist Mark Kleiman, if all drug prisoners were released tomorrow, we would still have four times the number of people in prison than our historical incarceration rate instead of five. That tells me that the root causes of drug use, trafficking and crime, must be seriously tackled.

On the other hand, legalization -- especially in ad-obsessed America -- would not only sweep the causes of drug use under the rug, it would open the floodgates to more addiction, suffering and costs than we could ever bargain for.

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On FoxNews.com, It’s a ‘Government Slimdown’

Here is an article from Matt Wilstein of Mediaite.com outlining how FoxNews has covered the government shutdown, notably referring to the fact that FoxNews.com refers to the shutdown as a "slimdown:"

http://www.mediaite.com/online/on-foxnews-com-its-a-government-slimdown/

While the rest of the media world is reporting the effects of today’s “government shutdown,” FoxNews.com has not-so-subtly rebranded it as a “government slimdown.” That term appeared six times on the website’s homepage Tuesday afternoon..."
The first article on the list, with the caps lock-heavy headline, “A GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN? Not really — turns out it’s more of a SLIMDOWN,” states:

What the Obama administration is portraying as a “shutdown” of the federal government — complete with signs posted at the entrances to government buildings, parks and monuments — is turning out to be more of a “slimdown,” as all but non-essential workers reported to their jobs Tuesday.

Subsequent headlines on the homepage adopt the “slimdown” language, but paradoxically, the word is replaced by the more conventional “shutdown” on the actual article pages. For instance, “How to visit national parks during partial slimdown” on the homepage becomes “How to visit national parks during the partial government shutdown” once you click through.
The rhetoric also doesn’t appear to have made it onto Fox News’ air, where the word “slimdown” does not appear to have been uttered by anchors or appeared in graphics on screen. The network had a “Countdown to Shutdown” clock Monday night just like every other cable news network:
And this morning, there have numerous segment and debates on the network about the impact of the “shutdown” and which side is to blame. So which is it, Fox, a “shutdown” or a “slimdown”? 

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Ted Cruz, Wendy Davis, and Politico's Bogus Claim of Media Bias

Here is an article from David Wiegel from Slate.com stating that the Politico article, "Ted Cruz, Wendy Davis and media bias," was false in saying that the mainstream media positively reported Wendy Davis and her filibuster and negatively reported Ted Cruz and his filibuster:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/09/25/ted_cruz_wendy_davis_and_politico_s_bogus_claim_of_media_bias.html

When Ted Cruz finally emerged from the Senate floor, he was met by a group of reporters nearly as large as the one that greeted Barack Obama when he came to the Hill to talk to senators about Syria. Cruz walked right into the thick of it.
"How do you feel?" shouted one reporter.
"Good afternoon," said Cruz, who proceeded to condense his speech into two minutes. "Obamacare is the biggest job killer in this country. It's causing millions of Americans not to have a job, to potentially lose a job, to be pushed into part-time work ... this debate was about whether Washington was listening to the American people."
"Can you talk about your feelings for us?" asked NBC News' Kelly O'Donnell. "What you think you've accomplished?"
Cruz gave another two minutes of greatest hits. "Americans are convinced there shouldn't be two sets of rules, one for members of Congress and another for hard-working families," he said. "Any senator who votes to give the majority leader the ability to fund Obamacare on a 51-vote party vote has voted to fund Obamacare." He name-checked James Hoffa, whose disagreement with Obamacare is that union health plans don't get subsidies, twice. After about five minutes, he pronounced he had "probably spoken enough" and left, ignoring some frivolous but logistical questions about how he'd had the stamina to hold the floor for 21 hours.
Anyway: I recount all this because a curious but predictable meme has broken out across the Internet. It is this: The biased media canonized Wendy Davis for her filibuster in Texas, but is giving too little or too cynical attention to Cruz. The meme was codified by Tim Carney in a column titled "Wendy Davis was a media hero and Ted Cruz is a 'grandstander.' "
"The typical mainstream spin on this: It's grandstanding! He's just raising money! Fauxlibuster!" wrote Carney, without citations. The media spin on Davis, according to him: "Hero! Giving a voice to women! Glowing interviews on every TV station."

Davis's filibuster was no more likely than Cruz's to change the law. Davis's filibuster was just as self-promotional as Cruz's, and just as directed at a bid for higher office.

Carney's take, intended to work the refs, worked on Politico's Dylan Byers. He did make citations:

When a Democrat like Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis filibusters against abortion restrictions, she is elevated to hero status, her tennis shoes become totems. When Cruz grandstands against Obamacare, he is a laughingstock in the eyes of many journalists on Twitter, an "embarrassment" in the eyes of The New York Times editorial board. ... Cruz is portrayed in the media as "aimless and self-destructive" (NYT ed board), elitist (GQ) and likely guided more by presidential aspirations than principles (CNN). Josh Marshall, the editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo, had no qualms about coming right out and calling Cruz, his former Princeton colleague, an "arrogant jerk" — and worse.

Does this prove anything? Byers says that CNN described Cruz as "likely guided more by presidential aspirations than principles." But the story he links to suggests that Cruz has multiple motivations, while "critics question his motives" and ask "is this about his principles or about presidential aspirations?" Doesn't read like the news division taking a stance on this. Neither does the NYT edit board's position—it's an edit board. Of course a liberal edit board is in favor of liberal grandstanding and against conservative grandstanding. What does that say about journalists writ large?
And what does it say about the coverage of Davis? Let's compare.
- Before her filibuster, outside of Texas, Davis was a largely unknown figure. Before this filibuster, Cruz was a national figure—he'd been profiled as long ago as 2011 by the New York Times. The new celebrity gets the new story. Them's rules.
- Cruz's filibuster was actually covered more than Davis' in real time. Davis' filibuster only became a story as social media, mostly Twitter, started discussing it. As Carl Franzen reported at the time, "viewers of the major national cable and broadcast networks would be forgiven for not knowing who she is or what she did on Tuesday night. After all, during the filibuster's momentous conclusion, CNN aired a repeated segment of Piers Morgan and Anderson Cooper discussing the calories in a blueberry muffin." Cruz's filibuster was covered heavily in real time by the Capitol Hill press corps.
- Davis' filibuster happened under stricter standards. She had to stand consistently without assistance; her speech was shut down after a colleague adjusted her back brace. Cruz had to stand, too, but he was allowed to drink water and enter dialogues with other senators, who occasionally took the burden from him.
- Davis was filibustering a bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks, and to tighten regulations of abortion clinics. National media—on the left, sure—was already working that story as similar laws moved in North Carolina and Ohio. Davis provided a new hook.
- Davis temporarily won, while reporters knew that Cruz wouldn't win. At the start of his remarks, Cruz specifically said that he was speaking before a vote that he didn't consider definitive; as he spoke, Harry Reid's office revealed that Cruz did not actually plan to delay this vote. But Davis was trying to eat up the last hours of legislative time so that Austin would end its session without passing a bill. With the help of an unruly mob that shouted down legislators, she won. (Note also that unruly mobs make good copy.) Carney says it was clear at the time that Rick Perry would call a new session and get the bill passed, but that only became clear as Davis' filibuster dragged on—and, hey, that's more of a kinectic action than Cruz's.
- Davis didn't just get softballs from the media. Absolutely, she got some gauzy questions from Vogue and from network news. But in the "glowing interviews" piece Carney links to, one questioner pointed out to Davis that "There is a poll out down there by the Texas Tribune that says sixty percent of Texans support banning abortions after twenty weeks, which is one of the things that this bill would do." Another told her to "look at some recent polling ... indicating even among women there's 50% support for a 20-week abortion ban." Of the 20 questions cited in that story, eight of them push Davis on the substance of the bill or the fact that it'll pass anyway.
Actually, that reveals the fallacy behind this whole "bias" charge. Davis' filibuster made her a star on MNSBC and in the New York Times, but not on Fox News. Cruz has been on Fox News every night this week, talking strategy; he's kept conservative media in the loop. Conservatives are annoyed that liberal-leaning media canonized Davis and let her shape her story. They're simultaneously annoyed when conservative media doesn't let Cruz shape his story.

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