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Paul Murray's weblog, with news you may have missed and my $0.02 worth on a number of topics.

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald

I bet you don't have a friend who's an acupuncturist

E-mail me: pmurray [at] despammed.com

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Thursday, November 15, 2007
Obsessing over image.
There's a number of things that trouble me about the idea of Hillary Clinton as president. One of them is her campaign's obsessive efforts to manage the media, well-described in this New Republic story.
If grumbling about a [NYT Barack Obama pickup] basketball story seems excessive, it's also typical of the Clinton media machine. Reporters who have covered the hyper-vigilant campaign say that no detail or editorial spin is too minor to draw a rebuke. Even seasoned political journalists describe reporting on Hillary as a torturous experience. Though few dare offer specifics for the record--"They're too smart," one furtively confides. "They'll figure out who I am"--privately, they recount excruciating battles to secure basic facts. Innocent queries are met with deep suspicion. Only surgically precise questioning yields relevant answers. Hillary's aides don't hesitate to use access as a blunt instrument, as when they killed off a negative GQ story on the campaign by threatening to stop cooperating with a separate Bill Clinton story the magazine had in the works. Reporters' jabs and errors are long remembered, and no hour is too odd for an angry phone call. Clinton aides are especially swift to bypass reporters and complain to top editors. "They're frightening!" says one reporter who has covered Clinton. "They don't see [reporting] as a healthy part of the process. They view this as a ruthless kill-or-be-killed game."

Despite all the grumbling, however, the press has showered Hillary with strikingly positive coverage. "It's one of the few times I've seen journalists respect someone for beating the hell out of them," says a veteran Democratic media operative. The media has paved a smooth road for signature campaign moments like Hillary's campaign launch and her health care plan rollout and has dutifully advanced campaign-promoted themes like Hillary's "experience" and expertise in military affairs. This is all the more striking in light of the press's past treatment of Clinton--particularly during her husband's White House years--including endless stories about her personal ethics, frostiness, and alleged Lady Macbeth persona.

It's enough to make you suspect that breeding fear and paranoia within the press corps is itself part of the Clinton campaign's strategy. And, if that sounds familiar, it may be because the Clinton machine, say reporters and pro-Hillary Democrats, is emulating nothing less than the model of the Bush White House, which has treated the press with thinly veiled contempt and minimal cooperation. "The Bush administration changed the rules," as one scribe puts it--and the Clintonites like the way they look. (To be sure, no one accuses the Clinton team of outright lying to the press, as the Bushies have done, or of crossing other ethical lines. And reporters say other press shops--notably those of Rudy Giuliani and John Edwards--are also highly combative.)

So far, the strategy has worked brilliantly. In the current climate, where the mainstream media is under attack from both conservatives and liberals, Clinton may have picked the right moment to get tough with the press. But, as the murmur of discontent among the fourth estate grows--and Hillary's coverage has taken a sharper tone since a widely panned debate performance late last month--even some Hillary supporters fear that the strategy may produce a dangerous backlash.

Emulating the Bush Adminstration -- yeah, that's an appealing attribute, all right.

Author Michael Crowley goes on to describe the various tactics the campaign uses, which are familiar to anyone paying attention. He also notes that many of her media advisors worked for fellow Senator Charles Schumer. (Schumer inspired the Bob Dole wisecrack that's been recycled about other politicians: "The most dangerous place in Washington is between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera.")

(via somewhere I can't remember -- I don't normally read the New Republic)

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Monday, May 07, 2007
Auletta on Mossberg.
Ken Auletta profiles the most powerful journalist in the technology business, the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg. For what it's worth, I agree with Mossberg a lot. (via Romenesko)

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Thursday, March 01, 2007
Playing by the rules.
You have to admire the way AP journalist Terence Hunt simultaneously obeys and (rightly) ridicules a press restriction in this story:
Mystery official briefs press on Cheney
By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
Tue Feb 27, 11:33 PM ET

The rules were simple. The official who briefed reporters on Vice President Dick Cheney's plane could be identified only as a senior administration official. But there were plenty of clues who was talking as Cheney wrapped up a trip with surprise stops in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"The reason the president wanted me to come, obviously, is because of the continuing threat that exists in this part of the world on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border," the high-ranking person who spoke on condition of anonymity said Tuesday.

The White House distributed a text of the senior administration official's comments on Air Force Two as Cheney flew from Afghanistan to Oman before beginning his flight back to Washington. The transcript did not spell out why the official on Cheney's plane would not be quoted by name.

There had been reports in some newspapers that Cheney was going to tell Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, that he needed to be more aggressive against al-Qaida operatives and Taliban fighters in the lawless border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"Let me just make one editorial comment here," the official said. "I've seen some press reporting says, `Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them.' That's not the way I work. I don't know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn't know what I'm doing, or isn't involved in it. But the idea that I'd go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business.

The story goes on in that vein for awhile longer, with Hunt dutifully quoting the "senior administration official." The press ought to do this more often, instead of letting politicians hide behind anonymity. (via The Politico)

Update: Howard Kurtz gets into the act:
The first-person pronoun gave away the game. But it also raised the question: Why did Cheney feel the need to speak on a not-for-attribution basis, and why did the seven journalists on the trip go along?

Lee Anne McBride, Cheney's press secretary, could not, under the ground rules, confirm the obvious. But, she said, "it was important to provide the press and public with briefings on these meetings, and it was determined that a more comprehensive readout could be provided on a background basis."

Administration officials concluded that, for diplomatic reasons, Cheney could not publicly discuss private conversations with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Mark Silva, a Chicago Tribune reporter who made the trip, was among those pressing Cheney's staff for an on-the-record briefing, saying the vice president has been elected twice.

"At the start of our meeting with a senior administration official, in which he advised us that he insisted this talk be on background, we asked him, too, to go on the record," Silva said. Cheney agreed to be identified only while discussing the suicide bombing at Bagram air base in Afghanistan that occurred while he was there.

Silva credited the White House with releasing an accurate transcript despite numerous "I" references. "But it's also a measure of how absurd the entire business of speaking as an SAO is."

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