(Expanded from an addendum to an earlier post. This will be a long one. Update: Now even longer.)
I saw an outrage and I said my piece, on this obscure website. Whether anyone read it, and what reaction they had to it, was entirely up to them. I had my say, and anyone else could have theirs, and all was right with the world, so I thought.
But it seems Canada's monopolistic newswire agency was sicced on me, an Upper Canadian law firm called in, a boss at the newspaper I write for brought into it, and efforts made to purge my words from the public record. All to no avail, of course, but I don't much appreciate the sentiment. I will not back down from what I wrote; I will back it up, in detail. And I won't be cowed, least of all by Canadian bigwigs.
I'm a great believer in the idea of a Fourth Estate. What is the use of a free press, if it props up the powerful and tears down the powerless? The press turned from "speaking truth to power" -- which in practice meant that when a sparrow fell to the ground, they blamed Bush -- to being incapable of skepticism and scrutiny of Congressional supermajorities and an executive branch annexing ever-greater swaths of society, in what is the most powerful government on earth. And instead of questioning the powerful, they have been practically persecuting the powerless minority.
In the newspaper I read every day -- The Chronicle-Herald of Halifax, Nova Scotia -- the foremost exponent of all that was the one-woman Washington bureau of the one Canadian newswire service, Lee-Anne Goodman. I held my tongue for half a year. I hate naming names and hurting feelings, when I might make my point just as easily without being so personal. But then one week in May I read a hit-piece on Bristol Palin -- a powerless 18 year old girl -- by Lee-Ann Goodman, and I came to feel she had forfeited any courtesy of having her feelings spared.
I think Lee-Anne Goodman is a fine writer, and would make a cracking gossip columnist. Which is not some backhanded compliment: I've read too many gossip columns to be in a position to hold the profession in contempt. Or, if Lee-Anne Goodman's dispatches ran under the "Opinions" banner, I'd have little to say on this. I wish her all the best and would never dream of bringing trouble down on her head. But Lee-Anne Goodman has represented anyone who's caught her eye in any way she's pleased, and had her words reproduced in the newspapers of Canada, called The News. So some nobody called her out on some unread website. And what I wrote stands.
Following is a compilation of my notes of the past half year on what's wrong with the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press:
David Halton.
When I watched The National on CBC years ago, the senior Washington correspondent was a man called David Halton. I can't remember a time when David Halton didn't look old. David Halton had covered the serious goings-on of Ottawa, London, and Moscow before becoming the CBC's man in Washington. He'd got in the middle of wars and uprisings in the field. He knew American politics and government, and war and economics, backwards and forwards, upside-down and sideways. He gathered the facts as he found them, without regard to which party or politician was helped or hurt. And I expected nothing less for the elephant of Canada's elephant-mouse relationship, and the capital of the greatest nation the world has ever seen. That's looking long ago and far away today.
And that's not an indictment of Lee-Anne Goodman; it's an indictment of the Canadian Press.
Bias and bad reporting.
It happens that I was following American politics and government at the time in question, all the way back in 2000 and '01, and I seem to recall some "reaching out":
So Bush did reach out to Democrats, and look where it got him. Then as Bush walked out of the White House, Canadians read in their newspapers that he hadn't been the "reaching out" kind.
I picked up a bit of a bug for polls in "Social Sciences Statistics" class and follow American polling fairly closely, and I was aware of no torrent of polls in the days and weeks before the piece was published that showed Americans clamoring for more Obama boondoggles. Just the opposite, in fact:
So at least three major national polls predating the dispatch exactly contradict the reported presumption that "countless public opinion polls" -- not one of which was cited -- showed "the majority of Americans" calling for "additional stimulus spending". And this was a central point in the argument that if Obama is socialist, then Americans are all for socialism. That the report was making an argument at all should have got it booted from the News section.
You'd never know it from that report, but gay marriage bans were actually on the ballot on election day in three states -- two of which voted at the same time to make Barack Obama president -- and passed in all three. Which brings the total of states outlawing gay marriage to 30.
And if was absolutely necessary to make a point about President Bush and Muslims in this Obama inauguration coverage, it might have been a more historically significant one, like: "the man who brought down two of the very worst regimes in half a century and made 50-60 million Muslims in two Muslim nations free citizens for the first time in their histories."
Indeed, if it had been up to Senator Obama, the 28 million Muslims of Iraq would have been abandoned in 2007 to their civil war and ethnic cleansing, their new democracy allowed to disintegrate, swaths of their country forfeited to Iran and al Qaeda, and the democratic reform of the Muslim world repudiated. But he mentioned "Muslim" in his inaugural address.
But President Bush "strongly supported a Palestinian state". He broke with previous administrations in calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of his "road map for peace", a year and a half into his presidency. He wanted this Palestinian state up and running by sometime in 2005.
However did President Bush manage to get himself re-elected after his first four years, if his presidency was "eight years" of unbroken "blundering" and "unpopular rule"? Was it a very obscure point that Bush's approval rating hit a record 90% after the 9/11 attacks? Even a year and a half after 9/11, his approval was at 70%. His re-election was the first in four presidential cycles in which a candidate for president won an absolute majority of votes. And Bush is one of just three presidents since the Civil War to see their party gain Congressional seats in a midterm election, and the only Republican president ever to add seats in a midterm.
And as for those eight unbroken years of "Republican rule", Democrats controlled the Senate for four of Bush's eight years, and the House for two. There was "Republican rule" for just half of Bush's presidency; the other half was what is called in the United States "divided government".
These problematic points are of a kind. They're the errors of a person exposed only to information that comes with a Democratic National Committee seal at the top. They're errors from ideological certitude and partisan acrimony so deep, one cannot allow that there is any right in the other side, or any good in it, and can see no faults or failings in one's own beloved "good guys". It's fine for opinion journalism, but opinion journalism is what it is, and it belongs in the Opinions section with the rest of us ax-grinders.
Obama adulation.
In her coverage of Barack Obama, Lee-Anne Goodman has been indistinguishable from a wide-eyed Obama volunteer (with gratuitous slights against President Bush, plus one against Prime Minister Harper):
"A stern and steady Barack Obama addressed the nation" -- "a nation still basking in the glow of his victory."
"Roosevelt ruled with calm assurance" and "a presidential Obama sounded a similar tone."
"His professorial remarks about the economy were in striking contrast to the string of malapropisms and nervous chuckles that often characterized many of his predecessor’s appearances before the national media. George W. Bush stammered and stumbled his way through many of his news conferences."
"He added he was grateful that Bush, one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history, has invited Obama and his wife, Michelle, to the White House on Monday."
"The president-elect went off-topic only once, smiling broadly when asked about his children, Malia and Sasha, and their impending acquisition of a puppy — a promise he delivered in Tuesday’s soaring election-night acceptance speech."
"A friendly and relaxed Obama, flashing his trademark smile."
"The Lincoln symbolism is powerful. ... The man who came to be known as the Great Emancipator was also a lanky Illinois politician with a gift for oratory when he became president."
"The celebrations reflect a country that's been in the grips of Obama fever since he made history in November."
"The star who shone the brightest was the man who sang nary a note -- Barack Obama, who enthralled a crowd of 500,000 with a brief message of hope."
"Millions cheered the apparent arrival of a new age of political idealism."
"The new president took on the formidable task of undoing the damage of his predecessor’s administration."
"[Obama's Ottawa visit is] sure to be a trip that will make any other presidential visit in recent memory seem like an exercise in watching paint dry."
"Since his historic election, Obama has set aside partisanship and stressed his willingness to consult and work with people from both ends of the political spectrum. Harper's intense partisanship, on the other hand, has almost cost him his career."
"Few presidents in recent memory, in fact, have burst out of the starting gates with as much speed and vigour as Obama."
(Update: I neglected the best one. "Hot item on the hustings; physical charms, fetching policies - women say Obama's got it all", from just a couple weeks before election day. Applying the same principle to the wife, there was: "Trendsetting first lady; Vogue cover establishes her as style icon of modern day". And this, from long after the shine was off it: "Obama a talk show pro".)
That's not reporting, it's knickers-tossing. It's one thing to document quotations and so on showing enthusiasm for Barack Obama -- and Lee-Anne Goodman has done plenty of that, too -- but these are the words of the "reporter". There's a place for that sort of thing, and it's someplace other than the News sections.
Opinion journalism.
Lee-Anne Goodman is not a reporter so much as a species of opinion journalist. Which would be peachy, except that her dispatches are not presented as opinion journalism; they're the sole Washington coverage of a monopolistic national newswire service.
The dispatches of the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press are typically traceable to the Associated Press versions, scoops in American news and opinion outlets, public-domain facts and quotations, TV appearances by newsmakers, etc. I recognize the methods because it's the sort of thing I do -- in writing op-eds.
The AP is invariably the first to get a story up, and for reasons I've never fully accepted, it is considered perfectly fine for any news outlet having an arrangement with the AP to lift the AP's content, without attribution. If I tried that on even once, I'd be branded a "plagiarist" and would never work as a writer again.
So, the AP reports: "The plan would effectively end a feud between automakers and statehouses over emission standards." Then Lee-Anne Goodman for the CP reports: "Most importantly from a Canadian perspective, the plan effectively ends a feud between the Big Three automakers and state legislatures over emission standards as the car companies get the single national standard they've been seeking."
A good deal of these dispatches are Canadian-content reproductions of the AP reports. That's no indictment against Lee-Anne Goodman per se: It's the way things are done in the moribund 21st Century news business. But it's not original reporting.
The "Sarah Palin didn't know Africa was a continent" piece was a roundup of rumors in Newsweek, the LA Times, and The New York Times.
The "American reporters are so ignorant of Canada" piece was a rumination on the American coverage of Obama's Ottawa visit, in the AP, cable news, and blogs, plus a line from The Tonight Show. The "Dijongate" piece was a rumination on Sean Hannity's making sport of Barack Obama for wanting Dijon mustard on a cheeseburger, and some blogger's speculation that MSNBC had tried hiding the Dijon business from its viewers, plus excerpts from Obama's The Audacity of Hope.
(Update: I wrote that the Canadian Press Washington bureau found those couple conservatives making sport of Obama's choice of mustard, but what looks more likely is that some American news outlet did the finding, and that was what was found by the CP Washington bureau. The original report, or anyway one of them, may have been a Washington Post online item posted on the morning of May 7, '09 and headlined "Obama Burger Firestorm Still Raging". That WaPo online report made no claim that conservatives generally were preoccupied with Obama's mustard; that angle was more original to the CP Washington bureau. So, even less original reporting than first thought. And worse: one of those couple conservatives was misrepresented by the CP report, and called it "a new low" in bias.)
The Bristol Palin hit-piece was built on Palin's appearances on TV chat shows: "Palin made the rounds of the American talk-show circuit on Wednesday morning." The same for the "Cheney slags Powell" piece: "On Sunday, [Cheney] was back in the spotlight again, this time on CBS's 'Face The Nation,' but even veteran host Bob Schieffer was taken aback to hear Cheney slag Colin Powell."
That's all very well -- it's the kind of thing I do for my little op-eds -- but that's the point: It's op-ed writing, not original reporting.
From Lee-Anne Goodman's "Dijongate" story: "The United States is in the midst of a devastating recession, mired in two overseas wars and grappling with a swine flu outbreak, but conservative critics are assailing President Barack Obama on another pressing issue: his choice of burger topping."
That's the lead to an opinion piece -- an article that takes sides, makes an argument, repudiates one side and vindicates the other.
That piece was unworthy of the Canadian newswire daily dispatch from Washington, not least because it was untrue. I check the conservative clearing houses daily, and I had seen exactly one reference to L'Affaire Dijon that day, in one post of 25 on HotAir.com -- where the verdict was: "As for me, well, this is about as much of a non-story as it can get."
Amen. This was simply not something American conservatism was exercised about. America's conservatives are positively fit to be tied, about spending, and taxing, and terrorist detainees, and Iranian-North Korean nukes, and Afghan-Pakistan instability, and federal annexation of the private sector, and arbitrary federal suspension of contract law and bankruptcy law, and illegal aliens, and activist judges, and missile defense, and the F-22 program, etc., etc., etc. But Lee-Anne Goodman reported for Canada that America's conservatives weren't bothered about all that; it was Obama's fancy mustard that had them jumping up and down. It was an egregious misrepresentation. And it seems to have worked: Two weeks later The Chronicle-Herald was leading a Sunday editorial in defense of Michael Ignatieff with the Lee-Anne Goodman/CP angle on "Dijongate".
What possible purpose did that story serve? It was unnewsworthy and untrue, but it certainly made "Obama's conservative critics" look like fools, so my bet is that was the idea. But then, why did it run as the Canadian Press dispatch from Washington in the World News section of my newspaper?
There are terms for this: "opinion journalism", "op-eds", "columns" -- even "news columns", if you want a pretense of reporterly credibility about it. So let it be identified to the readers as opinion journalism. Presenting it in the newspapers of Canada as The News is a fraud and an abuse of the readers.
Gossip columnist.
Before the Washington job, this was more Lee-Anne Goodman's beat: "Reporters Victoria Ahearn and Lee-Anne Goodman discuss Pete Doherty's nose bleed." Somebody's got to do it. She was an entertainment reporter. No doubt that sort of thing gets the most readers. And there's nothing remotely wrong with it: I'd be quite keen to know about this Pete Doherty nosebleed myself. "Enquiring minds" and all that.
I'm given to know that Lee-Anne Goodman had done more before the Washington job than report on the likes of Pete Doherty's nosebleed. I never imagined or stated otherwise.
But it's no idle point. If the Canadian Press promoted its defense reporter to the Washington posting, one might reasonably expect to see dispatches on, say, missile defense -- Obama's cuts to missile defense, Obama's possible changes to the missile shield deployment in Eastern Europe, the effect on Obama's missile defense policy of the Iranian and North Korean ballistic missile test-launches, etc. And if a reporter is posted to Washington whose aptitudes and experience run more toward arts and entertainment and celebrity gossip, one might expect to see, say, scuttlebutt on the Palins. Less war and economics, more "dishing". The dilettante angle on Washington.
Like this late entry: "U.S. politicians embracing Twitter, sometimes with embarrassing results."
(Update: Some examples of how the Canadian Press Washington bureau has been turned into a gossip-shop: "Rekers latest anti-gay activist to be snared by gay sex scandal in U.S.", "Former Bush campaign chariman says he's gay", "Hole in one spotless image", on Tiger Woods' infidelity -- credit to The Chronicle-Herald for that corny headline.)
Or take Lee-Anne Goodman's "Cheney slags Powell" piece, which was as straight as they come from the CP Washington bureau. The Associated Press version made no such characterization, and in no objective sense had Dick Cheney done any "slagging". Cheney only said he took Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama as a sign he'd left the Republican Party, and that, "If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh." After all, Limbaugh is an actual conservative, while Powell advocated for the furthest-left major-party presidential candidate in American history. "Cheney slag[s] Colin Powell" is the gossip columnist's angle and phraseology. And it was no throwaway line: it became the basis for the headline in The Chronicle-Herald.
Again, that's not an indictment of Lee-Anne Goodman so much as the Canadian Press. And now I come to my reason for taking this up in the first place.
Now, Sarah Palin ran for vice president; Joe Biden actually is vice president. Time was, the actual vice president of the United States would have gotten the scrutiny of the press, not the loser who returned to the ranch a world away from Washington. And this particular actual vice president happens to be a gaffe-factory and a boob. It's hardly as if Biden has kept a low profile, or sailed through his first four months as VP without missing a beat. But the actual vice president of the United States hasn't been the object of skepticism and scrutiny in the Washington dispatches of the Canadian Press; it's the Republican governor of Alaska -- and her family -- they've been onto.
The CP line is that Sarah Palin "has been touted as a future Republican presidential candidate." In another 3 or 7 or 11 years, Sarah Palin may be one of at least half a dozen Republicans running for the party's presidential nomination, so even her in-laws have been scrutinized, instead of those politicians who won actual elections and hold actual power in the here and now.
Two days after the presidential election, Lee-Anne Goodman recycled malicious rumors against Sarah Palin planted in the American press by anti-Palin political operatives. It was 650 words of purest gossip. The Herald promoted it on the front page.
The first line claimed, "Sarah Palin wasn't aware that Africa was a continent." That ought to have looked like a bridge too far even to the journalist class with their bottomless disdain for the capabilities of Sarah Palin, and in fact it turned out some of their credulous reporting on this was built on a hoax.
Then in the space of a few weeks in April and May, I counted three full-length dispatches on Sarah Palin and/or her family from Lee-Anne Goodman. They were as uniformly negative as the coverage of Obama was uniformly positive. In April, there was a story to do with some Palin nominee in Alaska who wasn't much enamored of homosexuality, which went into some detail on the "hillbilly" governor's "family and political theatrics that would do Jerry Springer proud," like "the arrest and indictment of her sister-in-law on break-and-enter charges" and "the sordid revelations of her daughter’s ex-boyfriend."
What tore it for me came in May. Lee-Anne Goodman devoted an entire article to Sarah Palin's 18 year old daughter, Bristol: "a decidedly curious poster girl for the cause of teenage abstinence." It was a hit-piece. A hit-piece on a powerless 18 year old girl. A girl was being ridiculed and sneered at for promoting abstinence after having a baby, in a Canadian Press dispatch from Washington on the World News page of my newspaper.
Lee-Anne Goodman lead with, "Do as she says, not as she does." There was even a gotcha quote from the girl's past: "Palin is encouraging adolescent girls to resist pre-marital sex entirely. This despite her remarks shortly after Tripp's birth that convincing teens to avoid having sex was 'not realistic at all.'"
I had never seen anything out of the CP Washington bureau along the lines of, "Obama's first full-year budget deficit, not counting bailouts, was three times the worst full-year deficit under Bush. This despite his remarks during the election campaign that 'what I've done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.'" A powerless teenager had been subjected to a level of skepticism and scrutiny from which the current president of the United States had been sheltered.
Bristol Palin's appearance on TV chat shows was not newsworthy in the first place; not for American newspapers and much less for Canadian ones. She holds no office, she's not seeking office, and she doesn't even talk politics. And I've never seen anything on the wires ridiculing the Clinton first daughter Chelsea -- even during the '08 presidential primaries when she was a grown woman actively campaigning for her mother and pointing at ambitions for national politics.
Lee-Anne Goodman has gone out of her way to run down Sarah Palin -- and her family. It's indulgent, it's gossipy, it's malicious, and it's a sick fixation. Lee-Anne Goodman does have plenty of company in that, among the political and journalist classes, but when the likes of Andrew Sullivan takes his hatchet to the Palins, it's not reprinted in newspapers across Canada under banners reading "News".
One more thing.
On the occasion of Obama's Ottawa visit, Lee-Anne Goodman took the American press to task for their ignorance of Canada. (I noted the piece mostly for the line, "The deliciously snarky Wonkette.com, the blog that dishes on D.C." There's a sentence that would never have been uttered by David Halton.) Fair enough, though those American journalists had the excuse that Canada wasn't their beat. But if insufficient knowledge of Canada among Americans gets Canadians exercised, then this is the sort of thing that does me, from Lee-Anne Goodman's post-election coverage: "Even in the Republican stronghold of Texas, people were basking in the post-election glow," which was demonstrated with a quote from a screenwriter in Austin.
This must be an obscure point among Canadians, but Austin is a notorious Democratic Party bastion. "Keep Austin Weird," as the bumper sticker says. And I'd guess "screenwriter" is a majority-Democrat profession. Show me a cattle-rancher "basking in the post-election glow" of Barack Obama, and I'd be impressed.
And another thing.
If Lee-Anne Goodman's dispatches came marked "opinion", my argument here would lose its thunder. But the Canadian Press insists on keeping up this pretense that they're just tellin' it like it is, and bristles at any suggestion to the contrary. Until the 20th Century, newspapers typically wore their prejudices on their sleeves. There's honesty in that, and square-dealing with the readers.
But until those pigs fly, and as long as I see these abuses, I intend to call them out. I won't take it down or take it back, and I won't be cowed.
(A second, shorter installment here.)
I saw an outrage and I said my piece, on this obscure website. Whether anyone read it, and what reaction they had to it, was entirely up to them. I had my say, and anyone else could have theirs, and all was right with the world, so I thought.
But it seems Canada's monopolistic newswire agency was sicced on me, an Upper Canadian law firm called in, a boss at the newspaper I write for brought into it, and efforts made to purge my words from the public record. All to no avail, of course, but I don't much appreciate the sentiment. I will not back down from what I wrote; I will back it up, in detail. And I won't be cowed, least of all by Canadian bigwigs.
I'm a great believer in the idea of a Fourth Estate. What is the use of a free press, if it props up the powerful and tears down the powerless? The press turned from "speaking truth to power" -- which in practice meant that when a sparrow fell to the ground, they blamed Bush -- to being incapable of skepticism and scrutiny of Congressional supermajorities and an executive branch annexing ever-greater swaths of society, in what is the most powerful government on earth. And instead of questioning the powerful, they have been practically persecuting the powerless minority.
In the newspaper I read every day -- The Chronicle-Herald of Halifax, Nova Scotia -- the foremost exponent of all that was the one-woman Washington bureau of the one Canadian newswire service, Lee-Anne Goodman. I held my tongue for half a year. I hate naming names and hurting feelings, when I might make my point just as easily without being so personal. But then one week in May I read a hit-piece on Bristol Palin -- a powerless 18 year old girl -- by Lee-Ann Goodman, and I came to feel she had forfeited any courtesy of having her feelings spared.
I think Lee-Anne Goodman is a fine writer, and would make a cracking gossip columnist. Which is not some backhanded compliment: I've read too many gossip columns to be in a position to hold the profession in contempt. Or, if Lee-Anne Goodman's dispatches ran under the "Opinions" banner, I'd have little to say on this. I wish her all the best and would never dream of bringing trouble down on her head. But Lee-Anne Goodman has represented anyone who's caught her eye in any way she's pleased, and had her words reproduced in the newspapers of Canada, called The News. So some nobody called her out on some unread website. And what I wrote stands.
Following is a compilation of my notes of the past half year on what's wrong with the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press:
David Halton.
When I watched The National on CBC years ago, the senior Washington correspondent was a man called David Halton. I can't remember a time when David Halton didn't look old. David Halton had covered the serious goings-on of Ottawa, London, and Moscow before becoming the CBC's man in Washington. He'd got in the middle of wars and uprisings in the field. He knew American politics and government, and war and economics, backwards and forwards, upside-down and sideways. He gathered the facts as he found them, without regard to which party or politician was helped or hurt. And I expected nothing less for the elephant of Canada's elephant-mouse relationship, and the capital of the greatest nation the world has ever seen. That's looking long ago and far away today.
And that's not an indictment of Lee-Anne Goodman; it's an indictment of the Canadian Press.
Bias and bad reporting.
Lee-Anne Goodman: "It's certainly hard to imagine Bush, in fact, immediately after winning the contested 2000 election, reaching out to his rivals in the Democratic party or to liberals in general in an effort to end the petty partisanship that so often paralyzes Capitol Hill."
It happens that I was following American politics and government at the time in question, all the way back in 2000 and '01, and I seem to recall some "reaching out":
- Two weeks after Bush's inauguration, he invited "Democrat lion" Ted Kennedy and several others of the Kennedy clan to the White House to watch 13 Days, the movie on John Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of the invitees had accused Bush of "stealing the election," and Ted Kennedy later accused Bush of "poisoning" Americans, among many other nefarious things. Then when Ted Kennedy was hospitalized in 2008, Bush called Kennedy's wife and told her to "take care of my friend."
- Even before Bush's inauguration, and a matter of days after the Supreme Court terminated the otherwise interminable Florida recount leaving him at long last as president-elect, Bush invited an assortment of Republicans and Democrats to Texas to discuss his No Child Left Behind Act, among them one of the more leftist congressmen and Democrats, George Miller. Miller would help shepherd the bill though the House and rewrite much of Bush's draft more to his liking. Miller later threatened to impeach Bush.
- Also before Bush's inauguration, he asked George McGovern -- 1972 Democrat presidential nominee and furthest-left major-party presidential candidate until that time -- to stay on as U.S. Representative to the UN Food and Agriculture Program. McGovern later urged Bush's impeachment.
- Within five months of Bush's inauguration, he appointed Norman Mineta -- Democrat Congressman and Clinton Commerce Secretary -- as Transportation Secretary. Mineta later endorsed Barack Obama in the Democrat primaries.
So Bush did reach out to Democrats, and look where it got him. Then as Bush walked out of the White House, Canadians read in their newspapers that he hadn't been the "reaching out" kind.
Lee-Anne Goodman (March 11, '09): "'It's really hard to argue that this isn't a fundamental transformation of our economy to look more like European-style socialism,' Pence concluded. If so, it’s a brand of socialism Americans are behind. Countless public opinion polls suggest that the majority of Americans support both additional stimulus spending as well as government intervention to save insolvent banks."
I picked up a bit of a bug for polls in "Social Sciences Statistics" class and follow American polling fairly closely, and I was aware of no torrent of polls in the days and weeks before the piece was published that showed Americans clamoring for more Obama boondoggles. Just the opposite, in fact:
- Rasmussen Reports Poll, released March 11, '09. "Just 27% of voters nationwide favor passage of a second economic stimulus package. The latest Rasmussen Reports nationwide telephone survey found that 55% are opposed and 19% are not sure."
- NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll, conducted February 26-March 1, '09. "Which of the following concerns you more -- that the federal government will spend too MUCH money to try to boost the economy and as a result will drive up the budget deficit, OR, that the federal government will spend too LITTLE money to try to boost the economy and as a result the recession will be longer?" "Spend too much": 61%; "Spend too little": 29%.
- USA Today/Gallup Poll, conducted February 20-22, '09. "Regardless of whether you favor or oppose the economic stimulus bill that Congress passed, do you think it would have been better for the government to spend more money to stimulate the economy, better for the government to spend less money, or is the amount of spending in the bill about right?" "Better to spend more": 14%; "Better to spend less": 41%.
- Ibid. "In thinking about the trade-offs between spending government money to improve the economy versus adding considerable amounts of money to the federal debt, which do you think is the greater risk: spending too little to improve the economy or adding too much to the federal debt?" "Spending too little": 37%; "Adding too much to debt": 59%.
So at least three major national polls predating the dispatch exactly contradict the reported presumption that "countless public opinion polls" -- not one of which was cited -- showed "the majority of Americans" calling for "additional stimulus spending". And this was a central point in the argument that if Obama is socialist, then Americans are all for socialism. That the report was making an argument at all should have got it booted from the News section.
From Lee-Anne Goodman's post-election coverage: "Some of those slated to be in attendance reportedly believe the Republican party's resounding defeat this election was due to its failure to embrace with enough vigour its socially conservative ideals. This despite a series of recent studies that suggest Americans are becoming more socially progressive and aren't concerned with issues like same-sex marriage and abortion."
You'd never know it from that report, but gay marriage bans were actually on the ballot on election day in three states -- two of which voted at the same time to make Barack Obama president -- and passed in all three. Which brings the total of states outlawing gay marriage to 30.
Lee-Anne Goodman: "On top of everything else, the president-elect must also begin extricating the United States from the unpopular war in Iraq."Again, the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement had been finalized already: The "extrication" of the United States from Iraq had not only begun, it had been agreed by both nations, in some detail.
Lee-Anne Goodman: "Obama was the first president in U.S. history to mention the word "Muslim" in an inaugural address, and he did it as his predecessor and the man despised by the Arab world, George W. Bush, looked on."As a point of fact, Afghanistan is part of the Muslim world, but not the Arab world. The same for Pakistan, and Iran, and all but 20 percent of Islam globally. I'd guess the intent was to report that Bush was "despised" in those countries as well as all the rest, but by using "Arab world" as synonynmous with "Muslim world", they were left out.
And if was absolutely necessary to make a point about President Bush and Muslims in this Obama inauguration coverage, it might have been a more historically significant one, like: "the man who brought down two of the very worst regimes in half a century and made 50-60 million Muslims in two Muslim nations free citizens for the first time in their histories."
Indeed, if it had been up to Senator Obama, the 28 million Muslims of Iraq would have been abandoned in 2007 to their civil war and ethnic cleansing, their new democracy allowed to disintegrate, swaths of their country forfeited to Iran and al Qaeda, and the democratic reform of the Muslim world repudiated. But he mentioned "Muslim" in his inaugural address.
Lee-Anne Goodman: "Others argued that if Obama doesn’t strongly support a Palestinian state, he won’t enjoy any more successes in the Muslim world than Bush did."
But President Bush "strongly supported a Palestinian state". He broke with previous administrations in calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of his "road map for peace", a year and a half into his presidency. He wanted this Palestinian state up and running by sometime in 2005.
Lee-Anne Goodman: "Among the measures Obama is looking at overturning is a proposal that cuts funding to women’s groups that counsel abortion in developing countries and reversing a ban on stem-cell research funding."That "ban on stem-cell research funding" was nothing of the kind. Bush was the first president to devote federal funds to embryonic stem cell research, on embryos destroyed before his policy was instituted, and he funded research on stem cells from other than embryos which turned out to be more fruitful than anyone had reckoned on. The ban was limited to federal funding for embryonic stem cell research which destroyed new human embryos. And there was no prohibition against states and private entities funding embryo-destructive research to their hearts' content. Bush's executive order on stem cell research was more than seven years old by this point, and had been painstakingly explained by the president himself in his only primetime television address before the 9/11 attacks.
Lee-Anne Goodman: "Eight years of blunders by George W. Bush" and "eight years of unpopular Republican rule under President George W. Bush."
However did President Bush manage to get himself re-elected after his first four years, if his presidency was "eight years" of unbroken "blundering" and "unpopular rule"? Was it a very obscure point that Bush's approval rating hit a record 90% after the 9/11 attacks? Even a year and a half after 9/11, his approval was at 70%. His re-election was the first in four presidential cycles in which a candidate for president won an absolute majority of votes. And Bush is one of just three presidents since the Civil War to see their party gain Congressional seats in a midterm election, and the only Republican president ever to add seats in a midterm.
And as for those eight unbroken years of "Republican rule", Democrats controlled the Senate for four of Bush's eight years, and the House for two. There was "Republican rule" for just half of Bush's presidency; the other half was what is called in the United States "divided government".
These problematic points are of a kind. They're the errors of a person exposed only to information that comes with a Democratic National Committee seal at the top. They're errors from ideological certitude and partisan acrimony so deep, one cannot allow that there is any right in the other side, or any good in it, and can see no faults or failings in one's own beloved "good guys". It's fine for opinion journalism, but opinion journalism is what it is, and it belongs in the Opinions section with the rest of us ax-grinders.
Obama adulation.
In her coverage of Barack Obama, Lee-Anne Goodman has been indistinguishable from a wide-eyed Obama volunteer (with gratuitous slights against President Bush, plus one against Prime Minister Harper):
"A stern and steady Barack Obama addressed the nation" -- "a nation still basking in the glow of his victory."
"Roosevelt ruled with calm assurance" and "a presidential Obama sounded a similar tone."
"His professorial remarks about the economy were in striking contrast to the string of malapropisms and nervous chuckles that often characterized many of his predecessor’s appearances before the national media. George W. Bush stammered and stumbled his way through many of his news conferences."
"He added he was grateful that Bush, one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history, has invited Obama and his wife, Michelle, to the White House on Monday."
"The president-elect went off-topic only once, smiling broadly when asked about his children, Malia and Sasha, and their impending acquisition of a puppy — a promise he delivered in Tuesday’s soaring election-night acceptance speech."
"A friendly and relaxed Obama, flashing his trademark smile."
"The Lincoln symbolism is powerful. ... The man who came to be known as the Great Emancipator was also a lanky Illinois politician with a gift for oratory when he became president."
"The celebrations reflect a country that's been in the grips of Obama fever since he made history in November."
"The star who shone the brightest was the man who sang nary a note -- Barack Obama, who enthralled a crowd of 500,000 with a brief message of hope."
"Millions cheered the apparent arrival of a new age of political idealism."
"The new president took on the formidable task of undoing the damage of his predecessor’s administration."
"[Obama's Ottawa visit is] sure to be a trip that will make any other presidential visit in recent memory seem like an exercise in watching paint dry."
"Since his historic election, Obama has set aside partisanship and stressed his willingness to consult and work with people from both ends of the political spectrum. Harper's intense partisanship, on the other hand, has almost cost him his career."
"Few presidents in recent memory, in fact, have burst out of the starting gates with as much speed and vigour as Obama."
(Update: I neglected the best one. "Hot item on the hustings; physical charms, fetching policies - women say Obama's got it all", from just a couple weeks before election day. Applying the same principle to the wife, there was: "Trendsetting first lady; Vogue cover establishes her as style icon of modern day". And this, from long after the shine was off it: "Obama a talk show pro".)
That's not reporting, it's knickers-tossing. It's one thing to document quotations and so on showing enthusiasm for Barack Obama -- and Lee-Anne Goodman has done plenty of that, too -- but these are the words of the "reporter". There's a place for that sort of thing, and it's someplace other than the News sections.
Opinion journalism.
Lee-Anne Goodman is not a reporter so much as a species of opinion journalist. Which would be peachy, except that her dispatches are not presented as opinion journalism; they're the sole Washington coverage of a monopolistic national newswire service.
The dispatches of the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press are typically traceable to the Associated Press versions, scoops in American news and opinion outlets, public-domain facts and quotations, TV appearances by newsmakers, etc. I recognize the methods because it's the sort of thing I do -- in writing op-eds.
The AP is invariably the first to get a story up, and for reasons I've never fully accepted, it is considered perfectly fine for any news outlet having an arrangement with the AP to lift the AP's content, without attribution. If I tried that on even once, I'd be branded a "plagiarist" and would never work as a writer again.
So, the AP reports: "The plan would effectively end a feud between automakers and statehouses over emission standards." Then Lee-Anne Goodman for the CP reports: "Most importantly from a Canadian perspective, the plan effectively ends a feud between the Big Three automakers and state legislatures over emission standards as the car companies get the single national standard they've been seeking."
A good deal of these dispatches are Canadian-content reproductions of the AP reports. That's no indictment against Lee-Anne Goodman per se: It's the way things are done in the moribund 21st Century news business. But it's not original reporting.
The "Sarah Palin didn't know Africa was a continent" piece was a roundup of rumors in Newsweek, the LA Times, and The New York Times.
The "American reporters are so ignorant of Canada" piece was a rumination on the American coverage of Obama's Ottawa visit, in the AP, cable news, and blogs, plus a line from The Tonight Show. The "Dijongate" piece was a rumination on Sean Hannity's making sport of Barack Obama for wanting Dijon mustard on a cheeseburger, and some blogger's speculation that MSNBC had tried hiding the Dijon business from its viewers, plus excerpts from Obama's The Audacity of Hope.
(Update: I wrote that the Canadian Press Washington bureau found those couple conservatives making sport of Obama's choice of mustard, but what looks more likely is that some American news outlet did the finding, and that was what was found by the CP Washington bureau. The original report, or anyway one of them, may have been a Washington Post online item posted on the morning of May 7, '09 and headlined "Obama Burger Firestorm Still Raging". That WaPo online report made no claim that conservatives generally were preoccupied with Obama's mustard; that angle was more original to the CP Washington bureau. So, even less original reporting than first thought. And worse: one of those couple conservatives was misrepresented by the CP report, and called it "a new low" in bias.)
The Bristol Palin hit-piece was built on Palin's appearances on TV chat shows: "Palin made the rounds of the American talk-show circuit on Wednesday morning." The same for the "Cheney slags Powell" piece: "On Sunday, [Cheney] was back in the spotlight again, this time on CBS's 'Face The Nation,' but even veteran host Bob Schieffer was taken aback to hear Cheney slag Colin Powell."
That's all very well -- it's the kind of thing I do for my little op-eds -- but that's the point: It's op-ed writing, not original reporting.
From Lee-Anne Goodman's "Dijongate" story: "The United States is in the midst of a devastating recession, mired in two overseas wars and grappling with a swine flu outbreak, but conservative critics are assailing President Barack Obama on another pressing issue: his choice of burger topping."
That's the lead to an opinion piece -- an article that takes sides, makes an argument, repudiates one side and vindicates the other.
That piece was unworthy of the Canadian newswire daily dispatch from Washington, not least because it was untrue. I check the conservative clearing houses daily, and I had seen exactly one reference to L'Affaire Dijon that day, in one post of 25 on HotAir.com -- where the verdict was: "As for me, well, this is about as much of a non-story as it can get."
Amen. This was simply not something American conservatism was exercised about. America's conservatives are positively fit to be tied, about spending, and taxing, and terrorist detainees, and Iranian-North Korean nukes, and Afghan-Pakistan instability, and federal annexation of the private sector, and arbitrary federal suspension of contract law and bankruptcy law, and illegal aliens, and activist judges, and missile defense, and the F-22 program, etc., etc., etc. But Lee-Anne Goodman reported for Canada that America's conservatives weren't bothered about all that; it was Obama's fancy mustard that had them jumping up and down. It was an egregious misrepresentation. And it seems to have worked: Two weeks later The Chronicle-Herald was leading a Sunday editorial in defense of Michael Ignatieff with the Lee-Anne Goodman/CP angle on "Dijongate".
What possible purpose did that story serve? It was unnewsworthy and untrue, but it certainly made "Obama's conservative critics" look like fools, so my bet is that was the idea. But then, why did it run as the Canadian Press dispatch from Washington in the World News section of my newspaper?
There are terms for this: "opinion journalism", "op-eds", "columns" -- even "news columns", if you want a pretense of reporterly credibility about it. So let it be identified to the readers as opinion journalism. Presenting it in the newspapers of Canada as The News is a fraud and an abuse of the readers.
Gossip columnist.
Before the Washington job, this was more Lee-Anne Goodman's beat: "Reporters Victoria Ahearn and Lee-Anne Goodman discuss Pete Doherty's nose bleed." Somebody's got to do it. She was an entertainment reporter. No doubt that sort of thing gets the most readers. And there's nothing remotely wrong with it: I'd be quite keen to know about this Pete Doherty nosebleed myself. "Enquiring minds" and all that.
I'm given to know that Lee-Anne Goodman had done more before the Washington job than report on the likes of Pete Doherty's nosebleed. I never imagined or stated otherwise.
But it's no idle point. If the Canadian Press promoted its defense reporter to the Washington posting, one might reasonably expect to see dispatches on, say, missile defense -- Obama's cuts to missile defense, Obama's possible changes to the missile shield deployment in Eastern Europe, the effect on Obama's missile defense policy of the Iranian and North Korean ballistic missile test-launches, etc. And if a reporter is posted to Washington whose aptitudes and experience run more toward arts and entertainment and celebrity gossip, one might expect to see, say, scuttlebutt on the Palins. Less war and economics, more "dishing". The dilettante angle on Washington.
Like this late entry: "U.S. politicians embracing Twitter, sometimes with embarrassing results."
(Update: Some examples of how the Canadian Press Washington bureau has been turned into a gossip-shop: "Rekers latest anti-gay activist to be snared by gay sex scandal in U.S.", "Former Bush campaign chariman says he's gay", "Hole in one spotless image", on Tiger Woods' infidelity -- credit to The Chronicle-Herald for that corny headline.)
Or take Lee-Anne Goodman's "Cheney slags Powell" piece, which was as straight as they come from the CP Washington bureau. The Associated Press version made no such characterization, and in no objective sense had Dick Cheney done any "slagging". Cheney only said he took Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama as a sign he'd left the Republican Party, and that, "If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh." After all, Limbaugh is an actual conservative, while Powell advocated for the furthest-left major-party presidential candidate in American history. "Cheney slag[s] Colin Powell" is the gossip columnist's angle and phraseology. And it was no throwaway line: it became the basis for the headline in The Chronicle-Herald.
Again, that's not an indictment of Lee-Anne Goodman so much as the Canadian Press. And now I come to my reason for taking this up in the first place.
Now, Sarah Palin ran for vice president; Joe Biden actually is vice president. Time was, the actual vice president of the United States would have gotten the scrutiny of the press, not the loser who returned to the ranch a world away from Washington. And this particular actual vice president happens to be a gaffe-factory and a boob. It's hardly as if Biden has kept a low profile, or sailed through his first four months as VP without missing a beat. But the actual vice president of the United States hasn't been the object of skepticism and scrutiny in the Washington dispatches of the Canadian Press; it's the Republican governor of Alaska -- and her family -- they've been onto.
The CP line is that Sarah Palin "has been touted as a future Republican presidential candidate." In another 3 or 7 or 11 years, Sarah Palin may be one of at least half a dozen Republicans running for the party's presidential nomination, so even her in-laws have been scrutinized, instead of those politicians who won actual elections and hold actual power in the here and now.
Two days after the presidential election, Lee-Anne Goodman recycled malicious rumors against Sarah Palin planted in the American press by anti-Palin political operatives. It was 650 words of purest gossip. The Herald promoted it on the front page.
The first line claimed, "Sarah Palin wasn't aware that Africa was a continent." That ought to have looked like a bridge too far even to the journalist class with their bottomless disdain for the capabilities of Sarah Palin, and in fact it turned out some of their credulous reporting on this was built on a hoax.
Then in the space of a few weeks in April and May, I counted three full-length dispatches on Sarah Palin and/or her family from Lee-Anne Goodman. They were as uniformly negative as the coverage of Obama was uniformly positive. In April, there was a story to do with some Palin nominee in Alaska who wasn't much enamored of homosexuality, which went into some detail on the "hillbilly" governor's "family and political theatrics that would do Jerry Springer proud," like "the arrest and indictment of her sister-in-law on break-and-enter charges" and "the sordid revelations of her daughter’s ex-boyfriend."
What tore it for me came in May. Lee-Anne Goodman devoted an entire article to Sarah Palin's 18 year old daughter, Bristol: "a decidedly curious poster girl for the cause of teenage abstinence." It was a hit-piece. A hit-piece on a powerless 18 year old girl. A girl was being ridiculed and sneered at for promoting abstinence after having a baby, in a Canadian Press dispatch from Washington on the World News page of my newspaper.
Lee-Anne Goodman lead with, "Do as she says, not as she does." There was even a gotcha quote from the girl's past: "Palin is encouraging adolescent girls to resist pre-marital sex entirely. This despite her remarks shortly after Tripp's birth that convincing teens to avoid having sex was 'not realistic at all.'"
I had never seen anything out of the CP Washington bureau along the lines of, "Obama's first full-year budget deficit, not counting bailouts, was three times the worst full-year deficit under Bush. This despite his remarks during the election campaign that 'what I've done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.'" A powerless teenager had been subjected to a level of skepticism and scrutiny from which the current president of the United States had been sheltered.
Bristol Palin's appearance on TV chat shows was not newsworthy in the first place; not for American newspapers and much less for Canadian ones. She holds no office, she's not seeking office, and she doesn't even talk politics. And I've never seen anything on the wires ridiculing the Clinton first daughter Chelsea -- even during the '08 presidential primaries when she was a grown woman actively campaigning for her mother and pointing at ambitions for national politics.
Lee-Anne Goodman has gone out of her way to run down Sarah Palin -- and her family. It's indulgent, it's gossipy, it's malicious, and it's a sick fixation. Lee-Anne Goodman does have plenty of company in that, among the political and journalist classes, but when the likes of Andrew Sullivan takes his hatchet to the Palins, it's not reprinted in newspapers across Canada under banners reading "News".
One more thing.
On the occasion of Obama's Ottawa visit, Lee-Anne Goodman took the American press to task for their ignorance of Canada. (I noted the piece mostly for the line, "The deliciously snarky Wonkette.com, the blog that dishes on D.C." There's a sentence that would never have been uttered by David Halton.) Fair enough, though those American journalists had the excuse that Canada wasn't their beat. But if insufficient knowledge of Canada among Americans gets Canadians exercised, then this is the sort of thing that does me, from Lee-Anne Goodman's post-election coverage: "Even in the Republican stronghold of Texas, people were basking in the post-election glow," which was demonstrated with a quote from a screenwriter in Austin.
This must be an obscure point among Canadians, but Austin is a notorious Democratic Party bastion. "Keep Austin Weird," as the bumper sticker says. And I'd guess "screenwriter" is a majority-Democrat profession. Show me a cattle-rancher "basking in the post-election glow" of Barack Obama, and I'd be impressed.
And another thing.
If Lee-Anne Goodman's dispatches came marked "opinion", my argument here would lose its thunder. But the Canadian Press insists on keeping up this pretense that they're just tellin' it like it is, and bristles at any suggestion to the contrary. Until the 20th Century, newspapers typically wore their prejudices on their sleeves. There's honesty in that, and square-dealing with the readers.
But until those pigs fly, and as long as I see these abuses, I intend to call them out. I won't take it down or take it back, and I won't be cowed.
(A second, shorter installment here.)
