It's been a while since anybody at Canada's newswire monopoly has tried to call the law down on me, wipe my little website from the internet in whole or part, or otherwise try to stifle some nobody who presumed to call them out on their abuses for once, so I thought I'd update my documentation of the abuses of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. (In this installment: "Selectivity and Sarah Palin", "Junk reporting and Tea Parties", "Sneering and Scott Brown", and "Incompetence and the filibuster")
Selectivity and Sarah Palin.
So. The Washington bureau of the Canadian Press can cite American polling after all. In just this past couple weeks it's reported on polls showing the unfitness for office of a conservative Republican, Sarah Palin, and the apparent wild popularity of a liberal Democrat government policy, to allow open homosexuality in the fighting forces. Judging by the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the American people must be repudiating conservatives and champing at the bit for their leftist government to "remake the nation", and this Age of Obama must be going swimmingly.
I almost thought, from the past half year or so, that it might be CP policy to never cite American polls. American polls have been unrelentingly bad news for the president and Congress of the United States, their governing party and nearly everything they hold dear, since sometime in the summer of '09, which might be the sort of thing a person would mention if she were, say, the sole American correspondent for the sole Canadian newswire service. And yet that half-year's worth of dismal news for the actual president and Congress, and their project to "remake the nation", seems scarcely to have made it into the dispatches of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. (I surveyed some of those poll findings as of August in a Chronicle-Herald Opinions piece that was a better predictor of the following half-year of American politics than anything that appeared in the Canadian Press or the Herald World News section in that time.)
The February 13 dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau was built entirely around a poll: "Poll: Palin not viable 2012 contender." I could have told you as much, without the aid of any poll and long before February of 2010. In fact, I did, here. But if Sarah Palin is a complete no-hoper for president, and considering that she's never held national public office, then how does the Canadian Press Washington bureau justify devoting such an extraordinary, prolific body of reportage to scrutinizing her, even unto the point of abusing its position with an entire report scorning her powerless 18 year-old daughter? (I wrote on that piece here; it ought never have been published in the news sections of the newspapers of Canada, and might even have been grounds for reassignment at a more serious news agency than the Canadian Press under Scott White.)
Lee-Anne Goodman, February 13, 2010: "New polls suggest the majority of Americans -- including conservatives -- have no confidence she's got what it takes to make it to the Oval Office. A Washington Post/ABC News poll suggests only 37 per cent of Americans have a favorable impression of Palin -- an all-time low. Fifty-five per cent view her unfavourably -- an all-time high."
The lowest ever! The highest ever! The chapter-and-verse on the poor Palin numbers went on for several paragraphs. Incidentally, "all-time" may not be the best usage for polling history covering only the 18 months since Sarah Palin has been known beyond Alaska. And a low approval rating will often correspond with a high disapproval rating, so it's not some confluence of especially bad luck that an "all-time low" positive impression would coincide with an "all-time high" unfavorable one, as if those are two completely independent findings. In any case, all the Palin-polling in the world counts for nothing, because Sarah Palin holds no public office, has never held national office, and was never going to be Republican nominee for president anytime soon.
(UPDATE, Feb. 16: Now here's a poll on electability -- not for some office-less punching bag, but the actual, sitting president and Congress of the United States. CNN, February 16: "44 percent of registered voters say Obama deserves re-election, with 52 percent saying the president does not deserve a second term. ... 34 percent feel that current federal lawmakers deserve re-election. ... That's the lowest number ever recorded for that question in a CNN survey. ... 51 percent feel their member of Congress should be re-elected -- also an all-time low in CNN polling." And that usage of "all-time low" refers to a period of longer than 18 months, including the last two midterm election years when control of both houses of Congress changed hands. But that's not the sort of thing that qualifies for news at the Canadian Press Washington bureau, which reported in January that Diane Sawyer's questioning Obama on the prospect of a one-term presidency "seems a premature topic of conversation".)
The Canadian Press Washington bureau had only just invoked a Gallup poll a week and a half earlier, in aid of a report claiming, "U.S. military wants to lift ban on gay serving openly."
Lee-Anne Goodman, February 3, 2010: "A Gallup poll taken last spring suggest the vast majority of Americans are opposed to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, even conservatives and weekly church-goers."
Now, that same Gallup poll in July of '09 found that Obama's job approval rating ranked "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures," and he's been stuck at or near the bottom in the Gallup poll archives for the most part since. Considering that the Canadian Press Washington bureau could barely type "Bush" without gratuitously appending "wildly unpopular" or "one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history" (as it happens, Bush worked out to be 7th in overall job approval of the 11 completed presidencies so far in the the Gallup poll), anyone might have thought that half a year's worth of bottom-of-the-heap presidential polling would rate a mention at the Canadian Press Washington bureau. But no. Indeed, when the CP Washington bureau brought up the subject of Obama's polls in September, it was to report -- twice in the same article -- that he was still a hit in Canada, without a hint of how he was faring in the one country where a president's public approval actually counts for anything.
But the Canadian Press Washington bureau got around to that. As in a passing reference, developed no further, to Obama's "sagging approval ratings" -- in late January, after Obama's gal had already lost "Ted Kennedy's seat" in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, two-and-a-half months after Obama's men had lost gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, both of which Obama had carried exactly a year before, and six months after Gallup first reported that Obama was down to 10th of the 12 presidencies since the advent of the Gallup presidential job approval rating. And Obama's approval rating wasn't "sagging"; that's just more aping of hackneyed newswire cliches, and too euphemistic to be descriptive. Obama's approval was scraping the basement floor, and had been for half a year before that glancing admission in the direction of reality.
The CP took the same line as the AP had taken a day or two earlier, explaining away Obama's troubles as public upset over high unemployment and so on, don't you know. Then the Canadian Press Washington bureau added a specious claim that part of Obama's difficulty was his "escalation" of the Afghan War. But Afghanistan is at this time one of the few issues where Obama scores a net-positive approval rating, but you see, the CP Washington bureau reported back in its heady days of covering the ascension of Obama that he had "pledged to peacefully end America's two unpopular wars." Of course, by that point the Iraq War had been won and the American withdrawal agreed by the U.S. and Iraqi governments, and as for Afghanistan, what Obama had pledged was precisely to escalate the war. It may be Obama's lone kept promise. For now, anyway. (Incidentally, how on earth can a war be "peacefully ended"? Wars are won or lost, or very occasionally stalemated; there is no painless alternative of "peacefully ended".) So when the CP Washington bureau blames Afghanistan for Obama's troubles, it says much more about the CP Washington bureau and the leftist elite than about American public opinion. The day may come when Obama falls down on Afghanistan, but at this point it's one of the few areas where he's still above water. Anyway, the jobs line does make a good start on explaining Obama's troubles, but it's more excuse-making than reporting.
To that end, and lest anyone imagine that there might not have been anything else worth mentioning in the Gallup poll, I offer these shock findings from Gallup, released five days after the open-homosexuality-in-the-military story invoking the Gallup poll, and a week and a half after Obama's State of the Union address, with its attendant "bump" in presidential approval. Gallup, February 8, 2010:
-more Americans disapprove than approve of Obama on six issues out of nine
-approval on the deficit down to 32 percent, with 64 percent disapproving
-approval on the economy at 36 percent to 61 percent
-approval on health-care at 36 percent to 60 percent
-approval among independents down to 24 percent on the deficit, 29 percent on the economy, and 24 percent on health-care
And Gallup's sample is "all adults", which is typically the most sympathetic to the Left. So Obama was underwater on six issues of nine, just a year in, with every elite on earth sheltering and flattering him, in the most friendly polling sample, and just after his first official SOTU address commandeering American primetime television for an hour and a half. The high unemployment is just the start of it; Obama's bigger problem is that the American people don't much agree with him, though you'd never guess it from reading the Canadian Press Washington bureau.
But back to this latest entry in the isn't-Sarah-Palin-just-the-worst series of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. When I made the case last May that the CP Washington bureau was excessively and obsessively scrutinizing Sarah Palin, the very "Editor-in-Chief" of the national newswire monopoly involved himself and justified every bit of the coverage on the grounds that Palin had been "touted" as a presidential nominee. As I wrote at the time, I do not accept that being "touted" as a putative nominee for president of the United States in 2012 or 2016 or 2020 warrants regular and uniformly-critical coverage in the newpapers of Canada in 2009, but that is the publicly-stated Canadian Press rationale for its excessive and obsessive scrutiny of Sarah Palin, and now the very headline on a dispatch of the Canadian Press itself informs us that Palin is not a "viable contender". The Canadian Press has defeated its own only stated justification for its Sarah Palin vendetta.
The Canadian Press Washington bureau devotes exquisite detail to those poor poll findings for Sarah Palin, but the Palin numbers are the irrelevant consolation of a leftist elite existing in denial of the historic collapse of Obama and his project to "remake the nation". Those Gallup numbers I sketched summarily above actually bear on the state and direction of American politics and government and on actual policies actually being pursued by the actual government of the United States, and they are positively calamitous for Obama and his agenda. They are also not even intimated anywhere in the dispatches of the lone Washington correspondent of the lone Canadian newswire service. How is anyone better off for their newspaper being turned upside down into an escape from reality? -- and worse, a denial of reality?
What do you call it when a writer cites those polls that affirm her own prejudices, and conspicuously ignores more than half a year of relentlessly contrary polling? Opinion journalism? Delusional? The Canadian Press calls it "the news".
Junk reporting and Tea Parties.
It was the same with the Tea Parties, which became the defining political movement of 2009. They began in February but when the Canadian Press Washington bureau treated them in May, it was only to sneer and to demonize, even declining to call them by their obvious and proper name, preferring instead to repeat the pornographic leftist taunt "teabagging protests".
To the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the defining movement of American politics in 2009 was just another clump of rednecks, only "ostensibly" concerned with policy, and in fact crypto-racist enemies of the state, to be demonized in the CP Washington bureau series on the theme. One of the early entries in the series was actually headlined "U.S. racists direct hateful messages at Obama". (I documented some of this at the time, here and here.) A single, serious report on the Tea Parties would have painted the most descriptive and predictive picture of American current events in 2009 and beyond, but the Canadian Press Washington bureau deals too much in the crudest caricatures of the average American to have been capable of understanding the Tea Partiers as anything other than latter-day lynch mobs, which is bad enough in any Canadian elite, but considerably more problematic in the sole Canadian newswire correspondent in America.
One of the reports in that Canadian Press Washington bureau series, supposedly uncovering murderous racism behind the opposition to Obama, repeated the claim -- found in a single book -- that death threats to the president had risen some "400 per cent" since Obama took office. What was that they taught in J-school about needing at least two sources for a claim? It turned out the claim was bogus. That "400 percent" was off by just about 400 percent.
The very Director of the Secret Service, Mark Sullivan, testified to Congress in December that "the threats right now ... is the same level as it has been for the previous two presidents at this point in their administrations. ... I have heard a number out there that the threat is up by 400 percent. ... I'm not sure where that number came from."
I know where it ended up, among other places: in my newspaper's World News, from the Canadian Press in Washington. Just more junk reporting from the Canadian Press Washington bureau, reproduced in the newspapers of Canada as fact, in aid of a storyline putting Obama up on the cross and turning the protesting American citizen into a suspect, and the record never corrected.
Earlier in its "Obama opposition nothing more than vicious, murderous racism" (not an actual headline, but it might as well have been) series, the Canadian Press Washington bureau reported on an imaginary death threat against Obama at a Sarah Palin rally -- seven months after it had been debunked by the Secret Service. (I documented the case at the time here.) Crap CP Washington bureau reporting, never corrected, repeated and amplified across Canada through the CP's monopoly network.
The implication in those Canadian Press Washington bureau reports was that the opposition to Barack Obama was illegitimate, and indeed, that is precisely the assumption of a 21st Century leftist elite. The assumption is that conservatism must necessarily be the result of ignorance, "intolerance" (in the political sense, not the dictionary sense), racial hatred, greed, stupidity, etc., while leftism in the same assumption isn't so much an ideology as the obvious conclusions of educated, intelligent people of good will. That is the worldview of a 21st Century leftist elite, and it is the worldview of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, which is a problem, because the worldview is bollocks, and because it precludes any possibility of impartiality, particularly in reporting on the Western world's most profoundly conservative and anti-elitist nation.
Sneering and Scott Brown.
The Canadian Press Washington bureau also reduced newly-elected Republican Senator Scott Brown to the sneer "onetime pin-up boy". Apropos of nothing. I suppose it wasn't absolutely necessary to mention Brown's 30 years' service in the National Guard or rank of Lieutenant Colonel, his three terms as a state senator or three terms as state rep, his law practice, etc., etc., and another CP Washington bureau report on the same general subject did at least acknowledge he'd been a state senator. But "pin-up boy" alludes to Brown's posing for an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine 28 years earlier -- at age 22. That's the sort of thing you get when you send a gossip columnist to cover Washington.
The gratuitous "pin-up boy" slight was common on the bitter Left, as in "pin-up boy for the teabaggers" (Huffington Post), and among the kind of people who write things like, "GOP Nazi Pin-Up Boy Exploits Voters' Frustration." The only instance of "pin-up boy" or "pinup boy" I could find anywhere in the Associated Press was in a quote from a bitter leftist who said she voted for the Democrat Coakley "to make sure the pinup boy doesn't get into office." At the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the bitter leftist is the one writing the newswire copy.
Incompetence and the filibuster.
And apart from the gross bias of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, there's the question of basic competence. Following is the CP Washington bureau's definition of the filibuster. I repeat, this is the definition of filibuster by the Washington bureau for Canada's newswire monopoly, and not a junior high social studies presentation: "The filibuster, a Senate rule that is a peculiarity of American politics, essentially gives the minority party the power to stop any legislation dead in its tracks".
That looks to me very much like a political science definition by someone with absolutely no aptitude for political science:
1. The filibuster is not peculiar to the United States. The U.S. Senate filibuster may be an extreme form of the phenomenon, but the filibuster is found in the Westminster systems including even the Ontario Legislative Assembly, which I was given to believe the Canadian Press Washington bureau was supposed to know something about.
2. The filibuster is not a "rule". It is pursuant to a Senate rule, and we even refer to the "filibuster rule", but the filibuster is a procedure or mechanism, or maneuver or tactic, not a "rule". Calling the filibuster a "rule" is subliterate.
3. It is not "the minority party" that is empowered by the filibuster, but any combination of senators totaling at least 41 percent. A couple weeks after that CP report ran, Senators Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson -- Democrats both -- joined Republicans in filibustering the confirmation of Obama's radical nominee for National Labor Relations Board.
4. And this business of "stopping any legislation dead in its tracks" could hardly be more crude. The filibuster blocks bills from being put to a vote. Before a bill can be voted on in the Senate, it must pass a cloture motion with at least 60 percent -- "cloture" referring to the closing of debate -- and that's where the filibuster comes in.
So if the Canadian Press wanted a one-line definition for the U.S. Senate filibuster which didn't look like it was written by an uninterested junior high schooler, it might have gone something like, "a parliamentary procedure whereby a minority of at least 41 percent can block legislation from coming to a vote." The CP's definition of filibuster is like defining a tank as "essentially a metal thingy that army men ride in", only not as accurate. That definition is an embarrassment, or it ought to be. Shouldn't a firm grounding in political science, not to mention war and economics, be a job requirement for anyone posted as the lone Washington correspondent for the lone Canadian newswire service? The average concerned citizen or letter-to-the-editor-writer could do at least as well, and very probably a sight better. Whatever credentials and cirricula vitae and contacts can these elites have that count for more than knowledge and accuracy and the capacity to present a complete story?
All of which is why Fox News -- which the Canadian Press Washington bureau has referred to as the "notoriously right-wing Fox News" -- recently became briefly the highest rated channel of any kind in all American cable television. Fox News is the antidote to the elite press that holds the American people in contempt, refuses to scrutinize the president and Congress so long as they are Democrats, and shuts out at least half the story. Fox News now has more viewers at 3 AM than CNN has in primetime. FNC's 3 AM ET comedy Red Eye -- which the press and government of Canada pathetically waged war against a year ago -- is now beating each of CNN's primetime heavyweights in the 25-54 demographic.
But that's just another telling snapshot of the nation that you'll never read in the Canadian Press Washington bureau, incapable as it is of reflecting reality in a conservative nation, and presenting instead a kind of delusional alternative universe of "the world as it ought to be" according to Canadian leftist elites. Anyone would be further ahead knowing nothing at all than reading the coverage of the Canadian Press Washington bureau and imagining it to bear any resemblance to reality. For over a year in this Age of Obama, the Canadian Press has been silent on the scandals of the Obama administration, the abuses of the Democratic Congress, the historic collapse of Obama and his Congress, and the tectonic shifts of the American people. Anyone depending for their coverage of American current events on the Canadian Press would have been oblivious to the great, relentless rightward realignment of the nation over the past year, and would have been nonplussed by the unthinkable Democratic defeats, which would have appeared to them to be quite without explanation. The Canadian Press Washington bureau belongs on the opinions pages or else not in the newspapers at all.
(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, here, and here.)
Selectivity and Sarah Palin.
So. The Washington bureau of the Canadian Press can cite American polling after all. In just this past couple weeks it's reported on polls showing the unfitness for office of a conservative Republican, Sarah Palin, and the apparent wild popularity of a liberal Democrat government policy, to allow open homosexuality in the fighting forces. Judging by the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the American people must be repudiating conservatives and champing at the bit for their leftist government to "remake the nation", and this Age of Obama must be going swimmingly.
I almost thought, from the past half year or so, that it might be CP policy to never cite American polls. American polls have been unrelentingly bad news for the president and Congress of the United States, their governing party and nearly everything they hold dear, since sometime in the summer of '09, which might be the sort of thing a person would mention if she were, say, the sole American correspondent for the sole Canadian newswire service. And yet that half-year's worth of dismal news for the actual president and Congress, and their project to "remake the nation", seems scarcely to have made it into the dispatches of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. (I surveyed some of those poll findings as of August in a Chronicle-Herald Opinions piece that was a better predictor of the following half-year of American politics than anything that appeared in the Canadian Press or the Herald World News section in that time.)
The February 13 dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau was built entirely around a poll: "Poll: Palin not viable 2012 contender." I could have told you as much, without the aid of any poll and long before February of 2010. In fact, I did, here. But if Sarah Palin is a complete no-hoper for president, and considering that she's never held national public office, then how does the Canadian Press Washington bureau justify devoting such an extraordinary, prolific body of reportage to scrutinizing her, even unto the point of abusing its position with an entire report scorning her powerless 18 year-old daughter? (I wrote on that piece here; it ought never have been published in the news sections of the newspapers of Canada, and might even have been grounds for reassignment at a more serious news agency than the Canadian Press under Scott White.)
Lee-Anne Goodman, February 13, 2010: "New polls suggest the majority of Americans -- including conservatives -- have no confidence she's got what it takes to make it to the Oval Office. A Washington Post/ABC News poll suggests only 37 per cent of Americans have a favorable impression of Palin -- an all-time low. Fifty-five per cent view her unfavourably -- an all-time high."
The lowest ever! The highest ever! The chapter-and-verse on the poor Palin numbers went on for several paragraphs. Incidentally, "all-time" may not be the best usage for polling history covering only the 18 months since Sarah Palin has been known beyond Alaska. And a low approval rating will often correspond with a high disapproval rating, so it's not some confluence of especially bad luck that an "all-time low" positive impression would coincide with an "all-time high" unfavorable one, as if those are two completely independent findings. In any case, all the Palin-polling in the world counts for nothing, because Sarah Palin holds no public office, has never held national office, and was never going to be Republican nominee for president anytime soon.
(UPDATE, Feb. 16: Now here's a poll on electability -- not for some office-less punching bag, but the actual, sitting president and Congress of the United States. CNN, February 16: "44 percent of registered voters say Obama deserves re-election, with 52 percent saying the president does not deserve a second term. ... 34 percent feel that current federal lawmakers deserve re-election. ... That's the lowest number ever recorded for that question in a CNN survey. ... 51 percent feel their member of Congress should be re-elected -- also an all-time low in CNN polling." And that usage of "all-time low" refers to a period of longer than 18 months, including the last two midterm election years when control of both houses of Congress changed hands. But that's not the sort of thing that qualifies for news at the Canadian Press Washington bureau, which reported in January that Diane Sawyer's questioning Obama on the prospect of a one-term presidency "seems a premature topic of conversation".)
The Canadian Press Washington bureau had only just invoked a Gallup poll a week and a half earlier, in aid of a report claiming, "U.S. military wants to lift ban on gay serving openly."
Lee-Anne Goodman, February 3, 2010: "A Gallup poll taken last spring suggest the vast majority of Americans are opposed to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, even conservatives and weekly church-goers."
Now, that same Gallup poll in July of '09 found that Obama's job approval rating ranked "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures," and he's been stuck at or near the bottom in the Gallup poll archives for the most part since. Considering that the Canadian Press Washington bureau could barely type "Bush" without gratuitously appending "wildly unpopular" or "one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history" (as it happens, Bush worked out to be 7th in overall job approval of the 11 completed presidencies so far in the the Gallup poll), anyone might have thought that half a year's worth of bottom-of-the-heap presidential polling would rate a mention at the Canadian Press Washington bureau. But no. Indeed, when the CP Washington bureau brought up the subject of Obama's polls in September, it was to report -- twice in the same article -- that he was still a hit in Canada, without a hint of how he was faring in the one country where a president's public approval actually counts for anything.
But the Canadian Press Washington bureau got around to that. As in a passing reference, developed no further, to Obama's "sagging approval ratings" -- in late January, after Obama's gal had already lost "Ted Kennedy's seat" in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, two-and-a-half months after Obama's men had lost gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, both of which Obama had carried exactly a year before, and six months after Gallup first reported that Obama was down to 10th of the 12 presidencies since the advent of the Gallup presidential job approval rating. And Obama's approval rating wasn't "sagging"; that's just more aping of hackneyed newswire cliches, and too euphemistic to be descriptive. Obama's approval was scraping the basement floor, and had been for half a year before that glancing admission in the direction of reality.
The CP took the same line as the AP had taken a day or two earlier, explaining away Obama's troubles as public upset over high unemployment and so on, don't you know. Then the Canadian Press Washington bureau added a specious claim that part of Obama's difficulty was his "escalation" of the Afghan War. But Afghanistan is at this time one of the few issues where Obama scores a net-positive approval rating, but you see, the CP Washington bureau reported back in its heady days of covering the ascension of Obama that he had "pledged to peacefully end America's two unpopular wars." Of course, by that point the Iraq War had been won and the American withdrawal agreed by the U.S. and Iraqi governments, and as for Afghanistan, what Obama had pledged was precisely to escalate the war. It may be Obama's lone kept promise. For now, anyway. (Incidentally, how on earth can a war be "peacefully ended"? Wars are won or lost, or very occasionally stalemated; there is no painless alternative of "peacefully ended".) So when the CP Washington bureau blames Afghanistan for Obama's troubles, it says much more about the CP Washington bureau and the leftist elite than about American public opinion. The day may come when Obama falls down on Afghanistan, but at this point it's one of the few areas where he's still above water. Anyway, the jobs line does make a good start on explaining Obama's troubles, but it's more excuse-making than reporting.
To that end, and lest anyone imagine that there might not have been anything else worth mentioning in the Gallup poll, I offer these shock findings from Gallup, released five days after the open-homosexuality-in-the-military story invoking the Gallup poll, and a week and a half after Obama's State of the Union address, with its attendant "bump" in presidential approval. Gallup, February 8, 2010:
-more Americans disapprove than approve of Obama on six issues out of nine
-approval on the deficit down to 32 percent, with 64 percent disapproving
-approval on the economy at 36 percent to 61 percent
-approval on health-care at 36 percent to 60 percent
-approval among independents down to 24 percent on the deficit, 29 percent on the economy, and 24 percent on health-care
And Gallup's sample is "all adults", which is typically the most sympathetic to the Left. So Obama was underwater on six issues of nine, just a year in, with every elite on earth sheltering and flattering him, in the most friendly polling sample, and just after his first official SOTU address commandeering American primetime television for an hour and a half. The high unemployment is just the start of it; Obama's bigger problem is that the American people don't much agree with him, though you'd never guess it from reading the Canadian Press Washington bureau.
But back to this latest entry in the isn't-Sarah-Palin-just-the-worst series of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. When I made the case last May that the CP Washington bureau was excessively and obsessively scrutinizing Sarah Palin, the very "Editor-in-Chief" of the national newswire monopoly involved himself and justified every bit of the coverage on the grounds that Palin had been "touted" as a presidential nominee. As I wrote at the time, I do not accept that being "touted" as a putative nominee for president of the United States in 2012 or 2016 or 2020 warrants regular and uniformly-critical coverage in the newpapers of Canada in 2009, but that is the publicly-stated Canadian Press rationale for its excessive and obsessive scrutiny of Sarah Palin, and now the very headline on a dispatch of the Canadian Press itself informs us that Palin is not a "viable contender". The Canadian Press has defeated its own only stated justification for its Sarah Palin vendetta.
The Canadian Press Washington bureau devotes exquisite detail to those poor poll findings for Sarah Palin, but the Palin numbers are the irrelevant consolation of a leftist elite existing in denial of the historic collapse of Obama and his project to "remake the nation". Those Gallup numbers I sketched summarily above actually bear on the state and direction of American politics and government and on actual policies actually being pursued by the actual government of the United States, and they are positively calamitous for Obama and his agenda. They are also not even intimated anywhere in the dispatches of the lone Washington correspondent of the lone Canadian newswire service. How is anyone better off for their newspaper being turned upside down into an escape from reality? -- and worse, a denial of reality?
What do you call it when a writer cites those polls that affirm her own prejudices, and conspicuously ignores more than half a year of relentlessly contrary polling? Opinion journalism? Delusional? The Canadian Press calls it "the news".
Junk reporting and Tea Parties.
It was the same with the Tea Parties, which became the defining political movement of 2009. They began in February but when the Canadian Press Washington bureau treated them in May, it was only to sneer and to demonize, even declining to call them by their obvious and proper name, preferring instead to repeat the pornographic leftist taunt "teabagging protests".
To the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the defining movement of American politics in 2009 was just another clump of rednecks, only "ostensibly" concerned with policy, and in fact crypto-racist enemies of the state, to be demonized in the CP Washington bureau series on the theme. One of the early entries in the series was actually headlined "U.S. racists direct hateful messages at Obama". (I documented some of this at the time, here and here.) A single, serious report on the Tea Parties would have painted the most descriptive and predictive picture of American current events in 2009 and beyond, but the Canadian Press Washington bureau deals too much in the crudest caricatures of the average American to have been capable of understanding the Tea Partiers as anything other than latter-day lynch mobs, which is bad enough in any Canadian elite, but considerably more problematic in the sole Canadian newswire correspondent in America.
One of the reports in that Canadian Press Washington bureau series, supposedly uncovering murderous racism behind the opposition to Obama, repeated the claim -- found in a single book -- that death threats to the president had risen some "400 per cent" since Obama took office. What was that they taught in J-school about needing at least two sources for a claim? It turned out the claim was bogus. That "400 percent" was off by just about 400 percent.
The very Director of the Secret Service, Mark Sullivan, testified to Congress in December that "the threats right now ... is the same level as it has been for the previous two presidents at this point in their administrations. ... I have heard a number out there that the threat is up by 400 percent. ... I'm not sure where that number came from."
I know where it ended up, among other places: in my newspaper's World News, from the Canadian Press in Washington. Just more junk reporting from the Canadian Press Washington bureau, reproduced in the newspapers of Canada as fact, in aid of a storyline putting Obama up on the cross and turning the protesting American citizen into a suspect, and the record never corrected.
Earlier in its "Obama opposition nothing more than vicious, murderous racism" (not an actual headline, but it might as well have been) series, the Canadian Press Washington bureau reported on an imaginary death threat against Obama at a Sarah Palin rally -- seven months after it had been debunked by the Secret Service. (I documented the case at the time here.) Crap CP Washington bureau reporting, never corrected, repeated and amplified across Canada through the CP's monopoly network.
The implication in those Canadian Press Washington bureau reports was that the opposition to Barack Obama was illegitimate, and indeed, that is precisely the assumption of a 21st Century leftist elite. The assumption is that conservatism must necessarily be the result of ignorance, "intolerance" (in the political sense, not the dictionary sense), racial hatred, greed, stupidity, etc., while leftism in the same assumption isn't so much an ideology as the obvious conclusions of educated, intelligent people of good will. That is the worldview of a 21st Century leftist elite, and it is the worldview of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, which is a problem, because the worldview is bollocks, and because it precludes any possibility of impartiality, particularly in reporting on the Western world's most profoundly conservative and anti-elitist nation.
Sneering and Scott Brown.
The Canadian Press Washington bureau also reduced newly-elected Republican Senator Scott Brown to the sneer "onetime pin-up boy". Apropos of nothing. I suppose it wasn't absolutely necessary to mention Brown's 30 years' service in the National Guard or rank of Lieutenant Colonel, his three terms as a state senator or three terms as state rep, his law practice, etc., etc., and another CP Washington bureau report on the same general subject did at least acknowledge he'd been a state senator. But "pin-up boy" alludes to Brown's posing for an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine 28 years earlier -- at age 22. That's the sort of thing you get when you send a gossip columnist to cover Washington.
The gratuitous "pin-up boy" slight was common on the bitter Left, as in "pin-up boy for the teabaggers" (Huffington Post), and among the kind of people who write things like, "GOP Nazi Pin-Up Boy Exploits Voters' Frustration." The only instance of "pin-up boy" or "pinup boy" I could find anywhere in the Associated Press was in a quote from a bitter leftist who said she voted for the Democrat Coakley "to make sure the pinup boy doesn't get into office." At the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the bitter leftist is the one writing the newswire copy.
Incompetence and the filibuster.
And apart from the gross bias of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, there's the question of basic competence. Following is the CP Washington bureau's definition of the filibuster. I repeat, this is the definition of filibuster by the Washington bureau for Canada's newswire monopoly, and not a junior high social studies presentation: "The filibuster, a Senate rule that is a peculiarity of American politics, essentially gives the minority party the power to stop any legislation dead in its tracks".
That looks to me very much like a political science definition by someone with absolutely no aptitude for political science:
1. The filibuster is not peculiar to the United States. The U.S. Senate filibuster may be an extreme form of the phenomenon, but the filibuster is found in the Westminster systems including even the Ontario Legislative Assembly, which I was given to believe the Canadian Press Washington bureau was supposed to know something about.
2. The filibuster is not a "rule". It is pursuant to a Senate rule, and we even refer to the "filibuster rule", but the filibuster is a procedure or mechanism, or maneuver or tactic, not a "rule". Calling the filibuster a "rule" is subliterate.
3. It is not "the minority party" that is empowered by the filibuster, but any combination of senators totaling at least 41 percent. A couple weeks after that CP report ran, Senators Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson -- Democrats both -- joined Republicans in filibustering the confirmation of Obama's radical nominee for National Labor Relations Board.
4. And this business of "stopping any legislation dead in its tracks" could hardly be more crude. The filibuster blocks bills from being put to a vote. Before a bill can be voted on in the Senate, it must pass a cloture motion with at least 60 percent -- "cloture" referring to the closing of debate -- and that's where the filibuster comes in.
So if the Canadian Press wanted a one-line definition for the U.S. Senate filibuster which didn't look like it was written by an uninterested junior high schooler, it might have gone something like, "a parliamentary procedure whereby a minority of at least 41 percent can block legislation from coming to a vote." The CP's definition of filibuster is like defining a tank as "essentially a metal thingy that army men ride in", only not as accurate. That definition is an embarrassment, or it ought to be. Shouldn't a firm grounding in political science, not to mention war and economics, be a job requirement for anyone posted as the lone Washington correspondent for the lone Canadian newswire service? The average concerned citizen or letter-to-the-editor-writer could do at least as well, and very probably a sight better. Whatever credentials and cirricula vitae and contacts can these elites have that count for more than knowledge and accuracy and the capacity to present a complete story?
All of which is why Fox News -- which the Canadian Press Washington bureau has referred to as the "notoriously right-wing Fox News" -- recently became briefly the highest rated channel of any kind in all American cable television. Fox News is the antidote to the elite press that holds the American people in contempt, refuses to scrutinize the president and Congress so long as they are Democrats, and shuts out at least half the story. Fox News now has more viewers at 3 AM than CNN has in primetime. FNC's 3 AM ET comedy Red Eye -- which the press and government of Canada pathetically waged war against a year ago -- is now beating each of CNN's primetime heavyweights in the 25-54 demographic.
But that's just another telling snapshot of the nation that you'll never read in the Canadian Press Washington bureau, incapable as it is of reflecting reality in a conservative nation, and presenting instead a kind of delusional alternative universe of "the world as it ought to be" according to Canadian leftist elites. Anyone would be further ahead knowing nothing at all than reading the coverage of the Canadian Press Washington bureau and imagining it to bear any resemblance to reality. For over a year in this Age of Obama, the Canadian Press has been silent on the scandals of the Obama administration, the abuses of the Democratic Congress, the historic collapse of Obama and his Congress, and the tectonic shifts of the American people. Anyone depending for their coverage of American current events on the Canadian Press would have been oblivious to the great, relentless rightward realignment of the nation over the past year, and would have been nonplussed by the unthinkable Democratic defeats, which would have appeared to them to be quite without explanation. The Canadian Press Washington bureau belongs on the opinions pages or else not in the newspapers at all.
(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, here, and here.)
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