If you haven't already seen it you can get the debate [[ LINK REMOVED ]]
I just watched it tonight and what an utter disappointment. Stephanopoulos is a douche, peering down at us with his glasses. With PA a week away there is so much they could have done with this debate and they chose to amplify the political theater. This is really something I would expect from Fox News, not ABC.
Maybe its because I support him, but I am certain Stephanopoulos was at Obama's throat the whole time. He consistently challenged Obama on his responses. I could go through the whole debate and show this case by case but I'm too lazy. The first half of the debate almost exclusively focused on Obama's negatives. Obama was asked about rescinding an invitation to his pastor, explained the reasons, then later on Stephanopoulos says "but you rescinded the invitation." Hello? He just explained that 5 minutes ago!
Clinton couldn't be more in her element, pandering to the whole charade. I admit she appeared confident, on message, and experienced. The problem is it felt like the whole thing was scripted to portray that image. Enough with the Chelsea cutaways!
Flag Pins??? Weather Underground?? Wright??
HOW ABOUT HEARING SOME REAL ISSUES!!!!!
I HATE THE US MEDIA!!!!
but to head off any
here is the Truth about the whole Ayers crap that Clinton patsy Stephanopoulos got his questions for Obama from Sean Hannity of Fox News
and that bitch hill was loving it.....till Obama stated what her Husband did for the very same group......
lets see, a $200 donation and co-chairing a comitee that HELPED THE POOR or a Presidential Pardon?? hmmmmmmm what is worse?
no wonder other countries think this nation is a joke!
quote:
Fact check: Obama and former radical
15 hours ago
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) � Democratic Sen. Barack Obama is defending his relationship with William Ayers, a college professor who was once part of the radical Weather Underground and spent years as a fugitive after a 1970 explosion that killed three members.
Obama suggests he barely knows Ayers and shouldn't be held accountable for anything Ayers said or did. But others, including Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, say the relationship gives Republicans an issue to exploit against Obama.
THE SPIN:
Obama was asked about Ayers as part of a discussion of his patriotism in a presidential debate Wednesday night in Philadelphia.
Obama responded that Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois, is "a guy who lives in my neighborhood" but hasn't endorsed him and doesn't regularly exchange ideas with him.
"And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense," Obama said.
Clinton seized on Ayers as "an issue that certainly the Republicans will be raising." She pointed out that Obama and Ayers served on a charity board together and brought the 9-11 terrorist attacks into the mix by noting that an interview in which Ayers denied any regret for the radical group's bomb-making happened to appear on the day of the attacks.
THE FACTS:
Ayers was part of the Weather Underground when a bomb the group was making exploded at a New York townhouse. Three people were killed. He fled and spent years as a fugitive. He met and married fellow fugitive Bernadine Dohrn during that period.
The two surrendered in 1980 and were never prosecuted. They now teach at Chicago universities.
Ayers and Obama both served on the board of directors of the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based charity that focuses on developing community groups to assist the poor. A variety of business executives, journalists and academics serve on the board.
When Obama was organizing his first race for the state legislature, the incumbent lawmaker he hoped to replace introduced him to her supporters and urged them to back Obama. One introductory event took place at the home of Ayers and Dohrn, according to published reports.
Ayers contributed $200 to Obama's legislative campaign in 2001, but there is no other sign that he has actively aided Obama's political career.
During Wednesday's debate, Obama argued that if the candidates are to be held responsible for distant connections to the Weather Underground, then Clinton would fail, too. He pointed out that her husband, just before leaving the White House, commuted the sentences of two members of the group who had been convicted of violent crimes.
Maybe ABC should of done some FACT checking.... :rolleyes:
this kid of just shows more proof that he - Obama - is right about this country. Once people are ready to stop playing bull games, maybe we can solve some real issues.
Q5echo
if you are a fan of irony, these are truly momentous times.
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by josh4
This is really something I would expect from Fox News, not ABC.
maybe it's finally high time you rethink EVERYTHING you know about the main stream media.
Lebezniatnikov
No offense, but do we really need another presidential election thread? I enjoy discussing it, but we may as well change the name of the sub-forum.
LazFX
I was thinking the same.... maybe we should have one of the MODs merge.....
josh4
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
maybe it's finally high time you rethink EVERYTHING you know about the main stream media.
I swear, elaboration is your enemy. Until then good day sir.
MisterOpus1
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
maybe it's finally high time you rethink EVERYTHING you know about the main stream media.
Hate to say it, but I think you have a fair point.
MisterOpus1
Nice historical twist perspective on that ABC debacle:
quote:
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (Slight Return)
by publius
Presidential candidates Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held this debate on April 16, 1858 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
MODERATORS:
CHARLIE GIBSON, ABC NEWS
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC NEWS
MR. GIBSON: So we're going to begin with opening statements, and we had a flip of the coin, and the brief opening statement first from Mr. Lincoln.
LINCOLN: Thank you very much, Charlie and George, and thanks to all in the audience and who are out there. I appear before you today for the purpose of discussing the leading political topics which now agitate the public mind.
We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
STEPHANOPOULOS: I�m sorry to interrupt, but do you think Mr. Douglas loves America as much you do?
LINCOLN: Sure I do.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But who loves America more?
LINCOLN: I�d prefer to get on with my opening statement George.
STEPHANOPOULOS: If your love for America were eight apples, how many apples would Senator Douglas�s love be?
LINCOLN: Eight.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Proceed.
LINCOLN: In my opinion, slavery will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Excuse me, did an Elijah H. Johnson attend your church?
LINCOLN: When I was a boy in Illinois forty years ago, yes. I think he was a deacon.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you aware that he regularly called Kentucky �a land of swine and whores�?
LINCOLN: Sounds right -- his ex-wife was from Kentucky.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Why did you remain in the church after hearing those statements?
LINCOLN: I was eight.
DOUGLAS: This is an important question George -- it's an issue that certainly will be raised in the fall.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you denounce him?
LINCOLN: I�d like to get back to the divided house if I may.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you denounce and reject him?
LINCOLN: If it will make you shut up, yes, I denounce and reject him.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you denounce and reject him with sugar on top?
LINCOLN: Yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: No takesies-backsies?
LINCOLN: Yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Whoa, so you would consider a takesie-backsie?
LINCOLN: That�s not what I meant�
DOUGLAS: When I was 11, my grandpappy and I chopped wood and shot bears.
LINCOLN: Ahem, I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect slavery will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you love America this much (extending fingers), this much (extending hands slightly), or thiiiiiis much (extending hands broadly)?
LINCOLN: I think we covered this�
GIBSON: If I may interrupt�
LINCOLN: Please.
GIBSON: I noticed, Mr. Lincoln, that your American flag pin was upside down�
LINCOLN: Yes, the wind caught it. Now, as I was saying...
GIBSON: We get questions about this all the time over at Powerline and on Hannity�s talk show. Mr. Douglas has said this is a major vulnerability for you in the fall. So I�ll ask again � do you love America?
LINCOLN: (scowling with a forced smile). Yes.
GIBSON: If your love for America were ice cream, what flavor would it be?
LINCOLN: (pausing with disgust and turning back to camera) Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new -- North as well as South.
DOUGLAS: He didn�t answer the question Charlie. This fall, that question is going to be on the minds of the American public. I�ve proudly stated that my love for America is Very Berry Strawberry.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me ask it another way. If Elijah Johnson were chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, would you eat it? Or would you decline to eat it?
DOUGLAS: Personally, as for me, I would decline to eat it.
LINCOLN (shaking his head): Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination -- piece of machinery, so to speak -- compounded of the Nebraska doctrine, and the Dred Scott decision.
STEPHANOPOULOS: We�ll get to Dred Scott in the second hour, time willing, but I want to get back to the ice cream question. And that's what we'll do, after the break.
^^^^ ha ha You just got to "brush it off" lol this man is class with a lil "real"
the more I hear and learn about him the more I really like him!
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by josh4
Until then good day sir.
until when? whatever:rolleyes:
anyways, you have some fairly lacking assumptions about a lot of things, espescially the media.
quote:
Obama's secret weapon: the media By JOHN F. HARRIS & JIM VANDEHEI | 4/18/08 7:05 PM EST
Are journalists not merely observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon?
My, oh my, but weren�t those fellows from ABC News rude to Barack Obama at this week�s presidential debate.
Nothing but petty, process-oriented questions, asked in a prosecutorial tone, about the Democratic front-runner�s personal associations and his electability. Where was the substance? Where was the balance?
Where indeed. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her aides have been complaining for months about imbalance in news coverage. For the most part, the reaction to her from the political-media commentariat has been: Stop whining.
That�s still a good response now that it is Obama partisans � some of whom are showing up in distressingly inappropriate places � who are doing the whining.
The shower of indignation on Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos over the last few days is the clearest evidence yet that the Clintonites are fundamentally correct in their complaint that she has been flying throughout this campaign into a headwind of media favoritism for Obama.
Last fall, when NBC�s Tim Russert hazed Clinton with a bunch of similar questions � a mix of fair and impertinent � he got lots of gripes from Clinton supporters.
But there was nothing like the piling on from journalists rushing to validate the Obama criticisms and denouncing ABC�s performance as journalistically unsound.
The response was itself a warning about a huge challenge for reporters in the 2008 cycle: preserving professional detachment in a race that will likely feature two nominees, Obama and John McCain, who so far have been beneficiaries of media cheerleading.
Politico�s top editors draw on their experience at the nation's largest news organizations to pull back the curtain on coverage decisions and the media mindset.
But there was nothing to justify Tom Shales�s hyperbolic review (�shoddy, despicable performances� by Gibson and Stephanopoulos) in The Washington Post or Greg Mitchell�s in Editor & Publisher (�perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years�). Others, like Time�s Michael Grunwald, likewise weighed in against ABC.
In fact, the balance of political questions (15) to policy questions (13) was more substantive than other debates this year that prompted no deluge of protests. The difference is that this time there were more hard questions for Obama than for Clinton.
Moreover, those questions about Jeremiah Wright, about Obama�s association with 1960s radical William Ayers, about apparent contradictions between his past and present views on proven wedge issues like gun control, were entirely in-bounds. If anything, they were overdue for a front-runner and likely nominee.
If Obama was covered like Clinton is, one feels certain the media focus would not have been on the questions, but on a candidate performance that at times seemed tinny, impatient and uncertain.
The difference seems clear: Many journalists are not merely observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon.
(Harris only here: As one who has assigned journalists to cover Obama at both Politico and The Washington Post, I have witnessed the phenomenon several times. Some reporters come back and need to go through detox, to cure their swooning over Obama�s political skill. Even VandeHei seemed to have been bitten by the bug after the Iowa caucus.)
(VandeHei only here: There is no doubt reporters are smitten with Obama's speeches and promises to change politics. I find his speeches, when he's on, pretty electric myself. It certainly helps his cause that reporters also seem very tired of the Clintons and their paint-by-polls approach to governing.)
All this is hardly the end of the world. Clinton is not behind principally because of media bias; Obama is not ahead principally because of media favoritism. McCain won the GOP nomination mainly through good luck and the infirmities of his opposition. But the fact that lots of reporters personally like the guy � and a few seem to have an open crush � did not hurt.
But the protectiveness toward Obama revealed in the embarrassing rush of many journalists to his side this week does touch on at least four deeper trends in the news business.
1. The breakdown of journalistic conventions about point of view. In an earlier era these standards � favoring austere, stoical language conveying voice-of-God authority � were designed in part to ensure that stories betrayed no hint of the writer�s real feelings.
But the convention was a pretense. There is a generally laudable move toward more conversational � and more candid � language in stories. This shift allows a respected pro like the Associated Press�s Ron Fournier to unsheathe a knife and write this sentence earlier this year about Mitt Romney: �The former Massachusetts governor pandered to voters, distorted his opponents' record and continued to show why he's the most malleable � and least credible � major presidential candidate.�
This shift is also what allows NBC News to feel comfortable with its Obama reporter, Lee Cowan, who has acknowledged that he finds it hard to keep his objectivity covering Obama.
But when does a legitimate attempt to capture the energy and mood of a political movement become boosterism? Did Cowan cross the line in this dispatch for the �Nightly News� on Feb. 5?: �Since the early days of his campaign, the candidate has morphed from the intellectual to the inspirational. � And it's that theme that's brought crowds in the door and to their feet.�
It is a thin and often illegible line between this kind of journalism and outright favoritism.
Wherever the line, it is clear that the profession collectively has stepped over it � based as much on what it hasn�t covered as what it has.
Two of the questions ABC asked Wednesday were related to subjects that have largely been met with media yawns.
One was Obama�s casual association with 1960s era radicals and would-be bomb-setters William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn: What is the nature of his relationship?
Another was about a questionnaire from a 1996 legislative race in which he endorsed a ban on handguns. Obama said the questionnaire was filled out by someone else and was in error about his views at the time. But it was later found that his handwriting was on the document: What gives?
One can dispute the relevance of these stories � though it seems certain they will be of interest to many moderate voters Obama would need in the fall � but it is indisputable that if Clinton was facing similar questions they would be the subject of constant and all-consuming coverage. There is an obvious double standard.
2. The rise of the liberal echo chamber. It used to be that if a reporter received a letter that started, �You biased S.O.B.,� it was almost certainly coming from someone on the right. In 1998 � the year of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Bill Clinton�s impeachment � those notes began coming in equal measure from the left. During the Bush era � when the media stumbled in coverage of the march to war in Iraq � complaints are much more likely to come from liberals.
But it has only been in this campaign cycle that we have seen the liberal echo chamber � from websites like The Huffington Post and cable commentators like Keith Olbermann � be able consistently to drive a campaign story line. In the past, it was only the conservative echo chamber � Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh � who regularly drove stories in new media and old media alike. This is a huge shift.
3. The blurring of lines between journalist and advocate. The Huffington Post is an admirable enterprise, staking a flag in a new media landscape. Its success this year was made possible by the openness of the Web and the decline in what was once the near-monopoly power of old media institutions like The New York Times to set the agenda on national politics. (Politico is itself an experiment in that new media landscape � one reason we admire Huffington.)
But it covers politics with a mix of traditional reporters and analysts, like Tom Edsall, and with people who define themselves principally as advocates. Many of these advocates, like The Huffington Post as a whole, are proudly cheering for Obama. (This is true even though the site, almost apologetically, broke the story about Obama�s recent remarks saying small-town Pennsylvanians turn to guns and God because they are bitter.)
Obama benefits also from probably the strongest bias of traditional, old media reporters: Against partisan combat and for a brand of politics that would transcend differences in favor of cooperation and centrism on elite issues like entitlement reform. Many of these reporters see Clinton representing bad, angry, contrived old politics and Obama bravely leading the way for good, civil, authentic new politics.
4. Covering politics as it is versus as it should be. Many of the people complaining about ABC�s coverage, even some Clinton supporters, disliked the questions and the tone because they felt they were serving as a warm-up act for Republican attacks in the fall.
It is not an easy balance. It is not reporters� job to promote the opposition�s story lines � especially dubious ones like the suggestion that because Obama does not favor flag pins on his lapel it reflects adversely on his patriotism. But nor can serious reporters avert their gaze from the fact that questions about how well candidates connect personally and culturally with voters matter a lot � they were decisive factors in both the 2000 and 2004 elections.
Gibson and Stephanopoulos handled this balancing act responsibly. They asked tough questions of both candidates. In the wake of the debate, it is time for Obama�s cheerleaders in the media to ask some questions of themselves.
