Blog – Don Irvine

Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton dismissed reader complaints that the paper is anti-Catholic, but admitted it could have done a better job in covering the different opinions of Catholics on a broad range of issues.

Pexton defended the paper at first by saying that the Post’s OnFaith blog has a wide range of voices including both conservative and liberal Catholics, but apparently the newspaper’s conservative Catholic readers weren’t buying it:

Still, many Catholic readers, particularly conservative ones, and the Catholic hierarchy at the Archdiocese of Washington and at the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, whom I spoke with at length last week, say that The Post just doesn’t get Catholics.

And Pexton noted that that in turn leads to other reader complaints about the Post’s coverage of Catholics:

They see most of The Post’s news as too political, too much about divisions within the church and the church’s position on divisive social issues, and not enough about the church in its many other roles.

Catholic Charities is the largest non-government social service agency in the area, for example, and it rarely gets covered, they say. Catholic schools have conducted a massive education program, nationally and locally, to train students, teachers and aides to recognize the signs of child abuse, in the wake of the priest sex scandals, but it is hard to get coverage of that effort. Liberal Catholic groups are quoted, but conservative or official voices not as much, they say.

They have a point. There are deep divisions within the church that Post reporting should accurately reflect. But sometimes The Post’s reporting and even editorials fall short in conveying the passion with which many Catholics hold their views, whether they be against the contraception mandate, gay marriage, and abortion or in favor of aid to the poor. It doesn’t mean that Post reporters or editorialists have to embrace those views, but they should accurately explain them in a ways all readers can understand. That, after all, is also part of getting at the truth.

It’s more than deep divisions, in my opinion, when the paper goes after former Republicans presidential candidate Rick Santorum by calling him a ‘cafeteria Catholic,” or Speaker John Boehner, while failing to give liberal Catholic politicians the same type of religious litmus test.

If the Post’s reporters and op-ed writers don’t “get Catholics” then they need to find some writers who do if they are really striving for accuracy and fairness. But that would probably mean dismantling the liberal perspective of the paper in order to do so — and that is an unlikely scenario.

In an op-ed in The New York Times, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown ripped President Obama for being grating and condescending and that he should stop it:

My bigger concern is that in courting women, Mr. Obama’s campaign so far has seemed maddeningly off point. His message to the Barnard graduates was that they should fight for a “seat at the table” — the head seat, he made sure to add. He conceded that it’s a tough economy, but he told the grads, “I am convinced you are tougher” and “things will get better — they always do.”

Hardly reassuring words when you look at the reality. According to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, about 53.6 percent of men and women under the age of 25 who hold bachelor’s degrees were jobless or underemployed last year, the most in at least 11 years. According to the Pew Research Center, if we broaden the age group to 18- to 29-year-olds, an estimated 37 percent are unemployed or out of the work force, the highest share in more than three decades.

Brown also said that the Obama campaign ad, “The Life of Julia,” is “a silly and embarrassing caricature based on the assumption that women look to government at every meaningful phase of their lives for help,” and doesn’t represent any of the women she knows in her life.

She then mentioned a cousin in Louisiana and another family member, both single moms who have been unemployed since the economy tanked and who have relied on friends and family, not the government, for help. Brown said they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Brown, who is married to Romney adviser Dan Senor, concluded her piece by saying that while she admired President Obama and even agreed with him on some issues, he needs to change his tone if he wants to connect with women.

I have always admired President Obama and I agree with him on some issues, like abortion rights. But the promise of his campaign four years ago has given way to something else — a failure to connect with tens of millions of Americans, many of them women, who feel economic opportunity is gone and are losing hope. In an effort to win them back, Mr. Obama is trying too hard. He’s employing a tone that can come across as grating and even condescending. He really ought to drop it. Most women don’t want to be patted on the head or treated as wards of the state. They simply want to be given a chance to succeed based on their talent and skills. To borrow a phrase from our president’s favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, they want “an open field and a fair chance.”

The Obama campaign may do well to heed Brown’s advice since the latest CNN/New York Times poll has the President trailing Romney by two points among women.

For Republicans, Vice President Joe Biden is the gift that keeps on giving. In an interview he gave on Thursday in Ohio, he told a reporter that he doesn’t blame people for voting for a felon in the Democratic primary in West Virginia with the economy being the way it is.

Biden:”Look, I come from a household where whenever there’s a recession, somebody around my grandpop or my dad’s table lost their job—a brother, a sister, a friend, a neighbor,” he said. “When you’re out of work, man, it’s a depression. And a lot of people are still hurt because of this God-awful recession we inherited that cost 8.4 million jobs before we could really get going. And so I don’t blame people. They’re frustrated. They’re angry.”

Angry enough to give a convicted felon, who is currently serving a 210 month sentence in a federal prison in Texas, enough votes to beat Obama in 10 West Virginia counties. The felon received 40 percent of the total vote, making him eligible for at least one delegate at the Democratic national convention in Charlotte this September.

Obama faces an uphill battle in West Virginia, which he lost to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary and to John McCain in the general election. Plus, he isn’t getting any help from the state’s leading Democrats, with both Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and Sen. Joe Manchin declining to endorse him.

And Biden’s remarks aren’t likely to help either.

Former Washington Post blogger Elizabeth Flock, who resigned from the paper in mid-April, announced on Twitter that she has been hired to blog for U.S. News & World Report. She will be the lead writer for the Washington Whispers blog which was previously written by Paul Bedard, who is now with The Washington Examiner.

Flock resigned after it was revealed that she made extensive use of material from Discovery News without attribution in a post in April. The Post had to issue its second Editor’s note in four months to apologize for her sloppiness in a blog post.

Back in December, the Post issued an apology for a Flock post using information that she picked up from a left-wing blog that accused the Romney campaign of using a KKK slogan in his stump speeches and in a campaign ad. Flock also accused the campaign of not doing its research when in fact she hadn’t bothered to verify the information.

These problems apparently weren’t serious enough to prevent U.S. News from hiring Flock and giving her a high profile assignment. But if they don’t keep a close eye on her they could wind up with their own Flock flop.

When Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt was invited to appear on CNN to discuss the campaign’s new ad on Mitt Romney, he probably didn’t expect that he would have to spend his entire time on the air defending the ad.

But that’s what he was forced to do when CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield questioned the accuracy of the ad:

Banfield: I want to take you to task on this one, because it was real heart wrenching to listen to those steelworkers in your ad that was ripping Mitt Romney for being at the helm of Bain when, in fact, he wasn’t at the helm when that company went bankrupt. So was that fair or was that dirty?

LaBolt disputed Banfield’s assertion that Romney wasn’t at Bain by saying that he was still the owner of Bain when he left to run the 2002 Winter Olympics and that he “put the company on the path to bankruptcy,” and that as a result 750 employees lost their job.

Banfield was having none of that and accused LaBolt of “mincing dates and cheating” in an effort to defend the content of the ad.

She then brought up the fact that The Washington Post’s fact checker gave the ad one “Pinocchio” for shading the truth and would have given it two, except that there were some gray areas that could have gone either way.

The Post criticized the ad for concentrating only on Bain’s investment in GS Industries and making it seem that this one single investment is representative of Romney’s business practices and values. The Post added that while Romney was running Bain the company did add to its debt load, which may have contributed to its demise, but it wasn’t the only reason the company filed for bankruptcy. Also, it failed to note that the Kansas City plant was facing difficult times before Bain took over.

While LaBolt said that the ad was not an attack on private equity, there is no doubt that while Romney was the main target, the campaign certainly did nothing to try to portray the industry in a positive light.

Banfield and the Post weren’t the only critics of the ad. Even Obama’s former car czar Steve Rattner thought the ad was unfair.

Rattner appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday and commented on the ad:

“I think the ad is unfair. Look Mitt Romney made a mistake ever talking about the fact that he created 100,000 jobs. Bain Capital’s responsibility was not to create 100,000 jobs or some other number. It was to create profits for its investors, most of whom were pension funds and endowments and foundations. And it did it superbly well, acting within the rules, acting very responsibly, and was a leading firm. And so yeah, I do think to pick out an example of somebody who lost their job, unfortunately, this is part of capitalism, this is part of life, and I don’t think Bain Capital did anything they need to be embarrassed about.”

Maybe the next time the Obama campaign wants to attack Romney for his business dealings they should check with someone who actually knows something about business.

On MSNBC’s Hardball this past Monday night, during a discussion of the new Obama campaign ad attacking Mitt Romney for his work at Bain Capital, host Chris Matthews asked Time’s Mark Halperin how Obama can effectively debate Romney on his financial dealings.

Halperin: I don’t think he needs to. I think he can—in a debate I think he can bumper sticker it and make it clear and again, the press—this is one of these instances where the press is very sympathetic to the Obama narrative on Bain and not all that sympathetic to Governor Romney. Governor Romney needs to make an argument so compelling that it finds an audience in the press, if he can do it, and an audience with the public. I think in the debate, again, we know what the president will say and I think he’d be pretty effective.  What will Governor Romney say in the debates, in the fall campaign at high profile moments? He had kind of a test run in the nomination fight, but he’s going to have to address it on a range of things.

Matthews then tried to rationalize the pro-Obama media bias by asking Halperin if it wasn’t due in part to private equity people making 20 or 30 times more money per year than newspaper people make.

Halperin responded quickly by saying, “Not necessarily what TV people make,”  causing Matthews to try to laugh it off, knowing full well that his estimated salary of $2 million is more than 60 times that of the average reporter’s salary, according to PayScale.

The admission of a pro-Obama bias, surprisingly coming from Halperin, only confirms what most Americans have known–the media have been in the tank for Obama since 2008 and even a poor economy and high jobless rate can’t dampen their enthusiasm.

CNN, which is coming off its worst ratings month in over 10 years, continued its downward spiral on Friday when it failed to attract more than 100,000 viewers during any time slot between 5 and 9 p.m. in the key A25-54 demo.

Erin Burnett’s OutFront, whose ratings are well below the expectations of CNN, was actually the best performing show in the demo last Friday, attracting 99,000 viewers, which was 12,000 more than Anderson Cooper could muster in the hour following Burnett.

That’s probably why it was reported yesterday that CNN was attempting to poach Jake Tapper from ABC.

Tapper, who is currently the Senior White House Correspondent at ABC and has been passed over twice as host of This Week, would be a huge pickup for CNN. But according to Mediaite, he is very happy with his current job at ABC.

But that could be little more than posturing and could easily change, depending on what CNN offers Tapper, which would most likely include a primetime slot.

ABC is unlikely to let Tapper go without a fight. But it will be difficult for them to offer him more airtime without displacing someone else, which won’t be an easy task.

CNN will have to wait until Tapper’s contract with ABC expires before making him a formal offer. But with their ratings tanking, time is not something the network has much of to spare.

During a segment last Friday on Hollywood’s support for Obama, with actor and director Rob Reiner, MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews said that when Wall Street backs a Republican candidate they are doing it because it is in their financial interest. When Hollywood celebrities back a candidate, however, they are doing it because they share cultural values.

Matthews: It seems to me that the people at Wall Street—let’s put it to the Republican side, I’m going to stick it there. When they invest in a Republican candidate, they’re investing in their businesses. They want a better tax break, they want less regulation, I mean, dammit, in a certain weird, perverted way they should get a tax write-off because what they’re doing is for the money.

And you guys are doing it for cultural reasons because you share values with the president. Now maybe gay people, especially gay people, are concerned. And they do get a value out of this and interest in terms of rights, but that’s what they have a right to anyway, I would argue. But this is interesting. You guys out on the coast out there do it because you agree with the president. People in Wall Street and the business world and Texas around there, they give money because they make money off Republican politics.

Reiner: That’s exactly right and it’s interesting but the Hollywood community is the only donor base, as you call it, that has no quid pro quo. We don’t support a candidate because he might be able to do something for us. When you see the Koch brothers throwing what’ll be twenty to hundreds of millions of dollars into a PAC, they’re looking for a payback. They want—and they’ll get it, too, if that man gets in the White House, they will get with—

Matthews: Oil money, oil breaks—

Reiner: Money, regulations that are reduced to allow them to pollute and do all the things that they want to do. We’re the only group of donors that doesn’t ask for something in return. We support somebody because, like you said, they share our values, whether it comes to education, healthcare, the environment, the economy, social issues. They’re in line with how we feel about things and we look at the totality of a candidate, not just at a very narrow, specific financial interest.

Matthews makes it seem like Wall Street money only backs Republicans, but he knows that isn’t true. According to the Sunlight Foundation, in 2008 Obama received more money from Wall Street than any politician in the last 20 years, including former President George W. Bush. Obama took in $15.8 million from Wall Street.

Funny, I don’t recall Matthews complaining about Wall Street money supporting Obama four years ago.

Obama is going to face a tougher time this year with Wall Street, as Romney has closer ties to business, and is promising to turn the economy around, compared to Obama’s policies, which are viewed by much of the business community as anti-business.

Matthews knows that, so he has gone back to the old liberal tactic of demonizing Wall Street support for the GOP in an effort to downplay their lack of enthusiasm for Obama.

What a difference four years makes.

During his opening Media Monitor segment, CNN’s Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz criticized MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall for cutting off the microphone of conservative guest Tim Carney last week.

Hall and Carney were having a heated discussion of a Washington Post story about the bullying charges leveled against Mitt Romney from when he was in high school. Carney accused Hall of using an old media trick, to which Hall took umbrage and cut off Carney’s microphone.

Carney: But what you’re doing here is a typical media trick: You hype up a story, and then you justify the second-day coverage of the story by saying, “Oh, well, people are talking about it. Here’s how Romney responded to it—“

Hall: You don’t have to answer a single question I ask you. You do not. And you did not have to accept the invitation to come on. You knew what we were going to be discussing…You’re not going to come on and insult the network when you knew what you were going to come on and talk about. Done.

Kurtz said that it was Hall who was being insulting by silencing Carney when she cut off his microphone. Kurtz defended Carney’s right to say that the bullying story was being hyped, and he wondered if Hall only wants guests who agree with her opinion on every story.

Not only was Hall insulting, but she was totally unprofessional in the way she handled the interview. She acted more like a child since, as she admitted, Carney was irritating her. Her response was to cut off his microphone for expressing a viewpoint that differed from her own.

And what did Hall think when she booked Carney for the show? After all he is a noted conservative in Washington, D.C. and works for a conservative newspaper. Did she actually think that Carney was just going to roll over and play dead when presented with Hall’s overhyping of the Romney story?

Hall would do well to realize that it’s probably not a good thing to throw a temper tantrum on national television and she should apologize to Carney for her behavior. But that would mean that she would have to admit that the only bully on the show that day was herself.

NBC announced on Friday that it was pulling its primetime newsmagazine show Rock Center with Brian Williams for the rest of the month and left its future up in the air. The show will be replaced by reruns of Law and Order: SVU.

Rock Center has been struggling in the ratings since it debuted last year and continually trails ABC’s 20/20 program by more than two million viewers each week.

By replacing the show with Law and Order episodes, NBC is unlikely to do any better in the ratings during the important May sweeps, but it gives them an excuse for poor ratings and buys the network some time to consider retooling the show.

NBC is holding out the possibility that the show will return in the fall, but more as a fill-in show for programs that flop with viewers.

The network seems determined to do what it can to save the show in some capacity, despite the ratings, and achieve the goal of creating a franchise that will last 20 years, which is what David Corvo, Senior Executive Producer of Primetime News, said back in March that he wanted Rock Center to become.

At this rate, though, Rock Center will be lucky to get much past one year, much less 20.

UPDATE:  NBC has decided to put Rock Center in the fall lineup after all.  It will air on Thursday night’s at 10 p.m. facing off against procedural dramas from CBS and ABC which will make it even harder to achieve ratings success.