ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA; NEWS TO BE ANCHORED FROM INSIDE WHITE HOUSE

[lawrocket 3]

Quote

>ABC will make a lot of money from it.

Evil capitalists making too much money? Horrors! Quick, to the keyboards! Slime those bastards!

J/K. That, of course, is the whole reason ABC is doing it - money. If they could make that much money doing a show from the Westboro Baptist Church they would.

From the original post:

Quote

Therefore, the Republican Party should be included in this primetime event, or the DNC should pay for your airtime.

This is the thing. It's going to be pushed as a town hall. And here's where I believe it will all be canned:
"ABC News' Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer will moderate the health care discussion with a live audience, and also take questions submitted by viewers."

http://www.eurweb.com/story/eur53997.cfm

This will not be a discussion, apparently. The questions will not be asked by audience members. Only those submitted by viewers, meaning that there will be the opportunity for planning out answers.

I have no problem with making money. I DO have a problem with doing it when there may be a violation of equal time rules. Personally, I don't like the equal time rules, but the rules are there.

ABC has responded:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/pressroom/2009/06/abc-news-responds-to-rnc-letter-.html

Here's the letter with my comments:

Quote

I am in receipt of your letter of June 15, 2009 and wanted to respond to a number of false premises you raise regarding our ongoing and upcoming coverage of health care.

I hope we can all agree that a robust debate of health care issues and potential policies is in order.

Then let's make the debate "robust" by putting on both sides.

Quote

To that end, ABC News announced plans to broadcast a primetime hour from the White House devoted to exploring and probing the President's position and giving voice to questions and criticisms of that position. We hope that any American concerned about health care will find our efforts to be informative, fair and civil.

Exploring and probing both sides is "informative" and "fair." Only allowing prescreened questions will not be "probing." Indeed, it allows the opportunity to not only fully respond, but to give the appearance that the response is "off the cuff" without the risk of going Biden.

Quote

Second, ABC News prides itself on covering all sides of important issues and asking direct questions of all newsmakers -- of all political persuasions -- even when others have taken a more partisan approach and even in the face of criticism from extremes on both ends of the political spectrum.

Then cover all sides of the issue instead of just one.

Quote

ABC News is looking for the most thoughtful and diverse voices on this issue.

Thoughtful and diverse according to whom? Thus, you will not be selecting from the targeted voice that would be probably the most relevant.

Quote

ABC News alone will select those who will be in the audience asking questions of the president.

So questions will be asked of the president? Well, another few questions:
(1) What are your seletion criteria?
(2) Are they going to be asking their own questions or somebody else's questions?
(3) Are the questions to be pre-screened?

Quote

Like any programs we broadcast, ABC News will have complete editorial control. To suggest otherwise is quite unfair to both our journalists and our audience.

This is political. Will you disclose a list of all potential questions posed? How about when and if these questions were disclosed to the President prior to the event? And, for editorial control, by necessity that means that there is an editorial stance. By what standards will "complete editorial control" be utilized? What will go in and be deleted?

Quote

Third, there already has been extensive coverage of the upcoming health care debates, on ABC and elsewhere, and there will be much, much more.

This is brilliant. He seems to be saying that the oppostion side has already received significant coverage and will receive coverage, so they've got nothing to bitch about.

Another point - why are they taking questions from viewers? They have nothing to ask, right? The President hasn't stated his plan.

Quote

Indeed, we've already had many critics of the President's health care proposals on the air – and that’s before a real plan has even been put before the country.

This statement is saddening or infuriating. This statement is already defensive of Obama. It seems to say that critics have been on air, but they have nothing to say because there is no plan. All they do is criticize proposals, which seems useless.

Quote

In the end, no one watching, listening to, or reading ABC News will lack for an understanding of all sides of these important questions.

I'd prefer to see, "From the beginning, no one watching, listening to, or reading ABC News will be informed of all sides of the issues."

Sorry. This isn't the "Write Rosty" telecast where bipartisan support was sought. Which leads me to some final additional thoughts on how I believe big laws should get passed.

(1) Do so without crisis

Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, etc. Many of these legislative acts were accomplished when there was no real crisis. They were given appropriate deliberation. There is a parable among lawyers and judges "Bad facts made bad law." A corollary could be posited: "Bad circumstances create bad laws."

The Patriot Act was passed quickly in a time of crisis. We see the consequences. Let us not do that again. Instead, what I count as politics and leadership at its finest - the 1986 Tax Reform Act (TRA). No real crisis. Just people and governemnt fed up with it.

(2) Bipartisan suport must be real and not talk.

The TRA came about in a situation where both the left and the right believed that the tax system was a cluster fuck. From this emerged two strong leaders: Rostenkowski and Reagan, who both thought it was needed and now was the time. Reagan "The Great Communicator" announced his plan on national television. Rostenkowski handled the Democrat response by applauding it and telling the People that if they supported it to "Write Rosty." Rostenkowski, of course, was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House.

It had support of the GOP POTUS and of the Democratic House.

(3) The Bipartisanship Must Include Strong Leadership from Each Side

The TRA was dead on arrival in the Senate. Except for two prime movers in the Senate: Packwood (R) and Bill Bradley (D). They kept reintroducing it. A GOP President, a Dem Congressman, and two Senators were committed to keeping it alive.

(4) Political masters sheparding it

Other persons such as Richard Darman and Donald Regan kept it going and left Congress with a choice: "Yes or no on tax reform. No middle ground." These were Reagan guys who know the politics and had influence.

These are what are probably lacking in Obama's administration. With a new admin, and sparse lobbyists in it, he's in for a helluva task.

(5) Clear goals identified.

The TRA was brilliant because everyone agreed on the core concepts: (1) tax rates would be lowered; (2) tax shelters would be eliminated; (3) deductions would be reduced; (4) the tax burden would not shift for individuals; and (5) the revenues would be the same.

(6) Application here:

Obama faces significant issues in all of the above. Most particularly, for success, he must start with No. 5 and identify clear goals of his proposal. That means being honest with the costs and benefits.

He cannot say, "We will provide inexpensive, high quality health care on demand to all." No. It has to be focused of individual goals.

Also, he should already have had t his message and had one or two powerful GOP Congressman to back him and applaud him.

I'll watch what he has to say. But I am already highly skeptical. The "town hall" is window dressing. Give a speech from the oval office. Say your points. Allow a response. THEN do your town hall a month later when the People have already thoroughly discussed it.

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[kelpdiver 2]

I don't mind the prearranged questions so much. Talk radio is painful to listen to as people seem to take minutes to spit out a simple question, and more often it is an incoherent rant.

And if the recipient has the general questions, they can give (one might hope) meaningful answers, whereas we see in the debates they give their precanned answer that seems closest in topic to the question.

Of course it's a dog and pony show. I won't be watching myself. Just about anything will be a better use of time.

[mnealtx 0]

About time they "got a room" - they've been under the White House desks more than Lewinsky was.

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[TheAnvil 0]

Charlie Gibson...the same fellow who interviewed Governor Palin and then Senator Obama oh so consistently...hot DAMN can we just sense the liberal bias here! But we already knew that...

Vinny the Anvil
Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL
JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

[justinb138 0]

Think there's any chance Fox can counter this broadcast with discussion between Ron & Rand Paul and Peter Schiff?

[chasteh 0]

You mean the ultra-liberal bias that he used when he called out Obama on his foreign policy, his logic, and admitted McCain has more foreign policy experience than he does?
Tangent: Osama Bin Laden himself said this is the reason he attacked the United States in his post 9/11 tapes...
(My admitting of this would mean that I don't support Obama myself, considering that Obama's support for Israel and negligence of Bin Laden's warning would put us in another dangerous domestic situation-I think it would serve our interests better if he approached this defferently)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAEnu89dxCY

Or do you mean the super-ultra liberalism that he approached Sarah Palin with when he asked her about her gosh-darn hard questions about foreign policy?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z75QSExE0jU

Attack Iran? You Betcha!

[lawrocket 3]

Quote

Think there's any chance Fox can counter this broadcast with discussion between Ron & Rand Paul and Peter Schiff?

If Ron Paul, M.D. did it, itd be an open town hall.

(It'd have to be "M.D." because the left give instant credibility to education. Especially "relevant" education. M.D. competing against a lawyer on health care debate. The left would faun over Dr. Paul's experience and education being superior to some piss ant lawyer."

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[TheAnvil 0]

I was referring to his first interview earlier in the campaign vs Palin's first interview. Please, compare and contrast.

Clicky

Biased? You betcha!

Face that fact whenever you like - a fact it remains.

Vinny the Anvil
Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL
JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

[TomAiello 26]

Quote

Quote

Think there's any chance Fox can counter this broadcast with discussion between Ron & Rand Paul and Peter Schiff?

If Ron Paul, M.D. did it, itd be an open town hall.

(It'd have to be "M.D." because the left give instant credibility to education. Especially "relevant" education. M.D. competing against a lawyer on health care debate. The left would faun over Dr. Paul's experience and education being superior to some piss ant lawyer."

Given their relative backgrounds, I'd love to see Ron Paul and John Edwards discuss malpractice lawsuits, especially those related to births.

-- Tom Aiello

Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com
SnakeRiverBASE.com

[chasteh 0]

Quote

I was referring to his first interview earlier in the campaign vs Palin's first interview. Please, compare and contrast.

Clicky

Biased? You betcha!

Face that fact whenever you like - a fact it remains.

Ok. So he interviews Barack Obama right after he is deemed THE candidate for the Democrat party.

>"Barack Obama did not win enough delegates to secure the nomination until June 3, after a 17-month-long campaign against Hillary Clinton."
In case you didnt know/look... the interview was done a day after this, on June 4th.
Surely, he could have asked the "tougher" questions at that point in time... but if you noticed... most of the news organizations were primarily focused on t he "race" for candidacy within each party... which is normal.
The race at that point in time is fairly complex on both sides, and most of the news organizations are happy just to cover the race and hardly ever focus on real issues at that point in time.
Perhaps you should take a look at the interview, for once, that occured with Obama at the same time of the "gosh darn hard" interview that took place with Sarah palin. (Which is on one of the links I posted.)
I found one interview where she is asked a very simple question... and could not deliver. (Yes, from all the other questions she doesn't know how to answer, I have taken arguably the simplest of all: Which news source do you use when you gather your world view?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9go38MgZ4w8

In the interview that you are using as a crutch for calling Obamas interview "easy"... that occured at a very different time than the one that occured within a few days of Palins "tough" interview. (Yes, the one where she should rightly have been able to answer all of Gibson's questions. Why? Because at that point in time she was less than two months from possibly being the fucking VP of the United States!)

Yea... the election was less than two months away... I think it was totally appropriate to ask her the "tough" questions at that point in time.

[kelpdiver 2]

Quote

You mean the ultra-liberal bias that he used when he called out Obama on his foreign policy, his logic, and admitted McCain has more foreign policy experience than he does?
Tangent: Osama Bin Laden himself said this is the reason he attacked the United States in his post 9/11 tapes...

He attacked the US because McCain had more foreign policy experience?

Probably the risk of going on a tangent without context.

[Rstanley0312 1]

Fortunately, this won't happen until September, so it won't affect the boogie season.

Bill you know that you and I disagree on most everything but that was funny!

Life is all about ass....either you're kicking it, kissing it, working it off, or trying to get a piece of it.
Muff Brother #4382 Dudeist Skydiver #000
www.fundraiseadventure.com

[chasteh 0]

And yours is a clear example of a straw-man fallacy.

Look at the lines following the Bin Laden statement.

To be clear: Bin Laden said in his post 9/11 tapes that he attacked the United States because 1) we are over there and 2) because we supply Israel with armaments and funds with which to attack muslims.

The context was there, your just not reading.

[chasteh 0]

Quote

And yours is a clear example of a straw-man fallacy.

Look at the lines following the Bin Laden statement.

To be clear: Bin Laden said in his post 9/11 tapes that he attacked the United States because 1) we are over there and 2) because we supply Israel with armaments and funds with which to attack muslims.

The context was there, your just not reading.

To be even more clear, Obama 1) supports defending Israel and 2) supports leaving troops in the middle east, particularly in Afghanistan.

Thus, we will remain in a situation that pisses off the one man on the planet that we can't find.

[kelpdiver 2]

Your's is an example of poor writing.

This is a thread about health care. It morphed slightly into a discussion of reporter bias in interviews. You made some wild leap elsewhere.

You hardly supported the claim either. Bin Laden said a lot of bullshit over the years. Attributing his actions to Israel is just part of his propaganda.

[chasteh 0]

Quote

This is a thread about health care

No, dude it isn't. That is a different thread.
This thread is about the "socialist and biased leap" that ABC has taken by not allowing the Republican party to debate the issue as well as it will allow Obama to.

Then, it morphed into ABC being biased itself... and then it morphed into Charlie Gibson presenting biased interviews on national television. Then I challenged the issue of the Gibson's bias. I supported the claim that Gibson's approach is less than biased, given the difficulty of interviews occuring just months before the general election.

Part of what propaganda? How would you defend that? Hopefully you wouldn't say something like "because he is hell-bent on destroying America because it is free" because that claim would depend on your perspective versus what he actually said.

[chasteh 0]

>Probably the risk of going on a tangent without context.

So, I am guilty of writing poorly. Why aren't you? Is that a complete sentence?

[jerryzflies 0]

Quote

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/16/plan-gives-fed-sweeping-power-over-companies/?feat=home_headlines

"The most likely candidate for elimination is the Office of Thrift Supervision, whose failure to detect and forestall problems at Countrywide, IndyMac, Washington Mutual and other freewheeling mortgage lenders is thought to have contributed to the financial crisis."

Good! The Office of Thrift Supervision is a joke, a dismal failure, and deserves to be eliminated.

However, I'm surprised that you still pay any attention to Sun Young Moon's mouthpiece.

If you can't fix it with a hammer, the problem's electrical.

[TheAnvil 0]

Perhaps you should go take a look at timelines yourself. I realize full and well that was Obama's first interview after clinching the primary. As I stated in my post, it was Palin's first interview as well, as she was nominated only a few days prior to its occurrence - a fact you conveniently ignore. I compare first interview with first interview - and the difference is striking, evident, and damning with regards to Mr. Gibson's bias. Ignore that fact as often as you like - a fact it remains. Ignoring facts IS the liberal forte, after all.

For the record, Palin was ill prepped for the national stage by her party. Her interviewing improved dramatically as the campaign went on, but still wasn't as good as her opponent - though her policies are vastly superior.

Vinny the Anvil
Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL
JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

[chasteh 0]

Unfortunately "first interview with first interview" is inadequate here. Perhaps if the republican party really gave a damn about what Sarah Palin had to say on behalf of John McCain, they should have recognized her several months beforehand to allow first impressions of her to subside.
I see no reason to ignore how late Palin was introduced into the campaign and i also see no reason to ignore that it was her first interview in regards to the campaign. The point is that they both occurred in very different stages of the race, meaning that the media sought to cover different parts of the race as events unfolded.

Ignoring facts is a liberal forte? No. Ignoring facts is a dogmatic forte. (You know, the kind of thing that happens when a party won't acknowledge how much of a failure their policies/actions have been in the recent past.)

In the end, it is very difficult for you to say that Gibson's bias is evident in the two interviews he conducted that were so far apart. Perhaps you could more easily identify his bias if you were to take some of his assertions and judge them as opposed to the questions (of equal difficulty) that occured immediately before the election.

You haven't really said much as to why their first interviews are comparable, either. Perhaps you could make this more clear.
Also, perhaps you could explain why it is a fact that he is biased. Usually facts are unobjectionable themselves (your "fact" here is highly objectionable) and or they have adequate justification in the form of other reasons that are unobjectionable. You haven't done this here.

End.

[billvon 2,991]

>In the end, it is very difficult for you to say that Gibson's bias is evident
>in the two interviews he conducted that were so far apart.

I take it you don't know Vinnie very well, then!

[chasteh 0]

Nuh uh. Sure don't. Perhaps you can tell me.

Note: For "Vinny"
here is an example of an unambiguous media bias:
(taken from another thread)

http://stevenjcamp.blogspot.com/2009/05/precedent-obama-vs-vice-president.html

"Precedent Obama vs. Vice President Cheney.
The "one" vs. The "Brilliant one"

Hmmm..... I wonder who this article is going to be in favor of?
Oh lemme guess... the one they call "brilliant!"

"Former Vice President delivered today one of the great compelling moments on post-911 national security. It was nothing short of superb. You can read the transcript here."

It was nothing short of superb. Aww shux.... that is another very clear example of a bias.

[billvon 2,991]

>Perhaps you can tell me.

Vinnie is more than capable of discussing his own political views with you; I'm sure you'll pick up on them quickly. He is not shy about expressing them.

[chasteh 0]

Oh. Well I suppose I am guilty of such a thing as well, as are all the other posters in the Speaker's corner.

However, I would be interested in seeing more of those same people, such as Vinny, more accurately and correctly explaining themselves in ways that are less than questionable.

[kelpdiver 2]

Quote

However, I would be interested in seeing more of those same people, such as Vinny, more accurately and correctly explaining themselves in ways that are less than questionable.

Ooh, irony!

We like that in SC.