...re into a slaughterhouse. I woke up to the headlines, stunned that as I had arrived home from my own midnight viewing of the Batman movie, hundreds of others were in living hell. I checked the big three news outlets (FoxNews, MSNBC, and CNN). All covered the same story. No partisan politics, just the sheer tragedy. President Obama turned his early morning campaign rally into a somber memorial. Governor Romney took a day off as well. Politics halt...
...every presidential election but two (1956 and 2008) since 1904. After Missouri failed to elect President Obama, many predicted that its bellwether status became a phenomenon of the past; CNN, Fox News, the New York Times and MSNBC all predict that MO will lean right for Romney in 2012. Obama’s campaign has, accordingly, expended minimal effort in winning that state, and his poll numbers there bear out his lackadaisical campaigning: aggregate pol...
...h the introduction of a new source of revenue, networks are no longer as dependent on advertisers. This business model, along with already increasingly polarized media, explains why today FOX can be blatantly conservative and MSNBC can be blatantly liberal and neither has to worry about losing cable subscriptions. What sets cable news apart from other news media is that it is always available. Networks have 24 hours of programming they have to fi...
...ecca Traister, author and columnist for Salon.com and Patricia J. Williams, Columbia University Law School Professor and columnist for The Nation. Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the night was that Melissa Harris Perry, MSNBC host and author, was not a part of the panel as was previously planned and advertised. It was reported that she called in sick about an hour before the event. Given the usual sad tone surrounding discussions on women’s...
...evoked deep discontentment and distrust with the elite class (think the Occupy Movement). How did our elite class, supposedly the best and brightest, arrive at this state of “institutional corruption,” as Christopher Hayes of MSNBC describes? Hayes, in an excerpt of his book “Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy”, describes meritocracy as giving rise to an elite class that rises on the basis of good grades/achievements, but which bec...
...ation of women as this uniformly thinking block is even more rampant at a women’s liberal arts college in New York City, where many women do hold similar political viewpoints. Barnard President Debora Spar, in an interview on MSNBC, boldly told the show’s hostess that “they’re [Barnard students] all huge fans [of Obama].” Is that true? Can the president of Barnard College say, in good faith, that every single one of her students is a fan of Pres...
...sked the same question in 1996, only 4 percent of voters identified gun control as an important issue. In 2000, that number reached only 17 percent, despite the infamous shooting at Columbine High School the previous year. An MSNBC exit poll of the 2004 election didn’t even include gun control as an option. Neither did the “Talking to America” survey of the electorate prior to the 2008 election. Why not? Incidents at Columbine and Virginia Tech,...
...ich No Labels strongly endorsed and supported. Today in Washington, we had a press conference at the Capitol calling for everything to be on the table with everybody at the table as we address the budget issues. Additionally, MSNBC has agreed to sponsor a discussion dialogue between the Tea Party and MoveOn. We have 1000 “generation” students across the country and we want to expand [this program] to at least 150 college campuses. One of the thin...
...nt Polarized Media.” Differing from the “New Partisan Media” of the 2000s, marked by figureheads of highly ideological cable talk-show news, such as Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly, that defined George W. Bush’s presidency, MSNBC and Fox News no longer define the media today. It is instead a cyclone of the old (print), the adolescent (television), and the infant (Internet). Romney’s realization that he can never engage with all aspects of the m...
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