OBAMA WINS (at last) (1 Viewer)

[Alisa]

Guilty as charged, your honor I'm not interested in reading somebody's manifesto. But you were nowhere near that.

Thank you for that, but its better to err on the side of caution, right?

 

[Alisa]

The cameras mentioned in the article are mainly operated by private security firms for local councils. The idea is to be able to 'police' city centres and shopping precincts more efficiently. So far, they've been quite successful in cutting down violence in some areas.

Government regulation of {fill in the blank} isn't really the issue, so either the 'nutjob' didn't follow this or just saw the opportunity to jump on a soapbox.

The latter, definitely, I was just curious if it was actually true or not. Doesn't seem like such a horrible idea to me, although I could imagine that abuse of such a system could lead to infringement of people's right to privacy. Wouldn't it theoretically be possible to stalk someone by using this system? (Assuming the wrong person got access to it).

 

[Rich]

The cameras mentioned in the article are mainly operated by private security firms for local councils. The idea is to be able to 'police' city centres and shopping precincts more efficiently. So far, they've been quite successful in cutting down violence in some areas.

Government regulation of {fill in the blank} isn't really the issue, so either the 'nutjob' didn't follow this or just saw the opportunity to jump on a soapbox.

Actually they're not helping to cut crime at all
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/06/ukcrime1

like everything else this stupid bunch of a control freak government has foisted on us, it's a LIE

 

[Alc]

The latter, definitely, I was just curious if it was actually true or not. Doesn't seem like such a horrible idea to me, although I could imagine that abuse of such a system could lead to infringement of people's right to privacy. Wouldn't it theoretically be possible to stalk someone by using this system? (Assuming the wrong person got access to it).

Yep. I've seen demos showing how you can, should you wish, follow someone from one end of a city centre to the other.

If you take into account in-building cameras, street cameras, motorway cameras, and any others, there are more per head of the population in the UK than any other country.

 

[Alc]

Actually they're not helping to cut crime at all
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/06/ukcrime1

like everything else this stupid bunch of a control freak government has foisted on us, it's a LIE

I suppose the guy who was being beaten up until the person behind the cameras told his attackers they were being recorded wasn't helped either?

I know of half a dozen cases back home that have gone to court because of CCTV footage that would have otherwise had to be thrown out due to lack of evidence.

Even the article you provided doesn't say that they're not helping. It says they have helped, just not as much as they could. It also mainly seems concerned with solving past crimes. Avoiding crimes being committed in the first place still counts as positive action and if someone knows they're being filmed, they may well think twice before doing something illegal.

 

[Sum Guy]

Actually most of THEM means that you are in agreement with her, stop wriggling

I have enough short term contracts at the minute, thank oh and by the way I haven't made anything up re: your posts

The full quote was "Actually, most of them like to be provocative. It gives them a thrill to get a response" within the context that they were not evil, just up to mischief.

You then joined two quotes from two different posts taking my remarks out of context so that they would conform to your interpretation.

Please stop trying to put words in my mouth. You will find its very difficult to get them past my feet.

 

[Alisa]

Sorry, must just me my perception. It sure looks like the nightly news anchors can't say his name without getting a gleem in their eye. When it seems like every editorial I read in the paper is a worship piece on Obama, it gets a little tiring.

Seems like your opinion is based on how the media "looks" rather than the stories they are reporting (editorials aren't news, by the way). Here is an interesting article on the subject: (I apologize in advance for the manifesto-length posting, but I think it is a good article)

Even while carrying McCain's water, media worry they aren't doing enough for him. John McCain complaining about media coverage is a little like an oil company complaining about profit margins: hard to believe, and even harder to feel much sympathy.

This is, after all, a politician who has referred to the press as his "base," and a politician about whom MSNBC's Joe Scarborough has said "every last one of them [reporters] would move to Massachusetts and marry John McCain if they could." As Eric Alterman and George Zornick recently explained in The Nation, "no candidate since John F. Kennedy, and perhaps none since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has enjoyed such cozy relations with the press."

But the coziness of that relationship has become increasingly one-sided in recent months, as McCain and his campaign lash out at the media, who then redouble their efforts to please the Arizona senator.

In early May, McCain senior adviser Mark Salter released a memo accusing the media of "form[ing] a protective barrier around [Obama], declaring serious limits to the questions, discussion and debate in this race," adding:
Senator Obama has good reason to think this plan will succeed, as serious journalists have written of the need for 'de-tox' to cure 'swooning' over Senator Obama, and others have admitted to losing their objectivity while with him on the campaign trail.

Later that month, McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt claimed MSNBC is "a partisan advocacy organization that exists for the purpose of attacking John McCain." The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz dutifully typed up Schmidt's charge without offering a contrary point of view. Nor did Kurtz note that McCain is subject of regular and effusive praise from MSNBC employees such as Chris Matthews, who has a habit of saying that McCain "deserves" to be president and says he "loves" McCain.

In June, Salter announced that seats on the comfy sofa next to McCain's captain's chair on his new plane were available only to "the good reporters," who would "have to earn it." Kurtz responded, "I think Mark Salter ... was joking and we should all lighten up. Can you imagine the uproar if the McCain campaign actually had a policy of rewarding favorable reporters with access to the candidate on the plane and shutting out those who dared to be critical? There would be a media revolt." But there was no "media revolt" when Salter reportedly threatened to throw Newsweek off the campaign bus just a month earlier, or when an Arizona reporter was kicked off the McCain bus. Rather than leading a "revolt" over such tactics, Kurtz covered them up, asserting it was all a big joke.

This week, the McCain campaign against the media went into overdrive. First, McCain allies began complaining that Obama's trip abroad was garnering a great deal of media attention. Republican Rep. Eric Cantor, for example, said: "The question really needs to be posed: Is this type of coverage fair? ... This is nothing but a political stunt." McCain spokesperson Jill Hazelbaker complained that "it certainly hasn't escaped us that the three network newscasts will originate from stops on Obama's trip." Today, the Republican National Committee sniffed about Obama's "overwhelming advantage in attention paid by the media."

And, as they often do when Republicans complain about the media, the media paid close attention. The Associated Press ran an article headlined, "Is media playing fair in campaign coverage?" The article was built around Republican complaints and contained not a word of criticism that the media has been excessively kind to McCain rather than Obama. The New York Times reported that coverage of Obama's trip abroad "feeds into concerns in Mr. McCain's campaign, and among Republicans in general, that the news media are imbalanced in their coverage of the candidates."

Unlike much of the media's navel-gazing in response to the McCain complaints, the Times article hinted at one of the basic flaws with criticism that the media is paying too much attention to Obama's trip: McCain and the Republicans just spent months building up the perceived importance of such a trip:

"If this were John McCain's first trip to the war zone, that would be a story and we would cover it big time," said Paul Friedman, senior vice president of CBS News. "This is Senator Obama's first trip -- his positions and the public's perception of him on national security issues are important."

Mr. Friedman said Mr. McCain and the Republicans had helped make the visit a bigger story because they had repeatedly questioned Mr. Obama's credentials, keeping a running count of the number of days that have passed since Mr. Obama last visited Iraq, in 2006.

For months, the Republicans have argued that it was of utmost importance for Obama to visit Iraq. Then, when Obama did so, the media behaved as though the visit was important. But Obama didn't commit whatever mistake the Republicans were hoping for during his trip, so the Republicans decided the trip shouldn't get so much coverage -- and many reporters, ever responsive to GOP complaints, rushed to agree.

More broadly, the problem with using the apparent fact that Obama is the subject of more media coverage to argue that he is receiving more favorable coverage is that it completely ignores the content of news reports. Take, for example, the week of April 28-May 4. Obama was either the "main newsmaker" or a "significant presence" in 69 percent of campaign stories, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, drawing significantly more media attention that week than John McCain and Hillary Clinton combined. Ah, but the bulk of that coverage was about Obama's relationship to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- 42 percent of the campaign news coverage that week. Anybody want to argue that the media's obsessive focus on Obama and Wright was good for Obama and bad for McCain?

All throughout the spring, as the media were obsessively focusing on every controversy, real or imagined, involving Obama or Clinton while giving McCain a pass, journalists kept promising that they'd scrutinize McCain just as soon as the Democratic primaries were over. Insisting that they couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time, reporters argued that the free ride McCain was getting was simply a result of the media's inability to cover both the Democratic candidates and John McCain. But they'd get around to the Republican nominee eventually.

That was their excuse for devoting far more attention to Obama and Wright than to McCain and Rev. John Hagee. That was their excuse for obsessively demanding Hillary Clinton release her taxes, but not saying a word about John McCain's -- even after Clinton released hers and McCain still had not done so. They'd get around to McCain someday, they kept telling us.

Well, they still aren't scrutinizing John McCain. And now, perversely, that lack of scrutiny is in effect being used to argue that the media are treating McCain poorly by not paying more attention to him.

In fact, some media are going further than merely failing to scrutinize McCain. CBS this week actively covered up a McCain blunder by deceptively editing an interview that Evening News anchor Katie Couric conducted with McCain. When Couric asked McCain for his response to a statement by Barack Obama that, in Couric's words, "there might have been improved security even without the surge," McCain responded by falsely claiming that the surge "began the Anbar awakening." In fact, the Anbar awakening began before the surge. But rather than air McCain's factually incorrect response, and tell viewers that McCain was wrong, CBS replaced his answer to Couric's question with three separate statements made by McCain spliced together, one of which was an answer to a different question -- with no indication that they had spliced the interview. (CBS also omitted another false claim McCain made during the interview: his description of the Iraq war as "the first major conflict since 9/11," something that would come as a surprise to the families of the 554 Americans who have lost their lives as a part of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.)

In explaining the deceptive editing of the McCain interview, CBS News senior vice president Paul Friedman claimed the editing "did not in any way distort what Senator McCain was saying." CBS had earlier claimed it made the edit in order to "give viewers a fair expression of the candidates' major differences."
That's nonsense. CBS showed viewers Katie Couric asking John McCain a question, edited out McCain's actual answer, which contained a falsehood, and replaced it with three separate statements spliced together, including an entirely different answer to a different question, without giving any indication of what they had done. That isn't a "fair expression" of anything. It is a gross distortion of reality, and the suppression of a false claim by John McCain on a topic that the media keep telling us is his area of expertise.

That is nothing short of fraudulent "reporting" by CBS, and it should be a major scandal.

But instead, the media spent the week wringing their hands over the possibility that they are mistreating McCain. Incredible.

And in between discussions of how unfair they were being to McCain, the media cheerfully repeated McCain's nonsensical attacks on Barack Obama.
When a McCain spokesperson and the RNC chided Obama for reportedly having people begin to plan for a possible transition, should he be elected president, the media obligingly repeated that criticism. One MSNBC host read it on-air; another agreed with the GOP that it is "premature" for Obama to begin to make such plans. A Fox host called it "unprecedented"; U.S. News & World Report's Kenneth Walsh called it "very early" and said "it plays into this notion that the Republicans are talking about, about Obama being too arrogant." A New Republic writer called it "The Earliest Transition Team Ever." Newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle reported the charge.

Only one problem: this may have been the dumbest attack any major presidential campaign has ever made. The McCain camp is criticizing Obama for preparing to govern effectively should he win. Doesn't that seem like a good thing? Clay Johnson apparently thinks so: He's the guy George W. Bush put in charge of precisely the same kind of planning in 1999 and 2000. See, Bush agreed with Johnson's assessment that it would be "irresponsible not to be doing this." Ronald Reagan began making transition plans early, too -- Ed Meese began asking people to help with the planning in 1979, the year before Reagan was elected president. Carter began his transition planning in May 1976, six months before Election Day.

So, whatever transition planning the Obama campaign is doing isn't "unprecedented" or "premature" or "The Earliest Transition Team Ever," as the media claimed on McCain's behalf. It is, instead, completely standard. And, when you think of the enormous responsibility of running the federal government, it seems -- as Clay Johnson says -- irresponsible not to do so.
The question the media should be pursuing is not whether it is "arrogant" to undertake such planning -- it plainly is not -- but why on earth the McCain campaign would criticize it. Instead, they made false claims in support of the McCain team's self-evidently absurd attacks on Obama.

Then they went back to chattering about whether their coverage favors Obama.

 

[Sum Guy]

Nixon tried the same approach. In 1968 when he got the nomination he steadfastly refused to comment on his past sins and accused the press of being unfair when they tried to bring them up.
The press gave him a pass in 1968 based on "fairness" and Nixon became President in one of the closest elections in US history.
The press were aware of most of Nixon's transgression during the 1972 campaign but nobody was going to beat Nixon that year and he got another pass from the media.
When Watergate broke, the press sharpened their knives and helped overthrow him.
One wonders if the press hadn't gone out of their way to be "fair" in 1968, would Watergate have happened.

It is the function of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.
Gene Kelly - "Inherit the Wind".

 

[georgedwilkinson]

Sorry, must just me my perception. It sure looks like the nightly news anchors can't say his name without getting a gleem in their eye. When it seems like every editorial I read in the paper is a worship piece on Obama, it gets a little tiring.

BTW: Just because I may disagree with what you are saying, doesn't mean I stop reading. I only do that if someone turns to personal attacks instead of making valid points.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism keeps a tally of news stories and provides that data weekly to whoever wants to read it.

Their report from June 9 - 15 shows Obama getting more coverage than anyone/anything else. The headline does say it's not all positive. http://www.journalism.org/node/11537. The telling part of the story:

In a relatively light week of campaign coverage, Obama topped McCain in the race for exposure. The Democrat appeared as a significant or dominant newsmaker in 77% of the week’s campaign stories compared with 55% for the GOP candidate.

Their overall stats are interesting:
http://www.journalism.org/node/12013 -- shows over time that Obama has had more media exposure than McCain.

None of this mentions starry eyed reporters extolling the virtues of Obama. That is completely subjective, but it certainly seems to be happening, especially given the amount of coverage Obama gets.

This is supposedly a non-partisan site, which is the only reason I would cite it here. If anybody knows it to be otherwise, please let me know so I can ignore it. I'm just not interested in biased citations (by anyone).

 

[Sum Guy]

They always are when they are trying to be President.

Wait until he gets in and see all the broken promises. Maybe he will end up parking the cars, before he gets shot of course.

I must find out what the odds are now on him getting assassinated. It's got to be worth a tenner.

Col

An excellent example of what we were speaking of previously.

A poster who thinks they are provocative and gets a great kick out of getting responses. Then they cross the line of good sence and good taste.

Pitiful really.

 

[ColinEssex]

An excellent example of what we were speaking of previously.

A poster who thinks they are provocative and gets a great kick out of getting responses. Then they cross the line of good sence and good taste.

Pitiful really.

He will have broken promises, they all do.

The car parking was with reference to the joke I posted earlier.

There are people in the UK betting on when he'll get shot.

What's your problem SummyJim?

Note:- "Sence" is spelt "sense"

Col

 

[Rich]

An excellent example of what we were speaking of previously.

A poster who thinks they are provocative and gets a great kick out of getting responses. Then they cross the line of good sence and good taste.

Pitiful really.

Which part of Colins statement is untrue?

 

[ColinEssex]

Which part of Colins statement is untrue?

Who knows? It sounds like a typical American comment to me.

Col

 

[Sum Guy]

He will have broken promises, they all do.Col

He hasn't been elected yet and you are already predicting this?

The car parking was with reference to the joke I posted earlier.Col

Oh yeah, the racist one.

There are people in the UK betting on when he'll get shot.Col

People like you it seems. Typical Albanian logic.

 

[Sum Guy]

Which part of Colins statement is untrue?

Please see previous post.

 

[Rabbie]

People like you it seems. Typical Albanian logic.

This appears to be a slur on the good people of Albania

 

[Alisa]

Their overall stats are interesting:
http://www.journalism.org/node/12013 -- shows over time that Obama has had more media exposure than McCain.

None of this mentions starry eyed reporters extolling the virtues of Obama. That is completely subjective, but it certainly seems to be happening, especially given the amount of coverage Obama gets.

A lot of these comparisons seem to be based on the underlying assumption that just by virtue being a candidate, they both deserve equal coverage. But McCain and Obama don't provide equivalent amounts of "story". McCain easily tied up the Republican nomination while the race between Obama and Clinton went on and on and on, so that right there explains why Obama (and Hillary, for that matter) got far more coverage than McCain did up until June. Add to that the fact that we have been watching McCain since the begining of time and Obama is a fresh new face - who is going to generate more interest?

As for the most recent Obama media blitz - Obama traveled around the world, met with foreign leaders in several countries, and gave speeches to crowds of hundreds of thousands of people. During the same period, McCain put out a press release whining about how the press was ignoring him, and then canceled a previously scheduled press availability.

"starry eyed reporters extolling the virtues of Obama" What channel have you seen that on? The only time I saw that was in a very unfunny SNL skit. Most recently I saw a reporter idiotically asking him whether he thought he was now "black enough", given that his approval rating among blacks has risen to 90% from a year ago when they were calling him an oreo. I would only expect that sort of insulting question from a reporter who is only interested in creating a good sound bite, not one who is "starry eyed".

 

[Rich]

Please see previous post.

Your previous post contained nothing of any substance, does history not figure in your mind?

 

[ColinEssex]

He hasn't been elected yet and you are already predicting this?

If people believe politicians then more fool them. It doesn't take a genius to work out they are all liars and will say anything to get the top job.

Oh yeah, the racist one.

I fail to see anything racist in a darkie getting a job as a parking attendant. Someone has to do it.

People like you it seems. Typical Albanian logic.

I haven't placed a bet on it. I may do but the odds will shorten dramatically if he gets in office.

I wouldn't know about Albanian logic. They don't flood our TV programmes like the Americans do, and I don't believe there are that many Albanians that post here to form any opinion on their logic.

May I ask where you get your Albanian logic knowlege from? And can you explain how my logic appears to be similar to theirs? I would be keen to learn.

I said your comment was typically American - no mention of logic. I have yet to see enough American logic in your posts to form a valid opinion. I shall keep looking though, I may get lucky.

Col

 

[ColinEssex]

As for the most recent Obama media blitz - Obama traveled around the world, met with foreign leaders in several countries, and gave speeches to crowds of hundreds of thousands of people.

Not in London he didn't, there were a few people looking from the pavements, but that was more out of curiosity I think than actually knowing what was going on.

In Horseguards parade during a stroll with Gordon Brown, the tourists didn't even notice him.

Col