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Right-Wing Media “Lied” During Campaign

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Cozy Ties With GOP Raise Questions of Integrity

“The Most-Liked Photograph of All Time”

Stats Show Newspapers Look “A Lot” Like GOP

Clamor for Obama Front Pages Doesn’t Match ’08

West on Obama: “Rockefeller Republican in Blackface”

Women’s Media Center Calls Out Sexist Coverage

N.Y. Daily News Could Be Out of Offices for a Year

Project Publicizes Contributions of Black Men

Short Takes

David Frum, conservative Newsweek columnist, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that “Republicans have been fleeced, exploited and lied to by the conservative entertainment complex.” (Video)

Cozy Ties With GOP Raise Questions of Integrity

“On Election Night, I tweeted that Republicans shocked about Mitt Romney‘s loss Tuesday should be angry at a conservative media that misled them about the former [Massachusetts] governor’s chances,” Adam Serwer wrote Thursday for Mother Jones.

“In the waning days of the race, much of this manifested in raising doubts about the polls and comical exaggerations about the possibility of a Romney landslide. Rush Limbaugh told his millions of listeners that ‘everything except the polls points to a Romney landslide,’ but the problem went beyond mavens like Limbaugh to afflict more well-regarded political analysts like Michael Barone and George Will.

“. . . Analysts like Karl Rove — who through his stewardship of outside spending groups had a clear financial interest in giving upbeat assessments of Romney’s chances — were given prominent perches to hoodwink the viewers of Fox News and the readers of the Wall Street Journal. And as Media Matters’ Simon Maloy documents, Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s pro-Romney blogger, expressed a far less sanguine view of campaign events after the election than she did when she covered them in real time.

“. . . Conservative media lies to its audience because much of its audience wants to be lied to. Those lies actually have far more drastic consequences for governance (think birthers and death panels) than for elections, where the results can’t be, for lack of a better word, ‘skewed.’ “

On Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” conservative Newsweek columnist David Frum, who served as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, called Republican leaders “cowards” and said “Republicans have been fleeced, exploited and lied to by the conservative entertainment complex.” A surprised host Joe Scarborough agreed and said it reminded him of French generals in World War II who kept reassuring British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that “they were putting up brave defenses when they knew they had already lost.”

Serwer also noted, “Much of the conservative media is simply far more cozy with the Republican Party than its Democratic counterparts (as exemplified by the numerous Fox hosts and contributors who moonlight as Republican fundraisers), which makes necessary detachment difficult.”

Exhibit A has been Rove, the GOP fundraiser and strategist who is also a Fox News Channel analyst. The New York Times’ Jeremy W. Peters Wednesday revisited Election Night on Fox News, when the network called Ohio for President Obama. “Karl Rove stood just off camera, his phone glued to his ear. On the other end was a senior Romney campaign official who insisted that the network had blown the call,” Peters wrote.

“What followed — an extraordinary on-air confrontation between Mr. Rove, a Fox commentator, and the network’s team of voting analysts — drew renewed focus on the Republican operative’s complicated and conflicting roles in this presidential campaign.

“What role was Karl Rove playing when he heatedly contradicted Fox News?

“Was he acting as the man who oversaw the most expensive advertising assault on a sitting president in history, unable to face his own wounded pride? The fund-raiser who had persuaded wealthy conservatives to give hundreds of millions of dollars and now had a lot of explaining to do? Or the former political strategist for George W. Bush, who saw firsthand how a botched network call could alter the course of a presidential contest?”

“The Most-Liked Photograph of All Time”

“Photojournalist Scout Tufankjian has been chronicling the political career of Barack Obama on and off since 2007,” Slate magazine said Thursday. “During the 2008 campaign, she worked as a journalist for various outlets and shot a book’s worth of photographs.

“This time around, she was hired by the campaign itself, coming on board in August 2012 as one of two photojournalists on Obama’s campaign team. Her image of the president hugging his wife went viral on Tuesday night when the campaign tweeted it — along with the phrase ‘Four more years’ — after news came that he’d won re-election. The post went on to become the most retweeted in Twitter history, and the image quickly became Facebook’s most-liked ever.”

Julia Turner conducted a Q-and-A with Tufankjian for “The Real Story of the Most-Liked Photograph of All Time.”

Stats Show Newspapers Look “A Lot” Like GOP

When this column noted Wednesday the parallels between the racial composition of the Republican base and the racial makeup of the news media, Journal-isms had no idea that a research company had validated the comparison.

But the validation is there, Ken Doctor wrote Thursday for the Nieman Journalism Lab.

“. . . In what seems like another lifetime, I co-chaired a Knight-Ridder (b. 1974, d. 2006, rest in peace) task force on young readers,” Doctor wrote. “This was in the early ’90s, I recall. Yes, all those elusive audiences: ‘young people’ (meaning those under 50), women, ethnic ‘minorities.’ The industry has always had problems with those ‘underserved’ groups. For reasons of both business success and doing the right thing, newspaper companies announced effort after effort to do better.

“I’d lost track of how they’d done, in the great washout of digital disruption. I checked in with Scarborough Research, the U.S. newspaper industry’s go-to source for readership, both print and digital.

“The Scarborough data [paint] an unmistakable portrait: When it comes to audience, the American newspaper industry looks a lot like the Republican Party. Consequently, its business reversals parallel the deepening Republican national electoral woes. The newspaper audience looks remarkably like the arithmetic that put Mitt Romney on the losing end Tuesday and is forcing Republicans to self-assess how to move forward. The math is the math.

“We can look at the data in three segments: print audience, digital audience, and combined audience.

“. . . The conclusion: The daily industry is doing okay with older, white people — mildly overperforming in print, digital, and combined.

“Among all other ethnic groups except Asian-Americans — off the charts with high overperformance for online news usage — newspapers are underperforming. They, like Mitt Romney, aren’t getting their share of the fastest growing population slices in the U.S. . . . .”

Clamor for Obama Front Pages Doesn’t Match ’08

Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 produced a surprise run on newspapers that reported the historic triumph, as readers sought tactile souvenirs. Obama’s reelection victory Tuesday brought a spike in sales, but not as much.

“Sales were up, but nothing like four years ago,” John Murray, vice president of audience development for the Newspaper Association of America, the newspaper publishers trade group, told Journal-isms by email.

“We did see increased demand yesterday on single copy sales,” Eileen Murphy, spokeswoman for the New York Times, messaged on Thursday. “Hard to tell exactly how big the sale was until we get all returns back, but certainly a much bigger day than usual in terms of single copy sales.”

“We saw an uptick in sales consistent with what we normally see the day after a general election,” Gary Weitman, spokesman for Tribune Co., said. “Nothing like what we saw after the President was elected in 2008.”

“There was a spike, but we don’t have final numbers yet,” said Kris Coratti, spokeswoman for the Washington Post, said on Thursday. “I can tell you that we printed double our normal single copy run.”

Nevertheless, news outlets produced souvenirs. Newsweek/Daily Beast announced a partnership to produce ebooks, digitalbookworld.com reported, starting with “Why Romney Lost: And What the GOP Can Do About It” by David Frum, Newsweek contributing editor and author.

The Washington Post released its own ebook, “Obama vs. Romney: ‘The Take’ on Election 2012,” a collection of dispatches from the campaign trail by chief political writer Dan Balz. It also offered souvenir copies of its election edition.

“Time released a special commemorative election cover that captures President Obama celebrating his reelection at a rally early Wednesday morning at the Chicago convention center,” Michelle Manafy reported for minonline.com. “. . . Time also released a bonus tablet-only election issue for subscribers Wednesday morning. . . . Non-subscribers can purchase the tablet edition for $2.99 in the iTunes store.”

The Times invited readers to “Commemorate President Barack Obama’s re-election with a front-page reprint from The New York Times on a rustic 8” x 8” marble tile.” At $59.95, each is custom made; an easel is an additional $18.95.

West on Obama: “Rockefeller Republican in Blackface”

The reelection of Barack Obama won’t change Princeton Professor Cornel West‘s posture toward the president, West indicated Friday on Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now!” Appearing with his good friend and fellow Obama critic Tavis Smiley, the media figure and activist, West called Obama “a Rockefeller Republican in blackface.”

” . . . I think that it’s morally obscene and spiritually profane to spend $6 billion on an election, $2 billion on a presidential election, and not have any serious discussion — poverty, trade unions being pushed against the wall dealing with stagnating and declining wages when profits are still up and the 1 percent are doing very well, no talk about drones dropping bombs on innocent people,” West said.

“So we end up with such a narrow, truncated political discourse, as the major problems — ecological catastrophe, climate change, global warming. So it’s very sad. I mean, I’m glad there was not a right-wing takeover, but we end up with a Republican, a Rockefeller Republican in blackface, with Barack Obama, so that our struggle with regard to poverty intensifies.

“. . . our battle is just beginning. We have yet to take off the gloves. You know, we’ve been fighting intensely.”

In 2011, West was criticized when he called Obama a “black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”

Michael H. Cottman wrote in May for Black America Web, “It’s unclear why West feels so compelled to lash out at Obama and why he needs to evaluate Obama through the media. Some of his criticism has been bitter — and downright hateful.”

Women’s Media Center Calls Out Sexist Coverage

“The Women’s Media Center celebrated the end of election season on Thursday by giving out awards for sexist coverage of female politicians through WMC’s ‘Name It. Change It’ project, Sara Morrison wrote Friday for Columbia Journalism Review.

” . . . Most sexist insult: Goes to Fox News’s The Five anchors Greg Gutfeld and Kimberly Guilfoyle for repeatedly calling Florida congresswoman/DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz ‘Frizzilla.’ Clips were shown of both anchors using the term and then smiling in a way that would suggest that they thought they were very clever to criticize a woman’s hairstyle.

“Most sexist debate question: Moderator and Capital Tonight host Liz Benjamin, noticing that both New York senate candidates happened to be female, just had to ask them if they’d read 50 Shades of Grey yet. They said no. Candidate Wendy Long later said the question was ‘out of left field, out of touch, and outlandishly sexist.’ She forgot to say ‘ridiculous’ and ‘totally irrelevant to the candidates’ abilities to do the job.’ . . . “

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