Welcome Interstate Bloggers

Three new blogs here:

Kevin.

Caroline.

Kasey.

Your classmates

Got some new blogs popping up!!

And here.

Sticky Wicket

Hey, there, Rhetoric majors!!!
What do you think of Lipstickgate?
Ooops! Meghan says Dad uses that expression. (When kids have blogs!!!)
And Obama unleashes an older loaded phrase.

Interesting

Greenwald at Salon has been doing some very interersting press criticism. Make sure you read this. And check the links.

My Dirty Little Secret

Last night, after class, I took off for a few days of much needed R&R in Truro. But I won't be billing the state for it.
I am, however, interested in the way Josh Marshall seems to be trying to track a Palin meme.
He even seems to feel he can shape it, by finding a familiar analogy.

ALSO -- Some of you may have hit an overestuffed mailbox when emailing me your urls. If so, try again. I did some cleaning here.

The flow of themed sessions may change, especially depending on the availability of some of our guests from the outside. You'll meet, over the course of this semester, peoplewho work inside campaigns, people who cover campaigns, people who fashion advertising.

Assigments related to these sesions will be posted on this blog every week.

For now, the sessions go like this.

Sept. 15. What is a campaign? (See separate posting.) How campaigns have speeded up.
Sept. 22 What is/are the media? Who reads and watches what? What kind of shape are some of these media institutions in? How are some of the older media -- including cable TV --changing their missions?
Sept. 29 Who are the new players and how do they change the game? Politico and Huffington Post and some of other big web presences didn't even exist four years ago. But we'll also look at Wikipedia.
Oct. 6 Sex (roles) and the campaign. Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama and how they get covered.
Oct. 13 Humor. This was the year SNL, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report not only shaped coverage but attracted serious scruitny about the way they do that.
Oct. 20 Polls. How do they work? How do they get covered? What kind of coverage do they deserve?
Oct. 27 Advertising and fact checking of ads. Guest star: Ad guru Steve Wolfberg.
Nov. 3 Media Bias. We'll be talking about it all year long, but let's look hard at the specific charges.
Nov. 10. Election Recap.
Nov. 17 Race in the race. How did they cover it? And did it matter? Did anyone ever talk about ageism too?
Nov. 24 Talk radio, Fox news and the explicitly conservative media .
Dec. 1 What will 2012 be like, based on what we've seen this time? What will become more important? The information cloud?
Dec. 8. Final class. Heavy weeping.

Sept 15 -- What Is a Campaign?

For the themes half of the class, we'll discuss possibly the most basic question. What is it we're talking about when we talk about how the media covers a campaign. Whqat's supposed to happen in a presidential race?

There will be some spcial reading for that.
Is Roger Ailes right? Are there only three things that get covered?
There's an argument made here that what it takes to win is not what it should take to win.
Maybe a campaign is basically a meme war. To better under stand the term, read the first chapter of this terrific book on memes.

Workload and What You Need to Do Right Away

One nice thing about this course is that you don't have to buy any books, and you don't have to do a final paper.

The emphasis, instead, is what you do every week. Please understand that, because of that, I have very high expectations for your weekly output. It is impossible to coast along for most of the term and then put on a big charge in the last few weeks and still get a decent grade.

The first thing you need to do is either start a blog or adapt an existing blog so that you can do your homework on it. If you're on some other platform like livejournal and want to use its blogging function, that's fine, as long as there is a specificl url that takes us directly to a blog or page that is all about the course and not about your bffs or how many beers you pounded down last Friday.

I say "us" because that is one of the other unusual aspects of this course. You will all have access to each other's blogs. Commenting on each other's entries is good, provided said comments are constructive and not snarky. {If you're a total Luddite or if this concept scares you, talk to me. I bet we can get you going on a blog pretty darn quick. Your classmates will help. And you'll be surprised at how much fun it is. At first. Exceptions will be made, but only with great resistance from me.}

Try to blog every day . If I see posts for four or five days per week, I will be happy. If I see two posts for the whole week, I will be happy only if they are longer and chunkier and noteworthy for the way they synthesize themes and use links to support various ideas. If I see an output that is thin and sketchy, I will not be so happy.

Try to blog intelligibly and thoughtfully. But if you want to use informal, not-so-academic language in your posts, that's fine with me, provided it is done in order to support your insights and observations with zippy, entertaining prose. Remember, this IS the written portion of this seminar, so make it sing, dudes.

Another thing you need to do right away is make sure you have registration access to at least one major newspaper. It's probably a good idea to make cure you can get on the sites of the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times with relative ease. The Wall Street Journal is trickier, but if it turns out we have at least one or two regular WSJ readers in the class, that will be great.

Every week the class will have two halves, although they will not always go in the same order.

One half will be a discussion pulling together all of what we have seen and gleaned from our media monitoring all week. The other half will focus on the theme we are exploring that week.

So let's talk about you media monitoring.
Each of you will be responsible for reading ALL of the political coverage in one major newspaper EVERY DAY. Not all of you will read the same newspapers. I will try to work as much as possible with whatever preerences you already have, but I will also divide you up into teams, so we make sure a diversity of newspapers is voered.

You must also, every day, look at Slate's Today's Papers feature. That will take you 30 seconds. While you are at Slate, you might as well poke around in their other coverage, which is very good. It tends to be read by a lot of other people in the business. One of the relatively new trends is that kind of "layering."
The big fish are often reading the smaller fish. In fact, that would be a cool thing to note in your blogs from time to time -- the way relatively minor players seem to be influencing coverage by (or even going into partnership with) better established players.

But I digress. If you get really obsessed with how newspapers are covering any one thing, I invite you to use this AMAZING tool, which allows you to look at all the front pages for any one day.

You must also spend 30 minutes day with some kind of television news. Again, the more diverse we are the better, and I will divide you up into teams based on what you already do. A network evening news or a cable show. THE DAILY SHOW DOES NOT COUNT. You should probably watch it anyway, as much as you can. And we will spend one week studying it and Colbert very closely.

You must also spend a few minutes every day with internet only content.
I would like you to stop in -- without necessarily becoming mired -- at one of the big ones like Daily Kos or Town Hall or Instapundit or peek at all the bloggers at the Atlantic site. But pick your poisons. You probably all have political blogs you like. I will ask you to commit to monitoring at least one of them.

So that's your bedrock monitoring commitment. Some newspaper, television and internet. And a daily or near-daily blog post sifting through your perceptions.

On top of that we will pile some content associated with each week's theme.

If that seems like a lot, all I can say is -- no books, no final paper, no exam. Work your ass off for me on a daily/weekly basis and we can all wave bye-bye on the last day of classes. What I'm really trying to do is build a weekly media hive in the classroom, where the bees teach each other. If we all do our work, we will be collectively as sharp about the topic of this class as anybody in America.

EXTRAS:
I could list 100 extra, but I will only list two.
If you look at this Pew site every day, you will get a good overview of our topic. Follow the links to learn more.
I look at Memeorandum about ten times day, five days a week. It in turn will lead you to some of the other biggies like Drudge and HuffPo and Politico. We will study them in depth one week, but feel free to look at them all the time.

It's not funny

This is the campaign where the serious people decided to study comedy.

Who reads and watches what

Some interesting new data on media use trends.
And everybody loves the thing about Stewart/Colbert.

New media questions

Undernews?
If you click on the Slate links in this post, you will see Mickey Kaus mention the "under-news." I think we know, in a general way, what he means, but exactly what is -- and isn't -- the under-news. On the day of this writing, the Google NEWS serach engine does not seem to pull up Politico-com articles. You have to get them, I think, from a general web search. But that, in a mechanistic way, is an interesting statement. And it may not matter, because Politico articles are headed into the MSM anyway. But then there will be another Politico, outside the campfire.


Do the Dems rule the 'net?
This Politico article raises relevant questions about whether the GOP trails in new media. But how much of an impact do, for instance, TPM and HuffPo really make?

Tim the Enchanter

We're going to have to discuss the death of Tim Russert. He was a far more controversial figure than the hagiography that followed his death could possibly convey. Read the comment threads on this article. But his death -- and the DAYS of coverage that followed -- seemed to be a funeral for more than just the man himself. We celebrate a thing when it's dying. More was dying than just Russert. But what? NPR's Tom Ashbrook devoted his show to the idea that Russert may have repreented the tail end of sober-sided grown-up journalism now being crowded out by the histrionics of Keith Olbermann. (And Chris Matthews.) Ashbrook and his guests rejected the idea that Russert's clubby D.C. centrism -- embodied in the idea that Carville and Matalin are legitimate sources of political perspective as opposed to cynical hired guns -- is itself a "point of view" imposed on fact-patterns.
Others detected in the Russert coverage a kind of self-loving within the media which seemed more energetic than the actual coverage of, you know, news.
Russert had, in the blogosphere, often stood for exactly the kind journalism that bloggers dislike. But most of them had to stay pretty quiet for a while.

Another thing that changed

Citizen journalists who do not declare themselves.

NPR on Clinton Coverage

This is one of the best things I've heard/read on the coverage of Hillary Clinton. The coverage of Clinton will be one of our first topics this fall.

Quote from the piece (in case the link goes dead):

The record often shows journalists and pundits do constantly describe Clinton in different terms than they would her male rivals. In interviewing voters for a focus group on the air earlier this year, Fox News Channel consultant Frank Luntz sought to learn what kind of campaign they wanted Obama and Clinton to wage.
"How many of you want them to really argue," Luntz asked. "And, how many of you want them to make love to each other?"
Just try imagining him putting Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in that scenario. Or, consider whether conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh could sneak Joe Biden into this one:
"Mrs. Clinton's testicle lockbox is big enough for the entire Democrat hierarchy," Limbaugh told listeners, "not just some people in the media."
On the other side of the spectrum, MSNBC's Chris Mathews famously said Clinton was a senator and a plausible presidential candidate only because of her humiliation during her husband's presidency.

The dog that did not bark I

By this date in history, there was a low-level hum in the media about Hillary Clinton's performance and the way in which it was outpacing Obama's.
This could be looked at in terms of coverage.
Or votes.
Or electoral votes, both for her and for him.

But the media storyline was different. You may not have read very much about the above, and you may have read quite a lot about the Bobby Kennedy remark.

More new media forms

In 2008, we saw the emergence of entirely new media forms.

Consider the Huffington Post. I can't really think of any obvious parallel or precursor to the way it blends blogging, mainstream-style commentary and the rather blurred use of Hollywood celebrities as news analysts.

Over at Brave New Films, documentary-maker Robert Greenwald decided that the development of viral videos was too important a thing to leave to chance.

Was the news coverage sexist?

That is the argument made by Hillary Clinton and her supporters in mid-May.

Here's a more detailed transcript, if you're interested.

The Wild Rover and the Tenor of the Times

The New York Times looks at the way the mass media have blurred the line between operative and expert, using Karl Rove as Exhibit K.

And here's another resource, Media Tenor, with a sample item from today.

What's Up, John?

This needed to be done.
A deconstruction of ''The Daily Show."

Tim and George. Do You Care?

Coverage of coverage!!!

The New York Times devoted a front page story to the rivalray between two Sunday morning hosts.

And I had a few extra thoughts.