RT @fivethirtyeight: Not my beat, but I’m no fan of the Juan Williams firing. Everyone’s gotten really trigger-happy; it won’t make for a better press.
RT @fivethirtyeight: Not my beat, but I’m no fan of the Juan Williams firing. Everyone’s gotten really trigger-happy; it won’t make for a better press.
Also, does anyone doubt that Williams-gate will only serve to put more wind in the sails of Republican candidates over the next two weeks?
It certainly will, especially given NPR’s CEO’s incredibly obnoxious “psychiatrist” comment about Williams (for which she dutifully apologized). Vivian Schiller is quite the dipshit.
I doubt that it will have any appreciable effect. I concede that any effect would be negative for the Dems. But this is mostly a Beltway/pundit-class tempest in a teapot. It’ll rile up the Tea Party Right against the Lamestream Media, but they were already at Defcon 1 riled-up status. And swing voters just aren’t going to make the logical leap that “NPR fired some guy so I should vote Republican.” They’re concerned about the economy and their own jobs, not the culture wars and Juan Williams’s job.
But this is mostly a Beltway/pundit-class tempest in a teapot.
You clearly don’t watch Fox News.
The reason it has sustained interest outside of the Beltway is because it’s a story that fits perfectly one of the main campaign memes that the Tea Party has been successful with: Washington is out of touch; they are liberal elitists who are in it for themselves but want to tell you how to run your lives; they’ve run the economy into the ground and now they are threatening America’s prosperity with rising deficits.
Also, while the amount of money from Congress that actually goes to NPR may not be appreciably large, I can guarantee you many candidates will now add public broadcasting to its list of cuts that need to be made.
Not only have NPR and the Dems shot themselves politically, they may also have hurt public broadcasting financially for years to come.
You clearly don’t watch Fox News.
I have no doubt that many, many heads have exploded at Fox News about this in the last 24 hours. But whatever is being said on Fox — or any cable news channel — is, by definition, within the category of “Beltway/pundit-class” chatter and #PANIC and #OUTRAGE. I remain unconvinced that many people, outside of hard-core Tea Partiers, will go to the polls in 11 days with this in mind.
Not only have NPR and the Dems shot themselves politically…
While I realize you probably don’t recognize any distinction between “NPR and the Dems,” are there any specific non-media “Dems” you’re referring to here? I’m not aware of any politician who was involved in this particular unforced error by NPR.
…they may also have hurt public broadcasting financially for years to come.
This is, I think, a much bigger concern. I stand by what I said above about the political impact — that the people “riled up” by this kerfuffle are basically the people who were already “riled up” anyway; I really doubt this is going to motivate swing voters to any non-negligible degree — but the policy impact for NPR could be quite bad (albeit limited by the paucity of federal funding it receives… but if this becomes a witch-hunt whereby second-hand and third-hard “federal funding” is targeted, that’s a bigger problem).
Nearly two million viewers puts Fox News in the “Beltway/pundit-class”?
No, not many people will show up at the polls specifically because of this incident. Rather, it is more of a straw-breaking-a-camel’s-back effect, the cumulative effect of which is to move the needle towards the Republican candidates by a percentage point or two.
Finally, I fail to see why one should need to make the distinction between NPR / the media and Democrats / liberals. In the minds of the voters about to toss Pelosi and possibly Reid out of running Congress, there is a clear incestuous, revolving-door relationship between the two groups. Just as with the other side, there is no line between WSJ / National Review / Rush Limbaugh and Republicans / conservatives. When Rush says something controversial, all Republicans / conservatives immediately get tarred and feathered for it.
Nearly two million viewers puts Fox News in the “Beltway/pundit-class”?
Don’t be obtuse. The consumers of media are not the pundit class. It’s the pundits speaking to those consumers through the media, Fox included, that are the pundit class. The fact that Fox News has 2 million viewers doesn’t somehow prove that every single thing which ever appears on Fox is, in fact, riling up the masses and producing massive electoral consequences. Fox can get caught up in teapot-tempest Outrage Machine-generated nonsense just as much as, if not more than, anybody else in the media.
This kerfuffle is one of those issues that will get tons of media play because it involves, well, the media, not to mention a major Fox News/right-wing hobby-horse/pet peeve. But it’s not going to influence consumers of media (i.e., voters) to any significant degree, because anyone who’s inclined to be seriously OUTRAGED!!!!! about this for more than 5 minutes is already a highly motivated, outraged, conservative “likely voter.”
I disagree. This is a huge momentum-killer for Democrats and will cost them a percentage point here or there in many key races. As I said above, this isn’t the kind of thing that pushes people out of their chairs to go vote, it’s the kind of thing that increases the enthusiasm gap and helps push the undecided voter into the “Throw The Bums Out” camp.
I think you’re getting caught up in the OOTM (Outrage Of The Moment). If the election were today or tomorrow, I might agree with you. But it’s in 11 days. The media cycle moves so fast now, we’ll be talking about something entirely different by then. I can imagine this swinging a 2000 Florida-close or 2008 Minnesota-close race, but of course, a butterfly flapping its wings in China (after buying a bunch of treasury bonds and then donating to the Chamber of Commerce) can alter a race that’s that close. Anyway I can’t see a 1% or 2% effect from this. Maybe 0.1% or 0.2%. I just don’t think this is a “Bush DUI” October surprise type event. I’ll freely admit that I’m going on a hunch and I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.
Of course, we’ll never know who’s right. Speaking of which, HOW DARE YOU MAKE PREDICTIONS THAT ARE NOT EMPIRICALLY VERIFIABLE!!! Next you’ll be telling me the NPR flap “saved or created” one million Republican votes. 🙂
It’s empirically verifiable, but I’m not going to drop fiddygrand to commission a poll. Maybe Rasmussen will test the waters on this.
Not really, because if you ask a bunch of MSM-hating right-wing Tea Partiers, “Did the NPR kerfuffle influence your vote?”, of course a bunch of them will say yes, but that doesn’t ACTUALLY mean they either wouldn’t have voted, or would have voted Democrat, if this hadn’t happened. That’s the equivalent of asking people, “Would you have laid off more people if not for the stimulus?” You can’t rely on self-reporting of counterfactuals to any reasonable degree of accuracy.
Even more importantly its time to talk about football damnit. Politics can wait til Monday.
Brendan, my point is, the NPR kerfuffle expands the number of people who self-identify as (or whose voting behavior mimics) “MSM-hating right-wing Tea Partiers”. And yes, you can measure things like voter intensity, ask questions about what issues influenced you, and so on, and come to a conclusion based on looking at the data that there was or was not a more-than-negligible effect.
“Reading between the lines of Juan’s statement and those of NPR officials, it’s apparent that NPR was moved to fire Juan because he irritates so many people in its audience. An interesting contrast: while many NPR listeners apparently could not stomach that Williams also appeared on Fox News. But it doesn’t seem that any perceptible number of Fox News viewers had any complaints that Williams also worked for NPR. The Fox audience seems to be more tolerant of diversity than the NPR audience.”
Perhaps, AML, but the conclusion would be subject to legitimate debate, no more solid fact than a conclusion about whether the stimulus did or didn’t create X number of jobs.
Joe, Fox and NPR are not equivalent. Fox and MSNBC are equivalent. There is no “conservative NPR” to my knowledge; the WSJ is perhaps the print equivalent, though I’m sure AML will dispute that. Regardless, the point is, there was nothing in particular for Fox viewers to “tolerate” about Williams working for NPR because, while NPR has a mild liberal bias, it can’t reasonably be portrayed as a partisan or advocacy-based news organization. Fox and MSNBC are completely different. They’re more like the old party-controlled daily papers than like virtually any other mainstream journalistic institutions in existence today. Thus, there is far more arguable justification for an NPR audience to be concerned about a commentator appearing on Fox than for the reverse. And furthermore, because Fox viewers are already clearly OK with watching a station that (like MSNBC on the other side) straddles the line between biased journalism and outright advocacy, they aren’t likely to (or at least shouldn’t) have any principled objections to “journalists” who express opinions, as they clearly don’t care much about that.
A more equivalent question would be whether WSJ readers (who have something that more closely resembles a mirror-image profile of NPR listeners) would be OK with a center-right news analyst being a regular contributor to MSNBC (which, as I’ve said, is FAR closer to being the “liberal Fox” than NPR is), yukking it up with Olbermann, Maddow, “Leg-Tingle” and the rest of ’em, and arguably giving some sort of conservative / kinda-neutral-journalist “cover” to their partisan views.
I said that it could be empirically tested, not that it could be proven beyond legitimate debate.
Brendan, WSJ from a news perspective is not conservative whatsoever — it’s just business and economy-focused. The op-ed page is a different story and is simply the counterweight to the NYT op-ed page. The NPR comparison doesn’t work.
P.S. By the way, as a center-left NPR listener myself, I personally had no problem whatsoever with Williams being both an NPR analyst and a Fox contributor. So I’m not arguing in favor of this viewpoint. I’m just saying that it’s more solidly justifiable than Fox viewers objecting to Williams being on NPR. I say this NOT because liberals rule and conservatives drool, but simply because Fox and NPR sit in very different spots on both the serious journalism <---> infotainment drivel spectrum and the genuine attempt at neutrality <---> blatant partisan/ideological advocacy spectrum.
I knew you’d say that, AML. Not sure I agree — I think WSJ has the same sort of “story selection bias” that you identified vis a vis NPR, and both have really solid, largely neutral reporting — but fine, what journalistic outlet would you cite as the conservative equivalent of NPR?
what journalistic outlet would you cite as the conservative equivalent of NPR?
There is none. Just as there is no real left-wing version of right-wing talk radio.
The WSJ doesn’t have a story selection bias — it’s a business-oriented newspaper. They barely cover sports and lots of other topics, unless they have some sort of economic / finance theme associated. It’s a newspaper version of what you’d get from Business Week or The Economist, except those magazines are more opinion-infused in their stories, whereas WSJ is straight-reporting until you reach the op-ed page.
A more equivalent question would be whether WSJ readers (who have something that more closely resembles a mirror-image profile of NPR listeners) would be OK with a center-right news analyst being a regular contributor to MSNBC (which, as I’ve said, is FAR closer to being the “liberal Fox” than NPR is), yukking it up with Olbermann, Maddow, “Leg-Tingle” and the rest of ‘em, and arguably giving some sort of conservative / kinda-neutral-journalist “cover” to their partisan views.
You mean like Tucker Carlson or Joe Scarborough?
1) Do either Tucker or Joe write for the WSJ?
2) Joe isn’t really conservative so much as unabashedly centrist. Tucker was fired by MSNBC and now contributes to Fox.
Also, regardless of his political views Tucker Carlson is just a moron, so he’s a poor example in general.
Tucker Carlson has written for the WSJ.
the cumulative effect of which is to move the needle towards the Republican candidates by a percentage point or two.
Huh?
“the cumulative effect of which is to move the needle towards the Republican candidates by a percentage point or two.
Huh?“
And there, AMLTrojan, is a classic response showing the level of understanding of those whose basic response to the Juan Williams firing is “Move on ! Nothing to see there !” …
After all, how can you possibly be accused of not supporting diversity when you fire an Uncle Tom ? Even if he seems to be the principle Black/AfricanAmerican/whatever-non-white regular on NPR, the Bastion of Diversity !
there was nothing in particular for Fox viewers to “tolerate” about Williams working for NPR because, while NPR has a mild liberal bias, it can’t reasonably be portrayed as a partisan or advocacy-based news organization.
But regardless of whether NPR in fact has only a mild liberal bias (which I’m not sure I agree with, but that’s beside the point), if Fox viewers perceive NPR as a partisan news organization the same way that liberals perceive FNC, which I would argue most of them do (rightly or wrongly), then that just reinforces the point about Fox’s audience being more tolerant than NPR’s audience.
The best argument against Barone in my view is that Fox viewers aren’t likely to begrudge Williams appearing on NPR because (1) Williams is a liberal (yes hippies, FNC has liberal analysts), and (2) outside of FNC and talk radio, there are very few media outlets that give conservative views a hearing on par with liberal views, so requiring fealty to those outlets would essentially mean cutting Williams off from the vast majority of media, which would be an unreasonable demand.
And there, AMLTrojan, is a classic response showing the level of understanding of those whose basic response to the Juan Williams firing is “Move on ! Nothing to see there !” …
No, I just don’t believe this will move the polls a percentage point or two. There’s a lot more outrageous shit than this going on in the world, after all.
Jim:
I think you are vastly underestimating the symbolism of Williams’ firing.
And I think you are vastly overestimating it.