Do the Clinton's simply have a propensity towards scandal? Many in the Beltway press have suggested so.
I will agree in one sense: Bill Clinton's extramarital dalliances in this day and age certainly can provide a target. After all, the only one of all fantastic charges against the Clintons in the 90s that stuck was that Clinton indeed is a man that as he himself admitted in a 1992 interview, 'Had caused pain in his marriage.'
Yet, overall I don't think the difference between the Clinton and the Obama years can be chalked up simply to the Clintons somehow 'courting scandal.'
I think it is about the radically different media environment of the 90s vs. the Obama years.
In the 90s the Right wing dominated the media in a way they don't today.
What you had on the one side was the old fashioned network news where news was updated much more slowly. There was some good news shows like Ted Koppel, Tom Brokaw, and 60 minutes but these were hardly giving us news in real time.
In the 90s the conservatives were way ahead technologically speaking regarding the media. David Brock documents how the Right wing big like machine could make something up out of whole cloth and it cold take weeks for months for the old dinosaur mainstream network news model to figure out that it was a hoax.
Meanwhile thousands of stories had been written and repeated on television and millions of Americans had read/seen the lies.
Correcting the record after this is sort of like closing the barn after the cows have all run to the hills.
http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Messenger-Right-Wing-Hillary-Government/dp/1455533769/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1441941325&sr=8-1&keywords=david+brock
The Right dominated talk radio, and it had the first footprints into both cable news with Fox and the Internet with the Drudge Report.
But thanks in large part to Brock's Media Matters and many other liberal blogs and liberals on social media-and on cable news as well, though MSNBC has been disappointing lately as we've chronicled.
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/09/please-sign-this-petition-for-msnbc-to.html
we have a much bigger footprint on the public debate today. And that, I will argue is in large part why there haven't been more Obama scandals.
If there was the liberal blogosphere there is today I think you can argue there never would have been a Clinton impeachment. To be sure an important weapon the GOP had then that they lack now is the ability to set up an Independent Counsel to investigate their latest manufactured scandals.
Now they need the Democratic White House's own permission unlike then.
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/09/gop-tries-to-browbeat-loretta-lynch.html
In the 90s Benghazi or the furor over the IRS supposedly targeting Tea Party groups might well have had legs it didn't get in this era of a more level media field.
I will agree in one sense: Bill Clinton's extramarital dalliances in this day and age certainly can provide a target. After all, the only one of all fantastic charges against the Clintons in the 90s that stuck was that Clinton indeed is a man that as he himself admitted in a 1992 interview, 'Had caused pain in his marriage.'
Yet, overall I don't think the difference between the Clinton and the Obama years can be chalked up simply to the Clintons somehow 'courting scandal.'
I think it is about the radically different media environment of the 90s vs. the Obama years.
In the 90s the Right wing dominated the media in a way they don't today.
What you had on the one side was the old fashioned network news where news was updated much more slowly. There was some good news shows like Ted Koppel, Tom Brokaw, and 60 minutes but these were hardly giving us news in real time.
In the 90s the conservatives were way ahead technologically speaking regarding the media. David Brock documents how the Right wing big like machine could make something up out of whole cloth and it cold take weeks for months for the old dinosaur mainstream network news model to figure out that it was a hoax.
Meanwhile thousands of stories had been written and repeated on television and millions of Americans had read/seen the lies.
Correcting the record after this is sort of like closing the barn after the cows have all run to the hills.
http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Messenger-Right-Wing-Hillary-Government/dp/1455533769/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1441941325&sr=8-1&keywords=david+brock
The Right dominated talk radio, and it had the first footprints into both cable news with Fox and the Internet with the Drudge Report.
But thanks in large part to Brock's Media Matters and many other liberal blogs and liberals on social media-and on cable news as well, though MSNBC has been disappointing lately as we've chronicled.
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/09/please-sign-this-petition-for-msnbc-to.html
we have a much bigger footprint on the public debate today. And that, I will argue is in large part why there haven't been more Obama scandals.
If there was the liberal blogosphere there is today I think you can argue there never would have been a Clinton impeachment. To be sure an important weapon the GOP had then that they lack now is the ability to set up an Independent Counsel to investigate their latest manufactured scandals.
Now they need the Democratic White House's own permission unlike then.
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/09/gop-tries-to-browbeat-loretta-lynch.html
In the 90s Benghazi or the furor over the IRS supposedly targeting Tea Party groups might well have had legs it didn't get in this era of a more level media field.
No comments:
Post a Comment