They can pull media's leg until it falls off

Every bunko artist counts 

on the victim to help make the con.

The hoax as a media phenomenon has been around a long time.

Damn MSNBC for falling for an election campaign scam. But don’t guilt the cable guys into thinking such things have never been done before.
A guy came into a newsroom where I once worked. He had some highly credible story. It relied on every newspaper’s drive to break a big news story.
In other words our own newshound tendency outweighed the actual facts.
Every bunko artist counts on the victim to help make the con.
His tale relied on him and him alone. He nimbly turned aside every attempt to identify someone who could collaborate. But we could trust him, he said, and wasn’t he standing right there in front of us?
He’d even be willing to stay in town — at our expense — until we published the expose. That way we could hold him accountable.
Asking for financial backing of course was his undoing.
All I had to do was Xerox his fake driver license and fax it to “the authorities,” I told him. That convinced our confidence man to skedaddle.
Election facts and myths flew helter-skelter before the Barack Obama election punctuated it all. A blog and false identity were behind a wavelet of deception about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. She supposedly didn’t know Africa is a continent, according to a claimed leak inside the John McCain presidential camp.
When so much was being said bizarrely and so much being supposed imaginatively about the VP candidate to nowhere, you can palpably feel the drive to go on air without verification.
The New York Times parsed the fraud ever so gingerly a week later. The Times wasn’t so absolutely sure the explanation of the prank wasn’t a deception too. Remember the old Mad Magazine’s spy vs. spy?
If it’s to be believed, two “obscure filmmakers,” the newspaper said, concocted the ruse with a Web site connected to a fictitious think tank.
The tricksters earlier had gulled The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.
In another exercise in sophomore humor, someone printed a spoof of The New York Times announcing the end of the war in Iraq.
Ask it. You’re already thinking it: Is truth no longer sacred?
Never was. Never will be. That’s the answer to that.
The ruse we have with us always.
The age of the blog, of the hack, of the wannabe triply guarantee it.
Sometimes it’s for laughs. Sometimes it’s for ego. Sometimes it’s for money.
The continental Palin sting was supposed to help pitch a television script concept.
But I suspect there’s something in the head of some people who’d find an excuse to put one over on media types anyway.
We’re asking for it all the time. Because we value an exclusive break on a big story more than we do waiting for the driver i.d. on the swindler to show up bogus.
The only antidote to the practical joke is fact checking every item broadcast, published and digitalized.
Do I think the media will adopt the absolute cure absolutely?
Nope. That you can bank on.

There's a simple way to shape political coverage on Oval Office qualifications

Reporting on and analyzing the skill sets of the two presidential candidates and the two vice-presidential candidates wouldn’t be that hard. First, we’d need journalism to work as smart as politics.

The President ought to be as smart as the cabinet.
Now that’s a proposition The Press could use to focus election year coverage.
No more teen mother angst or fighter pilot claim to superiority or community organizing theory or Delaware do-righteousness.
The person who appoints the heads of our governmental departments should be on a par with them.
Besides selecting the best and the brightest, the Chief Executive then has to monitor and manage and motivate them.
Oh, the President doesn’t have to out-lawyer the Attorney General. But a feel for the Constitution and the rule of law would be nice.
Contrary to GOP candidate John McCain’s emphasis, there’s more to the presidency that serving as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces.
So it’s not necessary to hold a driver’s license for an aircraft carrier or a permit to carry a howitzer or a flight plan for a stealth bomber.
Sufficient unto the day is the sure and certain knowledge that it’s the duty of every soldier to kill the enemy. The how can be left up to the Secretary of Defense.
What the president needs is the judgment to know when to unleash those dogs of war.
And it’s pretty important to have the analytical ability to maintain our tradition of civilian control of the military.
The Secretary of Agriculture may know a lot about crops and markets. But to carry on a conversation about farmers, the President needs to grasp the nuances. For instance we don’t have food stamps merely to feed the poor. The program is foremost an Ag subsidy program.
The Treasury is not a place we keep money. It’s the control room for keeping the dollar sound despite our debtor nation status.
Interior is not about raping the land but extracting its resources soundly.
Education isn’t about enforcing ideology but planting our seed corn for the smart nation we must be to compete in the world.
Commerce isn’t all census and weights and measures – not when we’re killing off our fisheries and can’t get trade policy to work right.
Labor is about fair pay for fair work instead of this seesaw between the rights of unions vs. the prerogatives of corporations.
And what does the President need to know about the State Department to monitor that Secretary?
This: State is the sum of all the other Departments, because we make our way in the world by projecting our good name with justice, intelligence, respect for full bellies and sound minds, caution against bullies and confidence in a Yankee sensibility about trade and money.
Barack Obama has a good idea about appointing a technology chief for the government. There’s a better claim for making that a Cabinet job compared with Veteran Affairs, which could be folded into the Pentagon.
How alienating toward the future and futurists – every person on the Internet – when McCain patronizingly said he doesn't do computers. His implication was we who appreciate the digital world are eccentric.
Technology actually is a way of making science work for us…of causing the future to happen now…of compensating America in the global prosperity race where others enjoy advantages over us.
That sort of thinking and a keenly organized mind would make the President an equal with any Cabinet.
Reporting on and analyzing the skill sets of the two presidential candidates and the two vice-presidential candidates wouldn’t be that hard.
First, we’d need journalism to work as smart as politics.
It’s always intelligent to elevate the national conversation and to focus.

Wasn't it Ronald Reagan who so famously said, 'There you go again'?

You can tell when Republicans enter campaign mode.
They make war on The Media.
And they polarize the nation.
The national conversation ought to be about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…about the economy, including our oil dependency…and about making us all reverse our feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.
The rapid response solution is to move assets from Iraq to Afghanistan…stimulate markets for alternative energy…and elect a peace and prosperity government.
But this is a democracy. So let’s talk.
It’s just that it’s hard to talk sensibly when Republicans get on their high horse.
I’d like to be bipartisan with this criticism. But the Karl Rove playbook does put the GOP in a class of its own.
So the national chitchat turned to one teen’s pregnancy, a governor’s tabloid family story and whether it’s okay to talk about an official of either gender taking the kids to High Office.
Simple questions from The Press on behalf of The Voter to understand better Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska brought down the wrath of the RNC.
Turns out the running mate choice by Sen. John McCain is perfectly capable of fighting for herself.
Her line about lipstick as the only difference between a pit-bull and a hockey mom will go down in the books.
But look what’s not among the serious talking points – our two wars, our greasy economy and the national confidence. Gov. Palin’s personal chutzpa isn’t enough to carry the needed political conversation.
And why did the minions of presidential nominee McCain get bellicose with the Press as a shield against a perfectly natural curiosity about his unusual choice of Gov. Palin?
Because the tactic works.
Network anchors and some other natterers were making nice, singing praises, backing off – after her acceptance speech.
So here we go again, polarized and under threat of a McCain permanent media war instead of doing journalism.

* * *

Any City Hall reporter knows a country club lunch and golf game with the mayor compromises credibility.

Network anchors celebrated a pleasurable birthday over French cuisine in a Manhattan restaurant with John McCain some time back and generally enjoyed the Media Elites' cozy relationship with the senator who would be president.

Jim Rutenberg captured the coziness when he reported in the NYT how dismayed the journalists were by McCain's media attack at the Republicans' convention.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/us/politics/04media.html?ex=1378267200&en=96c863317b4350bb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

So it was dismaying to to the rest of us to hear Tom Brokaw – NBC-TV's senior pontificator – lavish praise on the presidential nominee's performance moments after McCain's acceptance speech.

Club and tee time can't be far off.

* * *

The Times is getting the political story right.

And sometimes a chart tells it all. One on the front page the day after the GOP convention compared the number of times certain terms were used per 25,000 words there and in the Democratic convention.

Democrats uttered "change" 89 times compared to 33 for Republicans; they said "economy" 32 times vs. the GOP 14; "taxes" was heard 26 times in Denver compared with 46 times in St. Paul; and "reform tripped off Democratic tongues 6 times as opposed to 25 times from Republican mouths.

* * *

Sen. McCain vows to end "partisan rancor."

Well, maybe not.

He wants to reach the moderates that way.

Yet the hard core of his own party lives for Karl Rovian invective.

The running mate being called "Sarah Barricuda" and Rush Limbaugh will do a lot of standing in and mouthing off for the candidate.

But he's inevitably going to have to energize his base on his own.

Post-election, should McCain win, we'll have greater political division and soreness between his White House and an increasingly Democratic Congress.

End rancor? That's a campaign promise for The Press to monitor.

They serve popcorn in the movies. . .So, what would they serve in the Oval Office?

The movie Juno delights across generational lines: A family copes humorously but seriously when an unwed teen goes through with pregnancy.
Hollywood follows. It doesn’t lead. The film reflects changing social attitudes.
Now life imitates art, imitating life.
The daughter of the Republican pick for vice president is 17 and preggers. She plans to marry the young father but hasn’t yet.
Media and politics alike can leave that script alone.
Fairer game is the selection process Sen. John McCain uses for big decisions such as choosing his running mate – Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the teenager’s mom.
The governor enjoys an ultra short but messy resume with the pending investigation of an official firing wrapped around a lurid family problem, her sister’s divorce.
The more limited question is how well the would-be President McCain researched Gov. Palin’s background: Did he simply fall for a fellow political contrarian?
The larger issue is how the man makes all his decisions: Would he be such a dice-thrower in the Oval office?
His autobiography is the self-portrait of a devil-may-care jetfighter pilot, flying on the edge and taking chances without too much attention to rules.
The most dramatic moment of his long, legendary life struck like a surface-to-air missile over Hanoi – literally. His radar and his training both said, “Get outta there,” when a North Vietnam rocket locked onto his aircraft.
McCain gambled he could still drop his payload. He lost, spending the next five years in tortuous captivity.
The story bears a sacred stamp. No one can criticize the split-second decision nor the sacrifice made for flag and country.
But in the longer view of the man, what recurs again and again as a maverick, counter-to-convention thought process does merit scrutiny by The Media as the designated stand-in for The Voter.
Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin live the lives of a Hollywood script.
Now The Press must help us decide if we want to elect a credible president and vice president. Or do we want to spend the next four years inside someone else’s movie.