While most of the media is still focused on the Chris Christie scandal, we think it's critically important today to look not just at the issue of Gov. Christie's alleged malfeasance, but at several other major issues that all have the same problem: A severe lack of accountability.
Gov. Christie hasn't done himself any favors in that department, and he didn't help himself on Tuesday during his New Jersey 'State of the State' address. Right from the beginning, Gov. Christie used the non-committal, "Mistakes were clearly made" framing, while also saying his office would "…cooperate with all inquiries to ensure this breach of trust won't happen again."
It's important to note that Gov. Christie didn't say a similar screw-up wouldn't happen again. Just that no one else would break his trust and get caught again. That distinction is important, as Christie is already being caught in further lies about how well he knew certain people involved with the bridge scandal, or which now-former Christie aides were loyal team players.
In short, what New Jerseyans are suffering under is a severe lack of accountability from Gov. Christie's office - something more than 300,000 residents of West Virginia can relate to.
As Ana Marie Cox noted on Monday, much of the media has given grudging, if slight coverage to the equally important story of the chemical spill in West Virginia. The very real physical need of water to remain potable for hundreds of thousands, and not become some kind of deadly poison that could eat a hole through your kitchen table is generally more important than if a couple thousand people get stuck in traffic near Manhattan for a few hours.
Of course, West Virginians also would have helped their own cause if they'd actually followed multiple recommendations to add oversight, holding corporations like Freedom Industries responsible through inspections and effective regulations.
Many in the media have also been culpable in hiding the failures of both private industry and government. The perfect example of this is the failure of Congress to extend unemployment insurance.
Greg Sargent, Jonathan Cohn, and Steve Benen all made it clear that Americans who've been out of work long-term, through no fault of their own, were abandoned by Republicans on Tuesday. To make it clear: Those Americans weren't abandoned by Congress, or their government as a whole - just by GOP lawmakers. That fact, sadly, is an uncomfortable one that more than a few colleagues at places like 'The Hill' and 'Politico' attempted to run away from, with non-committal stories about "jobless aid" failing as a casualty of Congressional bickering.
The facts are clear, however, in all three of these cases.
Republicans in the Senate, led by the petty Sen. Mitch McConnell, abandoned their fellow Americans yesterday. West Virginians also made their own poisoned river over the last twenty years - with serious help from corporations tied to Koch industries and the Koch family.
As for Gov. Christie, it's obvious where the responsibility for his problems came from. It's also obvious the buck never stops with him.
It just stops, in a non-committal way.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
No Surprises Here
For all the headlines we've seen over the last 24 hours, decrying New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, or the Supreme Court, or the West Virginia chemical spill, or even the makeup of Obamacare enrollees, we have to note our relative lack of surprise at any of those stories. Even the silence among Congressional Democrats on the new Iranian sanctions bill floating around Capitol Hill, that Greg Sargent pointed out on Monday, doesn't entirely surprise us.
The fact is, 2014 is an election year, and for members of both parties up and down the ticket, virtually everything is going to be focused on getting elected, re-elected, or positioned for a higher office.
The news that some politicians are going to act like spineless, invertebrate, slugs - especially in an election year - should be the non-event of the season.
Take Gov. Christie's ongoing Bridgegate scandal. For a man with a long history of being a bully, it's now apparent he was throwing his metaphorical weight around, canceling meetings with mayors who disagreed with him. Christie generally being, well… a bully hasn't really surprised many folks. A Pew poll taken since last Thursday shows that the opinion of Chris Christie by most Americans remains largely unchanged since this scandal took over the front pages of most newspaper and news websites - likely because Americans already thought Christie was a typical, mean, slightly corrupt New Jersey politician.
The chemical spill in West Virginia shouldn't be much of a surprise to Americans, either. Yes, as Ana Marie Cox noted in The Guardian on Monday, the West Virginia disaster is a more important story than the Christie scandal in many ways. That said, as Sally Kohn pointed out in The Daily Beast, as more public delivery and safety systems have been privatized, and regulations have been weakened, more of these man-made disasters have been popping up all over the nation, from Texas, to North Dakota, and beyond.
The type of enrollees already signed up for Obamacare also shouldn't surprise anyone. Wonkblog's Sarah Kliff notes that one in four Obamacare enrollees are currently young adults, a number that's below the optimal target. However, as Jonathan Cohn from The New Republic spotlighted, just like with Romneycare in Massachusetts, younger people are waiting until the last minute before they get their enrollment completed.
What looks to be happening at the Supreme Court isn't much of a surprise either, given the high Court's current right-wing majority. That the Court looks likely to try to limit the power of the presidency under Mr. Obama, when they seemed perfectly fine with George W. Bush's multiple overreaches of executive power isn't much of a surprise.
Even the latest literary release coming out that reveals Fox News chief Roger Ailes to be a classless slug, to the book from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates that most of the media didn't actually read and just blasted through their own partisan lens, none of the headlines we saw over the last day or so really surprised us.
Maybe we're jaded after Paul's fantastic vacation, or maybe we're dulled in anticipation of our editor Amy's new baby.
Maybe it's just that the slugs, thugs, bullies, and criminals are all exactly who we expected them to be.
The fact is, 2014 is an election year, and for members of both parties up and down the ticket, virtually everything is going to be focused on getting elected, re-elected, or positioned for a higher office.
The news that some politicians are going to act like spineless, invertebrate, slugs - especially in an election year - should be the non-event of the season.
Take Gov. Christie's ongoing Bridgegate scandal. For a man with a long history of being a bully, it's now apparent he was throwing his metaphorical weight around, canceling meetings with mayors who disagreed with him. Christie generally being, well… a bully hasn't really surprised many folks. A Pew poll taken since last Thursday shows that the opinion of Chris Christie by most Americans remains largely unchanged since this scandal took over the front pages of most newspaper and news websites - likely because Americans already thought Christie was a typical, mean, slightly corrupt New Jersey politician.
The chemical spill in West Virginia shouldn't be much of a surprise to Americans, either. Yes, as Ana Marie Cox noted in The Guardian on Monday, the West Virginia disaster is a more important story than the Christie scandal in many ways. That said, as Sally Kohn pointed out in The Daily Beast, as more public delivery and safety systems have been privatized, and regulations have been weakened, more of these man-made disasters have been popping up all over the nation, from Texas, to North Dakota, and beyond.
The type of enrollees already signed up for Obamacare also shouldn't surprise anyone. Wonkblog's Sarah Kliff notes that one in four Obamacare enrollees are currently young adults, a number that's below the optimal target. However, as Jonathan Cohn from The New Republic spotlighted, just like with Romneycare in Massachusetts, younger people are waiting until the last minute before they get their enrollment completed.
What looks to be happening at the Supreme Court isn't much of a surprise either, given the high Court's current right-wing majority. That the Court looks likely to try to limit the power of the presidency under Mr. Obama, when they seemed perfectly fine with George W. Bush's multiple overreaches of executive power isn't much of a surprise.
Even the latest literary release coming out that reveals Fox News chief Roger Ailes to be a classless slug, to the book from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates that most of the media didn't actually read and just blasted through their own partisan lens, none of the headlines we saw over the last day or so really surprised us.
Maybe we're jaded after Paul's fantastic vacation, or maybe we're dulled in anticipation of our editor Amy's new baby.
Maybe it's just that the slugs, thugs, bullies, and criminals are all exactly who we expected them to be.
Monday, January 13, 2014
The Real Cost Of Quality Journalism
As another week begins, in the wake of another awards show last night, we thought about some of our colleagues in the media who really deserve awards, but won't likely ever get the kind of recognition you may have seen featured at the Golden Globes last night.
It's not easy being a journalist today, either in the U.S. or abroad. The wars abroad, especially the civil war in Syria, killed 70 journalists last year. That number doesn't even include those journalists jailed for simply doing their jobs, in places like Egypt. Domestically, Congress is still so bogged down with Republican obstructionism even K Street lobbyists are looking for side jobs. Both corporate media and politicians are also disgustingly beholden to ideological zealots like the Koch Brothers, making corruption in both politics and private business harder than ever for journalists to uncover.
If it were strictly up to the media minders at places like Fox, or some of the other right-wing media outlets, they'd keep the general public buried in nonsense, like the new book by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, or the latest hickup in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act - and not the serious corruption involved in two very major stories over the last week.
That's why we're incredibly grateful to ethical local journalists, and the ethical national journalists that followed the lead of the local reporters on both "Bridgegate" - the ongoing corruption scandal of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie - and the ongoing chemical disaster in West Virginia that's kept 300,000 Americans without any clean, useable water for nearly a week.
Gov. Christie's scandal, as we noted twice last week, is not only terrifying, politically. It's also nearly impossible to believe he didn't have some knowledge of what was going on. What should terrify Republicans even more is that as flawed as Christie's corruption scandal may show him to be, he is still considered the leading candidate for the Republican Party in the 2016 presidential race.
A similar kind of corruption has also become evident in the massive chemical spill in West Virginia. West Virginia officials knew about the very real danger of the coal mining chemicals Freedom Industries corporation was storing right next to the river that supplies drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians, yet they did nothing. Both local and national media outlets have asked the same very valid question: Why wasn't there a plan - and why wasn't West Virginia better prepared for such a spill?
That kind of hidden disaster, by the way, is the exact reason so many Nebraskans have absolutely no desire to have the northern leg of the Keystone pipeline driven through Nebraska - a fact we've made clear multiple times before. When - and it will be 'when' and not 'if' - that pipeline has a leak, it could poison the primary water source for hundreds of thousands of Americans throughout the Midwest, including the farmers who feed the millions of Americans across the nation.
Neither of these very real scandals would have been exposed without the efforts of quality journalists, who likely won't be featured on a major televised awards show anytime soon.
So later today, when one corporate media website or another tries to gin up interest or clicks hyping some fake fight between celebrities at the Golden Globes, or jumping up and down about the latest minor problem with Obamacare, remember who showed you the real scandals this past week. Then buy a copy of your local newspaper, or pay that small fee to browse your favorite news outlet online, willingly.
The cost of not paying real journalists is being buried in lies by those who are corrupt.
It's not easy being a journalist today, either in the U.S. or abroad. The wars abroad, especially the civil war in Syria, killed 70 journalists last year. That number doesn't even include those journalists jailed for simply doing their jobs, in places like Egypt. Domestically, Congress is still so bogged down with Republican obstructionism even K Street lobbyists are looking for side jobs. Both corporate media and politicians are also disgustingly beholden to ideological zealots like the Koch Brothers, making corruption in both politics and private business harder than ever for journalists to uncover.
If it were strictly up to the media minders at places like Fox, or some of the other right-wing media outlets, they'd keep the general public buried in nonsense, like the new book by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, or the latest hickup in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act - and not the serious corruption involved in two very major stories over the last week.
That's why we're incredibly grateful to ethical local journalists, and the ethical national journalists that followed the lead of the local reporters on both "Bridgegate" - the ongoing corruption scandal of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie - and the ongoing chemical disaster in West Virginia that's kept 300,000 Americans without any clean, useable water for nearly a week.
Gov. Christie's scandal, as we noted twice last week, is not only terrifying, politically. It's also nearly impossible to believe he didn't have some knowledge of what was going on. What should terrify Republicans even more is that as flawed as Christie's corruption scandal may show him to be, he is still considered the leading candidate for the Republican Party in the 2016 presidential race.
A similar kind of corruption has also become evident in the massive chemical spill in West Virginia. West Virginia officials knew about the very real danger of the coal mining chemicals Freedom Industries corporation was storing right next to the river that supplies drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians, yet they did nothing. Both local and national media outlets have asked the same very valid question: Why wasn't there a plan - and why wasn't West Virginia better prepared for such a spill?
That kind of hidden disaster, by the way, is the exact reason so many Nebraskans have absolutely no desire to have the northern leg of the Keystone pipeline driven through Nebraska - a fact we've made clear multiple times before. When - and it will be 'when' and not 'if' - that pipeline has a leak, it could poison the primary water source for hundreds of thousands of Americans throughout the Midwest, including the farmers who feed the millions of Americans across the nation.
Neither of these very real scandals would have been exposed without the efforts of quality journalists, who likely won't be featured on a major televised awards show anytime soon.
So later today, when one corporate media website or another tries to gin up interest or clicks hyping some fake fight between celebrities at the Golden Globes, or jumping up and down about the latest minor problem with Obamacare, remember who showed you the real scandals this past week. Then buy a copy of your local newspaper, or pay that small fee to browse your favorite news outlet online, willingly.
The cost of not paying real journalists is being buried in lies by those who are corrupt.
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