The Notion

Twitter Tweaks Social Media with New Lists Feature

By Ari Melber

Twitter, the over-hyped, under-appreciated social network for sharing chit-chat and links, just launched a tool enabling users to create their own lists on the site. The Journal explains the basics:

The new feature allows Twitter users to organize the people they follow and streamline their feeds. Others can then follow their lists, sparing them the time of hunting for individual Twitterers with shared interests

So what, right?

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October 30, 2009

How Many Experts Declared Public Option Dead?

By Ari Melber

As the Senate moves towards including some form of public option in health care reform, it is worth remembering all the Washington "experts" who already declared the public option dead.

The list is long, distinguished, sometimes surprising and, thanks to the open source web, the list is growing. A diarist at DailyKos, "BrookylnBadBoy," just began counting. It ranges from bearish Senators (Kent Conrad) to Republican operatives (Brad Blakeman, Dana Perino) to sympathetic progressives (Nate Silver, Jane Hamsher) to, naturally, a long list of professional pundits (Klein, Gergen, Cillizza, Brooks, O'Donnell, Krauthammer, O'Reilly). You can add to your own nominations over at "Daily Kos," or here in our comments section.

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October 27, 2009

Backing Obama, MoveOn Urges Congressional Dems to Join Fox Fight

By Ari Melber

MoveOn.org jumped into the battle between Fox News and the Obama White House on Tuesday, urging its 5 million members to call on Congressional Democrats to stay off the network for the rest of the year -- the same timetable announced by the White House.

"To draw attention to its biased coverage, President Obama will not appear on FOX for the rest of this year," notes a MoveOn email, citing recent reporting by The Times. "It's about time Democrats stood up to FOX," continues the missive, which calls on MoveOn members to sign a petition "asking Democrats to support President Obama's stance by staying off FOX as long as he does."

While Obama aides have forcefully singled out Fox for two weeks running, Congressional Democrats have been oddly subdued, as The Hill recently reported:

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October 20, 2009

Caught On Tape: Obama Adviser Explains How To Control Media

By Ari Melber

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn made headlines last week for calling out Fox News, now she's drawing attention for comments she made about how the Obama campaign managed to control and route around the traditional press. You can bet this video is going viral. (Embedded below).

In footage from a January conference, Dunn candidly explains the campaign's disciplined emphasis on disintermediation:

The reality is that whether it was a David Plouffe video or an Obama speech ... a huge part of our press strategy was focused on making the media cover what Obama was actually saying -- as opposed to why the campaign was saying it, what the tactic was.... One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters. We just put that out there and make them write what Plouffe had said -- as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it, as opposed to the press controlled it. And it did not always make us popular with the press... increasingly by the General Election, very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn't absolutely control.

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October 19, 2009

Maddow Responds to Bush Sr. - And 9 of 10 Republicans Fear Her

By Ari Melber

Rachel Maddow invites Republican officials to appear on her show "every day," the popular MSNBC anchor said Saturday, but only about one out of ten take up her offer.

Those numbers suggest Congressional Republicans are especially wary of a Maddow interrogation, since most politicians jump at the chance to appear on prime time news shows with good ratings. The "incentives" to appear differ for elected officials and operatives, she said, and the show draws more conservative "lobbyists and P.R. guys," who are paid to push their clients anywhere they can. (See Phillips, Tim.)

Maddow's comments came during an appearance at The New Yorker Festival on Saturday, in a sold-out session moderated by staff writer Ariel Levy.

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October 17, 2009

AP Asks If Obama Is 'Obnoxiously Articulate'

By Ari Melber

Political reporters have now toggled from worrying that Obama gets "too much" media coverage to asking whether he is "too" good at communicating through the media. Maybe even obnoxiously good. Maybe even -- here comes that loaded word from the primaries -- too articulate.

The A.P.'s Liz Sidoti is on the case. And this is from a news article:

Obama has been a constant presence in the mass media as he expands the bureaucracy's reach into the private sector.... In doing so, he has created a quandary. Put aside for a moment the question of whether government is actually intruding into people's lives more than before. The point is that many people feel like it is -- in part because Obama doesn't stop talking about his goals. If President George W. Bush got slapped around for being inarticulate, is Obama obnoxiously articulate?

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October 15, 2009

Progressives, Bloggers Make GQ’s New Washington Power List

By Ari Melber

GQ released its much anticipated "Power 50" list on Tuesday, the first compendium of Washington's most influential players in the Obama era, with a PR blitz and a glitzy Washington cocktail party celebrating the magazine's November issue. The rankings are sure to excite and roil the Beltway, where the score is often more important than the game, and in a nod to Change, this list is actually studded with some progressive and new media figures.

The highest-ranking liberal politicians are Nancy Pelosi, David Obey and Henry Waxman, who each made the top ten, followed by Eric Holder, Barney Frank and Carol Browner.

On the advocacy side, new labor gets a shout out with Andy Stern. Paul Rieckhoff gets props for organizing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. And the New Yorker's Jane Mayer is credited for not only informing U.S. "detention policies," but also pushing President Obama to "release the torture memos."

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October 13, 2009

New White House Line Against Fox: It's War

By Ari Melber

The White House's battle with Fox News reached a new high on Sunday, when Communications Director Anita Dunn went on national television to blast Fox as a partisan organization that functions as an appendage to the Republican Party.

"Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party," Dunn told CNN, adding, "let's not pretend [Fox is] a news organization like CNN is." Dunn also took her beef to The New York Times, saying in a Sunday interview that Fox is "undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House [and] we don't need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave."

In the most significant exchange on CNN, Dunn stressed that President Obama now personally views Fox as a partisan opponent, rather than a journalistic organization. "When he goes on Fox he understands he is not going on it as a news network at this point," she explained, "he is going on it to debate the opposition."

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October 11, 2009

When Pundits Attack: The Beck-Brooks Fight

By Ari Melber

Perhaps we still do not understand the current Obama backlash.

David Brooks caused a small stir on Friday by arguing that conservative radio hosts are, paradoxically, a lot like well-behaved children. They are seen – splashed across magazine covers and endlessly profiled – but not heard, politically, since they do not swing elections.

"The talk jocks can't even deliver the conservative voters who show up at Republican primaries," Brooks observed, reminiscing about how McCain's media detractors could not stop him in South Carolina last year.

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October 5, 2009

Ricky Martin Fights Human Trafficking at Clinton Summit

By Ari Melber

New York, NY – When Ricky Martin took the stage at the Clinton Global Initiative on Thursday, he did not sing, or dance, or even flash his trademark grin. Following the same stage directions as dozens of other celebrities who dropped by Clinton's 5th annual global summit, from Brad Pitt to Bono to Jessica Alba, Martin struck a somber note while discussing the fight against human trafficking.

"I feel that my heart is going to come out of my mouth," he said, recounting his sadness for the "millions of children that didn't make it." Martin was followed by testimony from a woman who, along with her two children, was kidnapped and held for four years of forced labor. Then Luis CdeBaca, a former counsel to Rep. John Conyers who now serves as President Obama's chief diplomat for combating human trafficking, explained that between 12 and 27 million people are enslaved around the world today. In its official materials, The Clinton Global Initiative notes that the higher estimates mean there are more people enslaved "than at any other time in human history," though that's the kind of factoid that says more about population growth than the scope of the problem. But the numbers are daunting by any measure. And the policy experts who huddled on Thursday stressed that many obvious measures to combat trafficking are simply not being applied.

About 90 percent of countries do not have dedicated police units for investigating trafficking, according to Clinton's organization, and many governments simply look the other way. Only one out of three governments around the world provide basics like emergency phone lines for children and families who do not know where to turn when faced with a kidnapping.

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September 24, 2009