Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernacke gave a press conference today. It was the first time a Federal Reserve chairman has even done a press conference. The cable news corporations covered it for 180 seconds even though they showed Donald Trump’s entire press appearance earlier in the day. As Steve Benen notes, this is exactly the kind of poor priority-setting that the president complained about in his press appearance this morning. But, you know, how can you expect companies that are driven by ratings to make it their job to sell people oatmeal? What percentage of the population can follow along when the Federal Reserve chairman is talking his strange language? I know I need a translator.
The problem, as I see it, is that we need an outlet for the people who are willing and able to eat their oatmeal. An hour of news on PBS doesn’t cut it. I don’t know the best way to create that outlet. I know that there is still a certain expectation that media corporations will devote some of their time to the public interest, whether that is kids’ programming or nightly news. But we don’t have anything like the BBC, which really does provide excellent oatmeal.
I watched the entire press conference on CNBC which was so annoying as to almost make it impossible to watch. Six or seven different subscreens were going at the same time, small type, switching between various markets, a scroll across the bottom, and then every so often they did a graphic that was an explosion that said “Bernanke’s Press Conference” or something like that. It is pretty difficult to understand “fed-speak,” though much easier with Bernanke than Greenspan. But it does take a bit of concentration, and the TV gurus just increased the difficulty beyond the normal comprehension of a lay person. Shameful.
As far as “oatmeal” goes, about the only informative morning show is Chuck Todd’s on MSNBC. At least there is news without such incredible partisan spin. No yelling. Just a decent set-up for the political day.
PBS’s depth is a welcome relief some nights, depending on the stories they are covering. But it feels very old … like my father’s Buick, so to speak.
I think we all hunger for something informative, non-combative, intelligent, and sometimes entertaining (with the least emphasis on that).
I haven’t watched the nightly news broadcasts for a long time. Do any of them do that in the 22 minutes they have?
PBS’ NewsHour is old — like leftover day-old plain oatmeal, the bland low-nutrition American variety which, to be sure, is marginally better than the sugary-sweet superficial bowls of outright junk food that the regular networks offer every night for 22 minutes of headline reading.
Still, last I checked, PBS was still about providing a platform for an hour a night for the usual establishment power figures, or status quo thinkers from the usual suspect think tanks, to make their case for no change or modest change with a friendly, conflict-averse PBS host who is guaranteed not to ask uncomfortable questions. All that hand-rubbing goodness plus Shields and Brooks to finish off the week. Oh boy!
BBC or Al Jazeera get you a little closer in the direction of the sort of steel-cut oats with almond milk and raw honey high-nutrition oatmeal servings we should be demanding over here.
Ideally, we’d have something like the best 15-20 minute in-depth hard-hitting segments from a Rachel Maddow or Larry O’Donnell combined with the BBC/AJ foreign coverage.
And 7 days/week too — no more taking off to the country for the weekend and leaving only PrisonDocBloc or the hapless Don Lemon behind.
Maybe the new Current teevee can begin to build such a network. One can hope, though it will take more than just Keith and re-runs of Keith.
Here’s some tasty Oatmeal that won’t put you to sleep like PBS and the others do…
Whoops.
… but the embed code doesn’t work here. You MUST watch it HERE
Love it. But That’s Entertainment.
But seriously we can’t have commercially sponsored news if we want to get the truth on any subject. Rule Number One in any commercially-sponsored organization is that you never offend your sponsors. So how can we get real news sponsored by the Coal industry, the Pharmaceudical industry, the Health Insurance industry, Bank of America, etc??? Tell me how.
It must be subscriber-funded. Not government-funded, not commercially-funded. Think C-Span, Think HBO, Think Link-TV or Free Speech TV. And all the rest should be forbidden to call themselves news. They all need to be called entertainment because that’s all that they are.
Don’t be a wuss. If you really were unhappy with the drivel the MSM promotes – and a lot of ‘progressive’ bloggers too – you’d be out there watching Real News or picking up the gen from Russia Today…or Current TV.
But nooooo. Can you get al Jazeera ? How about Tehran’s Press TV ?
Tis better to light a single candle than curse the darkness.
Whoosh – that sound is Booman’s point flying right over your head.
Booman isn’t the one who needs to get informed – to “eat the oatmeal”. He’s talking about informing the general populace – the folks who need to have enough information to, you know, vote – and how our media machine is a poor model for doing that.
But this has been a problem for a couple of hundred years now – it’s not like the Fox News model for news is anything particularly new. In fact it used to be the norm – newspapers were “Republican” papers or “Democrat” papers that slanted their news and editorials in a particular way and everyone in town knew which was which.
In fact the real poison to the system was the shift in expectations to expect news reporting to be “neutral” – no one can truly be neutral and every news outlet will have its biases. And this has always been the case – do you really think that even in the Golden Age of “neutrality” the news folks were neutral? No – they tended to bias towards the ruling party back then too. It’s just that the ruling party during the Golden Age of neutrality for news media happened to be the Democrats for a good long time (which is why I think the idea of “liberal media” sticks in the minds of the Baby Boomers and older generations – they’re remembering how the media was skewed towards Democrats in the 50s and 60s and are connecting that to “liberalism” rather than “kowtowing to power”).
Now the ruling party is the corporate party and the media kowtows to them. Same as it ever was, only the players have changed.
I didn’t watch it, but I read bits and pieces of it. As one of the few who speaks Fedese, it was depressing.
A few things jump out at me: (1) Atrios was right (as always) about the press asking dumb questions (“Will the deficit steal my bicycle?” ZOMGINFLATION?!?!!”), and (2) I question whether Bernanke has the votes to do much anymore. A lot of Fed people seem to have bought into Austeritism.
Krugman noted that Bernanke’s comments were inconsistent with Bernanke’s stated framework.
The replacement of economics with Austrian religionism has already shredded much of Europe. Now it’s our turn, I suppose.
Yeah everyone likes to bash Ben, but in truth it’s his colleagues that are a far larger problem. He’s only one person representing the Fed’s entire position, not his own. I suspect if he were dictator of Fed policy we’d see the needed changes.
I recently watched Inside Job. Between the Bog Pharm and the Banksters, it’s no wonder Obama can’t get enough done.
Federal Reserve Chairmen, like Presidential chiefs of staff should neither be seen nor heard on the media. Given the large media exposure of Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker, it is shocking that this was the first press conference conducted by a Federal Reserve Chairman. Who ever heard statements from Marriner S. Eccles, Thomas B. McCabe, Willlam McChesney Martin, Arthur F. Burns, or G. William Miller. Reading Fed Board of Governor and Fed Open Market Committee decisions used to be for the business press something like Kremlinology. Alan Greenspan was the first to telegraph to Wall Street upcoming Fed decisions.
In principle, the operation of the Federal Reserve shouldn’t be a major factor on the economy. The Fed should through open market transactions, reserve requirements, and interest rates increase the money supply just enough to serve growth in GDP but not so much as to create a general inflation.
The problem for US government economic policy is that all Fed chairs since Greenspan have argued against fiscal (tax and spending) mechanisms as instruments of economic policy and Congress has been gridlocked even if fiscal policies were proposed. The result is that the Fed’s manipulation of the money supply has been the sole tool available for managing the economy. It however is not well suited when there is a collapse in demand or the danger of a financial bubble (as opposed to commodity shortage or labor shortage price increases). You saw this in the panic of Greenspan during the 2000 election when he thought that Gore might deal with the IT bubble by raising taxes and paying down the national debt. And you saw it in Greenspan’s and Bernanke’s willingness to use infrastructure spending and backfilling state budget deficits as ways to deal with the Great Recession.
Even so, Bernanke’s press conference was not aimed at te general public but used the argot of Wall Street, business analysts, and the business media. So the Washington Monthly’s complaint is mistargeted.
To get to the “eating your oatmeal” issue, forcing the public to understand the necessary information to make wise public decisions and have reasoned public opinions, the fault is not the public’s aversion to truth. The junk food news the public is getting is not because they want it; they used to watch Walter Cronkite after all. It is because that is what the corporate media executives decide to give them. And what advertisers want to pay for.
Part of the difference is the regulatory climate and the way that PBS/NPR are funded. In the 1970s, PBS’s first major news show was gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings. Funding for PBS totally came from the federal government and PBS had the same mandate as the BBC. And private broadcast stations (not the networks, the individual stations) were obligated as part of their license to devote a certain percentage of time to public affairs programming (which was of the “eat your oatmeal, understand your government” type). And the “fairness doctrine constrained one-sidedness; thus, Edward R. Murrow’s invitation for Joseph McCarthy to reply. Another difference is the public, which in the 1950s and 1960s consisted of people who had lived through the Depression and through World War II, events in which radio news brought some degree of relief that neither of those events would go on forever.
A final difference is the politicians. In 1971, Lewis Powell wrote a letter to Eugene Sydnor, Chairman Education Committee, U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Powell Memo (text) had this to say about the media:
While framed as “free enterprise”, Powell was really speaking for Nixon Republicans who thought that controlling the media was a way to control the conversation about the Vietnam War. Read from the way Republican politicians implemented the Powell memo, it is fundamentally a total propaganda plan that Powell saw as being run out of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It didn’t take much corporate money to have politicians internalize this total messaging strategy. And that is where we first meet Richard Nixon’s salesperson for the President, Roger Ailes.
Good overview post.
Speaking of delivering the oatmeal to understand your govt, I’m reminded too that back then, all 3 networks (until ABC cut back to show highlights only in ’68) always used to cover both party political conventions in their entirety, from gavel to gavel. “Gavel to gavel” back then — for our younger readers — meant televising the official beginning of the convention day, usually beginning early afternoon east coast time, and televising the show all the way until late into the evening or whenever that day’s proceedings were gaveled to a conclusion. Sometimes that meant 12 hours of non-stop convention coverage, all 3 networks.
Also they covered the occasional important congressional hearings — the ones presented in 1966 and 1968 by Sen Fulbright’s For’gn Relations Comm’ee on Vietnam come to mind. Most (maybe not all) networks covered them either fully or substantially, much to the dismay of daytime soap fans.
And on the Fairness Doctrine, I always remember the way bold New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison in 1967 demanded, and got, a primetime chunk of time (up to an hour, but he decided to take only a 1/2 hour) to respond to the hit job NBC and done on him in one of their White Paper documentary programs. YT has the dramatic case he made — speaking directly into the camera with only notes, no teleprompter — for those interested. Only time, afaik, that an American network was forced to provide equal time under the FD.
Finally, as for Ailes and Nixon, Roger really ran the media show for Dick in 1968 and completely manipulated things such that the press barely had an opportunity to even get close enough to Dick to ask any questions let alone tough ones. One of the slickest media con jobs in political history, and the MSM largely didn’t complain about their being essentially roped off well away from the action.
Nixon as president played hardball with the press — some network execs for a while knuckled under to the pressure, such as CBS (firing the irreverent Smothers Brothers from their political satire/variety show), and threatened WaPo re taking away the license of one of their money-making broadcast outlets in FL. I can’t help but wonder whether Nixon’s overly aggressive approach to whipping the media into line caused a backlash wrt negative Watergate coverage by WaPo and CBS.