Mark Casey Online

Joe Scarborough is the host of the relatively popular show “Morning Joe” on MSNBC mornings. I like Joe, and I like his show. I really do — that’s not a joke, I swear.

But this morning, Joe got into an absurd tiff with David Schuster, who is an MSNBC reporter and was on the show acting as a guest commentator/analyst. For those of you who don’t know, Joe is a lot like Chris Matthews, only right-leaning (Matthews is left-leaning). Each of them are fairly laid back, curious guys with a genuine interest in politics and public policy. This genuine interest makes their respective shows immensely watchable.

Today, though, as often happens, Joe was going a little Right Wing on us, saying that if the president of Iraq wanted us to leave, we should, and he would be assassinated, and Joe said he didn’t care if that happened (in fact, Joe seemed to enjoy the thought). This was out of line, but in my opinion, Schuster was the one who brought up partisanship by calling Joe a Republican as if it were an insult. …okay, so maybe it is a pretty good insult these days:

But it comes on the heels of Keith Olbermann telling Scarborough to “get a shovel” (for his bullshit, you see) on national television last night, while Joe was making a legitimate claim about McCain gaining on Obama in the polls these last few weeks. If referencing polls is what qualifies as “bullshit” on MSNBC these days, I fear for the future:

And all of this seems to be a part of a larger theme, coming just a week after MSNBC hired Rachel Maddow for their third prime time TV slot along with Olbermann and Matthews, thus cementing their role as liberal antidote to Fox News. As a result, the liberals in the network seem to be far more bold and combative than they were even a few weeks ago — and that have Scarborough in their sites.

For the record, Fox news does need a liberal antidote — but not one that behaves exactly as Fox does, by suppressing viewpoints and demonizing well-meaning dissent.

I don’t always agree with Scarborough, but that’s the point. And that’s why I’m in his corner on this one.

For no apparent reason other than the fact that the Democratic National Convention is next week, CNN has once again trotted out its own private Clinton employee, Paul Begala, to lament the current choice of presidential candidates (read: no Clinton to vote for), as well as to lament the fact that Bill Clinton wasn’t named president for life.

No, really:

[Clinton’s environmental speech] was a tour de force: so deep in the details that the propeller-heads were swooning, yet simple and compelling enough that I could follow it. On the day before his 62nd birthday, I couldn’t help cursing the 22nd Amendment, which limited Clinton to two terms. Heck, he’s still 10 years younger than McCain.

Now might be a good time to mention that Begala has been an employee of the Clintons for nearly two decades, and as a senior political correspondent for CNN during the most recent Democratic primaries (not to mention during the entire 2000 era), he was the clear architect of their unabashedly pro-Hillary bias.

After Hillary lost in the primary, Begala has been relatively scarce on CNN — apparently, he didn’t have anything left to say about the presidential race now that a Clinton wasn’t involved. (Note: CNN took so much heat for regularly featuring Begala and James Carville’s political commentary while they were paid staffers for Hillary Clinton, they briefly kicked them off the air for the final part of the primaries. Now, CNN has a massive disclaimer at the beginning of all his articles disclosing all his Clinton affiliations and promising that he’s no longer on the Clinton dole. Right.)

But now, just before the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, Begala reemerges to claim that neither the Obama nor the McCain presidential tickets are likely to be good enough, and that no one should care who they choose as vice president.

This is an ominous sign for the Denver convention, as Democrats are still worried about what sorts of antics the Clintons and their rabid fans might pull. Clinton is already going to ask that her delegates are seated — it’s considered an “honorary” measure, but it will do nothing to make the party appear unified behind Obama — and Bill Clinton has been wildly unpredictable and bitter regarding his post-primary remarks about Barack Obama.

Most people think the Clintons will do all they can to help Obama win. I’m not so sure. They seem to still be considering an Obama win tantamount to a Clinton loss. And Paul Begala’s timely reemergence is not a good sign.

Okay, so it’s more than tens.

It’s 25,000 people who have “signed” an online petition, sponsored by a pro-Clinton group, “VoteBooth.” And considering the fact that online petitions regularly gather hundreds of thousands of votes, coupled with the fact that 18 million people voted for Hillary Clinton during the primaries, it seems to me that 25,000 people is a remarkably low number of participants.

And, to quote a colleague of mine over at Melted Reel, “we all know how effective online petitions are, and how seriously everyone takes them…” </snark>.

CNN, of course, is taking it very seriously. How odd! An international news outlet taking time out of its busy schedule to report on the tallies of various online petitions… I wonder why CNN is so interested in Hillary for VP.

The internet was set ablaze on Friday because Hillary Clinton referenced the fact that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated during the primaries as her rationale for staying in the race.

Here’s the video — commentary below:

At first, it seemed like she had gone crazy — she had finally lost control of her already weak grip on reality, and started to publicly root for the death of Barack Obama. But it wasn’t true.

No, she didn’t go crazy until Sunday.

As of today, she is using her mouthpieces at CNN to both blame Obama for the fact that people are outraged, not her own foolishness, and also to claim that her mention of RFK had nothing to do with Obama, saying:

I was deeply dismayed and disturbed that my comment would be construed in a way that flies in the face of everything I stand for — and everything I am fighting for in this election.

She also blamed the editor of the New York Daily News, who was nice enough to give her Op-Ed space to explain herself, and Bobby Kennedy Jr., for god’s sake, for “misinterpreting” her comments.

And obviously they were misinterpreted. No, Robert Kennedy, a man who died on his way to becoming the nominee of the Democratic party, obviously has nothing to do with Barack Obama, her opponent, who happens to be a man on his way to becoming the nominee of the Democratic party. The only possible alternative, of course, would be that she was comparing herself to RFK. So… let’s just not delve too deeply into that possibility.

No, definitely not.

A Boston TV host was fired by Comcast Cable, a well-known supporter and contributor to the Republican party, after publicly protesting the New England EMMY chapter’s decision to honor Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.

Nolan, the fired former host of the network’s CN8 Channel, believed that it was improper for the regional EMMY organization to nominate a figure as “partisan” as O’Reilly.

The host had this to say:

“He’s delusional,” Nolan said of O’Reilly. “He’s a man that mangles the facts. He inflates and constantly mangles the truth, and his frequent target is the ‘left-leaning’ media — the ones who do report the news fairly.”

Now, I realize that it’s only a local EMMY honor. But that’s the whole point. Why would Comcast risk their sterling reputation just to stamp out a little regional squabble?

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We’re almost to the point where we can stop suggesting that white people and women will refuse to vote for Barack Obama. A new Gallup Poll not only has Obama opening up a 16 point lead over Clinton nationally, but she no longer has a majority of support among women, whites who didn’t go to college, and Hispanics.

It looks as though the Democratic party is starting to come together behind their presumptive nominee. Now, we can start the general election proper, which should be more interesting than it otherwise would’ve been, since both Obama and McCain have a strong appeal to independents and party moderates.

And what about CNN.com? Have they toned down their anti-Obama bias? A little bit. But you tell me if you’ve ever seen them link directly to Essence Magazine, an African American culture mag, other than today, when they’re linking to a feature about what John McCain will do to help African Americans?

I’m not saying it’s wrong for this Essence article to exist, and I’m certainly not implying that John McCain won’t do anything for African Americans. All I’m saying is, CNN has never linked to Essence before.

I’ve noticed that CNN’s political coverage this year has been heavily, indefensibly, shamelessly biased toward Hillary Clinton. That’s to be expected — after all, two of her top political advisers, James Carville and Paul Begala, are former CNN employees, and continued their “political coverage” for the network even while they were Hillary employees, until the network got complaints and had to boot them.

But I’ve been keeping tabs on CNN more closely in the past two weeks, since Barack Obama has all but locked up his place as the Democratic nominee, even by Carville’s own admission. One would think that they’d probably give a little less publicity to Senator Clinton, since she’s nearly out of the presidential picture, right?

Wrong. Let’s look at a rundown of just the last forty “blogs” on their faux-news gossip column “The Political Ticker” — and I assure you that it has been no different for the past two weeks. Here’s a graph breaking them into how favorably they reflect on a candidate (some overlap):

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I don’t know who CNN thinks they are. Maybe they read my post yesterday about how wrong it was for them to parade around uncredited content and pictures from Ashley Alexandra Dupri’s MySpace page, but for whatever reason, their lead story this morning is nothing but more “quotes” and content lifted directly from Dupri’s MySpace and Facebook accounts. (For the record, Dupri is the high-priced escort at the center of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s prostitution scandal.)

With a sickeningly obvious tone of glee, CNN’s Mallory Simon wrote an “article” which is, literally, a detailed play-by-play of the events on Dupri’s MySpace and Facebook. She reports on Dupri’s Facebook ’status updates,’ and tries to infer what was going on in Durpi’s head when she wrote them, for example:

“Early Thursday morning, it appears Dupre realized she needed to make some changes to alter what the public would be able to know about her.”

It’s just a list of things like that. “Early Thursday morning,” “At 3:00pm,” and finally: “By 2:30pm, her MySpace and Facebook pages were gone.”

Yes, that’s right. Dupri was chased off the internet by CNN’s newfound tabloid journalism. And Mallory Simon just sat there and watched her updates roll by, taking notes and sketching out ways to somehow make Dupri’s friend requests a legitimate story.

CNN does go out of its way to quote one actual person, though. It’s a Law Professor (oh, god) from American University (Jesus Christ). And he’s happy to inform CNN and you, the reader, that Dupri has no right to privacy and deserves no respect from the media. After all, she opened up a MySpace account — why would she ever expect that information not to be exploited for free by mainstream media outlets?

That same law professor has some snarky comments about Dupri’s interest in singing, and her frustration that people were flooding her with hate mail:

“Unfortunately, you can’t say, ‘Oh well, I didn’t want that kind of publicity, I only wanted positive publicity,’”

I wonder what kind of publicity Mr. Professor wants.

Simon even goes so far as to detail how much she loves to investigate her subjects on the internet:

“Facebook and MySpace have become one of the go-to background tools for journalists in the past couple of years, allowing members of the press to put a face to the subject of their story and find out more about them.”

Look, I’m all for open source media — I think we should all visit social networks and interact with one another. And I’m well aware that CNN is within its rights to exploit this sort of information. It’s hypocrisy I’m against. It’s the fact that CNN would probably send me a cease and desist letter if they saw their logo on my blog. And exploitation, no matter what the purpose, is unethical. CNN can be my guest to write any number of stories that cite MySpace and Facebook pages — as long as they’re part of actual stories.

These last two were not actual stories. They were barely Tabloid stories. I hope CNN gives some of their ad revenue from this week to that poor girl, who had to close up her social media accounts because of all the hate mail CNN’s white, middle-aged demographic started to send her.

The mainstream media is giving us a schooling today on how to completely exploit a young woman — and the free content she’s created on her MySpace page — for fun and profit.

The 22-year old high-priced escort at the center of the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal wants to be called Ashley Alexandra Dupre. That’s her pop star name. Her escort name was Kristen, who was described in court papers as a “Petite, very pretty brunette.”

Immediately after her “real” name was released by the courts, mainstream media mainstays like the New York Times, CNN, and of course FoxNews — who so often laugh off sites like MySpace as ‘illegitimate media,’ — were using her MySpace page to earn themselves millions. The Times was first on the case, publishing three photos of her culled free of charge from her MySpace page. CNN did them one better, quoting from her blog posts as if they had actually interviewed her.

CNN’s headline read:

“Spitzer’s Escort: ‘I love who I am’”

Then their whole front page article ripped quotes out of her blogs, and used her “About Me” section to psychoanalyze the young girl. They doctored a quote from her that originally read “It all started when I moved in with a musician during my Odyssey to New York.”

CNN thought it would be better if they said she was on “an ‘Odyssey’ of degrading abuse and high aspirations.” They are, of course, talking about her admitted “drug abuse” and the fact that she left home when she was 17. But things seem to be going very well for her — she makes a very good living doing something that she seems to enjoy, and she has time to work on her ultimate goal of being a singer.

And for what it’s worth, her songs aren’t that bad. They’re the standard kind of pop/hip-hop songs you hear all over the radio, but her voice is decent.

All the articles contain at least a trace of tut-tutting about this poor girl’s “degradation” and exploitative lifestyle. But none of them seem to conceptualize their own exploitation of the MySpace service and the personal nature that users see their content as being. It’s certainly public information — and, according to contract, “owned” by MySpace.com — but that doesn’t change how creepy it is that the media would raid her page for some tabloid-style gossip.

I’m sure her page is flooded now that CNN has “interviewed” it and left it for dead. She’s getting all kinds of comments, mostly positive, such as “All this pressure is going to turn you into a diamond.” Who says she isn’t already?

Support her via MySpace here: http://www.myspace.com/ninavenetta

More photos below.

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