TV SoundOff: Sunday Talking Heads

Hello everybody, and welcome to your weekly ad-hoc, fast-typed, snaply judged, prickly thorn, but sweetly worn liveblog of Sunday morning political grunting and yelling. My name is Jason, and this is one of the best Sundays of the year, if not THE best (except for maybe some of you Wisconsinites) of the year because this is the one day each year that NBC does not show MEET THE PRESS and instead shows the French Open at the Stade Roland Garros in Paris. Bravo, you brave clay court specialists. Thank you, and of course, "Hello."

I am also very excited to share this Sunday with you today for another reason -- today is going to be one of those great acid-test weekends for the media. As you know, most Sundays, the people who put these shows together...well, you get the feeling that they are doing their utmost to talk about painfully trivial crap, when they could be doing something valuable with this time. This week we're going to see how serious these shows can be, by seeing how they cover a news conference that happened this past Friday.

As you know, President Obama gave one of those very rare press availabilities, where he took questions from the White House Press Corps. Now, I was watching the presser with an eye toward something interesting and substantive. The way I experienced the presser basically went like this -- there was a long and generic part where there were inquiries about the economy, and a bunch of seriously generic answers that were given in response.

And then, someone asked Obama about the recent national security stories -- the "kill list" story and the Stuxnet virus story -- and the leaks that enabled that enabled them. And suddenly things got interesting -- Obama did one of those "let me make a long series of disconnected phrases while I figure out what I'm going to say about this" moves, and a lot of long pausing, and finally, he talked at great length about how no one in the White House authorized anyone to be the sources of those stories and of course, no one had any idea who leaked them, no no! And it was total transparent crap, and fascinating, because he probably met with the leaker that morning, and they were probably all, "Hey man, nice leak!" And someone on twitter -- I forget who, probably one of those conscientious foreign policy guys like Joshua Foust -- tweeted something to the effect that Obama's response to the leak question was going to totally be "THE" story, post-presser. And I peeped the tweet and nodded and though, "Frack, yes, it will." And then David Wood and I had a brief little conversation about the leak question that was basically:

ME: Seriously, Obama?

WOOD: I mean.

Only it was a little bit smarter. (I mean, Dave was smart, anyway.)

Anyway, I was totally wrong. In just a few minutes, everyone was squawking about Obama's "remarks on the private sector." And I was totally confused. Obama had said very little about the private sector, only that it was doing better than the public sector, which is one of the most objectively true things in the world. Record profits don't exactly suck!. Here are charts that document what I'm talking about. What had I missed? OH MY! He used the word "fine," not "better." Oy. Didn't catch that. "Here we go," I thought.

It's pretty amazing how that story took off, and became more important than the part where Obama was pretty transparently BSing the press about the leaks. Because you know what, no amount of inquiry or analysis or discussion or opinion or examination or criticism of something someone says about the economy is going to affect the economy or impact anyone's lives. The economy is on its course now, probably headed in the direction of short-to-medium-term sucking, for a lot of people that never get to be on the news. Someone went off message though! Chanced upon the wrong word! SO SHINY. Must talk all day long about it, or else our brains might start working again.

On the other hand, there's actualy WORK the media can do on the whole leak story. Questions can be asked, sourced run to ground, a timeline established, logic applied. It's a serious and substantive discussion that can be had, you can bring real discomfort to powerful people, you can perhaps save lives -- but OH MY GOD it would take so much effort! Better to discuss how a permanently affluent political celebrity ruined his horse-race news-cycle news for a week because he used the wrong word.

I've often talked about how the media stays studiously disengaged from the lives of normal people, and almost always chooses the path of overhyped, arm-up-to-the-elbow alimentary canal-plumbing over doing even a tiny shred of good for our poor, bruised world. Today, I am guessing that we're going to hear a whole lot about how the way the word "fine" was used this week is a total embarrassment to a guy who'll never want for anything a day in his life, and not so much about how the same guy probably leaked a bunch of war-on-terror glory stories to a friendly press to burnish his cred for an election year at the possible expense of those secret programs' continued success.

We'll see, I guess!

Sunday! It makes our cynicism fun, and then we get sad, and then we go see "The Avengers" or something, and learn to hug again. Anyway, this is the part where I recommend that you all comfort one another in the comments and to feel free to drop me a line. As always, you can also follow me on Twitter, but I'll also recommend that you might prefer to follow me on RebelMouse -- the new social sharing tool developed by our pal, Paul Berry. Twitter, let's face it, gets a little bit silly at times. But if you go to \my Rebel Mouse page, you'll get the best of what I'm doing on Twitter and a big share of news stories that I've read and enjoyed. It's the perfect thing for those times you are waiting, in boredom, for this liveblog to refresh. So give it a try, if you want. If you don't want, don't do it! It's your life! I'm lucky to have you even reading this! Thank you, actually, for doing that!

You're great.

FOX NEWS SUNDAY

Fox has Mitch Daniels and Dennis Van Roekel (of the NEA) and Thea Lee (of the AFL-CIO) to talk about labor unions. And, let's credit Fox New Sunday right off the bat -- they make no mention of "the private sector is fine" but they DO preview their panel discussion by noting that they are going to talk about the leak story. So it looks like we'll have one potential acid-test pass today.

Meanwhile, labor unions are having a no good very bad week, after they failed to oust Scott Walker in Wisconsin. Tom Barrett, of course, didn't really seem like the ideal candidate to carry a torch for public sector union employees (in fact, the things Walker did in Wisconsin helped Barrett balance his budget in Milwaukee). In my Friday piece, I recommended that people take in what Doug Henwood had to say about the matter. Here's how he bottom-lined it:

Most labor people, including some fairly radical ones, detest Bob Fitch?s analysis of labor?s torpor. By all means, read his book Solidarity for Sale for the full analysis. But a taste of it can be gotten here, from his interview with Michael Yates of Monthly Review. A choice excerpt:

Essentially, the American labor movement consists of 20,000 semi-autonomous local unions. Like feudal vassals, local leaders get their exclusive jurisdiction from a higher level organization and pass on a share of their dues. The ordinary members are like the serfs who pay compulsory dues and come with the territory. The union bosses control jobs?staff jobs or hiring hall jobs?the coin of the political realm. Those who get the jobs?the clients?give back their unconditional loyalty. The politics of loyalty produces, systematically, poles of corruption and apathy. The privileged minority who turn the union into their personal business. And the vast majority who ignore the union as none of their business.

Bob thought that the whole model of American unionism, in which unions were given exclusive rights to bargain over contracts in closed shops, was a major long-term source of weakness. I find it persuasive; many don?t. But whatever you think of that analysis of the past is rapidly becoming irrelevant. Collective bargaining has mostly disappeared in the private sector, and now looks doomed in the public sector. There are something like 23 states with Republican governors and legislative majorities ready to imitate Walker who will be emboldened by his victory. And there are a lot of Dems ready to do a Walker Lite. If they don?t disappear, public sector unions will soon become powerless.

That means that if unions ever want to turn things around?and I?m old-fashioned enough to believe that we?ll never have a better society without a reborn labor movement?they have to learn to operate in this new reality. Which means learning to act politically, to agitate on behalf of the entire working class and not just a privileged subset with membership cards.

[More liveblog is coming soon. Like I said, check out my RebelMouse page, for good stuff to read.]

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