At least in modern times, all presidents have had fractious relations with the press. In World War I, Woodrow Wilson censored the media. In 1942, during a press conference at the height of World War II, a bitter FDR gave a Nazi iron cross to a reporter whose coverage he didn’t approve of. When the guard changed between the Johnson and Nixon administrations, LBJ warned Spiro Agnew:

Shortly after the 1968 presidential election, [Lyndon Johnson, the outgoing president] had sought to warn the Vice President-elect about the antagonistic nature of the media.

“Young man,” he told Agnew, “We have in this country two big television networks, NBC and CBS. We have two news magazines, Newsweek and Time. We have two wire services, AP and UPI. We have two pollsters, Gallup and Harris. We have two big newspapers — the Washington Post and the New York Times. They’re all so damned big they think they own the country. But young man, don’t get any ideas about fighting.”

Agnew’s boss would indeed try to fight back, via his infamous enemies list. Gerald Ford attempted to take a more conciliatory approach to those who helped topple his predecessor. He naively allowed Ron Nessen, his press secretary, to host NBC’s Saturday Night Live in April of 1976. When the news broke inside NBC that Nessen would be hosting, and thus Ford himself would be tuning in, an SNL writer exclaimed, “The President’s watching. Let’s make him cringe and squirm.”

At his first White House Correspondent’s Dinner in 1993, newly minted President Bill Clinton smeared talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh (who was also in the audience):

Clinton noted that Limbaugh had defended attorney general Janet Reno, after Rep. John Conyers attacked her over the Waco disaster. The president said, “Do you like the way Rush Limbaugh took up for Janet Reno? He only did it because she was attacked by a black guy.”

And needless to say, the media went to war with Reagan and GWB seemingly on a daily basis.

In the 1920s, when mass communication began with the first national radio networks, there were initially two: NBC and CBS. By the 1960s, there were three successor national TV networks; ABC began as a spin-off of one of NBC’s subsidiary radio networks. News and opinion were delivered in tiny, discreet blocks back then: For many Americans, a half hour of local news at 6:00 PM, a half hour of national news at 6:30 PM, an evening newspaper or two, and the weekly copies of Time and Newsweek constituted the entirety of their news intake.

But today’s social media is a unstoppable 24/7 flood of information and opinion, and it allows anyone to be a journalist or pundit. Anybody can launch a Weblog: click here, it’s free. Ditto for Twitter and Facebook.

And the president whose election in 2008 was predicated on the idea of social media, hates this notion, as Chuck Todd (no stranger to Democrat election campaigns himself) said in a remarkable statement in the otherwise Obama-friendly setting of NBC’s Meet the Press today:

CHUCK TODD: What I wonder how many people realized at the end [of Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner] when he did his, you know, there’s always this part at the end where they get serious for a minute. And it’s usually the part where presidents say, “You know, I think the press has a good job to do and I understand what they have to do.” He didn’t say that. He wasn’t very complimentary of the press. You know, we all can do better.

It did seem, I thought his pot shots joke wise and then the serious stuff about the internet, the rise of the internet media and social media and all that stuff — he hates it. Okay? He hates this part of the media. He really thinks that the sort of the buzzification — this isn’t just about Buzzfeed or Politico and all this stuff – he thinks that sort of coverage of political media has hurt political discourse. He hates it. And I think he was trying to make that clear last night.

As transcribed by Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters, who adds:

Todd was likely quite correct, but chose not to disclose why Obama hates new media. It’s because most of it isn’t in the tank for this President and can’t be controlled by him.

That’s obviously not true of folks such as Todd and his colleagues in the old media who echo the current White House resident’s talking points, mercilessly attack his opponents, and cover for his missteps.

But note the examples that Todd gave: Politico has numerous journalists who during the campaign in 2008 were on the infamous “JournoList,” which dubbed itself the “non-official campaign” for Obama’s election bid. The JournoList was created by Ezra Klein, who is now with the Washington Post. As Klein later admitted in his column there in 2010:

At the beginning, I set two rules for the membership. The first was the easy one: No one who worked for the government in any capacity could join. [Arguably rendered false with the presence of Obama advisors Jared Bernstein and Peter Orszag-- Ed] The second was the hard one: The membership would range from nonpartisan to liberal, center to left. I didn’t like that rule, but I thought it necessary: There would be no free conversation in a forum where people had clear incentives to embarrass each other. A bipartisan list would be a more formal debating society. Plus, as Liz Mair notes, there were plenty of conservative list servs, and I knew of military list servs, and health-care policy list servs, and feminist list servs. Most of these projects limited membership to facilitate a particular sort of conversation. It didn’t strike me as a big deal to follow their example.

So it can safely be assumed that anyone on the JournoList or its successor is safely in the tank for BHO. (Recall Klein and others on its successor list moving in lockstep last month to trash the reputation of Bob Woodward, Klein’s senior colleague at the Post, when his reporting destroyed the administration’s preferred meme that they had nothing to do with the current “Sequester.”) Another self-admitted member of the JournoList is Ben Smith, who is now with Buzzfeed; there’s a reason why John Nolte has singlehandedly made “BenSmithing” a verb to describe new media doing Obama’s bidding. And the Obama-worshipping MSNBC take their cues — and many of their stories — from those same social media sites, and other predecessors firmly on the left, such as the Daily Kos.

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“Obama doesn’t care about dead children. He’s indifferent to the suffering of their parents. There isn’t a single coherent argument on his side of the case. He lies about the issue. It’s pure politics,” Mona Charen writes, adding that “That’s the way the dispute would be presented if Obama’s opponents deployed the kind of demagogic language he slips on like comfortable loafers. Sounds harsh, doesn’t it, possibly even racist?”

Funny how touchy everyone is about the way Obama is criticized but how indifferent most are to his low accusations. His opponents are always guilty of bad faith, whereas he is concerned about preventing children from being mowed down by crazed gunmen.

Except he isn’t. The gun control measures the president worked so hard to pass and which the Senate voted down would have done nothing to prevent Newtown and would do nothing to prevent the next Newtown.

Adam Lanza did not obtain his guns through the gun show loophole. More rigorous background checks would not have prevented most of the mass shootings we’ve suffered in the past 15 years.

Nor does the president’s outrage at the Senate’s failure to pass his trivial reform really hold up as a genuine expression of policy disappointment. As Allahpundit observed, the president responded very differently to the Aurora, Colo. shootings than to Newtown. Could it be because Newtown was more heinous? It’s possible. It could also be because Aurora happened before the election, and Obama chose not to embrace a potentially unpopular issue like gun control while his name was on the ballot. Yet when four Democrats from pro-gun states declined to place their own reelections in jeopardy, Obama in effect called them “shameful.”

That the president is sincerely angry that he lost a political battle after making lots of speeches and parading Newtown parents before the cameras is beyond dispute. What must sting most acutely though is not that he lost, it’s that Democrats participated in his defeat, undercutting the preferred narrative about Republican obstruction that he might have flogged until November 2014.

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg notes another example of how the left and the media (but I repeat myself) stacks language against the right:

As the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein recently noted, among the myriad reasons conservatives take offense at this idiotic knee-jerk slander is that the term “right wing” is also routinely used to describe both terrorists and mainstream Republicans such as Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney. I can exclusively report that neither of them celebrates Hitler’s birthday.

Every Muslim terrorist enjoys not just the presumption of innocence until proven guilty but the presumption that he’s a fan of Ayn Rand, too.

Ah, but some would respond that “right wing” is different than “Muslim” because there’s so much similarity between mainstream conservative ideology and the terror-filled creeds of the far right.

Except there isn’t. Timothy McVeigh, an atheist, wasn’t part of the conservative or libertarian movements. He wasn’t even part of the militia movement. And what on earth was right wing about the Columbine shootings?

In plenty of cases of multiple killings, from the Unabomber to Christopher Dorner, the perpetrators espoused views closer to the mainstream left’s than McVeigh had to the mainstream right. Occupy Wall Street was an idealistic expression of democratic protest, but the Tea Partiers were brownshirts in khakis.

And, recall that Secretary of State John Kerry belonged to a group — Vietnam Veterans Against the War — that once discussed assassinating American politicians. Barack Obama was friendly with a convicted domestic terrorist. But to even bring these things up, never mind invest them with significance, is considered outrageous guilt by association.

And you know what? Maybe it is.

But if that is outrageous, what do you call the paranoid style of liberal politics that has confused normalcy for fascism for more than half a century?

Read the whole thing.

When one half of the nation is using a completely different dictionary from the other, there’s the great risk of running into what Aaron Clarey dubs “The Zombie Feminist,” or her male counterpart:

I truly believe that after K-Grad school education, the human brain is so indoctrinated and steeped in leftist thought they are mentally impaired and incapable off;

independent thought
critical thinking
intellectual honesty
open mindedness
admitting being wrong or in error

And with a compliant media, government, and society, this mental disease remains thoroughly ensconced in their psyches into adulthood.  But what makes it worse is there is usually a violent (though mindless) reaction.  An emotional and visceral response to anyone or anything that dares to suggest they or their ideology is wrong.

For example, compare and contrast these two clips.

This is what a feminist looks like.

This is what a zombie that wants to kill Will Smith looks like.

Precisely how do their psychologies differ?

Will Smith’s character (if I remember the movie right) tried to reason with the zombies saying he could cure them.

They wanted none of it.

The MRA in the other video wanted to have a calm discussion.

The feminist wanted none of it.

Post 9/11, the left has moved further and further into PC land, a trend that seems to accelerate exponentially every time a crime such as the Giffords, Trayvon or Newtown incidents becomes one of Mr. Obama’s nationalized psychodramas. (As opposed to last week in Boston, whose root causes “cannot be determined.”) And as the left gives a pass to their own radical chic desires and those of their fellow travelers. (See also: MSM fawning over a film director who’s learned to stop worrying and love the Weather Underground’s bombs.)

As the left moves further and further into PC land — where does a bifurcated nation go from here?

Related: Gerard Van der Leun on “The First Terrorist War – Five Years Later Ten Years Later.”

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“Around 1.7 million years ago,” this story at New Scientist notes, “our ancestors’ tools went from basic rocks banged together to chipped hand axes. The strength and dexterity needed to make and use the latter quickly shaped our hands into what they are today – judging by a fossil that belongs to the oldest known anatomically modern hand.”

Headline via Instapundit. Of course, tools are still shaping us, today, as the video atop this post highlights. Tom Wolfe explains everything you wanted to know about Marshall McLuhan, in a 23-minute video I stumbled over while I sat in at Instapundit last month. It was recorded in the 1990s, during the period when thanks to the heady early days of Wired magazine and the birth of the World Wide Web, McLuhan’s theories were undergoing something of a renaissance. (Some even credited McLuhan with inspiring the Blogosphere…)

Wolfe interviewed McLuhan in the mid-1960s, when McLuhan’s career as a pop theorist and corporate sponsored guru were at their zenith, asking, “What If He’s Right?” As Wolfe noted, McLuhan would tell GE, “Gentlemen, the General Electric Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from electric light bulbs, but it is not yet discovered that it is not in the light bulb business but in the business of moving information.” GE certainly went out of their way to eventually prove that statement true.

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Today’s elite loathes the public. Nothing personal, just a fundamental difference in world view, but the hatred is unmistakable. Occasionally it escapes in scorching geysers. Michael Lewis reports in the New Republic on the ’96 Dole presidential campaign: ‘The crowd flips the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say ‘Yeah, I’m the Media. Screw You.’* The crowd hates the reporters, the reporters hate the crowd – an even matchup, except that the reporters wield power and the crowed (in effect) wields none.

David Gelernter, in his 1997 book, Drawing Life. And Gelernter’s description of old media’s aloof reaction to its readers during the 1996-1997 time period dovetails perfectly with the chart atop economic professor Mark J. Perry’s post at AEI today titled, “Free-fall: Adjusted for inflation, print newspaper advertising revenue in 2012 was lower than in 1950:”

If you ask them, old media will swear up and down that the above chart’s apogee is entirely coincidental to the funny thing began to happen, starting in 1996…

* Speaking of declining revenues and customer alienation, Ginny Carroll of Newsweek mentioned wearing a button with exactly those words on it when she appeared on C-Span’s Journalists’ Roundtable in 1992:

“My reaction to that button [`Rather Biased'] and others, in part, is a button I bought yesterday that says `Yeah, I’m In The Media, Screw You!’….I do understand why a lot of people are upset with us, why we rank somewhere between terrorists and bank robbers on the approval scale. We do criticize. That’s part of our role. Our role is not just to parrot what people say, it’s to make people think. I think that sometimes I want to say to the electorate `Grow up!’”

When Carroll died in May of 2001 of hypertensive cardiovascular disease at age 53, the Chicago Tribune reported the above quote in her obituary, and that she had spent a decade as Newsweek’s bureau chief in first Detroit and then Houston.

Newsweek was founded in 1933 by a former editor of Time. The Washington Post purchased the magazine in 1961 for $8,000,000, and offloaded it for one dollar in 2010, perhaps having concluded that they had sufficiently alienated enough former and potential customers. Its new ownership would cease publishing a print version of the magazine at the end of last year.

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The little Roku box is a giant killer.

Last year, when I made a big upgrade to my home theater cabinet by installing a new large LCD TV, a Blu-Ray player, and a Roku box, I also installed a four-port gigabit Ethernet hub in the bottom of the cabinet. A decade ago, I had a hardwired LAN outlet installed behind the cabinet in an effort to future-proof my media room and home office. Which worked out well, as the DirecTV receiver that I installed there a few years later needs Ethernet to play YouTube videos, among other things. The Blu-Ray player needs Ethernet so that it can play the MP3 files on my computer through my big home theater speakers (among other things). The Roku box needs Ethernet to pump out everything else.

It occurred to me while I was wiring all this new gear up, that I was basically building a large deconstructed personal computer, designed to be interacted with via remote control while lying back in a comfy chair* as opposed to sitting upright in a swivel chair typing into a keyboard.

In 1990, George Gilder wrote a book titled Life After Television, in which he noted:

Data is rapidly approaching a level of 50 percent of the bits in a telephone network and already comprises 20 percent of the profits. Data income is growing six times as fast as voice income. As the telephone network becomes a computer network, it will have to change, root and branch. All the assumptions of telephony will have to give way to radically different assumptions. Telephony will die.

* * * * *

Television faces a similar problem. It is a broadcast system that assumes all human beings are essentially alike and at any one time can be satisfied with a set of some 40 or 50 channels moving up to 500. In Europe and Asia, 500 channels may seem wretched excess. But compare this array to some 14,000 magazines and a yearly output of some 55,000 trade books published in the U.S. alone.

* * * * *

TV defies the most obvious fact about its customers — their prodigal and efflorescent diversity. People perform scores of thousands of different jobs; pursue multifarious hobbies; read hundreds of thousands of different publications. TV ignores the reality that people are not inherently couch potatoes; given a chance, they talk back and interact. People have little in common except their prurient interests and morbid fears and anxieties. Necessarily aiming its fare at this lowest-common-denominator target, television gets worse and worse every year.

Nearly a quarter century later, Gilder’s predictions of television’s impending doom are starting to sound rather more plausible — including to those inside the industry. For the past decade, as more and more computer-savvy adults began to eschew the 6:00 PM news, the notion that television’s demographics were beginning to get more and more gray was tacitly reflected in the medium’s advertising. (Super Beta Prostate, indeed.) As Brian Anderson of City Journal told me in 2005:

Writing in the New Yorker recently, the media critic Ken Auletta pointed out something I hadn’t noticed: the commercials on the Big Three network newscasts are frequently hawking drugs like Viagra and Mylanta, and the broadcasts themselves often focus on health issues. There’s a reason for that emphasis on infirmity: the average age of a network news watcher is now 60; only about 8 percent of viewership is between 18 and 34. Ten years ago, 60 percent of adult Americans regularly tuned in to one of the network newscasts. Now it’s only about one in three.

But increasingly, those in the industry are becoming more verbal regarding their legacy media status, as we’ll explore right after the page break. (Which helps pay for our own sponsors.)

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“Here’s an idea for beleaguered California Republicans looking for someone to run against Gov. Jerry Brown
in 2014: Why not Victor Davis Hanson,” asks Mickey Kaus*:

He’s an articulate advocate of the conservative point of view on the central political issues of the state– a farmer, scholar, charismatic speaker who combines broad knowledge with ground-level machismo. He’d have an appeal in the disaffected, depressed central valley, where he lives, and the yuppie coast. While he’s skeptical of the current rush to amnesty, he talks about illegal immigrants living in his area with compassion.  He’s not a career pol like the other mentionees. He’s a real human being. He’s not a multimillionaire ex-CEO either (we’ve had enough of them).  The media would have an excuse to cover him–the fish out of water angle–as long as he kept them amused. The debates with Jerry Brown would be highly informative. It’s possible Brown would freak out in a fit of intellectual insecurity.

Works for me. VDH’s campaign team are more than welcome to use the retro Ike-era button I created in 2011 as a starting point for their own graphic design efforts, when our own Roger Simon also suggested that VDH take a run at the governorship. Though when I searched on that post, I came across my thoughts on the idea when it was posited by Roger:

After California chose Brown over Meg Whitman — by far the worst of the two choices available, if only given his track record in the past, I doubt very much that someone as sophisticated and erudite as VDH could actually win an election here. It brings to mind Adlai Stevenson’s legendary, though possibly apocryphal exchange with a fellow liberal during his presidential run in 1956:

A woman called out to Adlai E. Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!”

Stevenson called back, “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!”

I would never say such a disparaging thing about Americans as a whole; but at least at the moment, it seems sadly applicable to the once Golden State and the prospects of an increasingly dystopian future, as one of Ace of Spades’ co-bloggers described last month, using their rather colorful and more than a little PG-13 in-house language.

Sadly, little has changed in California since, other than even more icebergs have since floated into range. Rather than VDH attempting to wake Californians from their torpor, perhaps Aaron Clarey could produce a special California-Customized edition of his Enjoy the Decline book for those of us here in Weimar on the Pacific.

* Who’s also no stranger to California retail politics.

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“America just can’t seem to stop letting Barack Obama down, can it?”, John Hayward writes at the Conversation, the Breitbart.com group blog:

On Friday, President Obama returned to one of his favorite topics, infrastructure spending, in a move widely interpreted as the latest pivot to job creation.  As transcribed by the Weekly Standard, he used his rather grating “America can do better” formulation to insist on more money for roads and bridges:

“We still have all kinds of deferred maintenance.  We still have too many ports that aren’t equipped for today’s world commerce.  We’ve still got too many rail lines that are too slow and clogged up.  We’ve still got too many roads that are in disrepair, too many bridges that aren’t safe,” said the president.

“We don’t have to accept that for America.  We can do better. We can build better.  And in a time of tight budgets, we’ve got to do it in a way that makes sure taxpayer dollars are spent wisely.”

Obama announced today his plan. “I’m expanding on a proposal I made in the State of the Union.  I’m calling it a Partnership to Rebuild America.  It’s a partnership with the private sector that creates jobs upgrading what our businesses need most -– modern ports to move our goods; modern pipelines to withstand a storm; modern schools worthy of our children,” he said.

America just can’t seem to stop letting Barack Obama down, can it?  I’m sure we could compile a bipartisan history of political leaders urging Americans to “do better” in one area or another, but it seems like a particularly constant verbal tic of Obama’s, since he’s unwilling to concede the tiniest smidgeon of government responsibility for the unsatisfactory state of national affairs.

Matt Drudge had a little fun this weekend with that particular tic of Mr. Obama. As fellow Insta-guest-contributor Ann Althouse has noted,  Drudge “does commentary. You just have to figure out what he’s trying to say with his juxtapositions — Drudgtapositions.”

Like this one last night, juxtaposing our first president in a painting behind our 44th, and a link to a write-up on his infrastructure-obsessed Friday speech in Miami:

Heh. That’s just brutal.

Hopefully though, the Easter service that the president attended today will put him in a more forgiving mood. Or not:

At the Easter service attended Sunday by President Barack Obama and his family, the pastor railed against “captains of the religious right,” according to the White House pool report cited by the Washington Post. The service, led by Rev. Luis Leon, was held at Saint John’s Church at Lafayette Square, which is where the First Family worships most often, though they have not formally joined any particular church in Washington, D.C.

The Post article notes that the Easter sermon targeted conservatives as racists, sexists and xenophobes:

According to a press pool report of Leon’s sermon, the minister criticized what he called ”the captains of the religious right.”

People often want things to go back to the way things used to be, before “work got difficult and faith got confused, and life got more confusing,” Leon said, according to the pool report.

“You cannot go back,” Leon said, citing the words of Jesus. “It drives me crazy when the captains of the religious right are always calling us back … for blacks to be back in the back of the bus … for women to be back in the kitchen … for immigrants to be back on their side of the border.”

I’m sure that last sentence was a thinly-veiled attack at the One Percenters at Google, and their embrace of Cesar Chavez today…

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“RNC Report — 100 pages and not a single word about bloggers,” William A. Jacobson  writes at Legal Insurrection:

For the RNC to produce a 100-page report and not have a single mention of the need to interact with and support the conservative blogosphere tells me that the RNC simply has rearranged the deck chairs on the HMS Consultant.

Read the whole thing, as one pioneering blogger is wont to say.

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Veteran author and columnist Zev Chafets drops by to discuss his latest book, Roger Ailes:  Off Camera, which, as its title implies, is a biography of the Fox News impresario, and a history of how dramatically the media and political landscape has changed since Ailes cut his teeth producing the venerable Mike Douglas syndicated talk show in the mid-1960s. His chance meeting with Richard Nixon while producing Douglas set in motion a series of career events, including advising the campaigns of multiple Republican presidents.  From the late 1980s through the mid-’90s, Ailes launched CNBC, produced Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated TV series, and created the immediate predecessor to MSNBC. All of which were the prelude to Ailes being tapped by Rupert Murdoch in 1996 to build Fox News and give it an iconoclastic worldview. As Chafets writes in his book:

Murdoch, whose trajectory had taken him from his native Australia to London and then to the United States, already owned a string of broadcast stations, but wanted to go into the cable news business. He had an intuition that a large portion of the public was unhappy with the tone of mainstream TV news and would respond to a more patriotic, socially conservative, and less parochial sort of information. He and Ailes had met only once, briefly, on the Twentieth Century Fox movie lot years before, but they knew each other by reputation. “Roger had great success at CNBC and I heard that he was unhappy there,” Murdoch says. “I asked him to come see me.”

Ailes listened silently as Murdoch laid out his idea. “The question,” Murdoch said, “is whether it can be done.”

Ailes said that it could, but only if it could get on the air within six months, to beat MSNBC (and perhaps also ABC’s new cable venture) to the punch. Ailes would be working from scratch. There were no studios, no equipment, no staff, and no infrastructure. Essentially he would be creating a network from nothing.

“How much will it cost me?” Murdoch asked. “Nine hundred million to a billion,” Ailes responded. “And you could lose it all.”

“Can you do it?” Murdoch asked.

“Yes,” said Ailes. “Then go ahead and do it.”

“I thought, either this man is crazy or he has the biggest set of balls I’ve ever seen,” Murdoch says. Ailes was thinking pretty much the same thing about his new boss.

As John Podhoretz recently noted, after the 2012 election, conservatives spoke frequently about finding some way of changing the media landscape; in the mid-1990s, Ailes did just that. The result was a godsend for conservatives who longed for a TV channel whose tone matched theirs. Concurrently the channel would cause many self-described liberals to jettison their platitudes about free speech, tolerance and diversity, as they descended into apoplexy every time they got near channel #360 on their DirecTV dial.

During our interview, Chafets will explore:

● How did Ailes become an advisor to the presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush?

● How does Ailes compare to previous Chafets biography subject Rush Limbaugh, whose TV series Ailes produced in the early 1990s?

● How Ailes crafted Fox’s signature slogans “We Report, You Decide” and “Fair and Balanced” to be counterweights to the pretensions of the MSM on the opposite side of the aisle.

● How do Rush and Ailes cope with being such demonized figures by the left? (QED: this 2011 Esquire headline: “Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?”)

● How Ailes’ past careers have allowed to find and recruit new talent, and how crossing Ailes is frequently a quick trip to television Siberia for Fox hosts.

● What does Ailes think of new media impresarios such as the late Andrew Breitbart, and former Fox hosts Matt Drudge and Glenn Beck?

● What will happen to Fox News when the 72-year old Ailes one day departs the organization?

And much more. Click here to listen:

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(22 minutes long; 20MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this segment to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 6.22MB lo-fi edition.)

If the above Flash audio player is not be compatible with your browser, click on the YouTube player below, or click here to be taken directly to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

Transcript of our interview begins on the following page; for our many previous podcasts, including our interview earlier this month with Monica Crowley of Fox News, start here and keep scrolling.

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“The new Pope is a South American, the first non-European in centuries — but not one anyone saw coming.  Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina has become Pope Francis I.  This name has a lot of meaning for Catholics — Francis of Assisi was credited with reforming the Catholic Church in the 13th century through humility, simplicity, and works of charity.  However, Bergoglio is 76 years old, an interesting choice,” Ed Morrissey writes from Rome, where he’s been covering the Vatican’s election of a new Pope. Click over to his post at Hot Air (and white smoke) for much more.

Update: “TMZ surprised to discover new Pope is Catholic.” And this is CNN: Anderson Cooper to person who flew into Rome to be there when the new Pope was chosen: “Why are you here?”

More: Buzzfeed wastes no time Bensmithing the new Pope. And “NBC’s Russert Lectures New Pope In Blog Post Just Minutes After Advising People to Leave Politics Aside for a While.”

But then, NBC already has its own in-house religious avatar, who is viewed in the mind of MSNBC President Phil Griffin, as he told NPR in 2011, as being “smart. He’s entertaining. He’s experienced. He’s thoughtful. He’s provocative, all the things I think that MSNBC is.”

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It is to the point that writing about the news is like writing about telekinetic squirrels.

In other words, it can’t possibly even be real, so writing about it feels creepy, pointless, and silly.

– Rachel Lucas, this past Thursday. Read the whole thing.

(Via the Chicago Boyz.)

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I asked Roger Ailes what he imagined heaven would be like. “I’m pretty sure that God’s got a sense of humor,” he said. “I think he gets a laugh out of me from time to time, so I suppose things will be all right.”

“What if you get there and it turns out that God is a liberal?” I asked.

Ailes paused. It was something that evidently hadn’t occurred to him. “Well, hell, if God’s a liberal, that’s his business,” he said. He paused again, imagining it. “But I doubt very much that he is. He’s got a good heart.”

– From Vanity Fair’s excerpt of Zev Chafets’ upcoming biography of Roger Ailes.

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Orson Welles famously said that a movie studio was the best electric train set a boy could play with. I’d imagine a television network isn’t too shabby, either. Zev Chafets’ upcoming biography of Roger Ailes certainly looks like it will be fun, based on its extended excerpt in Vanity Fair — which I imagine is driving VF’s core readers appropriately crazy. (Read: crazier):

During the presidential campaign of 2008, candidate Barack Obama was upset by Fox News, which by then was in its sixth year of cable dominance. A sit-down was arranged with Murdoch and Ailes, who recalls that the meeting took place in a private room at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan. (White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to relate the president’s version.) Obama arrived with his aide Robert Gibbs, who seated Ailes directly across from Obama, close enough for Ailes to feel the intention was to intimidate him. He didn’t mind; in fact, he rather appreciated the stagecraft, one political professional to another.

After some pleasantries, Obama got to the point. He was concerned about the way he was being portrayed on Fox, and his real issue wasn’t the news; it was Sean Hannity, who had been battering him every night at nine (and on his radio show, which Fox doesn’t own or control). Ailes didn’t deny that Hannity was anti-Obama. He simply told the candidate not to worry about it. “Nobody who watches Sean’s going to vote for you anyway,” he said.

Obama then asked Ailes what his personal concerns might be. It is a politician’s question that means: What can I do for you?

Ailes said he was mainly concerned about Obama’s strength on national-security issues. The candidate assured Ailes that he had nothing to worry about.

“Well, why are you going around talking about making cuts in weapons systems?” asked Ailes. “If you’re going to cut, why not at least negotiate them and get something in return?”

Obama said that Ailes had been misinformed; he was not advocating unilateral cuts.

“He said this looking me right in the eyes,” says Ailes. “He never dropped his gaze, which is the usual tell. It was as good a lie as anyone ever told me. I said, ‘Senator, I just watched someone say exactly that on my computer screen before coming over here. Maybe it wasn’t you, but it sure looked like you and sounded like you. I think it was you.’ ”

At that point, Gibbs stood and announced that the session was over. “I don’t think he liked the meeting very much,” says Ailes.

“Maybe it wasn’t you, but it sure looked like you and sounded like you. I think it was you.” I think it was too:

Although this promise certainly has had quite an amusing expiration date — or at least extended postponement.

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We kick off our eleventh year of blogging with an interview with Monica Crowley of Fox News, who drops by today to ask — and answer — the question we’ve all been pondering since November: What the (Bleep) Just Happened…Again?

That’s also the title of the new edition of her New York Times bestseller, which is out today in paperback, with a new forward focusing on the GOP’s presidential election debacle, and thus, the consequences of four more years of Barack Obama at the helm, along with his disastrous polices both at home and abroad.

During our interview, Monica will discuss:

● How Big Government destroys individual freedom.

● How much success has Obama had in changing the character of Americans?

● Will Obama’s love of big government see a renewed interest in federalism across the land as a counterweight?

● How much tension will there be between the states — many of which have GOP governors — and DC?

● Is Obama naive when it comes to the dangers of the Middle East, or is there a deliberate plan at work?

● How the media has allowed Obama to get away with debacles such as Benghazi and Operation Fast and Furious.

● How conservative was Monica’s first boss, former president Richard Nixon?

● What would Nixon think of Obama?

● When Barack Obama departs the White House, what sort of America will he leave behind?

And much more. Click here to listen:

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Transcript of our interview begins on the following page.

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L to R: Breitbart, Glenn Reynolds, Driscoll at 2008 GOP convention.

Today is the first anniversary of the death of the ultimate happy warrior, Andrew Breitbart. I met and interviewed Andrew on several occasions from 2005 until his death last year at age 43, which was the very definition of the phrase “untimely passing.” Last year, shortly after he passed away, I dusted off the cassette tape of the first interview I had with Andrew, recorded a couple of weeks after meeting him for the first time at the PJM launch in Manhattan on November of 2005. We discussed his first book, Hollywood Interrupted, for quotes and background material for an article on Tinseltown’s woes that I was writing for Tech Central Station. What follows below is the post I wrote last year, when I originally ran that interview.

* * * * * *

Early on in Chris K. Daley’s new e-book, Becoming Breitbart: The Impact of a New Media Revolutionary, there’s a great quote from Mickey Kaus, on the power that Andrew Breitbart had quickly acquired, very early in his career:

In retrospect hitching his star to Drudge was a brilliant decision. This was hardly a given in 1995. Political blogger Mickey Kaus, someone who understood the power of the Internet, recalled, “I first met Breitbart when he showed up at a panel I was on at UCLA. He told me he was the guy who posted items for Matt Drudge, and I immediately realized he was the most powerful person in the room. Nobody could understand why I was sucking up to the crazed hippie kid in shorts.”

The power of Drudge Report comes from the large audience it has generated. By 2007 it was regularly attracting over three million unique visits. The average visitor spent an incredible one hour and six minutes on the site, an eternity in Internet terms. The average visitor went to the site 20 times a month. The Washington Post, a popular link for Drudge, noted in 2006 that its “largest driver of traffic is Matt Drudge.”

And not coincidentally along the way, as a headline at Andrew’s Big Journalism site gloats, “Newspapers [have become] America’s Fastest Shrinking Industry.”

Flash-forward to the fall of 2004, and Andrew’s behind-the-scenes power was very much in evidence, this time changing the face of television news. As Scott Johnson of Power Line noted at the start of the month:

I learned in the course of [my week-long visit to Israel in 2007 with Breitbart] that it was Andrew who changed my life in 2004, linking to our “Sixty-First Minute” post early that afternoon with the screaming siren on Drudge. He confided that Matt Drudge did not like blogs, but that he (Andrew) was a fan. On September 9, 2004, he was following the action online. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks for everything.

But along the way, Breitbart also took detours into other ventures, such as helping to build the architecture of the Huffington Post, and co-writing, with Mark Ebner, their 2004 book Hollywood Interrupted. As I mention in the podcast below, I met Andrew in person for the first time the week of November 14^th 2005, during the launch week of PJ Media in New York. After we both had returned to California, on November 28, 2005, I interviewed him by telephone for an article I was working on for Tech Central Station, now called Ideas In Action TV.com, about Hollywood’s box office woes, which was published a week later and titled, a la Woody Allen, “Hollywood Ending.”

I loved Hollywood, Interrupted, and I was certainly aware of Andrew’s backstage work at the Drudge Report and the celebrity-oriented Huffington Post. So I definitely wanted to get his take on how the movie industry, a medium that we both loved, had been utterly transformed, and not necessarily for the better, since its golden era of the 1930s through the mid-1960s.

This interview was originally recorded onto a cheap mono tape recorder, originally for the purpose of pulling quotes for my Tech Central Station article. And while I’ve done a considerable amount of restoration work (employing both extensive amounts of Izotope’s RX audio restoration software and the noise gate plug-in built into Cakewalk’s Sonar program), it’s still much cruder sounding than the podcasts and radio shows I’ve produced for PJ Media in the years since. But with Andrew’s passing, I thought it would be worth sharing. So apologies for the sound quality, but I think hearing Andrew riffing on the topic of how the Hollywood of old became, as he would say, Interrupted, is well worth listening to.

There are several observations that Andrew makes here that have withstood the test of time. Early on, there’s a grimly hilarious remark by Andrew concerning his ailing grandmother, who emitted a piercing primal scream of terror, whenever anyone attempted to change the TV channel from her beloved CBS, the only channel she apparently ever watched, in sharp contrast to today’s world of hundreds of cable and satellite channels and millions of Websites and blogs. At about 17 minutes into the interview, he mentions the punitive liberalism and growing nihilism of Hollywood’s product, the latter of which being a topic I discussed extensively with Thomas Hibbs last month, the author of the definitive look at Hollywood nihilism, Shows About Nothing. And two minutes later, Andrew makes a great observation on the popularity of today’s show-biz-oriented reality TV shows as a sort of payback by the American people for today’s drug-addled screw-up stars abandoning the glamour they maintained during Hollywood’s earlier era. Near the end of the interview, you can sort of hear the Big Hollywood Website starting to coalesce in Andrew’s mind; a topic he and I would discuss a few years later on PJM’s Sirius-XM radio show in 2009.

A transcript of this interview, which I originally typed up in 2005 as raw material for my Tech Central Station article, and thus paraphrases some of Andrew’s more stream of consciousness remarks, follows on the next page.

Click below to listen to the podcast:

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(28 minutes long; 26 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 8 MB lo-fi edition.)

Since in the past, a few people have complained of difficulties with the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, use the video player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

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PJTV alumnus Tony Katz has a modest proposal — and a big healthy check for three big ones, for The Big Man himself, Chris Christie.

I’m not sure how enticing Christie will find the offer, but I can’t help but approve the technique:

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Brit Hume-approved, to boot.

And found via Moe Lane, apparently, this Lawrence Welk clip was recorded at 4:20 PM:

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Since the November’s election debacle, Glenn Reynolds has been promoting the idea that wealthy conservatives should invest in women’s magazines* to both influence the culture, and reach low information voters:

One of the groups with whom Romney did worst was female “low-information voters.” Those are women who don’t really follow politics, and vote based on a vague sense of who’s mean and who’s nice, who’s cool and who’s uncool.

Since, by definition, they don’t pay much attention to political news, they get this sense from what they do read. And for many, that’s traditional women’s magazines — Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, the Ladies Home Journal, etc. — and the newer women’s sites like YourTango, The Frisky, Yahoo! Shine, and the like.

The thing is, those magazines and Web sites see themselves, pretty consciously, as a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. So while nine out of 10 articles may be the usual stuff on sex, diet and shopping, the 10th will always be either soft p.r. for the Democrats or soft — or sometimes not-so-soft — hits on Republicans.

When a flier about getting away with rape was found in a college men’s bathroom, the women’s site YourTango (“Your Best Love Life”) led with the fact that the college was Paul Ryan’s alma materin a transparent effort to advance the Democrats’ War on Women claim that Republicans are somehow pro-rape. A companion article was “12 Hot Older Men Who Endorse President Obama.”

Similar p.r. abounded across the board: Sandra Fluke is a hero; Sarah Palin is a zero. Republicans are all old white men (women or minority Republicans get mocked or ignored).

This kind of thing adds up, especially among low-information voters. They may not know or care much about the specifics, but this theme, repeated over and over again, sends a message: Democrats are cool, and Republicans are uncool — and if you vote for them, you’re uncool, too.

Pop culture-oriented Websites are also a way to advance conservative ideas to those who wouldn’t touch a political Website with a virtual barge pole.

But somehow, Cracked.com got there long before November of 2012. As I recall from the ’70s, Cracked the magazine was the dumber version of Mad, equally filled with goofy satires of movies and TV shows, but nowhere near as funny, and lacking the hipster cache of the latter comic. But check out this 2009 article at Cracked.com titled, “5 Ways People Are Trying to Save the World (That Don’t Work),” with topics on organic food, rejecting Vaccinations, carbon offsets. And Recycling:

The image of the paper industry hacking down every tree until we were all gasping for lack of oxygen was always ridiculous; we’ve increased the number of trees over the last 50 years as logging companies plant more to ensure future supply.

Equally silly were the warnings most of us got hammered with growing up, about tales of overflowing landfills, full of trash that takes thousands of years to biodegrade. At least in America, we were never in danger of walking through streets of garbage. Some expert at Gonzaga University, with a lot of time on his hands, calculated that at current rates all the garbage in the US over the next 1,000 years would fill up a 35 square mile landfill 100 yards deep.

This sounds like one of those “Holy shit!” scary figures until you consider this is about one tenth of one percent of the land currently used for grazing in the US. Also, this would be the accumulation over 1,000 years by which time we should have bigger things to worry about, like overthrowing our robotic overlords.

As for saving resources by recycling, this is where it gets tricky. Partly this is because whether or not recycling saves resources depends on whether you consider human labor to be a resource (that is, the effort to pick up, sort and transfer the items to be recycled). Recycling requires more trucks, more crews and more people to oversee the entire process. In Los Angeles alone there are twice as many garbage trucks than there would have been without the recycling program. Just like those douchebags who drive to the gym to run on a treadmill but still hop in the car to go the one block to the corner store to pick up their pork rinds and soda, it’s not clear just how much benefit there is at the end of the day.

This is the sort of topic that Reason, NRO, and other conservative or libertarian Websites have written about for ages — and it’s being discussed at a Website likely read by people who wouldn’t go within miles of Reason or NRO. The nearest equivalent I can think of this is South Park, or Penn & Teller’s Bullsh*t series. (Needless to say, from the title onward, language alert on the following video):

More, please.

* Or a newspaper. And say, there happens to be one on the market, right now…

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Neo-Neocon explores “The problem with starting an alternative media on the right:”

We’ve been saying for quite some time that one thing that’s needed is to start an alternative media source on the right. Fox is not enough.

But there’s an inherent problem with that, and it’s not just the fact that it can be hard to find experienced newspeople who aren’t liberals. The much more basic problem with an alternative conservative media is that the media on the right has been so demonized—and any alternative media would be equally demonized—that Democrats and even many of those in the middle have been taught that it’s unreliable and will not watch it, and/or they automatically discount what it says.

Fox News, for example, is “Faux News,” and most people I know laugh when it’s suggested they watch it, as though it were a Pravda of the right. The funny thing is that they are unaware that the MSM they do watch is closer to the old Soviet Pravda at this point (although a voluntary one); they are unaware of their own susceptibility to propaganda and how greatly influenced they are by it. So any new media source on the right will be “Fauxized,” much as any new exciting conservative politician is Palinized (see what happened to Ryan, and what’s starting to happen to Rubio). It’s a full court propaganda press, in which the MSM determines for the most part what the valid sources are, and the right is by definition unreliable.

Periodicals on the right such as National Review, Weekly Standard, and Commentary are either not heard of by non-political-junkies in the middle or liberals (leftists, who tend to be quite involved, often know quite a bit about them, if only to counter them)—or, if heard of, rarely read. For example, I’m not aware of having any liberal friends who read them; I tend to get blank stares of non-recognition if I even mention them.

Of course, one explanation for that is that the MSM has no reason to promote a right-leaning new media venture, except to demonize them. They’re certainly not going to champion anything on the right as a success story. Which brings us to Jonathan Last* of the Weekly Standard, after his visit to Glenn Beck’s Internet TV network, one in which he came away both simultaneously impressed and yet uncomprehending:

Second, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m fascinated by what Glenn Beck is doing with The Blaze as an internet TV network and it’s incomprehensible why media reporters (and business reporters) aren’t all over this story. Beck took a cable TV following, ported it out of an established network, and ushered into his own new network, which is not just an internet TV channel, but a pay internet TV channel. How is this not the most interesting, and potentially disruptive, media experiment since the advent of Fox News Channel? And yet when you look around the mainstream press . . . crickets.

As I said, incomprehensible.

Not at all. In his “Ten Media Truths for Conservative/Republican Legislators,” Moe Lane of Red State writes, “The Media hates you, and wants you to die in a fire.” That goes double, maybe triple for Glenn Beck. Other than getting their marching orders from Media Matters (and helping to bring down Van Jones, and helping promote Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, and…) I’m not sure why Beck gets that level of white-hot hatred from old media. But building a one-man media network after leaving cable TV — while others who have left cable TV are walking around, as Jim Treacher once quipped, with “Will Host for Food” placards around their necks — isn’t helping him generate PR from old media.

Not that Beck needs it, of course. Which really causes the MSM to silently rage.

* I’ll have an interview online with Jonathan about his new book, What To Expect When No One’s Expecting, in the not too distant future.

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As you’ve undoubtedly read by now, Roger L. Simon, our co-founder, is stepping down from his command post as CEO and Maximum Pajamahadeen. It’s been quite a ride these last seven years; here’s a link to the post I wrote in 2005 when I first met Roger in person, tongue-in-cheekily titled, “Secret Neo-Con Cabal Plots High Above Hills Of Silicon Valley.”

In November of 2005, when PJ Media publicly launched in New York, I can’t tell you how many “they’ll never last” posts I read, mostly from those who thought the train was leaving the station without them. Seven years and a lot of experimentation later, we’ll still here, and much of the credit must go to Roger’s steering us through the uncharted waters of new media.

On the PJM homepage today, Aaron Hanscom, who makes the trains — or at least the articles on the homepage — run on time at PJM, links to his first project here, videotaping Roger’s 2007 interview with Mark Steyn. During those Jurassic days of PJM, our first podcasts launched, hosted by Austin Bay. I was producing these up here in Silicon Valley (with Austin in Texas and everybody telecommuting in). The initial idea for them began in my kitchen, when Roger was back up in the San Jose area in early 2006 for a conference, and stopped by to talk with my wife and me.

Just as PJM’s early video experiments would eventually become PJTV, those podcasts were the prototype for PJM’s show on Sirius-XM from 2007 through the end of 2010. But both had to go through a very public period of experimentation to get good. And being able to do that live without a net, taking a leap of faith with people who were new to new media but eager to make their mark, is something that Roger deserves a lot of credit for overseeing, and quite frankly having the guts to do.

On the other hand, all during this period, Roger had numerous writing projects — for screen, print, and theater — percolating in his head, waiting for sufficient time to be able implement them. As my fellow PJM colleague Richard Fernandez writes in his own encomium to Roger, “when Roger says, ‘I am going to return to my creative writing while I still, to be honest, have some ability to do it’ he has in some sense no choice in the matter. There are some things he has to say before the curtain falls.”

To keep the railroad metaphors in this post going, Orson Welles famously said that a movie studio was the best electric train set a boy could have. In the 21^st century, a new media studio on the Internet isn’t a bad train set either. Thank you, Roger, for letting us play with the controls, even after we occasionally crashed the locomotives from time to time in the early days.

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