Baseball season is over for the A's, following this afternoon's lame-duck game, which the A's won and I missed because I thought it was to start at 5pm local time rather than 1pm. (I would have paid closer attention if we were still in contention.) I'll be rooting for the Angels in the playoffs, following my usual pattern of preferring the other AL West teams next after the A's (and anyone before the Yankees), but since I don't expect to actually watch any of the games, it's a formality that's even more meaningless than active rooting for a team.

I still haven't watched the tape of the presidential debate, and there's a distinct possibility that I'll never get around to it. As most have heard by now, the consensus opinion was that Kerry "won", so my concern over the lost opportunity is probably moot.

That first question that Bush dodged reminds me of something I'd been meaning to say. The question was basically asking Bush to confirm or deny what Vice President Cheney said at a campaign stop in Iowa early in September:

Most of the Democratic response to this was that Cheney's statement was outrageous, and it was shameful that he would even suggest such a thing. I don't think so. All Cheney is doing here is stating more clearly (though still not entirely explicitly) what most of the Bush campaign has been hinting at all along: that America is less likely to be hit by 9/11-like attack when Bush is president than when someone else is president.

Why should this topic be out of bounds? I think it's entirely relevant. If one believes (as I don't) that Americans really are safer from attack under one president than the other, then that's a perfectly reasonable consideration for choosing whom to vote for. By dismissing the charge as unreasonable the Kerry campaign allows the Bush campaign to insinuate it without needing to present any evidence to back it up. Do they have any evidence? Do the Kerry people have any evidence for the reverse? It's a healthy debate. If either side has good ideas about protecting Americans that the other hasn't adopted, I'd like for those to be aired.

Of the blogs I looked at for post-debate commentary, my favorite was Andrew Sullivan, who was also my favorite for the Republican convention. My opinion of Sullivan has gone back and forth many times over the years, going back to his days with the New Republic. Lately, I like him again. Probably it has something to do with his current position as a conservative who opposes Bush. I seem to have a thing for that sort of political ambivalence. I have a similar perverse affection for right-wing isolationist Pat Buchanan, who in today's political climate sometimes looks like the voice of reason on the right, unlikely as that seems.

On the matter of liberal vs conservative and how they have turned around, here is Sullivan's comments on a New York Times column by David Brooks:

This brings to mind a passage from the original conservative, Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France:

I think a true conservative would hesitate to pull down the edifices of undemocratic regimes around the world without having practical models for what will replace them.

11:09:56 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

I don't watch cable news very often, but earlier this evening I happened to be flipping through channels and I saw Howard Dean with Tim Russert on CNBC, so I stayed there for the rest of the interview. (I still love Howard Dean, and I still think he offers a better overall policy platform than any other politician or pundit in either party.)

In the course of the interview, during the ads I flipped to the network station which was running Jeopardy at the same time (interesting, but not as interesting as Howard). At the end of the interview, Jeopardy was over, so instead of moving on to another channel, I stayed on CNBC long enough to notice what the following four commercials were.

I'm interested in this because I'm interested in why the different news media have different political slants. There are exceptions in every medium, but some large-scale trends are obvious. Talk radio leans strongly to the right, while cinema leans strongly to the left. Partisans will disagree about how far either is from the center, but I think most will agree that television network news is less conservative than cable television news. The strongest example is Fox News, but even with Fox removed I think the pattern still holds.

Some have argued that corporate ownership of the news media causes them to be biased toward the right (a view which Howard Dean disagreed with in today's interview, by the way). In response to that I have seen it argued that whatever a corporate owner's own political bias might be, the station has to be programmed in a way that attracts viewers, which in turn attracts advertisers, which is what keeps the station in business. A station which flouts that will lose money, and thus the laws of the market force the stations to give the public what it wants. If cable news really is conservative, then, it's because only because that's what the viewing audience wants to see.

This raises the question of who advertises on CNBC. In my very small sample, the four ads following Tim Russert's show today were for Boeing, GMC, Xerox, and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Of the four, the only one obviously advertising a product that any viewer might buy was GMC's ad praising the virtues of its trucks. The Xerox ad was a generic boast about how that corporation is "the document company", but no actual products were mentioned. I'm not even sure what Xerox makes these days, but a quick search on the Web shows a variety of scanners, printers, photocopiers and related office equipment. A viewer who runs a small business or an office in the home might well want to buy one of those, though I'd guess those viewers are a fairly small portion of Xerox's total customer base. Royal Bank of Scotland I had never even heard of. Perhaps they offer consumer banking in the United Kingdom, or maybe even in parts of the United States. I've never seen any RBS branch here on the West Coast of America. Boeing is a corporation which manufactures large machinery like jet planes and weapons systems. It doesn't make anything that any individual consumer would ever buy, nor is it even an indirect factor in any buying decision I can think of that an ordinary individual would ever make.

Why do these companies advertise on CNBC? Presumably they must pay a lot of money for the air time. What audience is CNBC delivering to them in exchange for their advertising dollars? Only GMC's ad purchase makes sense as an appeal for customers. Xerox's and RBS's are surely very poorly targeted in that regard. Boeing would seem to have no interest in the viewing audience whatsoever.

It causes one to wonder what other reasons a large corporation would have for wanting to pay money to CNBC. Most corporations have lobbying arms which donate money to politicians they prefer. Whether the lobbying is intended to influence a politician's future decisions or to reward past decisions is a matter of debate (or perhaps just a matter of semantics). In either case, the contributions are made only insofar as the corporation believes that the politician's decisions can affect the corporation's profitability, perhaps by affecting regulations or tax breaks. If corporations believed that cable news stations might also have political influence, that could explain their desire to lobby them with advertising money.

1:35:48 AM  [permalink]  comment []