Political Influence on a Think Tank

Many posts have discussed the political role of think tanks, as well as the ways in which political figures try to influence media coverage.  Zaid Jilani, who used to blog for the Center for American Progress, addresses both issues, recalling what happened when he criticized the Obama administration's Afghanistan policy.

The post was one of the most successful things I had ever written to that point. It was featured by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and the Congressional Progressive Caucus used it in their briefings to criticize Obama’s plan. I felt great — like I was actually doing the right thing about Afghanistan for once at an institution that had remained quiet or supportive of Obama’s policy there, which in my view was accomplishing little but more bloodshed.

But then phone calls from the White House started pouring in, berating my bosses for being critical of Obama on this policy. Obama’s advisor Ben Rhodes — speaking of a staffer who follows policy set by others for his career path — even made a post on the White House blog more or less attacking my chart by fudging the numbers and including both the Iraq and Afghan troop levels in a single chart to make it seem as if the surge never happened (the marvels of things you can do in Excel!).

Soon afterwards all of us ThinkProgress national security bloggers were called into a meeting with CAP senior staff and basically berated for opposing the Afghan war and creating daylight between us and Obama. It confused me a lot because on the one hand, CAP was advertising to donors that it opposed the Afghan war — in our “Progressive Party,” the annual fundraising party we do with both Big Name Progressive Donors and corporate lobbyists (in the same room!) we even advertised that we wanted to end the war in Afghanistan.

But what that meeting with CAP senior staff showed me was that they viewed being closer to Obama and aligning with his policy as more important than demonstrating progressive principle, if that meant breaking with Obama. Essentially, they were doing the same thing to us RT America is telling its American producers to do now — align with your boss, who is the president of the country.

Foreign Influence: A Case Study

A previous post discussed foreign lobbying. Laurel Rosenhall writes at The Sacramento Bee about a public affairs campaign by Sheik Khalid bin Saqr Al Qasimi, exiled crown prince of one of the United Arab Emirates.

Before his 2009 inauguration, newly elected President Barack Obama made a public pledge not to accept money for the celebration from representatives of foreign interests.

That didn’t stop a top partner at California Strategies, one of Sacramento’s premier public affairs firms, and his wife from donating big dollars. The firm had taken an exiled Arab sheik on as a client just before the 2008 election and registered with the federal government as a foreign agent, designating partner Jason Kinney as the one in charge of a publicity campaign on the sheik’s behalf.

But Kinney himself did not register as required, and within months he and his wife gave $52,000 for the inauguration, according to data tracked by the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C. In total, the records show, two California Strategies partners, one associate and one spouse gave a combined $158,000 to the committee planning Obama’s inaugural festivities.

... 

Over the next two years [2008-2010], Sheik Khalid, through California Strategies, spent $3.08 million on the campaign, including payments to lobbyists, advertisers, bloggers, photographers and highly connected Democratic consultants. His message appeared on billboards in Washington, D.C., on bus ads in New York City and on a Twitter feed, where the sheik described meetings with former Vice President Al Gore and retired Army General Wesley Clark. The sheik was welcomed with a special message on the Los Angeles Dodgers’ scoreboard.

The firm dispensed gifts from the sheik – described in federal filings as maps of the Middle East – to more than a dozen officials, including California Gov. Jerry Brown, Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

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The strategy also included hiring former New York Times reporter Michael Janofsky to write a blog in the sheik’s voice. After 24 years with the newspaper, Janofsky was launching a career as a freelance writer. He said a political consultant working for the sheik – whom he declined to identify – connected him to the $5,000-a-month job.

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The campaign appears to have been ineffective. Today, the sheik’s half-brother, Sheik Saud, is the ruler of Ras al-Khaimah, according to the emirate’s official website. The status of Sheik Khalid is unclear. The United Arab Emirates Embassy in Washington did not respond to The Sacramento Bee’s question about him, and his former attorney in England did not answer The Sacramento Bee’s email. His blogs and Twitter account are inactive. 

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/12/08/5980984/sacramento-firm-represented-arab.html#storylink=cpy

Social Media, Mass Media, and Campaign Coverage

From the Project on Excellence in Journalism:

From the conventions until the first debate, a period of improving polls for Obama, Romney suffered his period of the most negative coverage; just 4% of stories about him were positive while 52% were negative. Coverage of Obama during this period was fairly evenly split (20% positive vs. 24% negative). That narrative reversed sharply with the first debate. For the next two weeks, Romney saw the mixed treatment (23% positive vs. 23% negative) while Obama was caught in the critical loop, with 12% positive and 37% negative. After the second debate, coverage returned to its more general pattern, with an edge for Obama.

This treatment in the mainstream media also differs markedly from what the study finds in the newer realms of social media: Twitter, Facebook and blogs. There, the narrative about both men has been relentlessly negative and relatively unmoved by campaign events that have shifted the mainstream narrative-more a barometer of social media user mood than a reflection of candidate action. On Twitter, for instance, the conversation about the campaign has consistently been harsher for Romney than for Obama. On Facebook, the tone improved for Obama in October with the debates, despite the sense that the president had stumbled in the first one. And in the blogosphere, neither candidate has seen a sustained edge in the narrative in the eight weeks studied.

The study also reveals the degree to which the two cable channels that have built themselves around ideological programming, MSNBC and Fox, stand out from other mainstream media outlets. And MSNBC stands out the most. On that channel, 71% of the segments studied about Romney were negative in nature, compared with just 3% that were positive-a ratio of roughly 23-to-1. On Fox, 46% of the segments about Obama were negative, compared with 6% that were positive-a ratio of about 8-to-1 negative. These made them unusual among channels or outlets that identified themselves as news organizations.

News: Digital Overtakes Print, Threatens TV

The online transformation of the news business continues. The Pew Research Center reports that television's dominance may be in jeopardy:

Online and digital news consumption, meanwhile, continues to increase, with many more people now getting news on cell phones, tablets or other mobile platforms. And perhaps the most dramatic change in the news environment has been the rise of social networking sites. The percentage of Americans saying they saw news or news headlines on a social networking site yesterday has doubled – from 9% to 19% – since 2010. Among adults younger than age 30, as many saw news on a social networking site the previous day (33%) as saw any television news (34%), with just 13% having read a newspaper either in print or digital form. [emphasis added]

These are among the principal findings of the Pew Research Center’s biennial news consumption survey, which has tracked patterns in news use for nearly two decades. The latest survey was conducted May 9-June 3, 2012, among 3,003 adults.

The proportion of Americans who read news on a printed page – in newspapers and magazines – continues to decline, even as online readership has offset some of these losses. Just 23% say they read a print newspaper yesterday, down only slightly since 2010 (26%), but off by about half since 2000 (47%).

The decline of print on paper spans beyond just newspapers. The proportion reading a magazine in print yesterday has declined over the same period (26% in 2000, 18% today). And as email, text messaging and social networking become dominant forms of communication, the percentage saying they wrote or received a personal letter the previous day also has fallen, from 20% in 2006 to 12% currently. There has been no decrease in recent years in the percentage reading a book on a typical day, but a growing share is now reading through an electronic or audio device.

The report notes patterns of blog use:

Slightly more than one-in-ten (12%) of all Americans regularly read blogs about politics or current events and another 21% say they read them sometimes. Just less than half (45%) never read blogs or do not use the internet. The numbers of those who read blogs regularly are little changed since 2008.

There is little partisan difference when it comes to blog-reading: 14% of Republicans, 13% of Democrats and 10% of independents say they read blogs about politics and current events.
Among age groups, regular blog reading is lowest among those 18 to 24 (6%) and highest among those 40 to 49 (17%). There is little difference in blog reading among the age groups in between. Looked at by education level, 15% of college graduates and those who have had some college regularly read blogs, a number that falls to 7% for those with high school or less.

Cruz Control of Social Media

In the race for the GOP Senate nomination in Texas, Ted Cruz is likely to defeat Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, who started the race with far more money and name recognition.  Social media have helped. Politico reports that Cruz has more than 25,000 Twitter followers 84,000 Facebook fans, compared with Dewhurst's 4,200 Twitter followers and 42,000 Facebook fans.  Steven Friess writes that "Cruz is among the first American examples of a dark horse candidate who rode to victory by tapping into the vast power of Facebook, Twitter, blogs and email."

Among Cruz’s smart cyber moves: Weekly calls with supportive bloggers, who had access to the candidate throughout the race. Two full-time staffers focused on social media content, resulting in speedy responses to just about every tweet, Facebook comment and email. A microsite, cruzcrew.org, that empowered volunteers to take on tasks and print out campaign literature. The use of social media ads from the earliest days of the campaign to build a mailing list that is, in the words of Vincent Harris, the Cruz campaign digital strategist, "bigger than most of the failed Republican candidates for president."
...

On Facebook, the Cruz campaign sent city-specific status updates so that, for instance, only users in Waco would receive the update about Cruz’s upcoming Waco appearance. Meanwhile, whenever Cruz appeared on national or statewide radio or TV programs, his campaign website would post a special splash page to specifically welcome the listeners or viewers who came there during or immediately after the show.

The campaign also took advantage of the resources provided by Google and Facebook, both of which have dedicated Republican and Democratic staffers available to offer advice. As recently as this week, Harris said, the campaign deployed an idea provided to them by Google’s Republican outreach guru Rob Saliterman.

Blogging in the Classroom

In PS, Christopher N. Lawrence of Texas A&M University and Michelle N. Dion of McMaster University make incisive points about political blogs and their role in the classroom. Here is one of their observations, which cites an episode that we discuss in the textbook:

The best political bloggers are critical consumers of media content. They evaluate the evidence that politicians and pundits bring to bear in support of their conclusions and search for inconsistencies between statements by various observers. For example, the controversy over memos alleging President Bush was derelict in his National Guard duties, which ultimately led to Dan Rather’s departure from CBS News, would not have come about had bloggers not recognized that a key document in question was apparently produced by computer software unavailable in the early 1970s. Similarly, we often expect students to engage with primary and secondary sources and evaluate their arguments and the evidence supporting them.

Bloggers for Hire

Our chapter on the mass media discusses the increasingly important role of bloggers. The Daily Caller reports that some of them are not independent voices:

Katie Couric once described bloggers as journalists who gnaw at new information “like piranhas in a pool.” But increasingly, many bloggers are also secretly feeding on cash from political campaigns, in a form of partisan payola that erases the line between journalism and paid endorsement.

“It’s standard operating procedure” to pay bloggers for favorable coverage, says one Republican campaign operative. A GOP blogger-for-hire estimates that “at least half the bloggers that are out there” on the Republican side “are getting remuneration in some way beyond ad sales.”

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On the left, many of the once independent bloggers are now employed by, or receive money from, liberal organizations like Media Matters, the Center for American Progress and Campaign for America’s Future.

Some critics allege that the funding sources have distorted the once vibrant voice of the liberal blogosphere, discouraging dissent in favor of staying “on message” to help President Obama and Democrats in Congress pass their legislative agenda.

Indeed, many of the groups now employing liberal bloggers meet with White House aides for a weekly strategy session on Tuesday afternoons organized by the group Common Purpose.

Last year, Politico reported:

The Common Purpose meeting every Tuesday afternoon at the Capitol Hilton brings together the top officials from a range of left-leaning organizations, from labor groups like Change to Win to activists like MoveOn.org, all in support of the White House's agenda. The group has an overlapping membership with a daily 8:45 a.m. call run by the Center for American Progress' and Media Matters' political arms; with the new field-oriented coalition Unity '09; and with the groups that allied to back the budget as the Campaign to Rebuild and Renew America Now.