On Thursday I had the pleasure and opportunity to speak with two members of Congress regarding a fairly new group that’s about a dozen strong currently, the Media Fairness Caucus.
MFC Co-Chairs Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas and Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia hosted the call, which featured their statements and a question-and-answer period. Unfortunately, because they’re fairly new to the world of blogger conference calls there was no transcript kept so I’m summarizing from memory and from notes. A transcript was something I suggested in a follow-up e-mail to Rep. Smith’s staff.
In his opening remarks, Smith opined that the “greatest threat to our democracy is a biased media” and noted the 3-to-1 bias on positive to negative stories about Barack Obama and the 20-to-1 disparity of contributions by reporters to Democrats vs. the GOP.
Kingston then chimed in by citing a Business and Media Institute study I previously noted in my latest Sunday evening reading. Additionally, he told those of us on the call that Obama’s poll numbers are falling in part “because of bloggers like you guys.”
Jack is a veteran blogger himself who was one of the first Congressmen to have a blogsite (even predating this site by a couple months) and wistfully recounted that President Bush “could have put blogs on the map” as a news source but didn’t do much in that arena.
Lamar then pointed out, returning to Obama’s polling numbers, that despite the glowing media reports on the Messiah (my term, not his) he’s on the “bottom rung of popularity”, ranking either 10th or 11th among Presidents six months into their terms depending on the pollster. And as an example of an item glossed over by the mainstream media, Smith cited the Heritage Foundation study of cap-and-trade’s impact on the Gross Domestic Product that the Congressional Budget Office’s study of the financial impact of Waxman-Markey buried in a footnote because they didn’t figure it into their overall numbers – an impact Heritage calculated could cost an average family up to $1600.
There were three participants who asked questions. First up was Pamela Geller, who writes the blog Atlas Shrugs. She wanted to see about putting together a sort of alternate system of getting information out, comprised of “higher-level people.”
This is where I wish I had a transcript because basically the Congressmen thought the idea was a good one and noted that several bloggers were already doing these sorts of things in a loosely organized way. Unfortunately, by this point I was already trying to figure out how to phrase my question so I didn’t catch the second lady and her specific question since it was sort of a follow-up to Pamela’s.
For I had two points I wanted to make when it was my turn to speak.
First, it’s not widely reported for obvious reasons that not only do reporters have a personal stake in political outcomes but many times their corporate bosses do too – take NBC as an example. General Electric has great potential business in alternative energy so it’s obviously in their interest to push that sort of legislation and report the news in a way favorable to their interests as opposed to true journalism. It’s a conflict of interest that I wanted to point out and a place to focus future blogger reporting on. (I figured with someone as widely read as Pamela Geller listening it wouldn’t be a bad suggestion!)
The second point I made was stating that as a Republican Party their interest should be in shrinking the size of government and not just changing one set of masters for another. There’s less incentive for people to stick their fingers in the pie if the pie is smaller, I remarked.
By and large the Congressmen agreed with my remarks, which I was pleased to hear. Truly it wasn’t a soliliquy because I took maybe 5 minutes of the call with my question and their answer, which turned out to be near the end of the conversation. Geller followed up by having the Congressmen pledge to make these conference calls on a regular basis.
I’d be happy to participate and aside from the lack of a transcript (which I’m sure will be corrected next time) I look forward to chatting with the pair as my availability dictates.
