Jonathan Martin

They must be paying by the word over at Politico. It's difficult to come up with another explanation as to why reporter Jonathan Martin would slog through about 3,100 words on an item entitled "Black pols stymied in Obama era." He could have easily summarized why this is the case in eight words: "Because Barack Obama is all about Barack Obama." Oh, he could have added a few more, namely "and everybody knows Barack Obama is all about Barack Obama."

Since he didn't limit himself, yours truly will note a few things Martin still left out, identify a few interesting points that were made, and then quote certain naive and/or inflammatory statements contained in Martin's mess.

Previewing the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library on Thursday, rather than positively reflect on the legacy of the Bush presidency, MSNBC unsurprisingly chose to mock and minimize his eight years in office. During The Daily Rundown, host Chuck Todd introduced a segment on the former president with a spew of Bush “gaffes." He then mocked, "I miss this part of Bush because Obama never does this stuff."

After playing the clips, Todd spun, "Some of the lighter moments there from Bush's time in office. President Obama's always a little more careful. President Bush would dip into some of those things."  Todd has gone so far as to excuse gaffes made by President Obama, blaming his speechwriter for the errors. [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

Whether Mitt Romney becomes the 45th president or not, Politico's Jonathan Martin insists that the Republican Party is on the verge of a looming crisis. Sticking with the same overgeneralized racist narrative, it is basically a 'fact' at this point that the GOP's conservative ideology and a lack of diversity will ultimately lead to its downfall.

Conversely, the Democratic Party is poised to dominate in future elections. Nevermind that we heard this before in 2006 and 2008, with Clinton acolyte James Carville forecasted 40 years in the wilderness for the GOP. No, Martin insists that demography is destiny, and the GOP is bound to shrivel electorally as older white conservatives die off the voting rolls:

It might seem like a bad time for a reporter to marvel over Joe Biden’s political gifts, after the load of gaffes this week, but not for Politico reporter Jonathan Martin. He wrote a story headlined “Mission Impossible: Managing Joe Biden.” But he meant that to be positive.

Just days after slamming Paul Ryan’s background driving the Wienermobile and “slinging cheap margaritas,” Martin began the story in awe of Biden’s campaign prowess:

The controversy surrounding Vice President Joe Biden’s offensive claim that Republicans want to enslave black Americans has become such a concern to the Obama White House that the veep’s staff have resorted to trying to directly censor the news coverage about him.

In what is widely believed to be an unprecedented move, the Biden press shop has severely restricted access to vice president and begun telling journalists what they should write about his activities as they write them up.

Politico's Jonathan Martin is putting on his "cracker counties" snob act again in attacking Paul Ryan's resume, much like Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, only meaner.

This was how it started: "Flipping burgers at McDonald’s, steering the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, slinging cheap margaritas, and toning abs and pecs. That’s about the extent of Rep. Paul Ryan’s private sector experience." Again, this from the liberals who weren't in the habit of mocking Barry Obama slinging Bubble Gum ice cream?

Gwen Ifill of the PBS Newshour hosted Jonathan Martin of Politico and Molly Ball of The Atlantic magazine in a left wing cuddlefest that bashed Romney over Bain, his taxes, and Solyndra on July 16.  Ms. Ifill was not the least concerned that this story is mere fodder for the Obama campaign to pivot away from its abysmal economic record, but nevertheless, started off the shooting gallery by asking Jonathan Martin to "help us explain this Bain back-and-forth."

"At the end of this weekend, was there any more clarity about when he left and if he left Bain?" Ifill asked:

As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, Politico's Jonathan Martin, while chatting with MSNBC's Chuck Todd, referred to some of Florida as "cracker counties."

Despite the firestorm this created, Howard Kurtz on CNN's Reliable Sources spent seventeen minutes Sunday - almost half of the show when commercials are taken out - with Martin as one of his guests and never said a word about this controversy.

As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, Politico's Jonathan Martin, while chatting with MSNBC's Chuck Todd, referred to some of Florida as "cracker counties."

This caused a bit of a firestorm for Martin who called the Media Research Center's publicist to address the matter.

In response, I spoke with Martin Thursday, and my first question was somewhat obviously, "What's a cracker?"

Politico correspondent Jonathan Martin's Tuesday morning comment about the "cracker counties" of Florida has gone unaddressed and unrebuked by the liberal media, so Sean Hannity and NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell led off last night's "Media Mash" segment with it.

MSNBC's "Chuck Todd agrees with Jonathan Martin," but he works at the same network which is constantly trying to find hidden racist messages in Republican speeches, particularly those of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the Media Research Center president observed. [see the full segment video below embedded below the page break]

Politico reporter Jonathan Martin on Tuesday mocked the  "cracker counties" of Florida's conservative Panhandle. Talking to Daily Rundown host Chuck Todd, he derided, "Chuck, a lot of the counties in the Panhandle, in north Florida, the cracker counties, if you will...more resemble Georgia and Alabama than they do Florida." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

MSNBC anchor Chuck Todd appeared indifferent to this attack, agreeing, "right." That area of Florida, of course, is where fellow MSNBC host Joe Scarborough represented when he was a member of Congress. No word  yet on how Scarborough has reacted. [See update below.]

On Friday's The Daily Rundown on MSNBC, host Chuck Todd posed this question to guests Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post and Jonathan Martin of Politico: "Is this the single best week in the Obama re-election effort?"

Todd elaborated on his hyperbolic question by announcing: "The argument I've already heard from team Obama is yesterday that they were giddy that the first line of attack from team Romney [against Newt Gingrich] was Paul Ryan." Todd explained: "So they're sitting there going this is great because Romney is moving to the right to try to stop Newt. And so, even if he becomes the nominee, he's got like a longer path back."

CNN's Howard Kurtz considers himself to be a media analyst, yet on Sunday's Reliable Sources, he spent 22 minutes discussing Politico's hit piece on Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain without once mentioning how the press handled Bill Clinton's actual  sex scandals.

The program began:

Common decency dictates you shouldn't congratulate someone for possibly ruining the career and marriage of a fellow human being.

Such morality eluded MSNBC's Chris Matthews and the Washington Post's Nia-Malika Henderson Monday when they actually congratulated - on national television, no less! - Politico's Jonathan Martin for Sunday's hit piece on Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Herman Cain has been taking heat for his response to questions about Politico's story on alleged sexual harassment.  But today on Morning Joe, it was Politico's own Jonathan Martin, lead author of the story, who was being evasive about the details of the allegations against Cain.

Incredibly, when Willie Geist asked him to describe specifically what Politico is accusing Cain of having done, Martin hemmed, hawed then ultimately said "we're just not going to get into the details of exactly what happened with these women," beyond the sketchy generalities in the Politico story.  Video after the jump.

You have to hand it to Politico, they know how to gin up publicity.

"Is Rick Perry dumb?" asks the top headline on the website today. Yet on balance, the corresponding article by Jonathan Martin isn't all that bad, noting that Perry has often been underestimated politically, much to the peril of numerous Republican and Democratic opponents who are now footnotes at best in Texas political history.

That being said, there's little doubt that the media, including Martin, are hard at work cementing certain prejudices and lowering expectations about the three-term Texas governor:

On Monday's "Martin Bashir," MSNBC analyst Jonathan Alter proclaimed that America would "be in a depression now if there had been a balanced budget amendment in 2009." Bashir, concurring with the former Newsweek editor, added, "Indeed."

Reacting to Rep. John Boehner's (R-Ohio) press conference about the debt-ceiling deal, Alter and Bashir mocked the speaker's suggestion that a balanced budget amendment is needed to "handcuff" Congress.

[WMV video here. MP3 audio here.]

As NewsBusters reported Thursday, Politico's Jonathan Martin wrote a hit piece on former governor Sarah Palin leading Sean Hannity and Mark Levin to demand retractions of false sections in the article that involved them.

On Friday, Glenn Beck brought Palin on his radio program to assist him and his team in mocking Martin's claim that she frequently cancels interviews at the last minute and is "high maintenance" (video follows with transcript and commentary, h/t The Blaze):

Has anyone noticed a leftward tilt by Politico lately? More and more, the respected inside-the-beltway publication seems to be more aggressive in its tack with conservatives.

Here’s one such example: In the Oct. 21 issue of Politico, an article written by Jonathan Martin attacks former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for her political activities and her dealings with other conservative leaders. One of Martin’s examples of Palin “wreaking havoc on the campaign trail” involved a disagreement with Fox News host Glenn Beck:

Video Below Fold

Conservative talk show host Mark Levin on Thursday demanded a retraction by Politico concerning statements made in Jonathan Martin's hit piece of the former Alaska Governor entitled "Hurricane Sarah."

In a Facebook posting, Levin said Martin's claim that Palin "backed out of planned interviews with conservative talk-show hosts Sean Hannity and Mark Levin the morning she was scheduled to talk to them" is "a flat out lie":

NBC's chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd, substitute hosting for Chris Matthews, on Wednesday's Hardball, managed to question the political viability of two Republican candidates in one sentence as he asked his guest panelist, Jonathan Martin of the Politico, "Is Ken Buck, you know, Sharron Angle in drag?" [audio available here]

Going over the results of yesterday's primary races with Martin and Newsweek's Howard Fineman, Todd claimed "Democrats were doing a touchdown dance" after Buck won the Republican primary contest for the Senate seat in Colorado and also relayed some rather colorful descriptions of Buck, as seen in the following exchange, aired on the August 11 edition of Hardball:

NBC's Chuck Todd, substitute hosting for Chris Matthews on Monday's Hardball, invited on Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum and the Politico's Jonathan Martin to navel gaze about what ailed the political structure as Todd questioned "Is Washington broke and beyond repair?" Pivoting off a Purdum article, that in part, blamed lobbyists, Martin offered his own explanation as he brought up the typical mainstream media boogeymen of the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. 

After Todd noted that it's not just the "lobbying community" causing distress in D.C., that the "media is playing a role here" and "it's not clear which came first, the polarized Washington or the polarized way that people get information," Martin buttressed Todd's point by offering his personal account of a Florida townhall meeting where he claimed voters there were only "listening to Rush Limbaugh," "reading Drudge" and "watching Fox News."

On Wednesday, Newsweek's Andrew Romano celebrated news out of Indiana that "establishment" Republican Dan Coats fended off two conservative opponents in the Senate primary.

Romano's obvious delight came through loud and clear starting with the headline, "The Tea Party is Now Irrelevant in Indiana." You see, one loss in a Senate primary was enough to declare the movement DOA - and Romano was anxious for the rest of the media to play along.

The real headline in Indiana was that 52 percent of Republicans went in favor of Tea Party challengers, but two of them in the mix was enough to split the vote, and Coats squeaked by at 39 percent.

A few media sources, including Politico, reported that Coats limped out of the primary "bruised" by anti-incumbency. Romano, however, insisted that 39 percent was a clear victory. Why the stark difference in coverage? According to Romano, some in the media were glorifying Tea Parties to apparently advance some selfish narrative.

Try not to cough from the smell of irony as you watch a Newsweek writer complain about dishonest narratives being perpetrated by the media:

Is the Tea Party movement nothing but a mirage? That’s the impression left by an odd confluence of recent reports.

First, the Christian Science Monitor’s Patchwork Nation blog reported that the entire Tea Party movement consists of just 67,000 members. PBS NewsHour cross-posted the story on its The Rundown blog the same day. The next day, CNN reported the findings on its Political Ticker blog and Politico’s Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith co-authored a piece titled “The tea party’s exaggerated importance.”

“Part of the reason (for the media’s coverage) is the timeless truth in media that nothing succeeds like excess,” explained Martin and Smith. “But part of the reason is a convergence of incentives for journalists and activists on left and right alike to exaggerate both the influence and exotic traits of the tea-party movement.”

Margery Eagan, a liberal columnist for the Boston Herald, ripped MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Sunday’s Reliable Sources on CNN over his “homophobic, racist, reactionary” label of Senator-elect Scott Brown on the night of the Massachusetts special election: “This is crazy...it’s sick.”

Eagan appeared during the lead segment of the CNN program with Jonathan Martin of Politico and conservative CNN contributor Amy Holmes. Anchor Howard Kurtz played Olbermann’s smear of Brown nine minutes into the 10 am Eastern hour, and after asking Holmes for her take, he played a sound bite of Glenn Beck’s recent dead intern crack against Brown. Though Kurtz asked Eagan for her response to the Beck sound bite, she primarily attacked the MSNBC host, lumping in the conservative talk show host in passing.

EAGAN: Listen, I think Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann have both taken leave of their senses. You know, I was a Martha Coakley fan. I thought she was a great D.A. But I know Scott Brown. He’s a great guy. You can’t help but like the guy. He strikes me as a wonderful family guy. He’s out there mowing the lawn. His wife, Gail Huff, has been a great reporter on Channel 5. Racist? A homophobe? Sexist? I mean, this is crazy. His politics are different than mine, but it’s sick.

Chris Matthews mocked Sarah Palin, her supporters and even some in the press who covered her as he went on one diatribe after another on Monday's Hardball. Matthews insulted Palin and her supporters by asking the Politico's Jonathan Martin if the Palin supporters he interviewed "take her seriously," and "Were they all white people?"

Matthews then went on to chide Martin and the USA Today's Susan Page for being "softened up" by Palin who "tickles all you guys under your chin" at her Gridiron Club appearance over the weekend, as he prodded, "Don't you essentially disrespect somebody who walks in and puts a book on the table and said they wrote it, when you know somebody else did?" and reminded them that Palin attacked the press during the campaign as he taunted:

She campaigned on her antipathy to the press trashing Katie Couric for asking the easiest, hardball question in the world, "What do you read?" She blamed Katie Couric for asking the most obvious question. She then went after Charlie Gibson, one of the nicest guys in this business and trashed him for being elitist.

Hours after the Senate Finance Committee rejected the public option as part of the proposed health care “reform” plan, CNN’s Campbell Brown couldn’t seem to find any conservatives to discuss the vote on her program on Tuesday. Her discussion segment brought three liberals to the table- former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich, Roland Martin, and senior political analyst Gloria Borger.

Brown first turned to Borger, who flatly stated that she thought the public option is dead: “I think it’s pretty dead, Campbell. I think it’s safe to say that right now it looks like it’s a goner.” The analyst continued that “the President has to settle for something less- something that may be a down payment on a public option, if the insurance companies don’t behave themselves. So, I think the President’s going to have to settle for less, and I think he’s signaling that he will settle for less.”

Try to keep a straight face when you hear this: President Barack Obama isn't getting enough media love.

That's the world view of MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews - at least when it comes to the economy. According to Matthews, there has been a plethora of positive economic news - from a stock market that has shrugged off the threat of bad liberal policy, i.e. cap-and-trade or ObamaCare, to the actions of newly reappointed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke of pumping liquidity into the economy.

"What do you make of this whole thing about the good economic news out there the president gets no credit for?" Matthews said on his Aug. 25 show. "I'm in the stock market. I have suffered like others before and I have seen this comeback - back up to almost 10,000 now. He gets nothing for this. The fact that consumer confidence, which was once closer to the bone, is way up. The fact that the Fed chair has done such a good job in pumping up the money supply and pumping back the economy, and averting a Great Depression - no credit."

Greta Van Susteren is clearly sick and tired of people accusing her of advising Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

She's also fed up with what she referred to Sunday as a "hit and run":

This is why I hate “sources” and where journalism can be grossly unfair — in the law you have to step up on the witness stand and identify yourself and take an oath to tell the truth.

According to Van Susteren, that's not what Politico did on Sunday: