Father Richard John Neuhaus died this morning in New York City. He was seventy two.
If there was ever a man who conveyed through his writing that he was ready for this moment, it was Fr. Neuhaus. But perhaps in my selfishness, there is no man I am more sorrowful to lose.
One could consider this loss in the context of the modern social conservative movement, or for First Things the natural comparisons to losing William F. Buckley, Jr. But in truth, it is a far greater loss than that.
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On its face, the invitation of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at President-elect Barack Obama’s swearing-in ceremony is a brilliant and savvy political move.
During the 2008 campaign, much was made of then-candidate Obama’s ability to potentially crack the longtime Republican hold on evangelical Christians. And while Obama’s performance among churchgoers did not turn out to be as significant as some anticipated, it was still sizeable enough to mark a meaningful stride for the Democrats. Obama bested John Kerry’s numbers by 5% among the percentage of weekly churchgoers, and by 4% among evangelicals (capturing 25% total).
If those evangelical numbers turn out to be a one-election thing, they can be dismissed as churchgoing voters merely following the trends of the general populace, considering that evangelicals had been reluctant to support John McCain from the beginning. To put the number in perspective, John McCain actually won a higher percentage of the self-reported gay, lesbian, and bisexual vote - a full 27% - so as you can see, Obama was starting with a rather low foundation. And Obama’s largest gains came among young evangelical voters, so there’s a question if generational politics outweighed faith here.
On the other hand, if 25% is not the ceiling but the new floor, and those numbers turn into a trend, it will be a very bad thing for Republicans, for whom churchgoing Christians have been an extremely reliable voting and volunteering constituency for more than a generation.
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If you’re a football fan, you know all about scripted plays - the method behind those precision-based offenses that can come out onto the field running a prepared order of plays, no huddle, picking up yards with ease. If they’re successful, they can set the tone for the whole game. In presidential politics, the first 100 days is the equivalent for any new Commander in Chief: can the momentum from electoral victory translate to policy results?
But in truth, every new president faces an issue or event within the first 100 days that tends to ruin the script. For Bill Clinton, it was “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Clinton had wanted to make his presidency about permanently cementing the middle class for the center-left, but before he even got on track, he became locked in a battle with old guard members of his own party like Sam Nunn and Robert Byrd, unintentionally helping spark the culture war revival of the nineties. George Stephanopoulos, in his better than you might expect memoir “All Too Human,” is convinced that the Clinton presidency could’ve gone much differently without this unexpected fight on undesired ground.
For George W. Bush, the script-breaking moment was the unanticipated controversy over stem cells - an issue that forced his first address to the nation. While his policy was controversial for both sides of the ideological divide, his attempt at a moderate solution on the issue was ultimately far more successful than Clinton’s, and has been vindicated in the years since (for more on that, I highly recommend reading Ryan T. Anderson and Joseph Bottum’s essay in last month’s First Things, where they explain that “the history of the stem-cell debate is a study of what happens when politics and science reach out to each other.”)
Clinton failed his test, and Bush got a C+ (from the public at least) on his. But with the ever-expanding scandal of what happened in Illinois, President-elect Obama is now facing a rift in his script that is unprecedented and shocking: a disruption that comes before he has even been sworn into office.
In every Presidential election, it’s my experience that reports of fraud tend to be a bit exaggerated. Yes, there will always be a degree of problems - but most of those are of the human error variety, not purposeful lawbreaking. With so many millions voting, and so many election officials who are really just volunteer librarians, mistakes are bound to happen. The Electoral system helps guard against these things mattering, and I am fairly confident that outside some isolated incidents in big cities, voter fraud won’t change who wins the Presidency tomorrow. Corrupt as they are, I doubt very much that ACORN will provide the margin of victory.
Now, when it comes to local elections, I think the story is the reverse. Voter fraud can have a huge impact on a local level, and yet it’s almost always underreported. ACORN can’t make a difference in the presidential stakes, but they can make a difference in who becomes the next mayor, commissioner, or Congressman. And it’s surprisingly easy for that to happen in an environment where election laws and regulations are shockingly lax.
Consider where I live - Loudoun County, Virginia, arguably the swing county in a swing state, and one Obama is absolutely certain to win if you’re keeping score. Here in Virginia, you can go in and vote absentee early - a slightly different arrangement than other states, but quite straightforward in practice. An enormous number of people, more than 450,000, have taken advantage of this so far. All you have to do is go to your local office, stand in line for about 30-45 minutes, fill out a form, and vote.
At the Loudoun location on Saturday, they weren’t requiring picture ID - not even a Federal one, just any ID. Turns out you don’t need one. How convenient.
But if, in theory, Virginia decided to require that you present an ID as opposed to just sign a piece of paper (which will only matter if there’s a lawsuit, of course, which costs money and time and is politically dangerous), it’s awfully easy to get ahold of a Virginia voter card with someone else’s name on it (perhaps one of these fun creations). Especially if you rent rather than own.
You see, in a state with more than 400,000 newly registered voters since the last election, polling places have changed a lot. The Volunteer Firehouse location where I’ve voted all but once in the past 8 years can’t contain the polling place this year, so it’s moved. So have the polling places for much of Loudoun. The local Election Board was kind enough to send out a mass mailing informing every voter effected by this change a few months back.
And they were also kind enough to include a new voter card, with your name, address, and local polling place printed on it.
Personally, I received five voter cards in the mail. One was mine - four others were for people who have not lived in the house I rent for more than three years. Five different names. Same address. They sure do make it easy.
Useful, that. If you were interested in helping your guy, whoever it is, win.
It’s really quite easy to do a bit of DIY Election Fraud in an age where they send the Voter Card, info and all, direct to you. But hell, you won’t even need it in the Old Dominion - there’s no ID required. Just sign the paper promising you’re cool, and your vote matters just as much as everyone’s.
It’s like leaving the front door wide open for days, and being surprised that the TV is gone when you come back.
Democracy: you’re doing it wrong.
One of the few moments in the debate between Republican Joe Biden and Democrat Sarah Palin (follow the link) when I raised my eyebrow and said, “That sounds off” from either side - on the whole, there were only a few exaggerations during the evening - came when Joe Biden mentioned the the idea that both he and Obama had warned against the Bush administration’s support for an election in Israel. I assume that he is referring to the municipal elections in 2005, the first elections held in Palestinian territories in 30+ years: details here.
As far as I can find with initial searching (I asked a friend to plug it in to Nexis), I don’t see anything from Obama on this subject. But the reason it seems off to me is that the timing’s all wrong: the election Biden is talking about happened in 2005, right after Obama was elected to the Senate. He had to have been in office for mere days when it took place (correction: during the first round, he hadn’t even been sworn in yet), and it’s doubtful he made any statement on it. If he did, it is not on his own site, nor is it available on the normal search methods, nor is it in the Congressional Record as far as I can see.
Can the campaign produce any evidence that Barack Obama took this prescient opinion on the elections in Israel? If not, will Joe Biden retract his claim?
Plenty of late-breaking thoughts on the first debate around the sphere today, including my own minor submissions. But the one that’s worth your time to read is Pete Wehner’s thought process on the overall challenges the McCain campaign faces - here’s his third point, but you should read it all over at Commentary:
What helps a campaign immeasurably is when the charge it makes seems to fit the person against whom the charge is being made. So, for example, the Bush strategy in 2004 to make John Kerry appear to be a flip-flopper and haughty was aided by the fact that it played to a pre-existing (and largely accurate) view of Kerry.
The difficulty Senator Obama presents is that his demeanor and countenance seem to act as a shield against the charge that he is, in terms of his policies and political philosophy, quite liberal and on the extreme end of the political spectrum. Senator Obama’s voting record certainly shows that to be the case. But the way he carries himself — combined with his post-primary, head-snapping shifts in policy — are designed to make Obama appear as a centrist. I don’t for a moment believe he is; Obama’s political career, taken in its totality, makes him the most liberal presidential candidate since George McGovern. But Obama has shown himself to be a nimble candidate, against whom it is difficult to land clean blows.
In addition, Obama came across in the debate as mostly agreeable, repeatedly saying “I agree with John” on this or that. I think that was an effective tactic; it gave Obama the patina of being bipartisan and a man ever in search of common ground. In fact, Obama has complied, in the words of Joshua Muravchik, “one of the most partisan of all voting records.” But once again, his style and manner send a different signal.
Potentially, the most lethal political charge against Obama is that he is a deeply liberal/ideological figure who has associated with radical individuals in order to advance his political career. The question is whether Obama’s countenance and personal style make those charges seem far-fetched; or whether the McCain campaign can convince voters that Obama’s appeal is at its core fraudulent and his new-found centrism a mirage.
I have some sympathy with the task faced by Team McCain; telling a campaign what needs to be done is much easier than actually carrying it out. That’s why it would be useful for more commentators to actually have had some experience in governing and political campaigns, which tend to be more complicated and difficult than pontificating.
I’m no fan of Congressman Roy Blunt, but purposefully lying about what any Congressman says is pretty low, especially when it’s of the “let’s cut out the first four words and last eight words of this television quote to make it seem like he’s saying the opposite of what he just said” variety.
Which happens to be what the Obama campaign just did:
REP. ROY BLUNT: Clearly, yesterday, his position on that discussion yesterday was one that stopped a deal from finalizing.
“Congressman Blunt just confirmed what’s been clear since John McCain rode into Washington at the eleventh hour – Senator McCain’s political theatrics succeeded only in stopping a bipartisan deal. During the most serious economic crisis of our time, we don’t need erratic posturing, we need steady leadership to protect American taxpayers and put our economy back on track,” said Obama-Biden spokesman Bill Burton.
Here is the full quote from MSNBC:
REP. ROY BLUNT: I do think that John McCain was very helpful in what he did. I saw him this morning, we’ve been talking with his staff. Clearly, yesterday, his position on that discussion yesterday was one that stopped a deal from finalizing that no House Republican, in my view, would have been for, which means it wouldn’t have probably passed the House. Now, Democrats are in the majority. They can pass anything they want to without a singe Republican vote, but they don’t seem to be willing to do that. I’m pleased we can have negotiations now that get us back towards things that we think can protect the taxpayers better, create more options, and frankly be better understood in the country than the plan—the path we were on a couple of days ago.
Yeah, that’s kind of…you know…the opposite.
Jen Rubin, one of the most diligent and perceptive writers in the ’sphere, has this to say about the NYTimes latest hit piece:
In just the first few paragraphs you have testimony that she was “effective and accessible.” So where are we going here? Well, despite the testimony that she was ”accessible,” others find her “secretive” and inclined to put a premium on “loyalty.” The evidence? The Governor’s office declined a request for emails that would have cost over $400,000. Proof positive. Oh, and the records sought (about Polar Bears and such) were in fact obtained.
Then there is the ” she blurs personal and public behavior” charge. The evidence? A phone call from Todd Palin to a state legislator about the latter’s chief of staff, which Palin denies was mentioned. Pretty thin gruel.
Next we have her tenure as mayor, where again all heck breaks loose because — are ya sitting down? — she brought in her own team. No! Unheard of. Jeeez. Next she’ll be firing the town museum director. Oh no– it’s true! Palin says (”Oh yeah, she says,” you can hear the Times reporters hrrumphing) she was cutting the budget.
This is pathetic, really. Is there something illegal here? Is there something nefarious? What is the point?
There’s more from Jen. Scrabbling away, they are.
Note: Head on over to FRCAction to view streaming video of this weekend’s conference.
You want proof about how successful the Sarah Palin pick has been in coalescing and motivating the socially conservative base of the GOP? Look no further than the subdued schedule today at the FRCAction Values Voter conference in Washington, DC.
A year ago, the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit propelled Gov. Mike Huckabee to unforeseen heights among grassroots evangelicals. This year, both Barack Obama and John McCain were invited to speak - the word is that organizers expected a video from Obama, and a speech from McCain or his running mate - but neither is expected to appear now. It’s instead a schedule with the odd (Lou Dobbs), the apolitical (Joe Gibbs), the political (Michael Steele), the aging (Phyllis Schlafly - surprisingly chipper), and the hilariously ironic (Newt Gingrich - sorry, smart as he is, his presence at Value Voters events brings on laughter for me).
The funny thing about social conservative conferences is how completely unnecessary they’ve become in the post-Palin universe. These rooms are populated by the grassroots heads of a hundred different organizations whose role has been significant when the Republican Party needed to sell a lackluster ticket or a less than appealing policy to a depressed evangelical base - many of these folks had to sell Harriet Miers against people who swore they were vile tools of Satan, and Lord knows that wasn’t that fun. But that’s all unnecessary in the aftermath of the Palin choice. Her stickers and buttons are everywhere - I don’t see a McCain sign in the whole place, but everyone’s wearing “Palin Power” or “I heart Palin” buttons; young and old, they’re smiling, they’re eager, they’re exuberant.
(Gratuitous plug: I still haven’t seen any PalinFacts.com gear, but I did hear people quoting them when I was on the escalator. If you want some yourself, head over to the Little Known Sarah Palin Facts store.).
Whether McCain wins in the fall or not, these people have found their new inspiration for the next generation of political activists. Barack Obama could’ve come here himself today, with a light shining down from heaven, and he wouldn’t make a dent in this crowd.
Give these people a champion, and reap the immediate political benefit. Had McCain chosen, say, Joe Lieberman, today’s conference would’ve been a huge event - you’d have had to convince all the folks in this room to be on board with a pro-choice Democrat on the national ticket, that the possibility of an Obama presidency would be just too much for them to bear. Had Palin fallen on her face on the national stage, they might have needed it, too.
But not any more - especially not in the wake of attacks from the media horde that makes these folks circle the wagons faster than you can say Clarence Thomas. These aren’t people who need selling - they’re full bore for the woman. No wonder McCain wants to travel with her, as the hardworking Anne Kornblut reported today: he’s smart enough to realize a good thing.
Well, time to tour the place to find some fun Christian swag. The celebrities here are random and confusing, unless Robbie George counts. I’ll let Leon tell you his Stephen Baldwin story, I just can’t match it. Too bad I’m busy tomorrow - missing out on Shohreh Aghdashloo. I hear if you pronounce her name correctly, she won’t destroy your soul with one look of her cavernous eyes.
The fine folks over at 1Cast, a new media delivery tool for smartphones,, were kind enough to let me try out a beta version of their software on an iPhone during the DNC and RNC. It’s an excellent solution to a problem for smartphone users who want to find video content across multiple channels, but end up getting RickRolled by Youtube half the time, and have to deal with proprietary constraints on others.
Imagine an automatically updated RSS feed for video, personalized to your specific political, corporate, or news tags, delivered smoothly to your device, and that’s this new service. The ability, within hours of her speech, to pull up footage of Sarah Palin’s remarks and then effortlessly move to related news clips of responding coverage on a variety of networks was just wonderful when you’re on the go at a convention. To me, the untapped potential of this service for Sports is the most tempting - the day I can get an inexpensive service on my existing smartphone (as opposed to having to purchase some specific device) that delivers so quickly and smoothly that I can get fully streamed TV highlights from a first half of NFL play while sitting at the game at halftime will be a very happy day.
If you’re a gadget addict or a politics and news junkie, check them out at 1Cast.
Jennifer Rubin posts on something that’s a truly significant moment: The great Sally Quinn recants her position on Sarah Palin.
Quinn had been one of Palin’s biggest critics in the days leading up to her speech (read her column here). But yesterday in an interview with Bill O’Reilly, she declared: “I was wrong about her.”
I thought that she was amazing. in her speech. She was funny and smart and poised and confident. She gave a great speech, beautifully delivered. I think she is going to be a formidable opponent. all of that I think is — I was wrong about her. and I didn’t know anything about her. I probably didn’t know any more than John McCain did a few days before he picked her.
Sally Quinn deserves credit for being far more honest than most of her media colleagues - she’ll actually admit she doesn’t know everything. Of course, there’s no evidence that McCain himself hadn’t known this stuff in advance, as Jen points out. But I think there’s something more here: I think a woman like Quinn is a perfect example of the sort of feminist most likely to be moved by Palin’s 21st century subtext of feminine empowerment, and subtle rejection of the vestiges of sixties-era emasculating uber-feminism.
Where Hillary embraced the sixties’ sexual revolution view of womanhood, Palin rejects much of it - it doesn’t take a village to raise her children, she and her guy can do it themselves - but in so doing, doesn’t lose any of the toughness or confidence that she needs to be a leader. This is the sort of thing, combined with great natural charm and humor (she can smile as she twists the knife) that Quinn finds so admirable.
Kudos to Quinn for admitting her error. Now if only the rest of the media was so honest.
One of the most pointed accusations Sarah Palin lodged against Barack Obama was the fact that, despite not authoring a single significant piece of legislation, he’s found the time to write two memoirs.
But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or even a reform, not even in the state Senate.
Annenberg’s FactCheck.org, who I find to typically be quite fair in their judgment, steps in to defend Obama. On this point, they write:
Palin’s accusation that Obama hasn’t authored “a single major law or even a reform” in the U.S. Senate or the Illinois Senate is simply not a fair assessment. Obama has helped push through major ethics reforms in both bodies, for example.
In advancing this argument, FactCheck.org oversteps in a significant way, and one that I believe they ought to reexamine in order to justify their argument - or failing that, to retract their point entirely.
The truth is that Sarah Palin’s statement is absolutely correct: neither Barack Obama nor the staffers in his employ (like speeches, remember, they tend to be written by others) have authored a single major law or reform.
I wrote about Andrew Sullivan’s descent into madness here. But Sullivan shows no signs of stopping even as his colleagues at The Atlantic recoil in horror. In fact, he keeps digging a deeper hole, now claiming that what happened to John Edwards was a different issue entirely because he wasn’t running for president any more, but Sullivan’s own baseless and profoundly insulting attacks on Sarah Palin and her family are justified, because he alone must stand up for investigatory journalism into this political unknown. And he will stand on his couch, hold his laptop aloft, and scream that we don’t have the full story about Trig Palin’s birth until someone in the condo upstairs complains to the super.
You would shame the man, but he has none left to invoke.
Yesterday Moe and I with his colleagues in respected corners of the news media who had disparaged Sarah Palin, relying on the rantings from the foulest corners of the blogosphere as the basis for their articles. Douthat’s disappointment - along with that of his colleagues McArdle and Goldberg - turned slowly into outrage over the course of the day, as it became clear that much of his frustration was directed at the worst offender of them all: Andrew Sullivan.
Sullivan is on the extreme edge of the assault on Palin - even as Campbell Brown and others have drastically scaled back their attacks on Palin as they realized their allegations were either unfounded, irrelevant, or significant stretches of fact, Sullivan continues to beat the drum. He repeats rumor and innuendo as established truth, but even worse, insists that every tabloidesque rumor be met with immediacy by Palin herself. It’s more than a little pathetic: Andrew Sullivan, once one of the most brilliant wits of the neocon blogosphere, now occupies that darkened zone of the tabloid preacher - the streetcorner pamphleteer who cries to all who will hear, “The Government will not respond to my writings the existence of extraterrestrials among us, and THIS LACK OF DENIAL PROVES DEFINITIVELY THAT THEY ARE HERE!”
The Nielsen numbers are out, and wow, they are good. Sarah Palin’s speech, despite being carried on only six channels compared to Obama’s ten, despite the lack of a huge venue or months of hype, was viewed by only a million fewer people than Barack Obama’s Speech o’ the Century.
Via Clayton, a few notable facts: Palin beat Obama in Persons 55+ (reliable voters!) and multi person white households; in the 18-34 demo (Obamas home base) Palin drew 81% of his audience; In the 18-49 demo she drew 88% of his audience; Palin trounced Biden in all categories except multi-person black households. And here’s more from Nielsen itself:
- The Sara Palin speech generated 37.2 million viewers, just a 1.1 million viewers short of Barack Obama’s record-breaking speech on Day 4 of the Democratic Convention. The Palin speech was carried on only six networks while the Obama speech was carried on ten (including BET, TV One, Univision and Telemundo).
- Palin attracted a large female audience (19.5 million women, or 4.9 million more than Day 3 of the Democratic Convention).
- Ratings for viewers 55+ (25.2) continue to be about ten times higher than for teens (2.2)
- Day 3 for the GOP attracted more Hispanic viewers (1.4 million) than Day 3 of the Democratic Convention (1.2 million), even though Univision and Telemundo did not carry the speech.
That last point is astounding. Even though it’s not a huge number, the fact is that Barack Obama had a ton of built in advantages for his speech - whereas the only one for Sarah Palin is that the media had placed expectations in such a negative way that everyone wanted to tune in (perhaps in hopes of a trainwreck?). And an excellent sign for the level of interest in Palin, and the number of people outside of the Twin Cities who viewed the speech as a defining event for this election.
So the best attacks the Democrats can muster against Sarah Palin’s epic speech is a twin version of the same spiel:
1) Sarah Palin did not write her speech.
2) Sarah Palin did not talk about education or health care in her speech.
The first attack is just silly on its face. Every politician with national stature has speechwriters - every single one. They have a press secretary or a communications director or even someone whose sole task it is to craft words that will achieve the right message in a powerful way. Not all politicians are great writers - some are - but all of them need help in framing their message correctly.
Even Barack Obama. His muse is a 26 year old white kid nicknamed “Favs.” The NYTimes profiled him here.
You mean…even The One DOESN’T WRITE HIS OWN SPEECHES! gasp Yes, sadly, it’s true.
The second attack is a creature of the Sixties-21st Century divide that I noted yesterday, in this post about post-feminism politics, in which apparently Republican women should behave the way that the leftist media believes they should - sticking to soft and homey issues. Instead, Palin spoke forcefully about the kitchen table issues that matter just as much, if not more, to most blue collar and middle class Americans: energy, taxes, and the war. She’s a mother, yes, and has a PTA background - but that doesn’t mean she only has thoughts about the issues the post-sexual revolution media still views as “girl stuff.”
Speechwriting is an odd task, and extremely challenging. But it can also be very rewarding - last night, as Sarah Palin gave her speech, I saw Matt Scully looking up toward the press section on cue after every punchline, making sure it registered with the hacks at their laptops. He’s got to learn this woman’s voice quick, and last night was a fantastic start.
It’s always good to see what works when you’re trying to figure out a new voice, one you haven’t studied before - and Palin is very new, and very unique, which makes her input on these speeches all the more significant. Anyone could write a Joe Biden speech at this point - just take a few slugs of whiskey, and stream of consciousness for about 4 hours. Don’t edit anything. Palin’s probably tougher to write for in this moment, but it’s clear she’s a natural - and if you give her something above average, her own ability will make it shine.
Let’s give Dean Barnett the last word - he hits directly on why this attack on Scully’s existence is so ludicrous. Read it here:
2) Interesting that the Obama campaign has decided that it has a winner in pointing out that Palin “cheated” by having a speechwriter. Of course, a pliant media did its job last night in spreading this supremely lame talking point. The funhouse at MSNBC was all over it, and even half the panel at Fox saw it as a nugget of information requiring dissemination. One can only wonder why media analysts didn’t feel it necessary to point out that Joe Biden’s oratory also received the ministrations of speechwriting pros (all appearances to the contrary). Could it be that Biden’s speech was so dreadful, no one felt the provenance of the speech required clarification?
Of course, this weak return of serve is unlikely to have its desired effect of dismissing Palin’s performance. Once again, Palin spoke directly to the American people last night – they’ll make up their own minds about her. It must really concern the Democrats that Palin will have many similar opportunities in the future.
A couple of final points on this matter – if giving a great speech is so darn easy, how come Joe Biden, John Kerry and Chris Dodd with a combined 340 years in politics have never been able to pull it off? And if it’s such an irrelevant skill, why again exactly is Barack Obama the Democrats’ nominee?
Here’s tonight’s biopic video of Sarah Palin. It’s all right, I guess - but the voice seems off. I think it’s John Voight, who’s been around here a bit as a supporter of McCain.
It’s funny: in the McCain set up, Robert Duvall is the patriotic video voice, Voight the inspirational video voice, and Powers Boothe is the “Be afraid. Be very afraid. Vote McCain. Or the world will burn” voice.
Hall of Fame Redskins Coach Joe Gibbs is addressing the GOP convention tonight. Apparently at 8:50 EDT.
Now if only they’d been smart enough to save him for AFTER the Redskins game.
Jen Rubin nails it: It’s the media’s own dang fault that last night was such a huge success.
Oh, and yes - even they have to admit it now.
Moe has already pointed out Ross Douthat’s creeping suspicion that these people who surround him are not particularly balanced or friendly to ideologies other than their own. But we shouldn’t leave it there - it’s actually gotten more pronounced in the hours since the initial revelations. Read Ross’s followups here, here,, and here.
Ross, we love you as a wise brother. But it’s high time you woke up to the fact that these people you’re talking to might as well be from the land of Nod when it comes to evaluating the media and realizing their own bias.
