m00d

Yeah, we already knew this. Those of us with half a brain, that is. Still, I'm glad they can stand up and say , "we made a mistake."

I'm posting the article below. Pay close attention to the part about the microphone filtering device. Those fuckers in the media fuck it all up AGAIN!







Feb. 8, 2004 | NEW YORK (AP) -- It probably means little now to Howard Dean, but CNN's top executive believes his network overplayed the infamous clip of Dean's "scream" after the Iowa caucuses.

"It was a big story, but the challenge in a 24-hour news network is that you try to keep all of your different viewers throughout the day informed without overdoing it," said Princell Hair, CNN's general manager.

The breathtaking media explosion turned the former Democratic presidential front-runner into a punch line and arguably hastened his campaign's free fall. It's also an instructive look at how television news and entertainment works today.

Whatever handwringing there may be in retrospect -- and there's only a little -- comes with a sense that repeats are inevitable.

"It was unfair," said Joe Trippi, Dean's former campaign manager, who lost his job in the fallout. "It was totally unfair. I don't think there was any question about it."

Trippi accepts that the footage was newsworthy, but he figured it was a one-day story.

Instead, the cable and broadcast news networks aired Dean's Iowa exclamation 633 times -- and that doesn't include local news or talk shows -- in the four days after it was made, according to the Hotline, a Washington-based newsletter.

"It shouldn't be an anvil that you keep hammering to destroy his candidacy," Trippi said. "I don't think there was a big conspiracy to do that, but that's what was going on."

Sitting in his Manhattan apartment watching the Iowa caucus coverage, Conan O'Brien saw Dean's speech and thought: Ooh, this is odd.

The NBC "Late Night" host immediately figured he'd be joking about it the next day, and he did, "interviewing" a raving Dean impersonator.

He wasn't alone.

David Letterman ran a clip that appeared to show Dean's head exploding. Jay Leno quipped: "I'm not an expert in politics, but I think it's a bad sign when your speech ends with your aides shooting you with a tranquilizer gun."

The cable news networks ran and reran the video clip. They analyzed it. They ran footage of the late-night comedians joking about it. They played the instant Internet songs that sampled Dean's shout.

Virtually overnight, the "I Have a Scream" speech became legend.

"With so many competitive 24-hour news channels and so many competitive talk shows, if you add the two together, it's a nuclear reaction," O'Brien said. "Once the core gets so hot, there's no stopping it."

It took on such a life, said Paul Slavin, senior vice president of ABC News, that "the amount of attention it was receiving necessitated more attention."

Neither Slavin nor Mark Lukasiewicz, NBC News executive producer in charge of political coverage, believe the coverage was overdone. Roger Ailes, Fox News chairman, told ABC News it was "overplayed a bit."

While it's impossible to blame any one network or reporter, CBS News President Andrew Heyward said, the cumulative effect was the event was covered more than editorially justified.

"It's just inherent in the structure of the news media today, especially with the role that 24-hour cable plays," Heyward said. "Cable thrives on repetition and, let's be kind, exhaustive analysis, which has to constantly be freshened. If there's a powerful piece of video to fuel it, it's going to be repeated even more."

News networks can do the same thing for footage that many consider positive, like when President Bush landed on an aircraft carrier to declare the combat phase of the Iraq war over, Lukasiewicz said.

Only 39 percent of Dean's coverage on the network evening news was positive during the week after Iowa, according to an analysis by the Center for Media and Public Affairs. By contrast, rival John Edwards' coverage was 86 percent positive during the same period, and new front-runner John Kerry's was 71 percent positive, the center said.

A speech where Dean was showing exuberance -- not anger -- was pointed to by rivals as a sign that he didn't have the temperament to be president, Trippi said, and this echoed throughout the media.

To Dean's misfortune, the moment crystallized concerns that voters were already having about him, news executives said.

"If he made the very same speech three days before Iowa, it wouldn't have resonated," Slavin said. "It wouldn't have resonated because he was the leader there and it did not in any way, shape or form epitomize the campaign in everybody's mind."

Trippi regards the argument that the speech received so much coverage because it symbolized the campaign's troubles as a rationalization.

"It was like the footage of a heat-seeking missile hitting its target," he said. "Once the press gets that, it just gets played over and over again for a week, and people say, `How cool.' That's what I think happened here. It was entertainment masquerading as news."

Heyward said he believed the event helped accelerate Dean's decline -- "not so much showing the speech again and again, as the kind of collective wisdom that suggested that it was extremely damaging and, to a degree, became a self-fulfilling prophecy."

The lesson for the media in cases like this is to be aware of its own impact, he said.

Still, politicians and newsmakers had better get used to a lightning-fast media world.

"They'll just do it again," O'Brien said. "The toothpaste is out of the tube. This is the world we're in now."

Slavin said his only regret was not airing an intriguing Diane Sawyer report on the coverage earlier. Sawyer reported that Dean was using a special microphone that night that filters out crowd noise to heighten his voice; other videotapes taken illustrate that his "scream" was barely audible to his live audience.

To Trippi, Sawyer's report felt like a Super Bowl referee admitting -- after the game -- that he blew a call that decided the outcome.

"Unfortunately, no one ran that 633 times," he said. "ABC, to its credit, did it once."




Story

sacX

yeah the video that was shown *never* happened like it appeared to.. Completely derailed his campaign because of technical issues..

__________________
Have Asian Language Traffic?

Mr. Mojo Risin

I saw the speech live and it looked kinda weird, but I didn't think too much of it at the time.... then the media made me rethink of it...


Dean is a elitist, cocky man with a temper problem anyway

plus he doesn't have much experience besides balancing the budget of a very small state.. wow, big achievement ....

The Truth Hurts

LOL..

blame it on the mics they all use for DOING THEIR FUCKING JOB.

m00d

Yeah the reason it sounded so inhuman and insane was a TECHNICAL glitch in the microphone filters. The things he said were not weird at all, it was the WAY he said it. Come to find out, he didn't say them that way at all."other videotapes taken illustrate that his "scream" was barely audible to his live audience. "

Brought down by a microphone filter..my god. That really sucks for Howard Dean.

Mr. Mojo Risin

then he fires his campaign manager after he made him a frontrunner out of nothing... hmm...

goBigtime

These days if you don't steal all the money your state has, or funnel it off to your friends, AND keep its budget balanced - that IS a big achievement.

I suppose you would rather your state buy $1200 hammers & $180 boxes of paper clips from your Governors third cousin?

m00d

He wasn't fired, he was reorganized and resigned. Trippi still supports Dean emphatically. He cried on msnbc telephone interview about his dedication to what Dean stands for.

Mr. Mojo Risin

so that makes him qualified to be prez? i suppose i would vote for him over Bush though

Mr. Mojo Risin

forced to resign from what I heard... that is called being fired


I heard he freaked when he heard he was being replaced

69pornlinks

they wanted and needed the focus to go to kerry...ppl will vote the lesser of two evils.great way to vote for a prez....oh yeah kerry is Skull and Bones like bush and his pops(i must say this evry time because ppl assume he's what right for the country,haha)

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m00d

Mr. Mojo Risin set your politics aside for a moment and admit that his campaign was derailed completely by that scream. If that scream was the result of filtered micing, does that not just SUCK? If other news outlet's footage doesn't sound unusual at all, it's the equivalent of CNN taking president bush's word and manipulating them with reverb and effects to sound like darth vader then trying to pass it off as real news.

m00d

you heard wrong, he was not forced to resign. He resigned, the campaign was sad to lose him. They did bring in another person to share campaign manager duties, this is what precipitated his resignation. He was not forced to do anything.

Mr. Mojo Risin

yes I believe that speech did derail his campaign

but you can tell he's got a temper problem regardless of that speech

The Truth Hurts

attention dumbasses...

he was in the shitter before the fucking scream even happened.

m00d

That is just bullshit you've been fed. Generalities. The only thing I ever saw that showed temper at all was him telling that heckler to sit down. I thought that was deserved.

m00d

Way to totally invalidate anything you say by prefacing it with namecalling.

Mr. Mojo Risin

you ever watch him when being interviewed? he cuts in before the question is over and basically "screams" then too

he needs some xanax or something... I wouldn't want a guy with a short fuse in control of nukes

EZRhino

LOL

m00d

I wouldn't have cast my votefor dean in the primary before the scream. I've supported Kerry all the way. I think all the media outlets owe dean and his campaign staff a huge public apology. It's what is right..

The Truth Hurts

uhm.. after all the endless hype before that first caucus...
he came in third...
before the scream...

When he told that guy at his rally to shut up and sit down (or something like that), that was the end of Dean.

m00d

Yeah, he might get us into a war.

m00d

Yeah, but he knew he wasn't going to win Iowa. He had huge leads in NH and elsewhere that evaporated in one doctored yell. He didn't have to win Iowa to win the nomination.

Mr. Mojo Risin

yep .... I give him credit for capitalizing on an unpopular war to get ahead, but I wonder what he would really do as president..

how could I vote for a pussy who goes skiing instead of doing his duty for his country....

m00d

Did Bush drop out of the National Guard to avoid drug testing?
The young pilot walked away from his commitment in 1972 -- the same year the U.S. military implemented random drug tests.
Feb. 6, 2004 | One of the persistent riddles surrounding President Bush's disappearance from the Texas Air National Guard during 1972 and 1973 is the question of why he walked away. Bush was a fully trained pilot who had undergone a rigorous two-year flight training program that cost the Pentagon nearly $1 million. And he has told reporters how important it was to follow in his father's footsteps and to become a fighter pilot. Yet in April 1972, George W. Bush climbed out of a military cockpit for the last time. He still had two more years to serve, but Bush's own discharge papers suggest he may have walked away from the Guard for good.

It is, of course, possible that Bush had simply had enough of the Guard and, with the war in Vietnam beginning to wind down, decided that he would rather do other things. In 1972 he asked to be transferred to an Alabama unit so he could work on a Senate campaign for a friend of his father's. But some skeptics have speculated that Bush might have dropped out to avoid being tested for drugs. Which is where Air Force Regulation 160-23, also known as the Medical Service Drug Abuse Testing Program, comes in. The new drug-testing effort was officially launched by the Air Force on April 21, 1972, following a Jan. 11, 1972, directive issued by the Department of Defense. That initiative, in response to increased drug use among soldiers in Vietnam, instructed the military branches to "establish the requirement for a systematic drug abuse testing program of all military personnel on active duty, effective 1 July 1972."

It's true that in 1972 Bush was not on "active" duty: His Texas Guard unit was never mobilized. But according to Maj. Jeff Washburn, the chief of the National Guard's substance abuse program, a random drug-testing program was born out of that regulation and administered to guardsmen such as Bush. The random tests were unrelated to the scheduled annual physical exams, such as the one that Bush failed to take in 1972, a failure that resulted in his grounding.

The 1972 drug-testing program took months, and in some cases years, to implement at Guard units across the country. And the percentage of guardsmen tested then was much lower than today's 40 percent rate. But as of April 1972, Air National guardsmen knew random drug testing was going to be implemented.


During the 2000 campaign, when Bush's spokesman was asked about the possibility of Bush facing a drug test back in 1972, the spokesman told the Times of London that Bush "was not aware of any [military] changes that required a drug test." Still, at the time when Bush, perhaps for the first time in his life, faced the prospect of a random drug test, his military records show he virtually disappeared, failing for at least one year to report for Guard duty. White House officials insist that if Bush missed any weekend Guard drills in 1972, he made up for them during the summer of 1973. If this is true, he would have been vulnerable to random drug tests during his makeup days. But again, Bush's own discharge papers fail to conclusively back up his claim that he performed Guard service in 1973.

"Nobody ever saw him" serving in 1973, notes author James Moore, whose upcoming book, "Bush's War for Re-election," will detail Bush's military record. "Not a single soul has come forward to say, 'I remember the summer of '73 when I did Guard training with George Bush, the future president of the United States.'"

Moore notes that Bush's discharge papers make no reference to service in 1973. The last entry in Bush's papers are for April 1972. Also, if Bush had served in 1973, there would have to be an Officer Effectiveness Rating for that year in his military file. There is not. Nonetheless, in late 1973 Bush received an honorable discharge in order to attend Harvard Business School.

During the early stages of his 2000 campaign for president, Bush was dogged by questions of whether he ever used cocaine or any other illegal substance when he was younger. Bush refused to fully answer the question, but in 1999 he did issue a blanket denial insisting he had not used any illegal drugs during the previous 25 years, or since 1974. Bush refused to specify what "mistakes" he had made before 1974.

Perhaps realizing that explanation pointed reporters toward possible drug use during his time as a guardsman, Bush insisted he hadn't taken any drugs while serving in the Texas Air National Guard, between 1968 and 1974. "I never would have done anything to jeopardize myself. I got airborne and I got on the ground very successfully," he told reporters on Aug. 19, 1999. But today we know that for his last 18 months in the Guard, from April '72 to late '73, Bush didn't have to get airborne, because he simply quit flying. Moreover, if Bush in fact took no drugs at all after 1968, that would mean his drug use, if any, stopped at age 22 -- an unusual age to swear off recreational substances for someone with the partying reputation Bush had at that time.

Unanswered questions continue to swirl around Bush's Guard service in part because he refuses to release the full contents of his military records.

Mr. Mojo Risin

he's a pussy too and an idiot