David Axelrod: The brains behind Obama's re-election (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Daily Beast has done a fascinating write up of a talk given by David Axelrod, President Obama’s chief re-election strategist, on the serious missteps made by the Romney team:

Offering a lengthy dissection of the campaign, David Axelrod told a Chicago audience that he was “a bit surprised that super PACS which spent an unbelievable amount of money” didn’t hit television and radio with anti-Obama ads until May.

“Our air defenses weren’t ready,” he said, alluding to his side’s early lack of resources. “They gave us a pass, for whatever reason.”

At the same time, he was surprised that a plausible, distinctly positive image of Romney as successful businessman was not central to Romney’s media strategy until late fall. In part he ascribed that to Romney’s “Faustian bargain” to get the Republican nomination and tacking far to the right while also unleashing a barrage of mostly negative ads against GOP primary rivals.

The Obama camp assumed that after Romney sewed up the nomination, he would offer that more upbeat aura in his ads. “They never did that,” Axelrod said at the evening gathering at the University of Chicago.

As for Ryan, Axelrod personally figured former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty would be the choice, possibly Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio. His doubts about Ryan were a function of tough-minded views on privatizing Social Security and making significant changes in Medicare.

Axelrod’s assessment is obviously more informed than mine, but I don’t think the strategic errors played the biggest part in Romney’s downfall. Romney’s campaign, right up until the first Presidential debate, was nothing short of disastrous mostly because they had a disastrous candidate; Mitt Romney. At literally every high profile event, Romney would put his foot in it and say something to disconnect himself from the general public. Time and time again he revealed himself to be an out of touch multi millionaire with no concept of how most people in America lived, culminating in the release of the ’47%’ video that should have ended his campaign once and for all.

Then an inexplicable meltdown from the President and a reasonably human performance from Romney on debate night propelled him back into the running, giving him a realistic shot at the Presidency that he did not deserve. Of course Romney’s team made strategic errors, but it probably would not have made a difference. A bad candidate is a bad candidate, and Romney will go down as one of the worst in Republican history.

No amount of negative campaigning could have countered that.

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Filipines a popular place for cheap labor

by Will Fitzgibbon: Newspapers across the United States of America are outsourcing the production of local news to low-paid researchers and writers in the Philippines, radio progamme This American Life has revealed.

In an interview with a young American journalist, Ryan Smith, This American Life presenter Sarah Koenig exposes the work of outsourcing company Journatic and the newspapers for whom it works, many of whom would rather remain unknown.

Former Journatic employee Smith says in the report that Journatic’s news is ‘written overseas, half-heartedly edited and slapped on a page’.

Smith, who risked being fired for speaking publicly, says he wrote and edited stories for newspapers in Texas while never leaving Chicago, about 1,000 miles away.

Using freelancers in the Philippines, Brazil, Eastern Europe and Africa, Journatic produces vast quantities of local stories, such as death notices, house sales and bowling scores based on publicly available information, for American newspapers that no longer have the resources to cover the micro detail of daily life.

Journatic and some of the newspaper companies who use it told This American Life that no writing was done in the Philippines itself. Rather, the Filipinos, who earn between 35 to 40 cents per story, ‘assemble information, in paragraph form,’ which is then written and edited in America.

However, it is hard to know how true this is. Koenig spoke to one anonymous Filipino freelancer who claimed to write stories himself. Yet their real names are never published. Instead, American newspaper publishers can click a ‘Select Alias’ button and choose Americanised names such as Jenny Cox or Glenda Smith.

While the programme paints the practice in a negative light, Journatic CEO Brian Timpone argues a good case for his model. He says he knows that he will be criticised for his business interests, but he argues that outsourcing information aggregation is the way forward for the financially-strapped media industry.

‘I personally think we’re saving journalism with our approach, ‘ says Timpone.

‘The single reporter model, the old model, just doesn’t work and hasn’t done for 30 or 40 years.’

‘We’ll be able to see more things, things that no one covers,’ Timpone says.

He goes even further, asserting that having journalists on the ground does not produce more accurate or more engaging stories than his at-a-distance model.

Timpone claims that his company can produce more content for less, helping to drive traffic for newspapers and encourage local advertising, an important stream of revenue.

‘If you have a better idea, I’m all ears,’ challenges Timpone.

Listen to the original This American Life programme here.

This article originally appeared on The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

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Parking meters: Less money for NYC, more for private equity (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Matt Taibbi blasts Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his short term money grab from selling off NYC’s parking meters:

Hizzoner Michael Bloomberg in New York has decided to do his own version of the Chicago infrastructure bake sale; the city announced that it is putting up nearly 90,000 parking meters for lease. They’re expecting to get over $11 billion in upfront money from the deal, which is great news if you’re Mike Bloomberg, who gets to use that money to patch current budget holes instead of making tough cuts or raising taxes. The news is less awesome for the next half-dozen New York City mayors, or for the citizens of New York, who now will get to spend most of the 21^stcentury grappling with its increasingly monstrous deficits with a major tributary from the city’s revenue stream shut off.

Taibbi wrote about the Chicago deal in his book ‘Griftopia’, blowing apart the notion that the deal was somehow good for the city. His recap:

In Chicago’s case, Mayor Richard Daley sold 75 years of meter revenue – worth an estimated $5 billion – for $1.2 billion. So he gets 20 cents on the dollar for the city’s parking meters in 2008, and then in 2009 the city still has a budget problem that’s now worse, because there’s no parking meter revenue anymore, ever. Meanwhile, a bunch of private investors rounded up by Morgan Stanley – these bankers go on road shows here at home and abroad to places like Geneva and the UAE to hawk discount American infrastructure to foreign billionaires and sovereign wealth funds – get to enjoy the fruits of raised rates. In some Chicago neighborhoods, the meter rates went from .25 cents an hour to $1 an hour in the first year of the deal, and then to $1.20 after that.

This really is a case of socializing risk and privatizing profit – in both NYC and Chicago, tax payers money went in to building and setting up the parking meter system, then received benefit from the revenue as it went straight back to the city. Now, private investors can get in on the incredibly lucrative business without the worry of investing in infrastructure or giving a better service to customers. It’s not as if the parking meter business has to worry about competitors either – as long as people live in NYC or Chicago, they will need to park. Heaven forbid the major cities raise taxes on the wealthy in order to close their budget deficits – instead, they’re screwing regular people by jacking up meter rates and starving the city of funds for future generations.

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NATO leaders sealed a landmark agreement on Monday to hand control of Afghanistan over to its own security forces by the middle of next year, putting the Western alliance on an “irreversible” path out of an unpopular, decade-long war.

A NATO summit in Chicago formally endorsed a U.S.-backed strategy that calls for a gradual exit of foreign combat troops by the end of 2014 but left major questions unanswered about how to prevent a slide into chaos and a Taliban resurgence after the allies are gone.

The two-day meeting of the 28-nation alliance marked a milestone in a war sparked by the September 11 attacks that has spanned three U.S. presidential terms and even outlasted al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

President Barack Obama and NATO partners sought to show their war-weary voters the end is in sight in Afghanistan – a conflict that has strained Western budgets as well as patience – while at the same time trying to reassure Afghans that they will not be abandoned.

A decision by France’s new President Francois Hollande to pull out French troops by the end of December – two years ahead of NATO’s timetable – has raised fears that other allies may also think about a rush to the exits.

“Our nations and the world have a vital interest in the success of this mission,” Obama told a summit session on Afghanistan. “I am confident … that we can advance that goal today and responsibly bring this war to an end.”

Alliance leaders, in a final communiqué, ratified plans for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force to hand over command of all combat missions to Afghan forces by the middle of 2013 and for the withdrawal of most of the 130,000 foreign troops by the end of 2014.

The statement deemed it an “irreversible” transition to full security responsibility for fledgling Afghan troops, and said NATO’s mission in 2014 would shift to a training and advisory role. “This will not be a combat mission,” it said.

Doubts remain, however, whether Afghan forces will have the capability to stand up against a still-potent Taliban insurgency that Western forces have failed to defeat in nearly 11 years of fighting.

Read more at Reuters…

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By Daniel Victor: Every local broadcast station has a repository of documents about political advertising that you have a legal right to see but can do so only by going to the station and asking to see “the public file.”

These paper files contain detailed data on all political ads that run on the channel, such as when they aired, who bought the time and how much they paid. It’s a transparency gold mine, allowing the public to see how campaigns and outside groups are influencing elections.

But TV executives have been fighting a Federal Communications Commission proposal to make the data accessible online. They say making the files digital would be too burdensome 2014 it “could well take hundreds of hours for a single station,” according to comments filed with the FCC by the National Association of Broadcasters.

Others have taken their case a step further. As reported by Bloomberg Government, Jerald Fritz, senior vice president of Allbritton Communications, said in an another FCC filing that online availability “would ultimately lead to a Soviet-style standardization of the way advertising should be sold as determined by the government.” (NPR’s On the Media did an excellent segment recently on broadcasters’ opposition to the proposal.)

We tend to like the idea of public data being online. Since TV stations won’t put it online themselves, we decided to do it ourselves 2014 and we want your help.

Working with students at the Medill journalism school at Northwestern University, we looked at five local stations in the Chicago market.

You can explore the results yourself: Here are detailed breakdowns of when the ads aired, during which programs, and how much each spot cost: Read the documents from the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and CW.

Big thanks to Medill students David Tonyan, Julie O’Donoghue, Vesko Cholakov, Safiya Merchant and Gideon Resnick, who visited the stations Monday.

We intend to enlist more readers in checking their local stations as the election campaigns slog on. The general election is likely to usher in even greater spending, and such spot checks could keep an eye on how big spenders are influencing the election. If you’d like to join in, please fill out this form.

Campaigns and super PACs are required to report their spending on independent expenditures to the Federal Election Commission within a day or two, but they often just report how much they paid ad-buying firms, which can disguise how much actual ads cost and where they’re airing.

What’s more, the files could be a window into what may be otherwise undisclosed spending by “dark money” nonprofit groups that are playing an increasing role in the elections .

For our experiment, we asked our Chicago volunteers to check on spending by five super PACs that individually support Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama. There were no records of spending in Chicago by four of them, but Restore Our Future, a pro-Romney super PAC, advertised on all five stations. The super PAC paid the five stations about $800,000 in the past month.

As our PAC Track interactive chart shows, Restore Our Future has spent more than twice as much as any other PAC so far 2014 nearly $37 million.

Medill student O’Donoghue said getting the files from the ABC station took her about half an hour, most of which was spent wrestling with the copy machine.

Tonyan, another graduate student, said he spent 15 minutes at the CW affiliate, plus a 15-minute drive.

Both said the station employees who helped them were friendly and accommodating. We encountered the same when I visited five stations in New York, Missouri and Florida. Typically, a station employee will simply show you the room where the files are kept and let you dig in.

Such visits don’t seem to happen often. A log at the New York CBS affiliate showed only six registered visitors since October 2011.

The Campaign Media Analysis Group, a unit of Kantar Media, tracks ads that have hit the airwaves and estimates what they would cost, but the company charges high rates to obtain the information. The Wesleyan Media Project publishes some CMAG data.

Rich Robinson, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, found that $70 million in advertising had been unreported from 2000-10 in Michigan. He got that number by personally examining public files, at one point driving 14 hours for a 15-minute visit to a station.

He told the FCC: “I can testify to you, unequivocally, that the threshold of effort necessary to report this important public interest story is too high for every news organization in Michigan, except mine.”

Which is why we’re asking for your help. You can help expose spending that might otherwise remain hidden in your television market. Sign up here.

This article was originally published on Pro Publica

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Update: MSNBC: “President-elect Obama calls for Illinois governor to resign, spokesperson says”

ABC: “Chicago Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., is the anonymous “Senate Candidate No. 5″ whose emissaries Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich reportedly offered up to $1 million to name him to the U.S. Senate, federal law enforcement sources tell ABC News. ”

>> Charges claim Illinois Governor Blagojevich sought to sell Obama’s Senate seat
>> Democrats call for special election
>> MSNBC’s Brewer, Newsweek’s Isikoff baselessly speculated about impact of Blagojevich arrest on Obama
>> Republicans Demand Obama Say He Wants Fitzgerald To Stay — Even Though He Already Has
>> Patrick Fitzgerald for FBI chief!

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