Andrew,

TPM has quite a few lawyerly readers. Would any of them be willing to comment on whether or not Shuster's statement could be considered defamation per se.

Schuster was just trying too hard. Hopefully the world will get past this HORROR and pay more attention to such trivial matters as an illegal, immoral war, war mongers in the Executive branch, the corruption and near destruction of our constitution by these monsters, torture of other human beings in the name of our country, etc., etc., etc.

"We The People" had better get over this ridiculous "Paris Hilton" mentality and begin paying attention to our system of government before we lose it.

Now, back to the never-ending coverage of Natalie, Paris, Anna Nicole and the rest by those who claim to be JOURNALISTS.

This is the kind of stuff we will continue to receive so long a nice hair is the primary consideration for hiring network infonews personalities.

AS a woman and a mother of a daughter in her 20's, this is bullshit. Really, if Chelsea or a son, whatever, is out there stumping for a campaign, then expect some crap. Hillary should worry so over the death's her war vote help enable. THOSE sons and daughters that DIED.

Not defamation. Hillary and Chelsea are public figures so that a would-be defamer has an increased first amendment interest in speaking about them.

Also, saying Clinton was "pimping out" Hillary is really just figurative language -- it makes no assertion about sexual conduct that either was involved in (of the type that could be defamation per se), and is not a "false" statement that was said with reckless disregard for its truth. It's just a way -- an inappopriate one -- of saying something else (i.e. that the campaign is "using" or "deploying" Chelsea, in a way that suggests coercion anad general nastiness)

It might be defamation if Shuster said: "Hilary is running a prostitution ring and pimping out Chelsea as the star harlot"

Mostly testing logo and password issues, the comments on all sides seem cogent.

I never watch any of 'em (and am a little sad that the TPM family wants to put up so many videos, they're just almost always a bit shallower and in-one-ear-out-the-other, in my estimation, than a couple of good solid paragraphs of historical fact).

But this kind of totally irrelevant sideshow is exactly what we get and deserve, after letting all of our focus on issues and the destruction of the rule of law, be bulldozed out of the way as we rush to the few ambitious personalities who put themselves forward and allow ourselves to be duped once again with personality-based campaigns.

I'm getting closer. There must be an organization of the pure and adamant who will be able to vote with Democrats and vote against Democrats, tactically and strategically as the need allows, while demanding thorough basic progressive reforms, and a replacement of the 80-95% of current "liberal and moderate" politicians who are, frankly, self-serving scum largely responsible for our drift into Bushite tyranny. Ordinary professional people drafted by our movement for 1 to 3 terms, and I'm including plumbers and electricians and so on, who can be honest, would serve us much better than this class of greed-headed con-men that make up our current political officeholders.

I totally agree with you about Shuster--he is the least of our problems. (I don't agree about Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan, both of whom I dearly love despite the fact that they're wrong on just about every subject.)

the problem is Chris Matthew--and Keith Olbermann to a lesser extent. you KNOW that Buchanan is a right-wing creep. but you are lulled into believing that Matthews is an actual newscaster. therefore, he's much more dangerous. IMHO.

the misogyny of the Matthews/Olbermann MSNBC clique is so ingrained that they themselves probably don't see it. very sad.

Hillary Clinton didn't "demand" that Shuster be fired, and Sargent is doing exactly what Shuster was doing - ascribing meaning and ascertaining ulterior motives without any evidence whatsoever.

TPM like the Mathews, et.al, looks for the explanation that puts Clinton in the worst possible light, without any consideration for any other possible explanation. You automatically assume that Clinton must be wrong and she's a political automaton angling for the best political advantage in this.

Does it occur to you that a more reasonable, obvious explanation is that Clinton is correct? That it is not enough to apologize, the behavior and attitude that allows this kind of contempt for women has to change? Would it be possible, in reading the NEXT paragraph that this is exactly what she said?

I might also add that you're completely lacking in empathy and understanding - if you want to inflict a mortal wound on someone, hurt his or her child. It is more painful, more lasting and more hurtful than anything anyone can ever do to you. All this sympathy and indignation over how poor David Shuster is treated and not one damned word about how painful this must have been for Senator Clinton - in fact, as usual, it has somehow become all her fault.

The news media in general, and the cable networks in particular, are salivating over the coming opportunity to treat another Clinton like they treated Bill Clinton. Bush is treated with far more respect than he deserves by those networks, but I would rather see Bush treated with respect than see any Democratic President treated as Clinton was. I strongly believe that the Clinton campaign reacted properly to this taste of the disrespect they are waiting to dump on her.

We have commented many times here about the need for our candidate to stand up and fight back, and not just roll with the punches as Kerry and Gore did. Now Clinton has done just that and we are supposed to criticize her?

I have no idea who Shuster is, and I doubt that I have ever seen him. He may be a great newsreader for all I know. But, no TV newsreader should be allowed to treat any of the presidential candidates with that kind of disrespect - not even Mitt, as tempting as that was.

For those of us who are working for Obama we should acknowledge that Hillary has made masterful use of this issue. Today she suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Obama. And here we are debating the meaning of this insult by some unknown newsreader. Not only has she deflected attention from the most interesting story of the day but this incident will serve to energize women's justifiable anger against so much sexism in this society into votes for her.

That is just good campaigning strategy. But we should not lose sight of the important goal of making Obama our next president.

While we've been reacting over this, I wonder how many young girls have been sold by their desperately poor families into prostitution in Asian countries where American and Western companies prop up the economy?

If Hillary would use this occasion to comment on THAT atrocity, I'd respect her a lot more.

BevD:

You have been a voice of reason throughout this campaign. And you are correct again. You, like me, intend to support the Democratic candidate with vigor in the next election. I don't know if or how you voted, but I voted for Clinton, so if people want to think I'm biased for what I write I accept that.

But, mark my words, when the history in the near and long terms are written about this campaign, the absolute failure of a mysoginistic media and blogosphere to deal appropriately with the first woman to be a serious candidate for the office of United States President, will be abundantly clear.

I sense Sargent is struggling for balance and I don't blame him for feeling frustrated if he is getting heat from both "sides", but he has fanned flames with his report here that the letter from Senator Clinton was a call for the discharge of David Shuster. It is what it is.

Thanks Bruce, I think with TPM's reporting on this issue it should be apparent that this is a built in reflex, just as it was with Gore - look for the most devious, cunning and calculating explanation for anything they do and then run with it - and of course, never, ever back down from it.

The headline at this site should be sufficient to prove that I am correct. "Clinton backing off firing demand?" She didn't demand it in the first place. They wrongly interpreted the letter and instead of fixing the mistake they preponderate it.

Dowd, Meyerson, Tapper, Crouch, Mathews, Carlson, Scarborough and now TPM? I don't think it's the Clinton campaign with the dirty tricks here.

Andrew, I wonder what you folks are going to do about people posting "blogs" which are nothing more than a sentence - a question like someone just posted about what time do they caucus in Maine?

I think some people are abusing the "blog" privilege and effectively forcing good posts off the page.

Probably the least of your worries... but still. It makes for community problems.

I have to say that this comment of Liam's strikes me as mindlessly hateful. Shuster accuses Hillary of Pimping Chelsea Out 'in a weird way.' Because Chelsea refuses to talk to the media.

So, he's accusing Hillary of being a pimp. Chelsea of being a whore. And his real cause for offense, the thing that clearly cheesed him off was that although Chelsea was being whored out... she wasn't being whored out to him. Instead she was sent off on this other campaign mission.

How dare they!!!

Pushed to the wall, Liam sort of kind of acknowledges that perhaps Shuster's comment was a bit out of line. But 99% per cent of it is the Clinton's fault.

Yeah.

Right.

Whatever.

Liam it seems has drunk the cool aid of moronic right wing hatred. It seems any attack on the Clinton's is justified no matter what. Any action of the Clinton's is evil, no matter what. If you cut a Clinton they do not bleed... except as an act of political cynicism.

It's pretty clear that as Liam hangs around, he'll be revealing that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian... when she wasn't sleeping with Vince Foster... who she had killed... as part of covering up travelgate... which she used to carry out the Whitewater deal... because her daughter is ugly and she punishes anyone who says it.

Liam, life is just too short. Go troll somewhere else, I'm not a fan of Bill or Hillary, but attitudes and tactics like yours offend me. Try to be civil.

Andrew: this is a bullshit of rationalisation. You are a junkie and you listen to this crap all day and don't worry about words that wound. I agree that David Shuster is a great reporter. But his exchange with the Clinton press office demonstrated a level of arrogance that is mind boggling. Where do journalists get this sense of entitlement from? How would they liked to have their family members called vulgar names. I guess it is time to send them rubbish about their own. Then we shall see how they slough it off.

Perhaps they should spend a spell in Iraq and dosome real reporting. The great journalists are there risking life and limb while these well paid assholes pollute our discourse at home.

I'm not a Hillary supporter, but I don't blame Hillary for putting her foot down. What I do find fault with is that she didn't do it until she became the target of it. The issue seems to me to be much larger than misogyny. I'd say it is (a) uncivil, trashy discourse that (b) is used consistently in a partisan manner against the Dems but never the Repugs. The bigger forest is that corporate media has no professional standards or ethics anymore, not since it has been taken over by the right wingers. (See Robert Parry on this issue.) ALL Dems should have taken a stand against this kind of uncivil, partisan discourse years ago.

It would be smart for Obama to join with Hillary to denounce this incident, but to also to state that it is much bigger problem than this incident, and emphasize that the Dems aren't going to take it anymore. Boycotting the Fox debate was a great beginning. Keep it going. Dems, this is bigger than Shuster, bigger than MSNBC. Unite on this, do not divide over it, so that it's a win-win for all Dems. There is no "win" on this for one Dem candidate and "lose" for the other. The only choice is win-win or lose-lose for the party. But do make MSNBC, not the employee, the example. Make them negotiate. Besides, it would make a great plank--"We CAN be better than this, so let's get back to civility."

I'm sorry - In that clip you linked where Mika shreds the Paris lead, did Willy Geist actually say, "unhand me, woman"?

I too am an MSNBC junkie, but the way Joe treats the weather reporter - a very good looking, young woman who happens to be very good at her job - on Morning Joe, is enough for me to never watch anything he does. David Shuster is indeed the least of their problems.

As I said, I think the fix is in. The coronation of another warmongerer to continue our disasterous foreign policy=McCain.

what a bunch of unmitigated crap,

I long for the days of Davai!!!!!

It's fine if Hillary wants to call the comments despicable and offensive. However, if she crosses the line by asking for any discipline against Shuster then, as a public official, she is a FACIST because she is using her position in government to quash speech in the press.

That is FACISM. Period.

RobbyLove, the hands inside those media sock puppets are some of the worst fascists this country has ever seen. Each one of those fascists has two hands--one in the sock puppet and one in your pocket stealing the money you pay one way or another to watch tv. You can stand there and whine at the sock puppets for insulting you, or you can get the fascist's hand out of your pocket. Which are you going to do?

Andrew, thank you so much for saying this! Very well said, I think. When you have Chris Matthews saying things like this to Elizabeth Edwards:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usDMwpoLV84&feature=related
(indiscretion starts at about 2:00, in case you don't want to watch the whole thing), I don't see how Hillary can call for David Shuster to be fired, unless of course she's been waiting in the tall grass to get even for some perceived slight during his reportage of Whitewater, et al.

If you know of Shuster's work at all, you know what a good reporter he is. One point I would like to make, though, is that David's comment was based on the fact that, although Hillary is using her daughter in the campaign, it is strictly verboten for Chelsea to talk to the press, and apparently vice versa. Apparently Chelsea is some sort of vestal virgin who cannot be approached, although when it's convenient for the campaign, Chelsea is given the home numbers of the ladies on "The View" so she can ask for their support for her mom. Yet she brushed off even a 9-year-old reporter's question with a comment about not talking to reporters and that mean the little girl, "unfortunately, even though I think you're cute!"

From my perspective, this is what happens when words formerly associated with vulgarity or obscenity creep into our vernacular. Everyone who is grown up enough not to take everything they hear literally (Huckabee notwithstanding) knows that David Shuster was not insinuating that Chelsea is a whore or that Bill and Hill are literally pimps that are selling their daughter.

It is my premise, although I have long been a fan of Bill Clinton's presidency, and have even defended his misbehavior in the past on this very blog, that Chelsea's parents are far more guilty of scandalizing their daughter than David Shuster's regrettably insensitive remark will ever be. Can you imagine being a schoolgirl whose friends, enemies, and all others she rubs elbows with daily know every dirty little detail of her father's indiscretion and the fact that he tried to cover it up with perjury? And that was not allegation or an off-hand comment. Those were the facts. So if Hillary wants to continue the onslaught and keep this dispute going and keep Shuster off the air, she should consider just what kind of a hornet's nest she is stirring up.

Sorry, RobbyLove, but you remind me of the old tale of the blind men feeling up an elephant and trying define what an elephant is. Your nutshell has the tail. The usual characteristics do include extreme nationalism, corporatism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, anti-individualism. Sound familiar? Actually, if you read up on fascism and compare it to cults, you see a lot of similar characteristics, but on a nationalistic scale.

But one by-product of fascism is control of the media, which happened a couple of decades ago here in the US. When the fascists control the media through corporatism (corporatism, the marriage of government and corporations), they control dissent. What Hillary is contesting IS the fascist control of the media, in effect, that now exists. Journalism today has NO accountability to anyone except its corporate/government(Republican) masters. No accountability to ethics and no accountability to professional standards.

But even so, it doesn't look to me like Hillary is invoking her position as a member of Congress to call a halt to what MSNBC is doing. Hillary wears many hats, but in this case I would say that she is invoking her power as a customer of MSNBC's commercial department, as well as an individual and wronged subject of their "journalism". Not as a Congresswoman.

Isn't it a bit... well, fascist... of you, though, to deny Hillary the right as an individual to demand that a wrong be righted, to deny her the right to ask for accountability from MSNBC? Had she given up her rights as an individual when she became a Congressperson? Just trying to think this through. But I do not see this as a conflict of interest. Again, I am not a Hillary supporter, but I'm wondering if your reaction would be different if Imus had called Obama's wife a "nappy-headed ho". Different strokes for different folks? Black, white, male, female, Dem, Republican, shouldn't our media be held to some basic standard applied to all? How bad is too bad for you?

Well MJ has just posted a piece implying that Hillary Clinton's camp is spreading anti Obama literature to Jews implying that he hates Jews and hates Israel.

I think MJ has gone over the dark side.

Not a shred of evidence that this stuff is coming from Hillary.

A more plausible scenario is that the Republican smear machine is distributing it in an effort to demonize Hillary.

THEY ARE SCARED TO DEATH OF HILLARY. As they should be
When she gets into power, she will root out these right wing maggots. That I'm pretty certain about.

The allegation that the Clinton campaign is wasting its time distributing literature to drive a wedge between Senator Obama and the small Jewish community in Maryland is bizarre. It makes no political sense, as it is unlikely to convince more than a handful of morons that they should switch their vote from Obama to Clinton. But intellectual and journalistic integrity is apparently playing second fiddle now at TPM, and unfortunately even at TPM Cafe.

And, of course, we get the chiggers above, who now seek to place the burden on the Clinton campaign to disavow this crap based on the completely unfounded assertion that the Clinton campaign had something to do with this garbage. Chigger, you borrow straight out of the tactics of the right wing spin machine; you have learned well.

Lost in all of this are facts, such as the fact that the American Jewish community has voted for both candidates. In New York and New Jersey, Clinton got the Jewish vote. In Connecticut and even in Mass. (where Clinton won handily), Obama won the Jewish vote. In California, the Jewish vote was within the margin of error.

bslev, I seem to remember, prior to the invasion of Iraq, that Jews polled at much higher rates than did the general population as being against the invasion. I would think that that would automatically incline that anti-invasion population to support Obama.

"Moron" is kind of harsh. I'm thinking of my eighty-something mom who isn't as sharp as she used to be but who is still attending to politics and voting. You might be surprised at how many of those are out there. I would imagine that primaries aren't any different than my caucus state, in which votes are apportioned, so many caucusers per delegate. In my precinct, Hillary barely had enough caucusers to get her two delegates, while Obama was only one caucuser short of getting a third. But both ended up with two delegates. Yes, small numbers can matter, quite often, and Hillary and the rest know it, and they will fight for every single one.

Is Hillary responsible for this? Who knows? Probably not. But is Hillary capable of it? I think so. You can't tell me that the Clintons didn't benefit in some way from Bill's last-minute pardon of Marc Rich. So, yes, I'd have no problem believing that Hill's campaign could do it, with a tad of evidence. That woman is ambitious.

Thanks, Andrew, for directing us to the outrageous MSNBC fight about having a Paris Hilton story leading the news. It's a nice encapsulation of the frat-boy attitude pervading that and other cable networks.

That said, it's up to us to make it change. A couple of months ago, there was a push back against Fox News by contacting local advertisers and telling them we would not buy their products/services if they advertised on Fox News while they perpetuated gross bias and misinformation as "news."

The bottom line is what will change the content on MSNBC or any of the networks. Take the time to find out who's advertising (locally is effective, because then the affiliates contact the parent, and it makes a difference simply by the numbers), contact them to complain about misogyny, commit to boycotting them, and make them take action. It's a trickle-up method than can have much stronger long-term effects than suspending Schuster or complaining to the networks about their coverage.

They won't care unless it's going to have an impact on their revenue.

JFb - are you kidding me? Brancati's article pointed out in a satirical manner that "pimping" is used to belittle students and show them who is boss. His article is one of many, documenting the medical students abuse by senior physicians. This isn't "non-sexual" - the point of the insult is a comparison to "pimped out women" who are regularly abused and degraded by their pimps. It is solely an application of power over the powerless.

It is a method of traumatizing, degrading, "putting a dent in the egos" of students. It has never been a benign practice. When Harvey longs for the students to be "pimped" he means it in exactly the way it was intended - to degrade, humiliate and use other human beings.

As for your other gratuitious remarks, I didn't attack anyone, call them trolls or accuse them of projection - it would seem that you are the one making the ad hominem attacks.

I might add that I doubt that Shuster meant the phrase as used by clinical professors and senior physicians, in fact, I believe his complaint was the opposite - that the Clintons were not allowing the press to relentlessly question Chelsea Clinton, which of course, would make the press the pimps, wouldn't it?