I was told once of a person who could never remember the difference between “gullible” and “morbid.” So I’m hoping that you know the difference… The following story shows why reading blogs is an important complement to reading the mainstream media:
Two years ago an editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) referred to the dream run that Patrick Moore and Christine Todd Whitman were getting in the media representing the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition. CJR noted that few journalists were disclosing that the group was created by the Nuclear Energy Institute with assistance from Hill & Knowlton. “Part of the thinking, surely, was that the press would peg them as dedicated environmentalists who have turned into pro-nuke cheerleaders, rather than as paid spokespeople. And the press came through.” They still do. Jay Hancock, a business columnist for the Baltimore Sun, wrote in his blog that “Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has decided that the risks of nuclear energy are lower than the risks of continuing to use carbon energy.” Hancock is not the only journalist not to disclose Moore’s nuclear industry ties to his readers. The week before his post, a CanWest News Service story simply described Moore as an “avid proponent of nuclear” power.
As a Los Angeles county prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi batted a thousand in murder cases: 21 trials, 21 convictions, including the Charles Manson case in 1971.
As an author, Mr. Bugliosi has written three No. 1 best sellers and won three Edgar Allan Poe awards, the top honor for crime writers. More than 30 years ago he co-wrote the best seller “Helter Skelter,” about the Manson case.
So Mr. Bugliosi could be forgiven for perhaps thinking that a new book would generate considerable interest, among reviewers and on the broadcast talk-show circuit.
But if he thought that, he would have been mistaken: his latest, a polemic with the provocative title “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” has risen to best-seller status with nary a peep from the usual outlets that help sell books: cable television and book reviews in major daily newspapers.
Internet advertising has been abundant, but ABC Radio refused to accept an advertisement for the book during the Don Imus show, said Roger Cooper, the publisher of Vanguard Press, which put out the book.
ABC Radio did not respond to a request for comment.
The network news programs apparently have a mission to avoid reporting news. Entertainment is what it’s all about. Take a look at this report from Media Matters:
Continuing a pattern of ignoringdevelopments in the ongoing investigation into the firing of several U.S. attorneys, none of the broadcast networks’ June 24 or 25 evening newscasts reported on the Justice Department Inspector General’s findings of politicization of hiring practices in several of the department’s recruiting programs.
As The New York Times reported, the report, released June 24, “is the first in a series of internal reviews growing out of last year’s controversy over the dismissals of nine United States attorneys,” and, according to the Times, found that “Justice Department officials illegally used ‘political or ideological’ factors in elite recruiting programs in recent years, tapping law school graduates with Federalist Society membership or other conservative credentials over more qualified candidates with liberal-sounding résumés.” The report focused on the hiring practices associated with the Justice Department’s Honors Program, which it described as “the exclusive means by which the Department hires recent law school graduates and judicial law clerks who do not have prior legal experience,” and the Summer Law Intern Program, which “is the Department’s hiring program for paid summer interns.” The report stated that “beginning in 2002, a Screening Committee composed primarily of politically appointed employees from the Department’s leadership offices had to approve all Honors Program and SLIP candidates for interviews by the [department's] components.” As the Times reported, the report “found that ‘many qualified candidates’ were rejected” by the Screening Committee “from two key recruiting programs … because of what was perceived as their liberal bent.” From the Times:
Glenn Greenwald carefully dissects a piece of propaganda in TIME magazine, a piece masquerading as news. Filled with misleading statements, omissions, and outright lies, the piece is attempting to justify the “compromise.” Well worth reading.
Workers must not be classy enough—journalists clearly prefer to interview CEOs rather than the guys and gals on the shop floor. And they write their stories from that viewpoint, as well. From the Center for American Progress:
Today, the Center for American Progress hosted a panel discussion to mark the release of a new report analyzing how the media covers the economy. The report, “Journalists Give Workers the Business,” finds that “the media ignores ordinary workers and instead covers economic issues from the perspective of business.” The analysis by David Madland, Director of CAP’s American Worker Project, looked at newspaper and television coverage of unemployment, minimum wage, trade, and credit card debt issues in 2007 and concluded that “the perspective of workers is largely missing from media coverage, while the views of business are frequently presented.” A front page story in Wednesday’s Washington Post, for instance, asked why Americans are “gloomier than the economy” but avoided talking to a single worker. The article failed to mention that incomes for most workers have declined since 2001, that health care and retirement benefits have become scarcer and more expensive, and that inequality has risen to unprecedented levels. As the report argues, this type of the coverage is the norm, not the exception. All too often the traditional media prefers “elite sources, such as government or business representatives, over ordinary citizens.”
WORKERS SHUT OUT OF THE DEBATE: While conservative media critics often claim that the mainstream media has a strong liberal bias, the report suggests that the bias of elite business sources overwhelms any partisan divide. After studying economy-related articles from the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, and monitoring the economic news reports on ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, and CNBC throughout 2007, the study concludes that ”representatives of business were quoted or cited nearly two-and-a-half times as frequently as were workers or their union representatives.” Specifically, “in coverage of both the minimum wage and trade, the views of businesses were sourced more than one-and-a-half times as frequently as those of workers.” In stories about employment, “businesses were quoted or cited over six times as frequently as were workers,” according to the report. In fact, only in coverage of credit card debt “was coverage more balanced, presenting the perspectives of ordinary citizens in the proportion as those of business,” suggesting that the media “can find out how complex economic issues will impact ordinary people and present the news from their perspective.”
Via Ethan Ham’s blog, I learned of PressDisplay.com, and—in particular—this particular page. Play around with it a while, and you’ll discover various ways to view a page of interest, including a cursor-controlled magnifier. Very good site to know.
Greg Mitchell has an excellent post at Huffington Post on a speech given by Dan Rather at the National Conference for Media Reform:
Scott McClellan’s claims in his new book — that the mainstream media were “complicit enablers” in the run-up to the Iraq war — have been met with denials from past and present TV news anchors such as Tom Brokaw, Charles Gibson and Brian Williams (with Katie Couric admitting some failures). But Dan Rather, who was CBS anchor in 2003, offered a strong critique of the journalists’ performance in his speech to the National Conference for Media Reform yesterday.
Rather opened by admitting that, referring to McClellan, ” Whatever his motives for saying these things, he’s right,” but he also recalled that some reporters did ask tough questions: “So how do we reconcile these competing reactions? Well, we need to pull back for what we in television call the wide shot.”
Rather then explored the big picture, starting with:
In the wake of 9/11 and in the run-up to Iraq, these news organizations made a decision — consciously or unconsciously, but unquestionably in a climate of fear — to accept the overall narrative frame given them by the White House, a narrative that went like this: Saddam Hussein, brutal dictator, harbored weapons of mass destruction and, because of his supposed links to al Qaeda, this could not be tolerated in a post-9/11 world….
Now, cut back to your evening news, or your daily newspaper… where that White House Correspondent dutifully repeats the question he asked of the president or his press secretary, and dutifully relates the answer he was given — the same non-answer we’ve already heard dozens of times, which amounts to a pitch for the administration’s point of view, whether or not the answer had anything to do with the actual question that was asked. And then: ‘Thank you Jack. In other news today… ‘
And we’re off on a whole new story.
Here’s how Rather explained further:
In our news media, in our press, those who wield power were, in the lead-up to Iraq, given the opportunity to present their views as a coherent whole, to connect the dots, as they saw the dots and the connections… no matter how much these views may have flown in the face of precedent, established practice — or, indeed, the facts (as we are reminded, yet again, by the just-released Senate report on the administration’s use of pre-war intelligence). The powerful are given this opportunity still, in ways big and small, despite what you may hear about the “post-Katrina” press.
But when a tough question is asked and not answered, when reputable people come before the public and say, “wait a minute, something’s not right here,” the press has treated them like voices crying in the wilderness. These views, though they might be given air time, become lone dots — dots that journalists don’t dare connect, even if the connections are obvious, even if people on the Internet and in the independent press are making these very same connections. The mainstream press doesn’t connect these dots because someone might then accuse them of editorializing, or of being the, quote, ‘liberal media.’
But connecting these dots — making disparate facts make sense — is a big part of the real work of journalism.
John Young writes in a Cox News Service opinion column about Scott McClellan’s first broadcast to discuss his new book on NBC’s Today Show with Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer.
“[A]nyone who tuned in seeking to get a better understanding about the mind-set of the policy makers who plunged a nation into that war instead got a further glimpse into how we could be so distracted.
“For 45 minutes, Matt and Meredith probed not the thought processes and decisions of George Bush, or Dick Cheney, or Condoleezza Rice. No, Meredith and Matt probed the thought processes of — Scott McClellan.
“Why now, Scott? What do you think the president thinks of you? Will you two guys go fishing now? Why didn’t you speak up then to the president?
“Watching this, one could easily see how America would be led into a pre-emptive war based on lies. We have watchdogs like Meredith and Matt.”
n the wake of the revelations (or assertions, if you will) in Scott McClellan’s new book, “What Happened,” leading TV pundits and reporters have taken to the airways to admit that there was some truth in his charge that they were “complicit enablers” in the march to war in Iraq. Many others have denied all that. (Print reporters have been largely silent so far.) We’ve already posted at least half a dozen articles about this at E&P Online.
What is most appalling, however, is that it took McClellan’s book to produce a debate about this tremendously vital subject at all.
More than two months ago, I wrote here and elsewhere (and stated on the “NewsHour” on PBS) that I found it appalling that in the orgy of coverage of the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war back in March, the media reviewed every aspect of the war and pointed fingers everywhere, except at the media. There was almost no self-assessment, after five years of war.
I observed then that this revealed a disturbing, and continuing, mode of denial or defensiveness—or else a shocking failure to realize what the war has wrought as the greatest blunder and catastrophe in our recent history. I made this same point in The New York Times yesterday. And, naturally, before that, in my new book, So Wrong for So Long.
Via Jaden’s Steamy Kitchen, I discovered Alltop, which offers an easy way to browse a selection of blogs in various topics without using a reader and RSS:
We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — “aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, Muslim, celebrity gossip, military, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the headlines of the latest stories from dozens of sites and blogs.
You can think of an Alltop site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In other words, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation” by providing “aggregation without aggravation.”
And if you like that, check out their site Truemors, which has a similar goal (though different design) with regard to news items.
He gives a really high-class reason for our invasion of Iraq. Via ThinkProgress:
Later, of course, he continually said that “in six more months” things would be better, or “the next six months is critical” or decisive or whatever—so frequently did he trot our the “next six months” that Atrios defined “the next six months” as a Friedman Unit (or FU).
It wasn’t the White House directly, it was the news executives who censored the news and shaped the narrative in shockingly heavy-handed ways. Read Glenn Greenwald’s column today—it’s amazing. And it’s coming out only because of Scott McClellan’s book. Here’s one example Greenwald refers to:
Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why — though we want to know more about the world than ever — the US media is actually showing less. Eye-opening stats and graphs. 4.5 minutes. Watch.
An amazing number of people who should know better simply don’t understand how our system of government works. True, those people have never attempted to understand—so far as I can tell, they consult only their own wishes, and think the government should work to accommodate those wishes. But they will be writing about their “analysis” of events. Glenn Greenwald has a fine example of ignorance in action:
The Brookings Institutions’ Ben Wittes has an article in The New Republic decrying the decision of the California Supreme Court striking down that state’s discriminatory marriage law. Wittes’ criticism of the decision reflects the standard attack on the California Supreme Court, an attack that relies upon what can only be described as profound ignorance about how our system of government works.
The above graph is from an Washington Post article by Joe Matthews on how well the news is reported in Spanish and in English. From the article:
… On most nights here [in LA], the most timely, serious and civic-minded local news is not available on the Internet, the radio or any of the half-dozen English-language stations that broadcast nightly shows that purport to be newscasts. At 11 p.m. each night here, the best newscasts in the market appear on two Spanish-language channels, Univision’s flagship KMEX and Telemundo affiliate KVEA.
This might come as a surprise to English-speaking Americans, who hear about the Spanish-language TV news only when its on-air personalities engage in soap-opera-style antics, such as the KVEA anchor-reporter who became the mistress of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. But I’ve been watching these two Spanish newscasts and their English competitors on the local ABC, NBC and CBS affiliates, and the content doesn’t lie. If immigrants took Schwarzenegger’s advice and flipped off Spanish stations in favor of English-language news, they wouldn’t have nearly as good an idea of what was happening in their adopted city, state and country.
Take a recent night, after a typical day of Los Angeles news. English-language TV led with the weather (it was raining, which is not as unusual as you might think during an L.A. winter), then moved into splashy reports with dramatic footage of a gang shootout and possible hostage situation in a city neighborhood. Less than eight minutes into the newscast, trivia took over. The CBS affiliate’s third piece involved new questions about the death of Marilyn Monroe. The NBC affiliate dwelled on a hepatitis scare at a party for celebrities and swimsuit models, then attempted a brief consumer-oriented investigation about people’s need to replace their tires more frequently. The ABC affiliate gave five minutes to movies and entertainment, from an Oscar preview to a sit-down interview with Jon Stewart.
In Spanish, viewers got fewer soft features and more deeply reported, longer pieces. KMEX mentioned the gang shootout but provided far more context, interviewing local residents about recent crime and about how local businesses and schools were affected by an hours-long neighborhood lockdown as police searched for a suspect. KMEX also aired a detailed report on a major beef recall from a local firm, a couple of pieces on local politics (including a roundup of what city and county leaders had done that day) and a four-minute examination of key policy issues in the presidential campaign. The Oscars went unmentioned. KVEA’s half-hour newscast, ” En Contexto” (which means what it sounds like), was even more substantive. It gave a thorough review of local political and government news, then delved deeply into nearly 20 minutes of explanation of rising home foreclosures and mortgage problems. (Yes, Spanish-language viewers were callously left to figure out that it was raining all by themselves.)
This was no fluke. The next night, KMEX broke the news that the LAPD had more Latino officers than white officers, and KVEA ran a piece on the pay and working conditions of security guards. Meanwhile, their English-language rival KABC was finishing another Oscar preview and beginning a heartwarming story involving dogs.
Bruce Falconer is calling out the mainstream media for ignoring the disturbing testimony that dominated recent U.S. Senate hearings into corruption by private contractors in Iraq. The testimony came from whistleblowers Frank Cassaday, Linda Warren (both former employees of Kellogg, Brown and Root) and Barry Halley (who worked in Iraq for Worldwide Network Services, the Sandi Group and CAPE Environmental Management. They told stories of widespread theft of materials and supplies needed by soldiers, looting Iraqi treasures (in one case melting down Iraqi gold to make cowboy spurs), and a prostitution ring run by the manager of a “major defense contractor,” which led to the death of a colleague whose armored car was diverted “to transport prostitutes from Kuwait to Baghdad.” Cassaday, Warren and Halley say they were punished and harassed when they tried to alert their companies to these abuses. Aside from Mother Jones, the only news outlet to file a report on their testimony was David Ivanovich of the Houston Chronicle, although a transcript of the hearings is available on the Senate’s website.
Beginning on page 17 of this document, there’s a conversation about how to spin friendly fire incidents in the initial invasion phase of the Iraq war. Press officer LTC Kenneth McClellan notes:
“That’s what I like about the American press. The dirt clods used to come before and during the fight - - as they would tend to do internationally. Now they seem to come principally afterwards.”
The subject? How they’re going to explain why, after 3 White Sands studies on friendly fire issues, they’re still relying on “foil on plywood and glint tape on helmets” for air-to-ground IFF and why the three services purchased different IFF systems that didn’t work together.
Friendly fire incidents, the talking points pack issued to the pet analysts notes, killed 35 and wounded 72 U.S. troops. [Let's not even talk about British losses to u.S. fire, OK?] That’s an increase to 17% from WW2’s 12-14% and Vietnam’s 10-14%.
Callous bastard, this McClellan, eh? But he’s sure they’ve got a tame press - and thus the public are subjected to another kind of friendly fire, pushing the administration’s spin.
And that’s really the important point. The press tolerates this sort of stuff as a condition of access. Hey fellas: how about we remember that our responsibilities are to the public, and not to the administration?
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