Media Alert
It's a bit short notice, but I'll be on The Live Desk with Martha MacCallum at 1pm Eastern today.
March 12, 2007
March 05, 2007
Coulter's No-Brainer
If there had been any debate about whether Ann Coulter had already jumped the shark, I don't think there is anymore. She's a performance artist who injured her brand by going to far - like a juggler who moves from beanbags to knives and then, spurred on by the excitement of the bigger crowds drawn to feats of increasing danger, moves to flaming torches and then chainsaws before eventually losing concentration and lopping off a hand. No more serious juggling for you - the show is over.
Her comments were so fantastically gratuitous and off the mark they had the weird appearance of being calculated - as if she was daring conservatives to stand up and smack her down. They have - and in some ways she did conservatives a favor by making it so easy for them. It was a free-pass and a no-brainer for almost everyone.
February 28, 2007
Ode To Olbermann
Mark Binelli profiles Keith Olbermann in the new issue of Rolling Stone, and though it's supposed to be flattering I'm not sure it comes across that way.
According to Binelli, Olberman's upswing began when he delivered this six-and-a-half minute rant against Don Rumsfeld last August. Binelli writes:
Audience response was positive, so Olbermann began hitting the Bush administration even harder. Scathing commentaries, directly inspired by broadcast legend Edward R. Murrow, became a regular feature on Countdown. As in Network, momentarily losing it seems to have paid off.
Later in the story Binelli briefly touches on Olbermann's history at ESPN, noting that after five years he left "under a cloud of stories about how he'd become a nightmare to work with." And then there's this:
Last June, the Daily News printed e-mail exchanges between Olbermann and hostile viewers. The host advised one correspondent to "go f*** your mother" and another to "kill yourself." He also told a fan that fellow MSNBC host Rita Cosby was "nice but dumber than a suitcase of rocks." Though the e-mails were meant to embarrass Olbermann, they only served to underline what people already know and like about him.
The pattern seems clear: Olbermann has pretty much always been an ass and a jerk in private, and now he's being celebrated by Arianna Huffington and others on the left for being that way in public.
February 20, 2007
The Campos Insurgency
Letfy law prof Paul Campos attacks Glenn Reynolds, calling him "the right's Ward Churchill." Reynolds responds here. I suspect we'll be hearing from Hugh Hewitt as well at some point in the not too distant future.
February 19, 2007
Krugman's Correction Run Amok
A reader emails to point out something that slipped past me this morning:
As so often, the truth is not just different but the exact opposite of what Krugman wrote.If you had looked up what the NYT's 'readers' representatives' had to say about Krugman you would have found him sinning in exactly the way he so unjustly, as you point out, tries to foist on Giuliani.
Indeed, Krugman's column this morning deriding those who can't readily admit mistakes is particularly ironic given his own history in this regard. I'm speaking of the August 19, 2005 column on the 2000 election where Krugman wrongly asserted that:
the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election." Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore.
Instead of admitting his mistake and issuing a standard correction, Krugman opted to use his entire next column to try and "clarify" his comment - without ever acknowledging or apologizing for his error. The Times' public editor, Byron Calame, protested and pushed editorial page editor Gail Collins to force Krugman to print a correction. Krugman issued a correction in his next column, on August 26, but botched it by citing bad info from a Miami Herald study.
According to Collins, Krugman pleaded out of having to issue a another correction in print, and she agreed to let him publish it on the Times web site, which he did on September 2, though it was published separately and not at the bottom of his column. One month later Collins concluded this had been a mistake, writing that, "The correction should have run in the same newspaper where the original error and all its little offspring had appeared."
February 02, 2007
Cable Wars
Yesterday Richard Johnson of the NY Post's Page Six reported that "ratings-challenged CNN is flipping out over a taunting Fox News Channel ad that cattily compares the also-ran cable network's dapper newsman Anderson Cooper to Paris Hilton." You can see the crew from Fox & Friends having a good laugh at the ad - and mocking Cooper - in the clip below:
This morning on Drudge's site, it looks like CNN has tried to strike back with the following ad (it's animated but I've captured three of the stills):
December 22, 2006
The MSM & The Blogosphere
You'll want to read Rich Miller's column in the Sun-Times this morning. Miller takes on critics of the blogosphere (Rago, et al) and concludes:
This phenomenon is not going away, no matter how much it is dismissed or chastised. The Internet has been seized on as a democratizing tool by millions of perpetually democracy-hungry Americans. Bloggers should definitely be open to criticism by the mainstream media. That's America. But lumping everyone together with the crackpots is neither fair nor honest. And the fact that so many reporters and pundits can't seem to get the story right just proves the bloggers' point that too many of them don't know what they're talking about on everything else.
November 16, 2006
'Anonymice'
NY Times Manaing Editor Jill Abramson talks about the use of anonymous sources:
You raise the issue of anonymous sources, which have proliferated in Washington-based reporting over time. Inside the paper, we call the sources of these stories "anonymice." And yes, these government officials are sometimes people who want to scamper back into their holes so nobody knows they have talked to the press. It is very difficult for readers to assess why they should trust a quote from a government official who refuses to be named. Our reporters and editors know this, which is why in recent years we have tried to publish much more information about why a source won't let us use his or her name and what the motivation for talking to us might be. We have also become more aggressive about pushing our sources to let us name them and being less willing to grant anonymity in order to get an interview. We have established new rules that require editors to know more about the sourcing of their reporters' stories.Sometimes we actually decide to take a pass on getting access for an interview if it is off the record. In the past year, The Times passed up an opportunity to be part of a small group of reporters who went to the White House to talk to President Bush because the session was off the record. This was a difficult decision, because there is news value in reporters in hearing and seeing any president talk more informally, even if it is simply insight into how he frames his ideas. But in this case we believed the ground rules meant we had to deny our readers too much of the fruits of such a visit. Each of these cases presents a slightly different balancing test, between the possible gain to readers from anonymously given information and the fact that information presented anonymously means the reader will have a hard time making an independent judgment about credibility.
October 30, 2006
Penetrating the Media Cocoon
As closely as we're all watching the polls, it's surprising to hear someone such as Newsweek's Howard Fineman saying and writing that, "...an overwhelming majority of the American public wants Rummy out." He repeated that on Chris Matthews's show on Sunday morning.
Mr. Fineman has apparently missed the new Zogby poll released last Thursday. According to that poll, "Asked whether Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should be fired because of the situation in Iraq, 42% agreed, while 49% said he should not be fired. Another 8% said they were unsure." Which means Mr. Rumsfeld is about 10 points more popular than the president. It makes one wonder what it takes to penetrate the media's cocoon.
October 12, 2006
Web 2.0 and Disappearing YouTube Videos
In light of the disappearance of the Zucker video earlier this week lampooning Madeline Albright and the Clinton administration's approach to North Korea and the Harry Reid video experience today on YouTube this is an interesting article by Robert Cox in the Washington Examiner.
If you doubt the Internet is causing a sea change in politics, just ask "independent" Senate candidate Joe Lieberman, who came out on the wrong end of a blogger-fueled campaign for the Democratic nomination in Connecticut.That was no accident.
In the waning days of Howard Dean's abortive presidential campaign, I met many of the talented folks who played a role in turning the Dean Web site into a powerful fundraising tool that propelled an unknown candidate into the national spotlight. At various blogging conferences since, I have had the opportunity to observe many of these bright minds strategizing on how to best leverage the emerging world of blogs and other "social networking" services known as "Web 2.0" to advance their liberal political agenda and win elections.
Their common refrain: "We need to own the Internet the way the right owns talk radio."
A-List blogger and talk radio show host Hugh Hewitt's response was typical: "It doesn't matter who creates the tools used by bloggers, but what bloggers do with those tools."
When I suggested that ceding control of the major "nodes" in the online world to the left was a huge mistake, they were dismissive. It became clear they could not imagine one day finding themselves boxed out of what is fast becoming the biggest force in electoral politics.
Enter Fox News pundit, author and top-rated blogger Michelle Malkin. Last week she received notice from YouTube, the world's most popular video sharing service, that her video had been deemed "offensive." The result? Her account was terminated and her videos deleted.
YouTube refused to say why her videos were "offensive" and there was no avenue available to challenge the decision. Today, her videos are gone and her voice is suppressed on the most important video "node" on the Internet......
Malkin may have been the first casualty in the coming information war but she certainly will not be the last. Yet online conservative elites seem not to care. They fail to realize that voters are increasingly accessing news and information from these new media sources and that these sources are using their editorial discretion to publish and promote a liberal -- not conservative -- agenda.
The Media Scandal
Why is it that none of the major television networks or newspapers have managed to pay attention to the biggest real scandal of the 2006 campaign season, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's real estate shenanigans? According to yesterday's AP report, Reid pocketed a $1.1 million windfall on the sale of some Las Vegas property he didn't own at the time of the sale. This makes Hillary Clinton's futures trading venture look like amateur hour. And it's time for conservatives to act because the biggest scandal is that the media are burying the story.
According to the AP report, the deal was put together by Reid's longtime friend Jay Brown, "...a former casino lawyer whose name surfaced in a major political bribery trial this summer and in other prior organized crime investigations." Apparently Brown structured the deal so that Reid could transfer his ownership interest to Brown without disclosing it to the public. And here's the kicker: Reid didn't disclose the sale on his financial disclosure forms filed with the Senate.
Not to make too big a deal of this, but falsifying that report - as Reid apparently did - is a federal crime. Under Title 18 US Code Section 1001, it's a false official statement. For which Reid could be sent to jail. If you're looking for this on tonight's network news or on the front page of tomorrow's New York Times (next to the newest revival of the Foley minutiae) you won't find it. There's ample time for Mark Foley, the discredited generals' revolt, and even the comprehensively discredited Lancet report on civilian casualties in Iraq. But cover a real scandal, with real misconduct that's punishable under federal criminal law?
Just imagine if this were Bill Frist, not Harry Reid. Calls for his resignation from Senate leadership (probably the Senate itself) would be loud and long, the Senate Ethics Committee would have already convened an investigation, the FBI would have been called in to verify the deeds and signatures and the 527 Media carrion crows would be in full cry. There would be front-page stories about connections to organized crime and lead items on the evening news about how this will sink the Dems' chances in November. But it isn't Frist, or any other Republican. It's Reid, on the verge of what the media hope is his tenure as Senate Majority Leader. So there's no reason to cover the story, right? The media culture says that's so.
Every talk show host should be booking the editors of the NYT, WaPo and LA Times, the news directors of CBS, ABC and NBC to ask why they aren't covering this story. Every columnist should be calling them for interviews. Just ask, "why aren't you covering this story?"
October 06, 2006
Media Alert (s)
I'll be on Hannity & Colmes tonight (9p-10p Eastern) along with Scott Rasmussen to discuss some of the latest Senate polling.
Also, Sunday evening I'll be on Beyond the Beltway with Bruce DuMont (7p-9p Eastern) talking more Election 2006. I've been told Joe Mathews, staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and author of "The People's Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy," will be one of the other guests, so it should be interesting.
October 02, 2006
Mixing a Liberal Cocktail
One of the benefits of being part of a newspaper's editorial page is that writers almost never have to sign their name to anything they write - no matter how wrong, intellectually dishonest, or just plain stupid it might be.
That's something Hartford Courant editorial writer David Medina might want to reflect upon after putting his John Hancock on this unintentionally comical op-ed appearing in the paper this morning which is one part ode to Hugo Chavez:
A child living in the slums of Caracas today probably stands a better chance of becoming a doctor than a child attending public school in Hartford. The Venezuelan child also eats better and lives longer and more comfortably than at any time in his country's recent history.
One part rebuke to Democrats:
Instead of criticizing Chavez, Democrats should only hope to have someone as colorful and daring as Chavez running for president in 2008. Had they done so in 2000 and 2004, they'd probably be running the country right now.
And two parts pure Bush derangement syndrome:
For the record, President Bush is not the devil.He might want to torture and maim suspected terrorists in defiance of the Geneva Conventions, but he is not the devil.
He might want the FBI, the CIA and the NSA to listen in on your most private conversations without the benefit of a court order, but, no, President Bush is not the devil.
He might want to gut the nation's affirmative-action laws and deck the entire Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with oil rigs, but even those actions, evil as they may seem, wouldn't make President Bush the devil.
Deceitful Democrats, on the other hand ...
And this is one of the people mixing up the unsigned editorials at the Courant every day.
September 26, 2006
The Washington Times on GOP Optimisim
The Washington Times offered an article today about improving GOP prospects that, to me anyway, seemed long on conclusions and short on evidence. Their thesis:
There has been a palpable shift in the mood in Washington in recent weeks. No longer are insiders in both parties sharing predictions of a Democratic rout of Republicans.Some on both sides had expected an election debacle for the Republicans, driven by the Iraq war, high gas prices and the perception that a Republican-led Washington can neither shoot nor spend straight.
Now those perceptions have changed.
First off, let me just note the strategic use of metaphor in this lead. This is metaphor-as-bet-hedging, which is typical of the press. No longer is there going to be a "rout" of Republicans. No longer are people expecting an "election debacle." This is interesting because -- what exactly is a "rout"? Is it 15 or 30 seats? Or 50 or 70? What is an "election debacle"? Is it that the GOP merely loses control? Or is it maybe that they lose control so badly that they cannot reacquire it in 2008? Who knows! What we do know is that nobody can point to anything specific in this article on November 8 and declare that the Times was wrong! Why? Because the Times has chosen to couch its thesis only in metaphor. One thing that has turned me sour about the press and its pundits is this kind of strategic use of the metaphor -- it subtly and quietly introduces ambiguity where clarity is possible and preferable. I think that this happens because no news outlet wants to put itself on the line, but they also do not want to appear as though they are not putting itself on the line. So -- they hedge their bets by way of metaphor.
Anyway, I will get off the literary high horse and get on with the argument. As I said, the evidence that the Times provides does not seem to me to justify the enthusiasm among DC Republicans.
For instance, here is something offered up by Ken Mehlman that the Times accepts without question.
Comparing the 2006 midterm elections to previous major shifts, Mr. Mehlman says he sees none of the signs that preceded those landslides. In 1974, following the Watergate scandal, there was a surge in the Democratic primary-voter turnout and a decline in Republican voter turnout. The reverse was true before the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress.So far this year, there has been no indication of a Democratic surge. In 36 of 39 primaries, the Democratic turnout has been lower than the average of the past 20 years. Only Connecticut, North Dakota and Vermont had higher-than-average Democratic turnouts this year.
The Times goes on to imply, though not by way of more Mehlman quotations, that this indicates that Democrats are not activating their base voters as well as they did in 1974. There are two major problems with this. First, they do not need to. They Democrats "only" need 15 seats. Provided that base amplification has a linear relationship with final seat swings, they need to amp the base by a little less than 1/3 the amplification of 1974 or 1994, all else being equal. The Democrats netted 48 seats in 1974, the GOP netted 52 in 1994. The Democrats only need 15 this time around. So -- what the Times notes might actually be consistent with a Democratic takeover.
Second, the argument that low primary turnout is a sign of a relatively placid base does not square with what we know about primary elections. Primaries do not tend to have high turnout because voters are so excited for November that they just have to go out and vote in March. They are not like football preseason. They tend to have high turnout because there are competitive races that attract voter attention. And competitive races in the primary tend to occur when more than one strategic, high quality politician see a good chance at actually getting into Congress, and throw their hats into the ring.
So -- why were Democratic primary races relatively uncompetitive this year? There are at least two reasons, one that favors the GOP and one that favors the Democrats. To the GOP's advantage, there are not many open seats that they have to defend. Strategic, high quality politicians most frequently come out of the woodwork for open seats because they know how hard it is to take on incumbents. Fewer open seats means fewer potential pickup opportunities for the Democrats -- good news for the GOP. To the Democrats advantage, the party can and does play a role in encouraging/discouraging candidates to or from running, and it appears that the national Democrats have done a good job at this. They succeeded in (a) getting good people in about 25 races and (b) helping clear a path for these people through the primaries by discourating competitive, but inferior, candidates from offering a challenge to the recruited candidates. Now -- the Democrats have suffered some embarassments in the recruitment/derecruitment game, notably in CA 11, KY 03 and NH 02. However, this seems to me to be explicable by their unprecedented activity in pre-primary maneuvering. If your failure rate is 15% of the time, you are going to have a lot more failures when you try 50 times than when you try 10 times. If your successes are not mentioned -- and, in this case, they are not because a successful recruitment/derecruitment will have the appearance of the party not being involved -- it will look as though you are stumbling when you really are not.
Taking a step back, this Times article is very peculiar to me. The Times is certainly a right-leaning paper. But right-leaning news outlets, beyond talk radio at least, do not seem to me to be historically guilty of being pollyannaish about the Republicans (I think the left-leaning ones like The New York Times are typically pollannaish about Democratic prospects, which in turn actually damages Democratic prospects). So -- the Times is clearly picking up on a vibe that the GOP elites seem to feel, but do not really justify it well at all. This means one of either two things (or possibly a mixture of both): (a) there is no justification to the vibe, and modified GOP expectations will yield disappointment on November 8; (b) there is some justification to the vibe, but the data that is driving this expectation is not yet publicly available.
I am not sure which it is. This is one of the drawbacks of living in Wrigleyville. I am not in any kind of loop. Of course -- if you are like me and think that separation from the center of power enables one to analyze power more clearly, overall one is better off being a stone's throw from the Cubs home than the Nationals home.
September 23, 2006
Bill Clinton and Osama Bin Laden
The two big stories today seem to be the rumor swirling around that Osama bin Laden has died from typhoid or a serious "water-borne illness." Time is reporting that:
Fugitive Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, believed to be on the run in rugged terrain in the Afghan-Pakistani border region since the September 11 attacks five years ago, has become seriously ill and may have already died, a Saudi source tells TIME, echoing earlier reports in the French media.The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, says that Saudi officials have received multiple credible reports over the last several weeks that Bin Laden has been suffering from a water-borne illness. The source believes that there is a "high probability" that Bin Laden has already died from the disease, but stressed that Saudi officials have thus far received no concrete evidence of Bin Laden's death.
"This is not a rumor," says the source. "He is very ill. He got a water-related sickness and it could be terminal. There are a lot of serious facts about things that have actually happened. There is a lot to it. But we don't have any concrete information to say that he is dead."
The Strata-Sphere has a good roundup on the bin Laden rumor.
The other story that is generating interest in political circles is former Preisdent Bill Clinton's interview with Chris Wallace for tomorrow's FOX News Sunday. You can watch Wallace comment on the interview here. The transcript makes compelling reading and Clinton goes off on more than one occasion:
WALLACE: ...but the question is why didn't you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?CLINTON: OK, let's talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this...arises. I'm being asked this on the FOX network...ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 911 commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 commission report. I think it's very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn't do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush's neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn't have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn't do enough said that I did too much. Same people.....
WALLACE: Do you think you did enough sir?
CLINTON: No, because I didn't get him
WALLACE: Right...
CLINTON: But at least I tried. That's the difference in me and some, including all the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try and they didn't..... I tired. So I tried and failed. When I failed I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke... So you did FOX's bidding on this show. You did you nice little conservative hit job on me. But what I want to know..
WALLACE: We asked.... Do you ever watch Fox News Sunday sir?
CLINTON: I don't believe you ask them that.
WALLACE: We ask plenty of questions of...
CLINTON: You didn't ask that did you? Tell the truth.
WALLACE: About the USS Cole?
CLINTON: tell the truth.
WALLACE: I...with Iraq and Afghanistan there's plenty of stuff to ask.
CLINTON: Did you ever ask that? You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch is going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers for supporting my work on Climate Change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you'd spend half the time talking about. You said you'd spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7 billion dollars plus over three days from 215 different commitments. And you don't care.
WALLACE: But President Clinton... We were going to ask half the question about it. I didn't think this was going to set you off on such a tear.
The vaunted Clinton PR machine seems to have lost a few steps this past moth. Their attack on ABC and the "Path to 9/11" only highlighted the exact stuff concerning the Clinton administration's approach to bin Laden they wanted to play down. And then here with the FOX News Sunday interview Clinton is only going to generate more focus on exactly what he did or didn't do as President to get bin Laden.
Should be interesting television tomorrow morning.
September 01, 2006
Kohl Is Key
Herb Kohl might well be described as one of the most low key members of the Senate. Today John Nichols writes that Kohl might also be the key to Internet neutrality.
Olbermann's Rant
I just watched the Olbermann video that Tom posted yesterday. It is simply stunning in its intellectual cluelessness and dishonesty. In what has to be the most bizarre attempt at an analogy with the 1930's I have ever seen, Olbermann tries to make the case that the "cowboy," "unilateralist," and "war-mongering" Bush administration is really the equivalent of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement government in the 1930's. His Chamberlain analogy is historical malpractice of the highest magnitude. Just stunning. Does Olbermann really think Americans are that stupid?
There are plenty of rational criticisms to be made of President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld's policy on the war. Senator Joseph Biden wrote a fair and very reasoned op-ed in last Thursday's Washington Post. George Will has been a vocal critic on one corner of the right. Bill Kristol and John McCain are no fans of Rumsfeld's stewardship. But unlike Olbermann, they all make real arguments and offer alternatives, and thus can be taken seriously. Keith Olbermann can not.
August 29, 2006
A Thousand Words
This shot of Rita Cosby and John Mark Karr perfectly captures the distasteful nature of today's tabloid media culture:
(Photo: Jack Dempsey, Associated Press)
August 28, 2006
Tribune Reporter Jailed
Another story in the local paper that deserves national attention: Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent Paul Salopek has been jailed in the Sudan and accused of being a spy.
August 24, 2006
The Post's Priorities
George Allen's apology to S.R. Sidarth gets A1 treatment in today's Washington Post. Is it really one of the six most important stories in the world today, or does the Post have its priorities a bit out of whack?
August 19, 2006
Kudlow Radio at 12:00 ET
August 18, 2006
More Fauxtography?
The Miami Herald reports on bloggers who are challenging the recently released photographcas of a recuperating Castro.
August 16, 2006
Are Pinch's Days Numbered at the NY Times?
Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker has done a great job chronicling the disastrous leadership "Pinch" Sulzberger has brought to the New York Times these past few years. In his piece today he suggests that Michael Wolff's "Panic on 43rd Street" in the latest Vanity Fair is the beginning of the Left's realization that Pinch is driving the paper into irrelevancy.
Anyone who understands the importance of the Times in setting the agenda for the entire media establishment realizes that without the Times to lead the way, lesser media properties in broadcasting and publishing might stray away from the left wing party line. Fox News has done better than any other media startup in recent memory by openly grazing in the conservative meadows. Despite intense derision by the Times and others in the Left establishment, it has prospered far more than they.....The Times is steadily becoming damaged goods. Its prestige is not what it once was. Jayson Blair, Howell Raines, Judith Miller, and other mere employees have done plenty of damage. Just last weekend (no doubt too late for Wolff's deadline), current executive editor Bill Keller made the jaw-dropping admission that he had lied to his readers about his decision not to publish a story on the NSA telephone intercept program before the 2004 presidential election, a matter of great concern to the Left. Even worse, Keller had a guilty conscience about the lie, but did not fess up until caught in an inconsistency and questioned by the paper's public editor, Byron Calame.....
Sparing his readers the gory details of the business decline of the New York Times Company, Wolff cuts to the chase: the paper version of the Times is dying, and there is so far no evident way for the expensive-to-produce content to be viable as an internet publication. His readers are warned that there will be a future without their daily dose of conventional Left wisdom. He goes so far as to predict it will be:
Just another newspaper company coming to its natural end.Vanity Fair readers are now informed that their favorite newspaper is doomed under the helmsmanship of Pinch.And, anyway, how do you exactly define "end"?
You mean NO New York Times? Nada? Darkness?
Well, yes, in effect.
I don't know that I would describe the New York Times as doomed, but there is no question the paper has been colossally mismanaged the last 5 years. Very ironic for a paper that editorializes ad nauseum about the Bush administration's incompetence as the country clips along at over 3% GDP growth, under 5% unemployment, and almost five years out from 9/11 without a substantive terrorist attack at home, while NY Times Company stock languishes near 5 year lows.
August 14, 2006
Gore Just Misses - Again
Interesting article in the San Francisco Chronicle comparing the massive popularity of YouTube with Al Gore's media venture Current TV. The nut:
Current "caught the (viewer-created content) trend early, but it is kind of surfing by them," said John Higgins, business editor at Broadcasting & Cable magazine, a trade publication for the television industry. "These guys (at Current) had all the right ideas and all the same machinery in place that YouTube did, but they didn't quite do it. Lighting struck 10 feet to the left of them.
August 08, 2006
Institutional Breakdown at Reuters
A reader who says he spent more than a decade working as a news photographer for major media outlets in Washington D.C. sends along the following comments on the Reuters/Hajj fiasco:
Firstly, the Reuters PR person's comment that Adnan Hajj was trying to "remove dust marks" is disingenuous on the face of it. Virtually every wire service photographer today shoots digitally -- there are no "dust marks" to remove. It's quite simply impossible. Secondly, his alteration of both photos (the smoke and the aircraft flares) from what I have seen was sloppy and amateurish -- it's clear he just coarsly cloned bits of the image over and over again.This causes me to wonder two things: Firstly, while cleaning or repairing an image fault may be permitted (although, for example, a photographer in North Carolina was just fired by his newspaper for simply making the backround of a photo richer in color -- a change he claimed was necessary because the camera failed to capture the true quality of the color he saw), this can NEVER be done by cloning, especially by cloning significant chunks of picture, as Hajj did.
Secondly, where were the editors? I have read that Hajj was apparently filing directly into the Reuters World desk, bypassing the Beirut bureau, but even this is no excuse. If the pictures I have seen were indeed the photos distributed, they are clumsy and obvious manipulations, and any desk editor worth his salt should have seen them for what they were INSTANTLY.
Next, filing a deliberately misleading caption (for example, identifying flares as missiles or bombs) should be a firing action. The only excuse Hajj could have was that he couldn't tell the difference, which would lead one to wonder why he is trusted to cover this fighting in the first place.
BTW, the "time stamp" thing on the Qana pictures is a spurious argument. If it means what I think (the time marker for when the picture was transmitted to clients from the wire service), the time on the picture is meaningless. Editors would transmit the best picture first, then continue sending pictures from the event in order of importance and quality, not in the order they were shot. They might even transmit a picture hours or days later at the request of a client.
I know that there is a big difference between covering the White House, as I did, and Beirut, where the men with guns are not as polite as the Secret Service. However, there are two inviolable rules here:
1. You've got to be able to trust your stringers. They are reporters too, trusted to transmit the FACTS, not what they think or what they believe, but what simply, actually happened.
2. Your editors -- at every level, from the guy simply running the desk to the big guy incharge of all photos -- are there to watch for this stuff.
August 03, 2006
There They Go Again - Jed Babbin
It's fascinating how the press first contrives a story and then its herd mentality takes over and runs with it, hyping it to the skies regardless of the truth. The latest exercise began Wednesday afternoon at Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld's press conference. After someone from Reuters first posed the question, CNN's Barbara Starr asked it again: why Mr. Rumsfeld turned down a Senate Armed Services Committee request to testify at a special hearing on Iraq on Thursday. Rumsfeld answered that because he was making himself available to the whole senate answering questions on the war that same morning he'd determined that he couldn't do both. It went all down hill from there because the Dems know the earlier session Thursday won't be before the tv cameras. They want bread and circuses, not answers to questions.
Lolita Baldor, an AP reporter, wrote a breathless piece in which she said Rumsfeld's action was, "...raising a new furor on Capitol Hill over the three-year-old conflict." The furor is limited in her story to a chest-deep harrumph from Sen. Kennedy ("America is in deep trouble in Iraq, yet Secretary Rumsfeld refuses to explain and defend his policies in full public view tomorrow") and a nice letter from Hillary asking Mr. Rumsfeld to change his mind. No Republicans - not even John Warner who could easily be confused for a Dem - were quoted.
From here, it's going to follow the usual pattern. The New York Times will have a Doug Jehl story about how Rumsfeld is hiding from the devastating questions he'd face (the secret list of which will appear in Jehl's story). That will precede MoDo's Sunday vespers session about why we need a female SecDef), Chris Matthews will have Sen. Dodd on to say that the Pentagon is an Augean Stable that needs to be flushed out, WaPo's Dana Milbank will have a front page above-the-fold piece on Senate Dems' outrage and Katie Couric will be overheard on a shuttle flight shouting into her cell phone about how she needs to get on the air early to make sure this story is treated with the seriousness it deserves. (And while all this media talent was spinning up its macrodander, Rumsfeld decided to show up after all. He's just mischevious enough to do that just to see the media continue to spin.) But how do stories like this get concocted?
The answer isn't available from AP. I called night bureau chief Robert Glass who, when I asked him about it, sounded as calm as Leo Bloom after Max Bialystock screamed at him. (He told me to send my inquiry to editor Alan Fram. I did and have not received an answer last night or today.)
Where's the Dem war room that is running this show? How is the Dem spin machine driving these reporters so relentlessly? Who is the Dem Moriarty at the center of the web that pulls the media in and manipulates it so? Or is it, as we expect, just Teddy and Chris Dodd chugging scotch in some back room in the Capitol and dialing random numbers? Stay tuned. This is gonna be fun to watch. And please do watch. Something tells me you won't be seeing any Republicans on the nightly news asking why the Dems are demanding we cut and run. It's not like the Dems have anything else to say.
July 27, 2006
What Liberal Media? No, Really ...
CNN sticks the knife in at the end of a story about the Democrats' "Six in '06" agenda unveiling.
Here are the closing two paragraphs of their story:
At a meeting with reporters at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee headquarters, Democratic leaders unveiled a Web video with clips of the president saying "stay the course" interspersed with graphics such as "gas prices at an all time high."They played the video on a small laptop in the front of the room full of reporters because, they said, they couldn't find a screen projector.
Ouch.
July 24, 2006
Media Alert
I'll be on Kudlow & Company later this afternoon (roughly 5:35 eastern) along with Peter Beinart and Kevin Rennie discussing Joe Lieberman and more.