The headline might leave a salty, perhaps putrid, taste in your mouth, but Greg Sargent’s blog post “Journalists Cheerfully Urinating On Senate Bill’s ‘Ideological’ Critics” makes a good point.

In his post, Sargent takes the media to task for lumping all liberal opponents of the diluted Senate bill into one category.

“It would really be nice if certain Beltway journalists could get it into their heads that the Senate bill’s critics on the left have actual substantive differences with the bill’s proponents, and are not motivated solely by ‘ideology,’ whatever the hell that means.”

Sargent’s upset. Read his blog post.

Today’s tweets worth mentioning.
In true Tweet-fashion these updates are not necessarily linked as a conversation, but more like random screaming non sequiturs.

WAR
@svendarko said: Obama’s “law of love” is to bomb others because we can’t figure out what else to do. #nobel #peaceprize http://bit.ly/783ORY

@allnitewatchman responded: @svendarko Get with the program. There’s a lot of defense contractors that are pretty happy about this surge in Afghanistan.

CLIMATE CHANGE
@dannymcle @JustPlainBill But since you mention it, CO2 is toxic to humans. Don’t believe me? Try some, please. http://bit.ly/7DgCxs #tcot #p2

HEALTH CARE #hcr

@now7grandkids TO HELL WITH NORTH DAKOTA& TRAITOR KENT CONRAD. THE ENTIRE STATE HAS A HALF MILLION PEOPLE&THEY2 WANT PO. RT.

@penngator Well, at least I’ll only have to wait until I’m 55 instead of 65 to get decent healthcare. #hcr #p2

@Baconmints thank imaginary jesus that johhny mccain isn’t allowed to fuck over the American people from the oval office. #tcot #p2 #GOP #hcr

JOURNALISM
This one’s sad.
@panopticon13 E&P closing seems like a significant milestone in the transition from print to online.

DUMB
Today’s tweet not worth mentioning but so dumb I can’t resist.
@kirkland4 i have a cure for obesity. extreme obesity.
@kirkland4 @svendarko you’re living in a dreamworld my friend. where’s your proof. look at your own criminal govt. and the people that voted them in.
Editor’s note: @kirkland4 supposedly lives in Arizona. Last time we checked that’s still part of the US. It’s your government too @kirkland4. There’s no context for his “dreamworld” comment.

@BDBOY55 Obama hates the middle class !!! but why

@cbdooley Jim DeMint for Senate Majority Leader 2010. #tcot #rino #teaparty

@JTS_1957 RT @alexashrugged: 44% say they’d rather have Bush back than Obama! http://bit.ly/5yKBE4 I TOLD people, be careful what you wish for! #tcot

@ResistTyranny “Death is softer by far than #tyranny.” ~Aeschylus #tcot #ocra #sgp

@thestickman2000 #tcot Obama is the worst President ever in my lifetime. Worse than Carter, Nixon, Bush Jr. Just the worst!

I can’t believe it. Well, I can believe it, but it’s still a little shocking that Editor and Publisher is going to cease publishing at the end of the year. They’ve been going for 125 years.

The E&P Web site is cranking 100,000 uniques a month. That’s not a ton of traffic, but for a niche industry Web site, that’s pretty good. I can’t believe that the Nielsen Co. can’t figure out how to make some money with that traffic. My guess is that they can, but for Nielson Co. it’s small potatoes and not worth it.

And so the fracturing of the publishing industry continues. It’s really rough right now being a journalist, but I think things will shake out in a couple of years and we’ll all be better off. I just wish food wasn’t so expensive.

Oh well, good luck E&P staffers, you did good work and you’ll be missed.

Here’s the farewell story.

Wall Street Journal Front Page Screen Shot

We have a problem. It’s a big problem, and it’s only going to get worse. The public record is being tampered with, subverted and in some cases destroyed entirely.

Last week I was bumping around the Web and I found a blurb on the Wall Street Journal about a plagiarized story. Evidently, the Journal ran a piece called “Homeward Bound” by freelance writer Mona Sarika, and portions of the story were either fabricated or stolen from other publications. In other words, it was a crap story and an embarrassment, so the Journal took the story off its Web site. It’s gone. It doesn’t exist anymore on the Wall Street Journal Web site.

But that’s bullshit. That story only existed online. There is no printed public record made of that story and now it’s gone forever.

I don’t care about the actual story itself. It was a plagiarized pile of donkey dung, but I do care about maintaining the public record. So I went to Google, found a cached version of the story and published it here.

By deleting the story from their Web site, the Wall Street Journal sanitized a very embarrassing situation.

So in 10 years, if someone is researching the accuracy of online media, for instance, that story won’t be there. Sure if you go to the Web address for that story, you’ll see a little blurb about the incident, but you can’t read the story. And how long will the Journal even maintain that link? One year? Maybe two?

The bottom line is that if a news organization publishes anything, it should stay published. If there’s a problem with the story, update the story and note the changes. If the story is a plagiarized pile of horse hockey, then put your we-screwed-up-big-time blurb right at the top of the story to let readers know how badly you failed. But no matter what happens, don’t delete a story from the public record.

Fox News and the Obama administration don’t get along. White House officials have accused the cable news network of being an extension of the Republican Party. Fox News commentators fire back that Obama is a communist seeking to destroy the country by turning the US into a Chairman Mao style fascist state.

Let’s set aside the fact that 99 percent of all cable news, no matter which network you watch, is worthless. It’s a mix of “balloon boy” stories and opinion journalism masquerading as news. The stories that are covered are often, wrong, incomplete or in the case of “balloon boy” irrelevant.

But what about Fox News? Should the White House be telling journalists to stop paying attention to the network with the highest ratings?

One White House official told Politico that the ACORN story only became big news because Fox News covered it “breathlessly for weeks on end.”

According to the Politico story the White House official cautioned journalists about following Fox’s lead.

“Let’s make sure that we keep perspective on what are the most important stories, and what’s being driven by a network that has a perspective. Being able to make that point has been important.”

Some journalists and media critics have said that a direct attack on a specific news organization can have a chilling effect. That is, of course, if journalists take their marching orders from the White House. Otherwise, it seems unlikely to have any such impact.

But nonetheless some veteran reporters are concerned.

“I can never remember a White House urging news organizations to boycott other news organizations. That strikes me as unprecedented,” Thomas DeFrank told Politico. DeFrank has covered eight presidents and is currently the bureau chief at the New York Daily News.

However, it’s worth noting the dramatic shift in journalism over the last five years. The old notion of objectivity has been tossed overboard for the more Hunter S. Thompson gonzo-style reporting. Whether that’s good or bad – it’s here to stay. And as anyone who’s watched Fox’s news coverage, they’re all for it.

And let’s not forget that the battle between the Fox News and the White House is more about politics than the sanctity of journalism. The White House rightly sees Fox News as the enemy. When you look at their coverage during the Bush administration, there’s was nary a word about a White House that kept a tight lid on its message. And anytime a news organization ran a scathing story about the Bush administration, it was labeled a radical left-wing propaganda machine by Fox News commentators.

But now, Glenn Beck – the biggest loudmouth on Fox News – can’t stop talking about Obama’s Mao-ist agenda to silence journalists. He’s outraged that the president would try to “control the media.” Evidently this is the first time Beck has paid attention to presidential politics. There’s never been a president who didn’t try to control the media – it’s all part of the game.

The reason the White House is taking shots at Fox News is to garner some love from their base. Liberals are dismayed by Obama’s lack of progress on nearly every issue he campaigned on: Gitmo, the Iraq War, don’t-ask-don’t-tell, health care reform, the economy, the environment, transparency and the list goes on. This attack on Fox News is an attempt to show progressives that the Obama administration has the stones to stand up and fight. The question is whether this is a fight worth fighting.

–
Source: Politico “White House: Media shouldn’t follow Fox” by Josh Gerstein and Mike Allen Oct. 20, 2009

TIME’s cover story with Glenn Beck is a grotesque attempt at journalism. The magazine is hoping to ride Beck’s coattails in pandering to right-wing extremists. Not that it’s surprising, the bulk of mainstream media spend most of their time chasing the latest fad rather than doing honest journalism. It’s sad but expected.

Read Greg Mitchell’s analysis of the Beck story in TIME
The TIME story about Glenn Beck

I wrote a story a few days ago in which I said that the problem with journalism is that it’s controlled by corporations that breed incompetence, but I was wrong.

It’s not that mainstream media journalists are incompetent, it’s that they willfully seek to distort the public record for the purposes of lining the pockets of men like Rupert Murdoch and the other fat cats who control the vast majority of media in the US. The goal is to maintain capitalism, capitalists and the spheres of power that support the moneyed interests.

This explains why there was virtually no coverage of previous FCC rule changes which further consolidated the media and cemented the power brokers in their seats of influence. This explains why news reports rarely, if ever, highlight the real opposition to things that corporate capitalists want or don’t want.

In today’s Washington Post, there’s a story about health care reform which clearly paints the so-called town hall protesters as mainstream when they so obviously are not. People carrying assault weapons, hanging people in effigy and shouting down politicians and fellow citizens to prevent any real discussion of health care reform to occur does not represent the mainstream, but if you read the Post story you’d think so.

And this is nothing new. News publishers have always sought to maintain the power structure in the US, because they are an integral part of that structure.

And so the bogus notion of objectivity is a ruse to create the illusion that all sides of the story are covered fairly, but they aren’t and have never been. Just look at the coverage leading to the war in Vietnam, World War II, World War I and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In none of these cases did The New York Times, or any mainstream news organization, take a critical look at the root causes of any of those wars before, during or after.

All of these wars, like all war, was about control, money and power. Whether you supported the war effort or not, none of them were fought for peace because claiming war is peace makes no sense, yet that’s how it was presented to the public and the public ate it up with a spoon.

As a journalist, and someone who truly cares about role of journalism in a viable representative democracy, I’m ashamed to even associate myself with this industry.

journalism

If you ask the founder of the conservative Media Research Center what he thinks of the media, L. Brent Bozell III will say that news coverage has an overt liberal bias. If you ask me, that’s bunk, the reason journalism sucks has nothing to do with political ideology, but just plain old incompetence.

The root of the problem is corporate consolidation of the media. The bean-counters expect 20 percent profit from an industry that in a good year can turn out 5 percent, maybe ten.

The only way to get those huge profits is to track the least expensive and most outrageous “news” story. Last month’s town hall meeting coverage provides a perfect example.

Certainly there was plenty of reasonable debate taking place in town hall meetings everywhere, but that’s boring. The cheap thrills were found in taping the wackos representing a small percentage of the population, giving the impression that there’s widespread outrage over health care reform. There isn’t.

Bozell’s argument for a liberal bias in the media holds no water. Leading to the war with Iraq, the “liberal” media duckwalked in lockstep with the Bush administration and did nothing to challenge the president, in fact, they paved the path to war by not providing a valuable check on the Executive. The New York Times and the Washington Post issued apologies for their failure after-the-fact.

But none of these anecdotal examples of conservative bias proves the media has any particular bias at all. What it means is that the news media is grotesquely incompetent. Sure there are overtly biased “news” organizations on cable TV. Fox is obviously a right-wing propaganda machine and MSNBC is now unabashedly liberal (it’s worth noting that back in 2003 MSNBC was clearly ideologically right-of-center).

If the responsibility of a journalist is to provide all sides to a story (yes, sometimes there are more than two), there can be no doubt that the news media, particularly broadcast news, is utterly failing. It’s failing because telling all sides of a particular story is difficult, expensive and not always the most exciting to watch on TV.

So to get viewers or readers – to make lots of money – journalists are in a race to the bottom and our supposedly representative form of government is failing. Extremists, liberal and conservative, know that if they scream loud enough and burn enough people in effigy, someone will point a camera at them and they’ll dominate the news cycle – creating the illusion of widespread outrage.

It is interesting that conservatives are far more effective at changing policy with this strategy than liberals. My guess is that while most journalists are politically left of center, most executives that run these corporate media conglomerates are not. So we’re left with a corporate-controlled incompetent news media that is failing as the unelected fourth branch of government. To solve this problem, the FCC must reinstate rules about media ownership to break up media conglomerates and put the power of the press back in the hands of the people rather than the MBAs.

Chris Wallace August 2009

Andrew Sullivan makes an interesting point in his column today about the so-called journalists at Fox News.

“When future historians ask how the United States came not only to practice torture but to celebrate it and treat torturers as heroes, a special place in hell among the journalists who embraced and justified it should be reserved for Chris Wallace.”

I don’t know if Wallace will burn in hell, but there’s no doubt history will not look favorably on the Chris Wallace’s working for Fox News. However, the same can be said about a lot of the mainstream news media. Corporate controlled news organizations go out of their way to toe the corporate line. That explains why they failed to cover changes to the FCC encouraging further corporate consolidation of news organizations. That also explains why the majority of mainstream media duck-walked in lockstep with Bush and Cheney into the war in Iraq.

Chris Wallace August 2009

Is MSNBC any better than Fox News?

During the fervor following 9/11, MSNBC made a concerted effort to go as far to the right as they could. Now that Democrats control the White House and Congress, MSNBC has swerved hard to the left.

But we’re talking about cable news, which, well, it isn’t really news. So when Sullivan condemns Chris Wallace to hell for his lack of journalistic integrity, it’s a false claim because Wallace is no more a journalist than is Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Wolf Blitzer or Lou Dobbs.

–
Check out Sullivan’s column Chris Wallace, A Teenage Girl Interviewing The Jonas Brothers at the Atlantic

The Media Research Center produced “special report” on the media coverage of Pres. Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office. Not surprisingly the ultra-conservative organization found an overwhelming liberal bias favoring Obama’s socialist-liberal-commie-craphole policies – I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea.

According to the report, not one reporter called Obama a “liberal” or a “socialist.” In fact, the Center found that “the networks lavished good press on every major initiative of the early Obama administration.”

The Center’s raison d’etre is to prove that the press is a bunch of hippies running around trying to take everyone’s guns, murder the elderly and promote atheism, or is it satanism? I don’t know where they got the idea that liberals support the murder of the elderly and sick, but here it is.

Of course when George W. Bush was president, the Center’s report claims that the press doggedly scrutinized every decision he made – holding his little carpetbagging feet to the fire. I don’t remember it that way. I remember everyone, particularly the press, duckwalking in lockstop with Bush and Cheney into the war in Iraq, Afghanistan and nary a word was uttered when Bush created the largest bureaucracy ever – The Department of Homeland Security. Remember, The New York Times and The Washington Post was forced to admit their complete and utter failure in covering resistance to invading Iraq and Bush administration claims of weapons of mass destruction. Smoking guns that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. Fade to black … the sound of crickets followed by 6 years of war, thousands dead and trillions spent.

The accusations by the Media Research Center do not prove a liberal bias in the news media. What the Center does prove is that the conservatives who operate this organization think there’s a liberal bias. In other words, they have drawn a conclusion that there’s a liberal news bias, and then they find evidence to prove it.

You can learn more about the Media Research Center at my continuously updated dossier on the organization and the people associated with it.