Tag Archives: Media

Late Night Video — Ginger Gibson on the Fact Checker Hotseat

Former NJ reporter Ginger Gibson was on Reliable Sources on Sunday speaking to their stand in media critic (Frank Senso), who asked her what she did with the factchecking that gets produced by the various organizations doing this. She told him she ignored it, and we’re off to the races:

She’s asked what she would do with a fact check that says that someone in one of her stories is shown to have been wrong and she says — mostly nothing. Which I get, I suppose — the fact check is after her reporting and few (if any) news organizations will go back to talk about who gave them faulty information. You can hear her hide the business of wrong information in the category of “political fighting” — which is pretty sad when you learn that there really are no death panels and leave that bad information out there until you can point to fact-checking next time you hear the claim. This isn’t as bad as Chuck Todd’s claim that pointing out lies is not his job. But it is still more reason – directly from one of its practitioners – to distrust what the media serves up.

A Short History of ‘Liberal Bias’ in the Media

When Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum both complain of bias from Fox News that catches one’s attention. When two columnists “report” that some see “that Fox News is morphing into just another liberal leaning voice” (link), one starts to laugh and laugh. In this morning’s New York Times there’s a wonderful 1,500 word essay called “The Boys Who Cried Fox”. The essay takes a short look at the history of  the charge liberal bias in the press from the 1950s to the present day.

The funny thing is that this role reversal is the end product of a process that was set in motion by the conservative media. Having spent decades promoting the charge of bias, they have helped strip it of meaning. These days, bias translates roughly to “reporting something I don’t like,” a reflexive defense against stories that cut against conservative interests. (Liberals claim bias, too, but here we’re focused on the curious spectacle of right-on-right crime.)

The essay touches on Nixon, Agnew, Palin and an extremely bad study on media from the 1968 election cycle.

Edith Efron, a writer for TV Guide, began documenting liberal bias for a book called “The News Twisters,” which appeared in 1971. With research funds that Buckley made available, Efron compiled what purported to be a scientific study of liberal bias. Her method? Watching news coverage of the 1968 election and tallying up favorable and unfavorable comments about Richard Nixon.

This methodology was clearly susceptible to confirmation bias, and sure enough, Efron concluded network news followed “the elitist-liberal-left line in all controversies.” (An internal review by CBS in response to the book found, also unsurprisingly, that its coverage was balanced and largely neutral.) Despite its weaknesses, Efron’s book won accolades across conservative media. “The News Twisters” soon became a best-seller, thanks to Nixon.

Take a moment from your day and read Nicole Hemmer’s “The Boys Who Cried Fox”.

Sunday Open Thread [2.5.12]

It is Super Bowl Sunday and many of you are tending to the food and drinks (and fine tuning the color calibrations on your TVs) that you’ll serve at your parties this evening. In case you’ve a few lazy minutes today to catch up on some reading, the theme of this Open Thread is The Media.

Here are some links to some writing you may have recently missed:

1. How the Media Lost the Plot on U.S. Taxation — I first saw this reprinted in The Guardian. It is written by Mike Lofgren who is a former GOP Congressional staffer. As he notes:

The media doesn’t seem to understand the basics about budgets — and the inescapable relationship between aggregate revenues, aggregate spending, and total deficits. Either that, or reporters just choose to play dumb. The end result is the same, however: Journalists don’t probe deeply — or they probe when it is too late to matter — into budget proposals and their real-world consequences (as opposed to regurgitating the talking points politicians issue to “explain” them).

True enough — and I’d add that they don’t get that a politician talking about policy is ALSO TALKING ABOUT BUDGETS. So when the local Delaware delegation shows up at some local commemoration of the latest good news coming from our local non-profits, the local media should be asking them detailed questions about how they reconcile telling people that these great programs should continue with the advocacy of reducing Federal government spending on said projects. Discussions of great programs and discussions of major cutbacks (or the everything is on the table locution) should not happen as separate conversations. Because they aren’t. Lofgren also notes that there are good a credible organizations doing yeoman’s work on analyzing these proposed tax programs that should get wider play.

2. Pick up the pitchforks: David Pogue underestimates Hollywood — David Pogue of the NYT famously wrote on his blog that those opposed to the SOPA/PIPA legislation should calm down and not worry about Hollywood’s motives in pushing this legislation. Clay Shirky provides the perfect explanation as to exactly WHY Hollywood should not be allowed to run the internets and leaves us with a warning:

We should delight in the stand we’ve taken in favor of things like, say, notifications, and trials, and proof before censoring someone, but we should get ready to do it again next year, and the year after that. The risk now is not that SOPA will pass. The risk is that we’ll think we’ve won. We haven’t; they’ll be back. Get ready to have this fight again.

3. Why Newspapers Often Don’t Call Out Politicians for Lying There has been a firestorm of debate over a question that the NYT Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane, asked his readers about whether or not their reporters ought to be calling out the lies of politicians. This has been an interesting debate to watch, as the NYT Editor and former editor have weighed in to try to tell their Public Editor that he needs to move along here, reporters are doing a very fine job indeed. They make the case — as do other editors and reporters — that beat reporting is one thing, and you need to look to the opinion pages or the blogs working at their sites for policy context or adjudication of truth. But the comments on Brisbane’s articles at the NYT and in blog across the internet have been incredibly clear that the people who consume the news want more context and more truth from their reporting. People don’t want to be sent to other sources for the thing that they came to read a story for in the first place. That’s not much of a surprise to me, but Friedersdorf’s article in The Atlantic tries to detail the controversy and the habits (structures?) that keep reporters working in a manner that persistently misleads their readers. Go read the whole thing.

4. Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users — Clay Shirky again, and this time he discusses newspaper paywalls. This may be the definitive piece justifying the paywall practice and the best piece to clearly outline their limitations.

Paywalls were an attempt to preserve the old mass+mass model after a transition to digital distribution. With so few readers willing to pay, and therefore so few readers to advertise to, paywalls instead turned newspapers into a niche+niche business. What the article threshold creates is an odd hybrid — a mass market for advertising, but a niche market for users. As David Cohn has pointed out, this is the commercial equivalent of the National Public Radio model, where sponsors reach all listeners, but direct suport only comes from donors. (Lest NPR seem like small ball, it’s worth noting that the Times ‘ has convinced something like one out of every hundred of its online readers to pay, while NPR affiliates’ success rate is something like one in twelve. Newspapers with thresholds now aspire to NPR’s persuasiveness.) Paywalls encourage a paper to focus on the value of their content. Thresholds encourage them to focus on the value of their users.

Which leaves me with a note to The News Journal. I understand you were to have implemented your paywall this week. However, I spent a good deal of time at your on line site trying to find where I could signup for just the online version. Even though I pick up your paper at retail prices every day I’m in town, I wanted to preserve my access to the online version. After emailing your subscription people, I find that I can’t signup online for the just the digital version of the News Journal. I actually have to call your subscription people during business hours to accomplish this. Really, NJ? Really? Not implementing the ability for our online readers to buy subscriptions online (clarifying that I mean just subscribing to the online content with no home delivery of the dead tree version) seems to be a fatal flaw in this strategy of getting more paying readers. I’ve been pretty slammed during the day for the last few weeks (and this week will be just as bad), so I’ll call sometime this month and get that subscription, but this omission doesn’t speak well for a strategy that might try to capture subscriptions from your online readers.

Now, what interests you today?

In Which We Find the Media as Broken as the Republican Party

I wish I could stop being stunned at how badly our MSM completely fails at genuinely informing their audiences the issues of the day. This particular failure is focused on the debt ceiling coverage, which has been breathlessly working on this silly “who won the day” coverage, rather than delve into the detail of what is going on — the state of negotiations, what is on offer in negotiations and how each party to the negotiations is managing their caucus. This kind of coverage is out there, though — you just need to do a fair bit of work to go get it. Which strikes me and counterproductive. Nevertheless, I’m seeing more and more criticism of the coverage of this issue that I wonder if we aren’t looking at a point somewhere in the next weeks or months after this crisis is done where our media does some of the sheepish navel gazing that followed when it became really plain that the Iraq War was done on a very large bed of lies that the media did little (except for the McClatchy organization) to try to check up on. But then again, we’re about to be served up another round of the lazy he say/she say once the Republicans decide to push for government shut down over concluding a budget for the year.

So for this Sunday, I’m linking to many of the critical pieces I’ve seen so far. The theme of almost all of these pieces is that “objectivity” as currently practiced by the MSM is increasingly dishonest, and fairly self-centered when reporting on high stakes political stories. The “objectivity” as currently baked in the cake of American journalism is its own fetish object, to be followed no matter where real information or data takes you. If, in fact, said journalists are even working on getting real data or information. You may have seen links to some of these throughout the week from pieces posted by me or Pandora.

Josh Marshall notes with some wonderment that the key thing from Monday (when this was posted) was that Speaker Boehner did not even have the votes for his own plan in his own caucus, yet the thing you hear from the media all over is that the Democrats and Republicans can’t compromise. Even though Democrats have been compromising all over the place and the people with the line in the sand are Republicans. This is worth reading in its entirety — because he spends just a few paragraphs orienting you to where the real news was on this issue from Monday. Real news rather completely missed by the usual media suspects.

Obama says Boehner wouldn’t agree! Boehner says the opposite! Who’s right? We don’t care! Jon Chait points us to a Republican debunking (from Politico no less!) of the oft-repeated claim that the *Grand Bargain* talks broke down because the President asked for an additional $400B in revenue. He takes off after that to explain (this is important):

Why is this so important? Because this dispute has been the hinge for a dramatic turn in the press coverage. Through last weekend, reporters and pundits were generally portraying the situation, accurately, as one in which Obama was proposing compromises and Boehner was rejecting them. But that is a highly uncomfortable position for reporters and centrist pundits to be in. They want to portray a balanced situation in which each side is to blame. They could define balance to avoid making any judgment about the merits of a deficit agreement or a debt ceiling hike, but the media is openly rooting for a Grand Bargain and a debt ceiling hike, so portraying one party as standing in the way was always going to be tricky.

The dispute over the $400 billion provided enough ambiguity for reporters to stop framing the issue as Boehner refusing to accept a Grand Bargain and revert to the comfortable practice of castigating both parties for refusing to compromise.

So that your news is highly dependent upon how a reporter or pundit or editor can define *balance*. Even though said reporter or pundit may have real information that undermines this fetishized framework. So that in this case — had any of you heard this about the $400B before? — the GOP whinge that the President changed the goalposts was wrong and someone from the GOP confirmed that. Yet this gets in the way of the set narrative that both sides do it, so is ignored.

Washington Isn’t Broken, the Republican Party Is I posted this last week in the Debt Ceiling speech thread. This makes note that journalism as it is currently practiced can’t manage to remind themselves that they have an audience that needs this information, not a bunch of fake theater about balance:

And commentators who are obsessed with balance should remember good journalism is not “Republicans say the sky is blue, Democrats say the sky is red, experts disagree.” It is reporting — without fear or favor — what is actually happening. It means substituting moral clarity for moral equivalence.

Clive Crook is Drowning America This isn’t just about Clive Crook, but about all of the pundits and journalists who can actually point to the problem here, but find themselves retreating to the both sides do it mantra in an effort to not *name* the problem.

Another Krugman piece, The Cult That Is Destroying America — He pretty clearly notes that the press is more dedicated to its own needs than to those they are trying to inform.

Posted yesterday, Media Blows Debt Crisis Coverage from Ari Melber at the Nation does a great job of detailing the problem here and does us the service os defining Balance Bias:

1. The assumption that there is truth and legitimacy to both sides of every dispute.
2. The iron law in political journalism that one side in a debate can never be exclusively right, or have a monopoly on the facts.

What this bias does is provide a ready made framework for political reporting that is pretty much guaranteed to ensure that news consumers never really know what their government is doing. And this is a real problem. You’d think that an institution called the American Fourth Estate would see this problem.

Even Joe Klein is calling out the charade:

I am usually willing to acknowledge that Democrats can be as silly, and hidebound, as Republicans–but not this time. There is zero equivalence here. The vast majority of Democrats have been more than reasonable, more than willing to accept cuts in some of their most valued programs. Given the chance, there was the likelihood that they would have surrendered their most powerful weapon in next year’s election–a Mediscare campaign–by agreeing to some necessary long-term reforms in that program. The President, remarkably, proposed raising the age of eligibility for Medicare to 67.

The Republicans have been willing to concede nothing. Their stand means higher interest rates, fewer jobs created and more destroyed, a general weakening of this country’s standing in the world. Osama bin Laden, if he were still alive, could not have come up with a more clever strategy for strangling our nation.

What is really heartbreaking is that these journalists (not pundits who mostly are political operatives with an ax to grind) seem to have no idea — genuinely no idea — that they are failing their audiences. Audiences who don’t really have a sense of the state of play or of the substance of the policy being discussed (or not) by their politicians. So they continue to be hugely mistrusted and continue to craft pieces that don’t adequately inform anyone about that is at stake. To be certain, this is easier journalism, but this isn’t journalism that holds anyone accountable or helps their audiences do that. Time for these journalists to remember that journalism is not about its reporters — it is about making sure that people know what their government is actually doing. And lazy BS saying that Democrats and Republicans won’t compromise — in the face of all kinds of evidence that that is simply not true here — doesn’t help anyone but the journalist resorting to this bit of laziness.

BBC Criticized for “Fake Balance” in Science Reporting

The British Broadcasting Corporation recently commissioned a report surveying the coverage of science topics across all of their departments and networks. Led by Steve Jones, Emeritus Professor of Genetics at University College London, with content analysis support provided by a team from the Imperial College London.

This report generally gave the BBC very high praise for its science reporting noting that there was a great deal of depth and accuracy to their reporting across a very wide range of science topics and news.

The report also says we should make sure that we achieve the right balance between well-established scientific fact and opinion. Otherwise, Professor Jones argues, there is a danger of the BBC giving undue prominence to critics on the fringes of what is actually a settled scientific debate.

According to Clive Crook at the FT:

Prof Jones found that some news and current affairs programmes had been guilty of “false impartiality, of presenting the views of tiny and unqualified minorities as if they have the same weight as the scientific consensus”. This applied particularly to controversies about vaccines, genetically modified crops and climate change.

In other words, the effort by the BBC to provide “balance” to scientific stories ended up giving equal weight to both the scientific consensus and to the fringes of dispute gives the impression of more controversy over certain scientific topics than actually exists. The report notes that the limited pool of scientific sources for stories, a lack of cooperation for stories across BBC units as well as a lack of training in science by journalists contributes to this over-privileging of fringe views. You can see the report for the ways that the BBC can fix these problems.

This report gets to the heart of the vulnerability of science reporting right now — that it is too easy to change what should be a discussion of science into a political discussion. And as long as the media presents people with little to no background in a topic as the contrary voices to scientific discussion, they’ve just helped to make that topic a political one. Because the individual injected in to this discussion isn’t interested in science, that person is interested in influencing pubic opinion. And no one does science on the basis of public opinion — that would be the business of politics.

Unfortunately for us, this is the British trying to understand how they can communicate the world of science better. This kind of introspection is probably not possible here — certainly not at a level where journalists will make changes to their approach. But it does mean that we have the prospect of seeing a better quality of science reporting from British sources at least.

Farewell — Bob Herbert’s Last NYT Column

Bob Herbert has spent years writing about lives and challenges of those increasingly voiceless and often invisible in our society.   He has been a fiercely moral voice writing about the immorality of torture, killing, institutional injustice against the poor, or working people or minorities — always making the case that you can’t be a great nation by demonizing and dehumanizing those who aren’t so fortunate.  There is alot to commend about his career — I probably remember best his writing against torture and his dogged effort to not let the people of Tulia targeted by law enforcement out of control get out of our sight.

For a few years now, I have been amazed that Herbert has been able to hang on to his space on the NYT editorial page.  They’ve been turning over their real estate to frivolous and dodgy writers for sometime now, but it was good that his singular project survived.  But this column- called Losing Our Way – is the last, at least at the New York Times.  It begins:

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

And makes a key point:

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

You should make a point of reading the whole thing, the entire indictment. Then think of how our State Government and NCCo government are looking to their employees to bear the brunt of financing the cost of closing budget gaps. And think of how our local media is actually cheerleading this bit of injustice instead of calling for leadership to put their Big Boy pants on and come up with a more sustainable — more grown up approach.

You’ve probably read the accusation that Democrats all too often govern to be well regarded in the editorial pages of the leading papers. Too bad that Herbert wasn’t the one whose favor they wanted.

Bob Herbert says at the end of this column that he will be doing other work, but still working on his advocacy for the poor and working people. He also leaves an email address where he can be reached — take the time to think him for his work today.

Thanks, Mr. Herbert. I’m hoping we don’t have to live without your moral clarity for too long.

AOL To Buy The Huffington Post

Old media company AOL will buy the Huffington Post. The deal was announced last night. AOL is better known for messing up Time Warner and for making money for charging confused older people for email they can get for free on the Internet.

AOL Inc. [NYSE:AOL] announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire The Huffington Post, the influential and rapidly growing news, analysis, and lifestyle website founded in 2005, which now counts nearly 25 million unique monthly visitors*.

The transaction will create a premier global, national, local, and hyper-local content group for the digital age – leveraged across online, mobile, tablet, and video platforms. The combination of AOL’s infrastructure and scale with The Huffington Post’s pioneering approach to news and innovative community building among a broad and sophisticated audience will mark a seminal moment in the evolution of digital journalism and online engagement.

The new group will have a combined base of 117 million unique visitors a month in the United States and 270 million around the world**. Following the close of this transaction, AOL will accelerate its strategy to deliver a scaled and differentiated array of premium news, analysis, and entertainment produced by thousands of writers, editors, reporters, and videographers around the globe.

As part of the transaction, Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, will be named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all Huffington Post and AOL content, including Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater, AOL Music, AOL Latino, AutoBlog, Patch, StyleList, and more.

What do you think? This sounds like a terrible fit to me but perhaps it could work. I wonder if the HuffPo will continue to run all the science quackery and anti-vax articles they’ve become known for?

30 Media Heroes

Having some fun with the Salon Hack 30 List, Greg Mitchell over at The Nation challenged his readers to create the 30 Media Heroes list. They spent a few days nominating and voting via comments at The Nation and via twitter and take a look at the Top 10:

1. Rachel Maddow (MSNBC)

2. Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!)

3. Glenn Greenwald (Salon)

4. Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone and more)

5. Bill Moyers (formerly PBS)

6. Jon Stewart (The Daily Show)

7. Keith Olbermann (MSNBC)

8. Jeremy Scahill (The Nation)

9. Paul Krugman (New York Times)

10. Stephen Colbert (Colbert Report)

I’m not familiar with the work of everyone on this list (never heard of Allison Kilkenny-Jamie Kilstein before). But of the people in the honorable mention list, I would like to see Josh Marshall and Ezra Klein in the top 30.

Who is missing from this list and why?

Even better, who would you put on a Delaware Media Hero list?

Fake Objectivity

Not sure how many of you have been following the fallout from Keith Olbermann’s suspension from MSNBC. There has been Ted Koppel getting the vapors over the loss of objectivity and waxing nostalgic over perfectly objective times gone by. Or how about Howard Kurtz trotting out some of the tick tock on the MSNBC/Olbermann war.

I was going to use these posts to have another go at the fake objectivity of the news business. To remind people that one of the fundamental acts of reporting news is grounded in what reporters and editor choose to report on and what they choose to ignore. Those choices (much like mine to not write a post on,say, the City of Wilmington’s layoffs) are themselves NOT objective choices, but choices largely in the service of shaping the stories they choose to tell. The current fetishization of “objectivity” is largely an excuse for the reporter to not be part of the world that he or she is reporting on. As characterized by Jay Rosen, the current form of “objectivity” is really the view from nowhere — itself a POV that wants to convince you that the reporter is just reporting what he or she sees or hears. Even though said reporter has a well-stocked rolodex of folks who will provide the right balance of POV for any story.

Happily, I don’t have to write that blog post. Because Keith Olbermann did. This is worth reading in its entirety. Because he reminds us that some the signature bits of TV journalism — the ones we hold up as brave and smart — were certainly not “objective” choices. But as you look at those examples, you wonder how the business of holding the powerful accountable can ever exist with the usual view from nowhere.

What interests me about the reaction to Olbermann’s suspension is that we have plenty of folks crawling out of the woodwork to have on about this so-called loss of objectivity. Where were these people as Fox News was recreating itself as a PR arm of the RNC? Their shenanigans are legendary and documented — there are no other traditional news networks who send out a memo with the Talking Points or the POV of the Day. Fox is wall to wall lack of “objectivity” and the usual handwringers never seem to get their panties in a bunch about FOX except as part of a critique of news that needs to call out ALL fringes (stupidly including MSNBC) without calling out the singular abuse of journalism that is FOX.

But here is Olbermann dissecting the business of “objectivity”:

The great change about which Mr. Koppel wrings his hands is not partisanship nor tone nor analysis. The great change was the creation of the sanitized image of what men like Cronkite and Murrow – and H.V. Kaltenborn and Elmer Davis and John Charles Daly and H.R. Baukhage and Howard K. Smith and Eric Sevareid and Dan Rather and Peter Jennings and George Polk and even Ted Koppel – did. These were not glorified stenographers. These were not neutral men. These were men who did in their day what the best of journalists still try to do in this one. Evaluate, analyze, unscramble, assess – put together a coherent picture, or a challenging question – using only the facts as they can best be discerned, and their own honesty and conscience. And if the result is that this story over here is a Presidential chief of staff taking some pretty low-octane bribes and the scandal starts and ends there, you judge all the facts, and you say so. And if the result is that that other story over there is not just a third-rate burglary at a political office, but the tip of an iceberg meant to sink the two-party system in this country, you judge all the facts, and you scream so.

Insist long enough that the driving principle behind the great journalism of the television era was neutrality and objectivity — and not subjective choices and often dangerous evaluations and even commentary — and you will eventually leave the door open to pointless worship at the temple of a false god. And once you’ve got a false god, you’re going to get false priests. And sooner rather than later, in a world where subjective analysis is labeled evil and dangerous, some political mountebank is going to see his opening and seize the very catechism of that false god, words like “objective” and “neutral” and “two-sided” and “fair” and “balanced,” and he will pervert them into a catch-phrase, a brand-name. And he can create something that is no more journalism than two men screaming at each other is a musical duet.

This is good stuff and there’s more at his dKos post. And he is right that “objectivity” serves no one except the person who wants to armor himself with it. It seems to be the last refuge of those who don’t want to make the case for genuinely fact-based journalism, rather than letting the partisans tell their story and pretend that your consumers now know what they need to know with no context for what those partisans say and no fact-checking of what the partisans say.

This isn’t a defense of what Olbermann does nightly (because sometimes it is over cooked), but what Olbermann and Maddow do *is* some real fact-checking and the provision of real context for the spin of the day. Sometimes (especially Rachel) you get to hear some of the worst spin offenders have to really answer for their spin. Outside of NOW and the occasional 60 Minutes piece, there is nothing else like this on TV and there should be MORE, not less of it. Because I’d like any political journalist worth their salt to explain to me how they are holding the powerful accountable or even informing their consumers by just letting two sides say just anything. (And even this two sides thing can be really misguided. During the health care debates, the real debates were *within* the Democratic Party — the Republicans had largely opted out, but you dutifully got the Dems vs Repubs he say/she say throughout.) Beyond the fact that standing in the so-called middle and observing both sides, lets the dishonorable get away with alot of lying. Keith and Maddow deconstruct some of that lying and for their efforts at some accountability they are labeled not “objective”. When they are done, you know more than what he or she said — you know something about how he or she is trying to shine you on. In an era when getting zombie lies into the CW is the only way to influence policy discussion, knowing who is straying from the facts is news I can use.

The story of accountability ought to be in very high demand these days. Because while journalists have been hiding behind their “objectivity” there have been massive stories developing over the past 30 years that they have been completely missing. For example, the wholesale buying and selling of our governments (by both parties). Or even the massive destabilization of the middle class — on purpose — by Reagan acolytes who saw government as a tool to increase the wealth of those who already have money (Or as my Dad says, Supply Siders who think they should have all of the Supply.), rather than as a tool to keep building the most productive middle class in history. Or even right now — where we have lots of folks furiously displaying their deficit hawkery plumage and NO journalists asking these same hawks how stuff they are proposing (modernizing the nuclear weapons arsenal????) gets paid for. Or how this new stuff employs Americans. Or even following up on jobs claims to see if they are real.

Olbermann is right about this though — “objectivity” is not the current crisis of news. Getting journalists to commit to genuine acts of journalism *is* the current crisis of news.

It Would NOT Be OK If A Democrat Did This

You’ve probably read already how the teatard candidate for AK-Sen had his hired security guards handcuff and detain — at a public event — a local blogger who wanted ask Miller about some questionable bits about his employment with the Fairbanks North Star Borough. But if you look around the intertubes today, you can see some discussion about this but not the wholesale outrage that would have accompanied such an event if this had been a Democratic candidate illegally detaining a member of the Fourth Estate. Why do I say this? Steve Benen reminds us about what happened when candidate Obama:

[…] mentioned the idea of having a civilian reserve corps that could handle postwar reconstruction efforts such as rebuilding infrastructure. A Republican member of Congress, Georgia’s Paul Broun, said the idea, which had been endorsed by the Bush administration, is the equivalent of “what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.” Glenn Beck and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) still talk about this to make the case that the president is some kind of fascist.

But today, we see a media — and Democratic — landscape where bad behavior by Republicans is SOP. It is SOP enough that the Fourth Estate finds itself still stuck in its View From Nowhere and not even standing up for itself.

Locally, WHYY did a report this AM called Political candidates remain cautious of recording devices on campaign trail . Go take a close look at that article. The people who are being extra “cautious” here — and trying to control who gets to report on what they do are the Republican ones. So much so, that WHYY reports on Jim Gerlach making sure that WHYY could not record a debate. WTF? This behavior is apparently so one-sided locally that they couldn’t even come up with the obligatory false equivalency. Even though this piece probably wasn’t meant to be blowback for that decision, it sure should have been. That would not have aligned with the media’s fake objectivity, but it sure would have aligned with the business of making the comfortable uncomfortable. If this had been the behavior of lots of Democrats locally, this story would have been filled with local GOP’ers getting their outrage on PLUS a bunch of commentaries by station editors on the threat to people’s right to know and the threat to all of our constitutional freedoms when journalists are treated this way. But apparently restricting the freedom of the press IOKIYAR.

The Rules of Lying in American Politics

Or….how to lie without the media scrutinizing those lies.

Robert Waldman over at The American Prospect writes about these rules, illuminating how it is that the media chooses the lies it wants to chase down:

The first rule is that lying about yourself is worse than lying about your opponent. Candidates routinely fib about their opponents’ records and histories with little notice. Perhaps it’s because reporters presume that in the rough-and-tumble of a campaign, a certain degree of hyperbole is to be expected and therefore can’t be judged too harshly. If you claim, though, to have done something you haven’t, reporters will usually be all over you. Look at what happened to O’Donnell’s fellow Senate candidates Mark Kirk in Illinois, who was caught inflating his military record in multiple ways, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who said at various times that he had served “in” Vietnam when really he had served “during” Vietnam. This is the kind of lie reporters find outrageous — when candidates make themselves look more heroic or accomplished than they actually are. A lie about your opponent may draw attention, but the discussion will be about whether the attack was out of line; in other words, what you did. A lie about yourself, on the other hand, will spur a discussion about who you are.

Which leads to the second rule: Lying about personal matters is worse than lying about policy. That may be because reporters think policy is less important than “character,” but whatever the cause, candidates can, with few exceptions, get away with murder when it comes to policy. O’Donnell herself has benefited from this double standard; lots of people heard about her comments about witchcraft, but nearly no one knows that she revived the claim that the Affordable Care Act will create “death panels” — perhaps the most despicable lie to have coursed through our political bloodstream in recent years.

Go read the whole thing. Christine O’Donnell is the example of choice throughout this article, which results in a media narrative largely about her outrageous statements (not so much about her character yet), but giving her a pass on her policy lies. And this, of course, works across all media. The fact that she is lying about “death panels” is nowhere near as important as the witchcraft BS. I wish I knew why the Fourth Estate seems to think that lying about policy — really the one area that is at all indicative about how you’ll govern — deserves a pass. I wouldn’t mind that they seem to have decided that holding them accountable=illuminating character if they would treat lies about policy with the same breathless outrage.

The failure to hold people accountable to lies about policy leads to certain groups of people having their own facts. A thing that Waldman has also written about recently — noting that most of the inaccuracies being pushed benefit the right. A thing that shows how dominated by wingnut narratives our entire media has become. In large part, I think because lying about policy doesn’t count in the business of holding the powerful accountable.

The News Journal Admits to Deficient Political Coverage

Yesterday, John Sweeney took to the pages of the NJ OpEd page to tell us what we already know — that the media isn’t doing an especially good job at getting political candidates to discuss in detail their approach to issues of concern to voters:

A common and legitimate complaint about the mainstream news media is that they are more interested in fluff and scandal than substance.

The horse-race aspect of elections is more exciting to them than a candidate’s ability to govern.

Sad, but true.

A preoccupation with polls, for instance, works against the interest of the voter. But keeping everyone’s eyes on the trivial also serves the interests of the politicians. They have a stake in a dumbed-down electorate. It helps them avoid committing themselves and it gives them an easy scapegoat, “the media.”

This admission is in the service of touting an effort that the NJ is working on to get the candidates to actually speak in detail about these issues, so they’ll be submitting a series of essays to do this. This may or may not work — but I wonder about an effort to get political candidates to speak to specific issues that isn’t specifically mediated by a third party to insist on the detail required.

Which gets to the heart of the matter. The horserace reportage is a function of a bunch of things — a reporter’s interest may be one, but the daily demands of having something to report on is the other. If you have to crank out something on a political campaign in the course of a day, the horserace is the easy thing to cover. A story on the state of the race may keep the story fresh for the reporter, (and may also be easier for their audiences too) but it is way easier than getting up to speed enough on policy and policy choices to avoid the shallowness of talking points reporting. An example from Sweeney’s own column:

The biggest expenditures are the entitlements: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

You see the problem here, right? A specific political narrative that the media repeats ad nauseum without checking on it or giving it any context. Sweeney isn’t alone in this, but I think that if you claim to deal in information, you’d be embarrassed by just repeating this BS. Social Security and Medicare are among the biggest entitlements, but they are the only ones with a funding steam directly from taxpayer paychecks. SS is fine for some years (2037 currently) and can be pretty easily fixed. And its most immediate problem is getting Congress to pay the IOUs. Medicare also has a direct funding stream, but is in more immediate trouble, even though it has a slightly longer lease on life due to the ACA. Medicaid does not have a direct funding stream and does have lots of trouble. But the narrative of entitlements are a problem persists even when the data clearly doesn’t support that entirely. And to the extent that they are a problem, SS and Medicare have solutions, but little political will for any of it. But notice that the label of unsustainability applies to entitlement programs, but not to a raft of expensive policy choices (for instance, a Defense Department that is expected to be the world’s policeman, or even to an entire government posture of transferring as many tax dollars as possible to businesses) largely favored by Republicans.

And then we have the snide presumption that liberals like big government:

As liberals and/or progressives, have you ever met a government program you didn’t like?

As if Mr. Sweeney never heard of Medicare Part D or the massive amounts of new spending from BushCo on education during the Bush years. Maybe he could ask the repub candidates if they would vote against farm subsidies or why they would advocate the *borrowing* of billions of dollars to provide tax cuts or even if they would advocate the repeal of Bush-era spending on Medicare and Education. That, of course, would mean that Mr. Sweeney himself get out of the horserace business that he notes political media is so mired in. If you are going to ask serious policy questions and ask for detailed solutions, you need to do that honestly — not from the media narratives derived from those in what Jay Rosen calls the Church of the Savvy. If you are going to ask questions that ask liberal candidates to defend an activist government, you need to ask conservative candidates to defend the kind of activist government they fight for — restrictions of personal liberty, borrowing money to give to businesses and rich people, insertions of Christianist policy to government and so on. In short, whoever asks these candidates for more detail is going to have to get beyond a GOP talking points view of the world, and get beyond a GOP talking points view of liberals, specifically.

Good on the NJ for trying to get to some policy detail, but I’m not hopeful for this effort if Mr. Sweeney’s fairly uninformed — and, frankly, biased — questions are any guide.

What If Political Scientists Covered the News?

I’m going to know for absolute certain that there is really and truely a God if I could ever get news written like this:

Obama now faces some of the most difficult challenges of his young presidency: the ongoing oil spill, the Gaza flotilla disaster, and revelations about possibly inappropriate conversations between the White House and candidates for federal office. But while these narratives may affect fleeting public perceptions, Americans will ultimately judge Obama on the crude economic fundamentals of jobs numbers and GDP.

Chief among the criticisms of Obama was his response to the spill. Pundits argued that he needed to show more emotion. Their analysis, however, should be viewed in light of the economic pressures on the journalism industry combined with a 24-hour news environment and a lack of new information about the spill itself.

Poll numbers also confirmed that Americans are in an anti-incumbent mood. … Ha! Just kidding. The anti-Washington narrative was concocted by dominant media outlets based on the outcomes of a statistically insignificant handful of largely unrelated races. Sorry.

Just go read the whole thing. It was inspired by this really interesting Columbia Journalism Review article thinking about how political journalism might improve if it had more influence from political science than from the entertainment business.