Incompetence
Perpetually pregnant protester pepper-sprayed.
This story does not reflect on Occupy Seattle or anything, other than the fact that anarchistic and chaotic
protests attract young and mixed up kids. The story does reflect on the state of journalism today. The
two newspapers in print took her words at face value. Three blogging journalists dug a little deeper.
Secrets of the American
Nomenklatura. [#1] The media and the Democrats are joined at the hip and have created a "hereditary
celebrity class". ... TV news is now officially entertainment and if you are looking for journalism turn it off
and look elsewhere.
The Hot-Air Car.
It would be so easy for "journalists" to ask an engineer to verify the claims in their stories, but
then they would not have a story.
It's
no wonder that the public hates journalists. I'm ashamed to be a journalist. Yes,
again. Like little kids who continually put their hands in a flame and get burned every time, my
profession just never learns from its mistakes. We have an unfortunate habit of hyping the wrong
stories. Over and over. And when it comes to assessing the effect that our foolishness
has on our craft's reputation, it's practically a fatal flaw.
Murdoch to media: You dug yourself a huge
hole. With newspapers cutting back and predictions of even worse times ahead, Rupert Murdoch said
the profession may still have a bright future if it can shake free of reporters and editors who he said have
forfeited the trust and loyalty of their readers. ... Murdoch, whose company's holdings also include MySpace
and the Wall Street Journal, criticized what he described as a culture of "complacency and condescension" in
some newsrooms.
The Problems with Al Gore:
[Scroll down slowly] The world is full of ignorant people. As a college professor, I interact
constantly with students, many of whom are very concerned with global warming. But in my interactions
I have invariably found that the more science a student knows, the more skeptical they are of the standard
global warming alarmist scenario. Students majoring in engineering or physics have some appreciation
for the scientific method and the uncertainties involved in understanding and predicting climate change. ... Students
who buy into global warming alarmism are almost always from non-technical majors such as journalism. They
can't think quantitatively, critically, or analytically. They have beliefs, but no interest in or
appreciation for facts.
Mike Huckabee: Journalism is dead.
Former Arkansas GOP Gov. Mike Huckabee, currently a Fox News talk show host, ripped the media this weekend, claiming that
journalism has been reduced to "ink-stained drivel that smeared the pages of paper and the people who attempted to
read it."
Doctors are the most trustworthy and journalists the least, poll finds.
It is the 25th year running that doctors have been rated as the most trustworthy in the survey commission by the Royal
College of Physicians. Four times as many people believe doctors tell the truth as believe politicians do, the poll
found. More than nine in ten adults in Britain trust doctors, compared with 87 who trust teachers, 79 percent
who trust professors, 78 percent trust judges and 74 percent trust clergymen.
Media
Rubes: The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines a "rube" as a "naïve or inexperienced
person," or "an awkward unsophisticated person." Clearly, no better set of adjectives can be found to
describe a great many American journalists, who together have managed to provide Obama with an 86 percent
favorable report rating, at least through March of this year.
Modified Media Mea Culpa.
[Scroll down] The Cardiff researchers did point out that British reporters today have about two-thirds
less time to check their stories as their media counterparts did 20 years ago. Nevertheless, "The
researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with
a staggering 70 percent of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all,"
Powers writes. Indeed the Guardian is so infamous that there is even a web site devoted exclusively
to exposing its inaccuracies….
Crypto box failure causes MTA credit card
processing failure. There are a few lessons here. One, of course, is that headline writers
shouldn't be trusted to get technical details right. Saying "M.T.A. Blames Encryption for MetroCard
Problems" is just wrong — the MTA didn't blame encryption, they blamed the failure of a particular
unit.
Spitzer's Media Enablers:
The fall of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer holds many lessons, and the press will surely be examining them in
coming months. But don't expect the press corps to delve into the biggest lesson of all — its
own role as his enabler. … What makes this more embarrassing for any self-respecting journalist is
that Mr. Spitzer knew all this, and played the media like a Stradivarius. … He doled out scoops to
favored reporters, who repaid him with allegiance. News organizations that dared to criticize him
were cut off. After a time, few criticized anymore.
Network
TV News: Evil or Incompetent? In the complex and intense world of the 21st Century, an
informed and aware public is more essential than ever. Citizens are asked to make judgments on issues
and candidates where the decision could literally mean life or death for millions. And yet, what is the
public fed nightly by those over-paid "news" organizations at what is called the Networks? The public is
force fed a steady diet of propaganda, distortions and outright pap.
Alinsky, Stalinsky,
It's Still the Same Old Agitprop. [Scroll down] "Mainstream" now means homogenized, lowbrow,
ignorant, robotic, group-thinking cheap plastic puppets. America used to have great
journalists — Benjamin Franklin was one, and Mark Twain, and Henry Louis Mencken, all sharp writers and
independent thinkers. They would be nauseated by today's media. Today, the only real journalists
write for blogs.
The Mainstream Moron Media:
[At the Democratic National Convention] the media gaggle, with few exceptions, has plangently repeated —
tediously and cheerlessly — many things that I know to be untrue. The preeminent untruth resounding
across the airways is that the Clintons are political geniuses. … Since the early 1990s I have sedulously
researched the Clintons' life and work. My finding is that they are mediocrities in all things political,
save one: huckstering. Moreover, they are accomplished hucksters solely because the media are
composed of credulous ignoramuses.
ATF Seizes Gun Shipment Labeled
'Toys' — But They Really Were Toys. Working from a Customs and Border Protection
(CBP) press release entitled "Tacoma Seaport U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officers Seize Shipment of
Machineguns," these news organizations had every reason to feel that they were just reporting the news ... But
there was much, much more to the story that [Rolando] Suliveras and the CBP failed to mention, starting with
the fact that the 30 "machine guns" seized in the raid really were toys.
Media Blunders in Covering
California's Prop 8. Six months ago, California voters passed Proposition 8, denying legal
recognition to same gender marriages. Petitions are now being circulated to put the issue back to the
voters in June 2010. Before venturing into this thorny thicket again, the media should realize what a
poor job it did in covering the fundraising for Prop 8. The reporting blunders include gross
inaccuracies and one where the media did not recognize a good story right before their eyes.
Media Malpractice:
Now I am not a scientist, but the idea that a few alleged degrees of warming — with none apparently in
the last decade — could cause an increase in earthquakes seemed pure quackery to me. So, I decided
to perform Google and Yahoo searches of the "scientist" who had issued the finding, one Thomas Chalko, MSc, Ph.D.
In less than five minutes I found that Chalko was perhaps the last person who should be quoted on the purported
impact of allegedly man-caused global warming.
CBS Pulls Unvetted
Story Blaming Earthquakes on Global Warming. CBS News and the Associated Press were quick to
regurgitate claims that global warming has increased the intensity of earthquakes fivefold in the past
20 years. But had either taken the time to investigate, they would have discovered that both
the source's facts and credentials were, if you'll pardon the expression, on very tremorous ground.
The Editor says...
I am amazed that a story like this got on the CBS web site, and may have aired on CBS stations. Anyone
with a milligram of critical thinking skills should be able to conclude that a one-half degree temperature
change is not enough to cause an earthquake, without having someone else point it out.
Happy Birthday, Monicagate! The press loves
anniversaries of big public events because they're predictable, a quality seldom found in the news.
Coverage can be planned in advance. Stories can be written, laid out, and put to bed without any worry
that later developments will compel revisions. Sputnik is turning 50? Let's cover it. The
only thing it can possibly do while we're not looking is turn 51. Given this predisposition, I find
it worth studying the rare instances when the press accords a significant anniversary little attention.
Citizen journalist 1, MSM 0.
Is there anything that moves slower than a government bureaucracy? Actually, it seems that there is: the mainstream
media. Back on March 17, [2006,] I posted a story about FEMA going after people who received duplicate or fraudulent
Hurricane Katrina disaster payments. It was a followup to a February 13 story on the Government Accountability
Office's report on people defrauding FEMA. And despite their having access to the same sources I do — and a
whole lot more — it's taken the mainstream media until today [4/21/2006] to get a story out.
Highway Robbery: Rick Perry's vision for Texas,
the Trans Texas Corridor, made it through the State Legislature in 2003. H.B. 3588, the enabling
bill for the Trans Texas Corridor and, hence, the largest spending bill in the state's history, became law in
large part because Texas' mainstream press, used as a watchdog, was inexplicably asleep.
Ship collision with San Francisco Bay Bridge:
Despite many reports calling it a tanker, the Cosco Busan was actually a container ship, and the fuel on board
was solely for the purpose of running the ship.
Norman Hsu Who? Radio
personality Rush Limbaugh has coined the term "Drive-By Media" to refer to those in the MSM who shot up a
story and then leave others to clean up the mess, or not. First the WSJ broke the Norman Hsu story.
Then, last October the LATimes broke the story of the vanishing NYC Chinatown donors. Neither story was
completed. The "Drive-By's" just shot them up and drove on down the road. Meanwhile, where's Hsu
and what's his story?
Treason, Plagiarism and The Washington Post:
Winning a Pulitzer Prize for a story about CIA "secret prisons" has been quite lucrative for Dana Priest of the
Washington Post. … But the article for which she won the prize not only damaged the security of the United
States and endangered the safety of American citizens but appears to have been largely based on the work of
London-based journalist Stephen Grey.
The End
of America As We Know It: [Scroll down] Add to that a heavily partisan, politicized environment
where different political parties can't even agree on the most basic facts, much less the issues —
and an incompetent mainstream media that cries wolf on an almost daily basis about something that's going to
kill us — and we're producing a society riddled with people who have extreme difficulty coping with
or even recognizing basic threats.
Journalism's Hoax on Duke: As the
late commentator and editor Michael Kelly wrote, "most journalists learn to see the world through a
set of standard templates into which they plug each day's events." The most obvious templates
concern race — whites are oppressing blacks, gender — men are oppressing
women, and class — the privileged are oppressing the poor. Since all three of
these templates were in play during the Duke race case, how surprising is it that this triple
high tide resulted in some of the worst journalism of the decade?
Don't
know much about voting. Two-thirds of those surveyed in NYU's Foundations of Journalism
course would trade their vote for a year's tuition, department chair Brooke Kroeger found. Twenty
percent would trade it for an iPod, and 90 percent would give up their franchise forever for
$1 million. At the same time, it is claimed, the students "value" their votes. About
70 percent still believe that one vote can make a difference. This result is strange for a
profession which counts "government watchdog" among its roles.
Journalism
School Probes Possible Cheating on Ethics Exam. It was an ethics exam in a journalism class, and
someone may have cheated. Ironic? Yes. Unfortunate? Certainly. But what made the
incident particularly notable was where and when it took place: at Columbia University, one of the
premier journalism schools in the country, at a time when media ethics are much in question.
Scooping the
mainstream media: The Associated Press reached a new level of incompetence, and the "news"
industry they serve doesn't seem to care. If you want political opinion, you'll find it in Associated
Press dispatches. If you want news, you might have to read conservative opinion columns.
Clueless
Press Can't Decide If Espionage Is Journalism. Imagine the year is 1942 and the German government
runs a news bureau in Washington, D.C. collecting government secrets. Even FDR would have laughed at
claims they were actual journalists, locked them up and thrown away the key. He would have been right.
There's a huge difference between an individual or an organization reporting abuses in government or business
one at a time and the same people stealing enough classified material to run a spy agency.
Amateur
Hour at CNN: Error-Filled Chyron During Beck Rally. There is something about CNN and the
people writing chyrons for the alleged "most trusted name in news" with the "best political team on television."
Last week, these geniuses clarified the White House's position on President Barack Obama's religion.
However on CNN Aug. 28 coverage of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally, which CNN reporters and anchors
seemingly held their collective noses up and reported on throughout the event, the chyron on the screen was
something likened to one of those parlor games where you circle the numerous errors involved.
The Media
is the Politics. The "debates" between the current crop of presidential wannabes bear little
resemblance to the stirring intellectual drama of Lincoln and Douglas, but they accurately reflect our
times. Short answers to trivial questions for short attention spans. There's little opportunity for
eloquence in a sound bite and it's not likely that television audiences would stay tuned if there were.
The News Media Vs. the Innocent.
Years ago, Ray Donovan, Ronald Reagan's Labor Secretary, was prosecuted for corruption, only to be acquitted.
After the verdict, Donovan asked plaintively, "Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?" Steven
Hatfill knows where to go to get his reputation back. But upon arriving there, he finds the door blocked
by someone who says her privileges are more important than his good name. That someone, of course, is a
journalist. And, not surprisingly, she enjoys the broad support of other journalists, who have proved to
be slow learners about the obligations they share with their fellow citizens.
AFP Takes
Lessons from TNR. The caption that accompanied the photo read: "An elderly Iraqi woman shows
two bullets which she said hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite
Baghdad suburb of Sadr City." … The only way these "bullets" could have hit the woman's house was if
they'd been thrown at it. They'd obviously never been fired.
Haditha Massacre: Media and Terrorist
Hoax? As charges against U.S. Marines — regarding an apparent fabrication of the
"Haditha massacre" — continue to be proved false and based upon unsubstantiated "evidence," only
some of the leftist media appear to be standing by their original spin on the story.
A press storm over
secrets. The media may not be the most detested institution in America, but it is surely a
contender for the title. A Harris poll in March found that only 14 percent of American adults
express a "great deal" of confidence in the press, while 34 percent — one American in
three — have "hardly any" confidence in it.
Media
Should Have 'Outed' Foley. The finger-pointing in the Mark Foley scandal has curiously not focused
on one particularly powerful player complicit in allowing the Florida Republican to continue his detrimental
behavior for years: the American media.
Update:
After
election, Foley story fizzles. If ever a news story bolstered Rush Limbaugh's low opinion of the
"drive-by media," it is the tawdry saga of former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla. When the story about Foley's
e-mails to former House pages first broke, cable news was All Foley/All the Time. … When the House
Committee on Standards of Official Conduct report came out this month finding no violations by GOP leadership
of House rules or standards, the once-big story devolved into news briefs and tepid editorials. No big
scandal, no big story.
Hillary and the Ghost of LBJ:
Much complained about every four years is the tendency of the media to play elections for the presidency as a
horse race. There is reason for this. Exciting, colorful, horse races never fail to capture an audience.
They have a winner and a batch of losers. But horse races always end. What the horse racing model of media
coverage never does is illuminate the long-term success or failure of the underlying ideas at stake in the ever
fluid, always forward-moving history of the American experience. But those ideas do win —
and they do lose. One of the most continually defeated ideas that has appeared in American politics
is that of weakness and appeasement in foreign policy.
Big Media are Repeatedly Wrong Claiming
'Record-High' Gas Prices. Since Hurricane Katrina swept ashore on the Gulf Coast, we've heard
seemingly countless reports of "record high" gas or oil prices. From the beginning of September last
year, the big three networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — have told us about record high gas
or oil prices close to 100 times. They've been wrong each and every time.
The
media's shabbiest moments. The year 2005 is ending as it began, with another
successful election in Iraq and a liberal media still flapping around trying to find other
controversies to submerge it. It does not matter to them that a Gallup poll found
that 74 percent of Americans express confidence in their military, but only 28 percent
express confidence in their newspapers or TV news outlets.
Jellyfish of the Year: The
intellectual flubber of Time's decision is manifest on many levels. Though some argue that
Time was patting the American people on the head for voting the way they wanted in the last election,
the more obvious explanation is that Time's editors didn't want to offend anybody. "If you choose
an individual, you have to justify how that person affected millions of people," Richard Stengel, Time's
newly vintaged managing editor, told the Associated Press. "But if you choose millions of people, you
don't have to justify it to anyone."
The KGB's Useful Idiots:
There are numerous examples of leftists unwittingly serving the Soviet cause in the 1980s, which today sit in
Communist government and media archives, some of which have been translated and are easily accessible in the
United States. There they gather dust, as liberal historians and journalists ignore them, failing to
do their jobs, never reporting the real history that exists.
Anchors
Aweigh: According to a Pew Research Center survey of 552 journalists and news media executives
from November 20, 1998 to February 11, 1999: "40% of journalists working for national news
organizations and 55% of those working for local outlets said that news reports were increasingly marred by
factual errors and sloppy reporting. About 60% said the boundary between reporting and commentary had eroded."
Funniest Media Gaffes of 2006: In the dubious
sources category: "Don Spille — A man who told the Tallahassee Democrat that he lost everything
in Katrina — including his father. Ed Spille Sr., his father, later contacted the newspaper to
disagree."
Media Report
of Raids on Tulsa Illegals Draws Outrage. A series of raids in Oklahoma last week led to the
arrests of 127 criminal aliens, fugitives and other immigration violators despite a TV station's news report
that not only exposed the operation to the public, but also described the people and the vehicles being used
in the effort.
This Ain't Nightline. It's not Ted Koppel's
fault that the New York Times has made him a Times contributing columnist. … [T]he fault belongs
to whomever assigned, accepted, and edited or rewrote Koppel's self-indulgent, self-congratulatory,
late-to-the-party, and punishingly obvious 1,500-word piece about the state of television
news. (It's bad.)
The Press And the Rush To Judgment. Remember
those January newspaper headlines heralding the survival of all 12 trapped miners in West Virginia? Even
the august New York Times reported "12 Found Alive 41 Hours After Explosion," but only one miner had actually
survived. In the frenzy to scoop competitors, reporters failed their journalistic responsibility, and
this penchant to rush to judgment before all the facts are verified is again occurring on two recent hot
button issues — homeland security funding cuts to New York City and the Haditha civilian deaths.
Life
after Ted Koppel: Koppel's debut as a New York Times columnist has been widely panned,
but it is a revealing column, for Koppel confirms what many of us had figured out as he and his broadcast
became increasingly irrelevant. He writes that journalists "should be telling their viewers what is
important, not the other way around." Finally, all of his cards are on the table and he's revealed
the contempt that he had for his audience all along.
Whatever happened to news as
information? Most hurricane reporters aren't exactly war reporters, so once they've
proved how hard the wind is blowing, they pack it in. … And have you noticed where most of
these reporters were "reporting" from? More often than not, it's either just outside their
station's office building or on the patio of some hotel. There's nothing seriously wrong with
reporting from your hotel, but it's awfully lazy.
Myths of rich
and poor: There is a fundamental difference between seeking the truth and scoring
points. In politics, the truth is strictly optional and that also seems to be true in parts
of the media.
Journalists have become ambitious
courtiers. Gone are the days of the cheerfully humble reporter sticking
to the facts and keeping his opinions to himself. Today's media forget how much they
don't know. … You may have noticed, for example, how thoroughly the media omit
any religious perspective on the news — which means that they miss the
actual significance of the news for countless Americans. They utter self-assured
pronouncements about the Constitution from depths of confusion.
How the CIA Uses the
Press: One of the fascinating aspects of coverage of the Joseph Wilson
affair is the tendency of the media to go to the defense of the CIA, which arranged for
Wilson's dubious Africa trip.
When accountability is
compromised: The disgraceful affair of Wen Ho Lee, the onetime Los Alamos scientist
defamed but never tried for supposedly stealing nuclear secrets for China, is over. The U.S. government
and five news organizations will pay Lee $1.64 million for sliming him by publishing private information
from his personnel files to support espionage allegations that nobody could ever prove and that apparently
were unfounded.
Hiding
Barrett. In a very clever year-end column the venerable William Safire writing in the
New York Times asks whether "special prosecutor David Barrett's 400-page expose of political influence
within the Internal Revenue Service and the Clinton Justice Department" will be the government
report "most likely to resist investigative reporting" this year. I certainly hope not.
Media
Report Miracle Mine Rescue — Then Carry the Tragic Truth. In one of the most
disturbing media performances of its kind in recent years, TV news and many newspapers carried the
tragically wrong news late Tuesday and early Wednesday [1/4/2006] that 12 of 13 trapped coal miners
in West Virginia had been found alive and safe. Hours later they had to reverse course. … It
was "Dewey Defeats Truman" all over again.
United Flight Diverted
Because of Unruly Passenger. Boston's Channel 7, an NBC affiliate, reported that the woman had
a screwdriver, Vaseline and a note referencing the al-Qaeda terrorist group. [George Naccara, federal
security director for the U.S. Transportation Security Administration at Logan Airport] said she was not
in fact carrying any of these items.
Judith Miller, TWA 800 and
the Death of Press Freedom. All those wonderful federal sources who spoon-fed you, the
dominant media journalist, story after story for which you were praised and rewarded with even better
stories — as long as you did not demand that officially sanctioned stories be backed up
with actual documents and other provable facts. These "sources" would never again be available
to you if you ever crossed the Beast, the National Security State. You'd actually have to push
away from your desk, get out of your chair, go out into the cold, cruel world, walk past your favorite
pub and find sources.
And now, a touching, fake story of
bogus courage and false hope. Who can really blame student journalist Michael
Brenner, editor of The Daily Egyptian at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill., for
grabbing onto what seemed to be a really good story when it dropped into his lap? How was
he to know that it wasn't true at all?
Conventionally
Ignorant: Washington is an echo chamber. One pundit, one senator, one reporter
proclaim a snazzy "truth" and almost immediately it reverberates as gospel. Conventional wisdom
about Iraq is rarely questioned. A notion seems to find validity not on its logic or through
empirical evidence, but simply by the degree to which it is repeated and felt to resonate.
Why the media passes off bunk as news.
I like oddball news as much as anyone. In fact, I make a decent living showcasing a daily collection of
silly news, offbeat items, and real news with amusing headlines on my website, Fark.com, which attracts
3.5 million unique visitors each month. What's scary, though, is that the ratio of filler news to
real news is now so high that the content of Fark and major news websites is often nearly identical. That
should never happen because, in theory, mass media outlets are staffed by full-time, serious journalists who
have better things to do.
No, they really don't.
Disgruntled
CNN visitor launches website due to marimba-playing robots. Do you ever go to CNN.com to check up
on the latest news? Neither do we. Well, unless we're writing about CNN's political analyst Jeffrey
Toobin watching baseball on his laptop during a vice presidential debate. But why bring that up? At
least one disgruntled CNN visitor is challenging the network's choice of news selection. Not that the
network is too liberal or too conservative but too fluffy.
Math Is Harder for Girls. The
New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts
say otherwise. … Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot
understand the most basic science reporting.
Clinton's Mythical
FEMA. While making the rounds of the network morning shows, [Senator
Hillary Clinton has] been very hard on the Federal Emergency Management Administration
and, of course, the Bush Administration. She went as far as complaining that Bush
damaged "Bill's FEMA." Naturally, the mainstream media are too lazy to
investigate her politically-charged exploitation of Katrina to not only revise her
hubby's legacy, but also to score brownie points as she eyes a 2008 presidential run.
Media Mind Control
in the War on Terror. By using graphic images, focusing only on what
they want you to see and hear, shaping events by reporting only on those that fit
the media's political agenda, ignoring anything that is counterproductive to their
goals, they control an empire that is actually a fourth arm of government.
Preserving the public
trust: Most of the truly profitable newspapers in the country today are essentially shopping
circulars with some cheap journalism printed on those pages not devoted to shopping mall sales. The
great newspaper chains take over local papers, fire journalists, and set out to fill their pages with
still more advertisements.
USA Today's Reporting Scandals: USA
Today recently acted correctly to remove a reporter guilty of fabricating facts and sources for several
articles. Too bad they weren't so responsive several years when Michael Fumento reported
major errors in reporting on the Gulf War Syndrome story by a reporter named John Hanchette.
Schools for
Scribblers: On the education of young journalists, there has been much recent
debate. There is one argument over whether or not journalists should aspire to objectivity
and another about the liberal bias that permeates journalism programs. But the problem
isn't that journalists are being taught improperly; it's that the foundations of journalistic
education are faulty.
Soft on the stars'
scientology. Many people believe, as I do, that Scientology is a cult, an oppressive
organization that splits families and milks believers for every cent they can muster. But to
entertainment journalists, Scientology is about as harmless as scuba diving.
Fannie Mae's bailout
tab: Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage association, has been battling a
mounting scandal since last year. It has accounting errors of about $11 billion. [That's
Enron × 19.] This is news — $30 billion worth of
news — but only print reporters are out there covering it regularly. TV news
is out to lunch.
The
hardest numbers: Polls on unfamiliar issues are notoriously volatile,
and results can shift wildly when questions are worded slightly differently.
Poll Accuracy in the 2008 Presidential Election: 23
organizations ranked by the accuracy of their final, national preelection polls.
Poor
reflections in the media mirror. The mainstream public does not
perceive that the "mainstream media" takes the time to check facts and eschews
opinion in its "reporting." According to the Pew Center for the People and
the Press, only 35 percent of Americans think the media get the facts right.
Self-indulgence: The
enraged speeches and street disorders across the country that accompanied the inauguration of President
Bush may tell us more than we want to know about what is happening to this country. Elections are
supposed to be an alternative to other ways of settling political differences, including riots, military
coups and dictatorships. But riots have been re-christened "demonstrations" by the mealy-mouth
media.
Tainted
media: Who in the major media has asked why John Kerry would need to be
issued an honorable discharge during the Carter administration, years after leaving
the navy, unless his original discharge was less than honorable? One of Jimmy
Carter's first acts as President was to issue an order granting amnesties to draft
dodgers who had fled the country during the Vietnam war and also allowing an upgrading
of military discharges that had been less than honorable.
How to skew the news without really
trying. As columnist Jill Stewart notes, "disingenuous reporters hate … term limits because
reporters must woo new legislators every eight years, working their butts off for leaks and cell phone
numbers." Journalism depends on access. Term limits, by making old cultivated sources of access
irrelevant every few terms, make reporters work harder. Why would they want that?
Be Doubly Afraid Of Cell Phones Lost In
Airports. Earlier this week, a scare story about the supposed dangers of hidden data left on used
cell phones did the rounds, spurred on by a self-serving vendor's "research". … Somehow, stories
like this would be a lot more believable if they didn't originate from vendors who just happen to have a
solution to these invented problems for sale.
News 4 sale: Local newscasts
are passing off corporate press releases as news, according to a new report.
The Editor says...
Manufacturers and marketers of new products know how local TV news works. The stations
have time to fill, and one of the highest priorities is getting video on the air other
than a studio camera pointed at the happy team of news anchors.
Pre-packaged "news" stories, called Video News Releases (VNR's) are fed via satellite, sometimes two or three
times a week. In some cases, the items are syndicated and available only to subscribing stations, and in
other cases they're made available to any station that wants them. Someone at the station looks them over,
and decides if the donated items are interesting enough to use as filler. Naturally, the "news" in each
story is about some problem that a new product — a drug or gadget or software package —
will fix, and that's the point of the story. Sometimes, the satellite feed contains footage of the product,
along with "suggested anchor lead-in" scripts, and sometimes it is a complete pre-produced "package,"
essentially a 90-second infomercial, ready for air. Small market stations probably put the stories
on the air exactly as they were received. In larger markets, if it's interesting enough, the story
is given to a reporter, who then re-records the announcer track in his or her own voice, often without
even rephrasing it (except to remove verbs!), making it look like (s)he went out and dug up the
story. Thus the station gives the appearance of providing "local news" coverage, without spending
any money, and without mentioning that the footage was shot a thousand miles away by somebody else.
There has apparently been some backlash to the story above, because the news managers at many stations
are now being careful not to run VNR's.
Simpletons
in the press. Can we have a serious political debate in this country any
more? Why is it that when a politician, addressing an important national
issue — articulating the position held by an overwhelming majority of
Americans — is ridiculed, his words distorted, twisted, caricaturized?
The Malkin
Media Diversity Test: The diversity they seek is, by definition, skin-deep. They
call themselves "journalists of color." Not journalists of substance. Or journalists of
integrity. Or journalists of independent thought.
When diversity is only
skin-deep: What the convention should have been told is that it is neither moral nor
progressive to view the world through a racial prism. Unity's "journalists of color" should have heard
the blunt message that journalism does not need more reporters and editors of color. It doesn't need
more white journalists, either. What it needs are men and women of talent and integrity —
adults who have no interest in a "diversity" that is merely skin-deep.
Real Sherrod Story
Still Untold. [Scroll down] The major media reported the settlement as though it were
the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. For the last forty years, as the civil rights industry has
manufactured more and more absurd grievances — most notably the Tea Party smear that incited
Breitbart's reprisal — the media have reported on them with increasingly wide-eyed innocence.
In the various stories on the settlement, not one reporter that I could identify stopped to do the
math. ... Although 86,000 black farmers are alleged to have received payments, at no time in the last three
decades have there been more than 40,000 black farmers. Nor is there much turnover in the farming
business.
Blame
uninformed voters. Whether you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or
Republican, if your only news source is the boob tube you are simply underinformed,
though not necessarily misinformed. Unfortunately, most Americans are
underinformed.
Climate
Reality Bites. Thankfully, the American system makes it hard for colossal tax and regulatory
burdens to foxtrot into law without scrutiny. So we hope our politicians will take responsibility for
the global-warming policies they say they favor. Or even begin to understand what they say they favor.
For a bill as grandly ambitious as Warner-Lieberman, very few staff, much less Senators, even know what's
in it. The press corps mainly cheerleads this political fad, without examining how it would work or
what it would cost.
Media
ignorance: Many media people have been journalism and/or communication
majors. Most of these programs have little analytical rigor. Along with departments of
education, they are a dumping ground for the most ill-prepared students. That might
explain a lot.
All the News We Get From the
ACLU: In case you aren't able to read ACLU press releases for yourself, The Associated Press
and The New York Times will helpfully restate them for you as important, breaking "news."
CNN called Castro's
"megaphone": After analyzing every Cuba-based story that has appeared on CNN since it established
a Havana bureau five years ago, the Media Research Center is calling the network a "propaganda tool for
Fidel Castro's government" and a "megaphone for a dictator."
Chris Matthews'
latest verbal blunder. Discussing the Ground Zero Mosque: "Suppose they built this thing
right square over....right over the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem." Obviously, he does not realize that the
Dome of the Rock Muslim "Shrine" was built directly on the site of the 2nd Temple...
Juan Williams and the Left's Intellectual Bankruptcy.
Juan Williams makes the understandable post-9/11 observation that the sight of Muslims on airplanes makes him nervous, and NPR
immediately fires him. Bill O'Reilly states the obvious truth that Muslims attacked the United States on 9/11, and Whoopi
Goldberg and Joy Behar walk off the set. These incidents and others demonstrate that the Leftists in the mainstream media
and their Islamic supremacist allies are wholly intellectually bereft — and so they cannot engage their opponents on
the level of ideas, but must instead bludgeon them into silence.
Newsroom Clichés
Why do reporters and news anchors constantly refer to ordinary people
as "folks"? When will they stop using "absolutely" as an expletive? Why must news writers
refer to snow as "the white stuff"? Why are politicians called "lawmakers" in the press when
nobody uses that term in person? When was the last time you went somewhere and then "fled the
scene?" The Medical Examiner probably doesn't actually say, "I pronounce you dead at the
scene", but that's the way it's often reported when someone dies on the highway. What
are these news writers thinking?
The most overworked cliché in the field is the ubiquitous "How do you feel?" to which every
reporter resorts when he or she runs out of ideas during an interview. Of course, many reporters
start out with that question because it makes the other guy talk a lot, and because it adds emotional
appeal to the story. (If they start to cry, zoom in!)
I'm sure to face stiff opposition from some of you, but you owe it to yourself to keep reading.
Lake Superior State University Banished Words
List. This "breaking news" just in: Lake Superior State University releases its 33rd annual List
of Words and Phrases Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness.
And then there's this…
Banished Word List Archive from
1976 to the present.
Groaners! You know 'em. You
love 'em. But can't we live without 'em? Groaners are those horrible, overused, hackneyed
phrases that turn news copy into boring, "same old, same old" stuff. This is a list of some of
the worst offenders.
[But they left out "every parent's worst nightmare", "an emotional roller coaster"
and "a mile-long path of destruction."]
Sports Clichés: The Sports Cliché List
was assembled from a detailed survey of numerous player and coach interviews, pre-game, post-game, and
halftime analyses, sports radio commentaries, television sportscasts, and printed sports
reports. … For the purpose of this website, we define a sports cliché as an
expression that has been used in and around sports with sufficient frequency over a protracted
period such that it is "tired" at best and meaningless at worst.
At the end of the day, do an about-face on
clichés. Chris Pash is an executive with Factiva, the database company that loads news
articles from 10,000 sources, including 1,600 American newspapers. [He took] the leading 55
clichés and developed a detailed index which charted how often each cliché was used and
which publications used that cliché the most.
More Clichés Than You Can Shake a Stick At. Some
of these are classics. Others might more accurately be called newspaper or media jargon because you'll
never see or hear these phrases anywhere else. What normal person says "densely wooded area"
or "blueprint for growth" in everyday — or any — conversation?
Inspiring 'overcomer' stories are
newsroom cliches. "Supercrips are everywhere in the media," Wolfe went on. "The person
with no use of her arms who paints masterpieces with her feet, the guy with Tourette's syndrome who becomes
a radio announcer, Stephen Hawking explaining the universe from his wheelchair. And, of course,
that blind mountain climber."
Banned For Life: This page is devoted to those
expressions so hackneyed and insufferable that they should be forever banned from the nation's news
reports.
rising tide of clichés, The.
Periodically an old (or hoary old) question is raised. Is the standard of writing at the BBC declining
(or plummeting or plunging or even in free-fall)? Or is it improving (or soaring or rocketing)? ... It is
lucky for the BBC that the only people who continue to be worried about such matters are the Radio Four audience,
and the smattering of news snobs who insist in a superior fashion that they much prefer the World Service bulletins.
Listeners to other networks give no sign of knowing or caring about good English. The same applies to the
television news, in which words count for almost nothing.
The Cliché Community:
But let's turn the page! Paul[ McCartney]'s right that the times are ever-changing, but I wish they'd change a little more
quickly, so we could get a new set of insta-clichés and cant phrases for everybody to start using all at once —
or better, so we could all return to using the perfectly fine words we were using before we popped these new verbal pacifiers
into our mouths.
Show me where Stalin
is buried and I'll show you a Communist Plot. Cable networks in particular label weather
phenomenon as The Battle for Des Moines! Crisis in the Heartland! The term hero is applied to
everything from crossing guards to anyone in the military. It's heroes and battles all the time.
Watch the language of the media carefully and see if you don't detect it. The battle for this, a politician
goes to war for such and such. A Senator speaks of how hard he had to fight. And on and on it
goes. Naked plagiarism of Soviet era propaganda.
Oxford
compiles list of top ten irritating phrases. Heading the list was the expression 'at the end of
the day', which was followed in second place by the phrase 'fairly unique'.
See No Evil. [Scroll down
slowly] If reporters ever read their own words or listened to their own voices, they would stop
repeating the ugly cliché that the Taliban (or gang X) has "claimed credit" for some revolting
crime or attempted crime. Do we say that "The jury assigned credit to Joe Shmoe for beating up an
old lady and kicking her dog down the stairs"? The word reporters are looking for is guilt.
The Taliban have admitted guilt, once again, for an attempted mass murder. Do liberals ever listen to
what they are saying?
Man up, Media and
Open Your Eyes! One of my complaints in the local newsrooms that I worked in was that we did not
do "real" very well. We liked telling viewers early and often in our promos that we are, "part of your community,"
or, "your neighbors in the newsroom," or, "watching out for your neighborhood," or whatever silly slogan was used.
The reality is that the local TV newsrooms are more connected to grabbing stories out of the daily newspaper and repeating
them, or repeating what they are told by the last public official they spoke to than they are at being on the pulse of a
community. If you try to do "real" on a TV newscast you don't last very long...
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