“The actual journalistic accomplishment in ‘State of Denial’ is less than grand. It took him three books to arrive at a conclusion thousands of basement-bound bloggers suggested years ago: that the Bush administration is composed of people who like war, don’t seem to be very good at it and have been known to turn the guns on each other. Such an epiphany doesn’t seem to reflect a reporter who had rarefied access.”
— David Carr in The New York Times
“Why is the ‘western experiment’ dying on the vine? (The attempt to live by Enlightenment values?)”
The Daily Howler explains.
“And just when you thought there were no depths of sycophancy and general fluffitude to which she could not dive, Couric suits up, climbs into the bathysphere, and descends into the realm of sightless fish on her new blog. They should just leave this stuff off the Internets and let Katie scrawl it on the cover of her History notebook during study hall.”
As opposed to a list of documents to read, what would you nominate as the list of concepts journalism students should be exposed to? Here’s a quick sample:
* Institutional culture
* Regression toward the mean
* Moral hazard
* Expected value (of an uncertain outcome)
* Present value (of a stream of gains and losses over time)
* Statistical control
* Correlation v. causation
* Benefit-cost analysis and willingness-to-pay
* Cost-effectiveness
* Separation of powers
* Mill’s “harm principle”
* Rent-seeking
…* Opportunity cost
* Cognitive dissonance
* Milgram experiment
Here’s the original reading list.
“Bush was elected twice, over Democrats Al Gore and John Kerry, whose know-it-all arrogance rankled Midwesterners such as myself. The country thought Bush was a pleasant, down-to-earth guy who would not rock the boat.”
— The dean of America’s political correspondents, David S. Broder.
Better to know-it-all than know nothing.
I think I might start a subscription to The Washington Post just so I can cancel it. Sheeesh!
This, from McSweney’s, is just excellent: Another Letter From an Earth Ball. An excerpt:
Now, look: I’m not as naive as a tennis ball. I understand that Sean Hannity’s job requires him to create false issues to distract his listeners from real issues. I understand that he is a kind of rodeo clown for the radio. He was just taking care of business, I thought to myself, and I was sorry I did, because the song came back in force, even after Donny switched off his radio and left.
But something was still bothering me. Sean Hannity had always been a character assassin, but this hit seemed especially unfair. How did Roger Clinton’s trip to Serendipity 3 in August 2006 for frozen hot chocolate have anything to do with his comments on an old surveillance tape? And how did those comments reflect upon Bill Clinton at all? The attack didn’t even seem worthy of Sean Hannity, which is like saying that a particular load of excrement is not worthy of a toilet.
“One of my frustrations with the blogosphere—as those of you who read this blog know—is that I think that the immediacy of web publishing makes some people lazy. They type faster than they think; or they believe that a reaction is the same thing as an argument.”
Malcolm Gladwell, responding to more criticism of his most recent article (mentioned here).
Some 36-38 years ago in Tucson NewMexiKen lived across the street from a small supermarket. At the rear of the store they parked a large, flatbed trailer with a wire cage on it. As they stocked the store’s shelves they’d toss the empty cardboard boxes into the cage. Once-in-awhile someone would come by, drop off a new trailer and haul the full one away.
One afternoon around three the boxes caught fire. It was a pretty spectacular bonfire for about five minutes and during that brief time a local news guy happened by (he must have had a scanner to hear the fire call). He took a few seconds of film. We laughed, but sure enough that night on the news there was film of cardboard boxes in flame. If I remember right, it was the lead story.
It wouldn’t happen that way anymore. Oh, TV news would still cover a cardboard box fire, but here’s what we’d see.
A news crew would show up, more than likely after the fire was out. They’d videotape a few seconds of fire engine lights flashing, a firehose leaking, and a soggy, charred mess of cardboard. They’d interview a guy in a tank top, who’d say it was the biggest box fire he’d ever seen.
Then, at 10PM, they wouldn’t just use the video like Channel 13 in Tucson did all those years ago. No, they’d send a reporter and van out to the now deserted store, hours after the fire. The reporter would stand in front of a now even soggier mess and introduce the seven hour old video.
Live, local, late breaking.
If you don’t believe me, I just saw a live shot of an empty trash container tipped over by flooding earlier today.
NewMexiKen agrees with hrh at Daily Kos, what about these Beautiful Dead Girls?
David Carr has a good column today about when the reporter thinks he or she is the star. To wit, Tony Kornheiser. An excerpt:
Like no one else, Mr. Kornheiser has leveraged a radio face and a newspaper voice into multiplatform stardom, but his history demonstrates that when it comes to dishing it out without the ability to take same, he also has few rivals. It is not that he has thin skin; he has no skin.
When Mike Golic, the host of a morning sports show on ESPN, suggested that Mr. Kornheiser’s performance was merely “fine,” Mr. Kornheiser was moved to say, “I just want to ring Golic’s neck and hang him up over the back of a shower rod like a duck.”
Last year, the ESPN columnist Chuck Klosterman took a measured swipe at Mr. Kornheiser, who then ranted on his radio show for days, demanding that Mr. Klosterman come to the phone and defend himself.
The three networks (you remember them, ABC, CBS and NBC) game the Ramsey case 15 minutes combined time on the evening news yesterday. The NSA decision got just under three minutes total (and 2/3rds of that from ABC).
Paraphrasing Jefferson: The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who views nothing but television news.
Do you suppose The New York Times knows the name of the guy they endorsed? It’s Lamont. Wouldn’t know it from these headlines:
Lieberman Uses Rival’s Wealth as Issue in Race NYT, August 3
Senator Takes to the Road as His Primary Rival Focuses on Schiavo Stance NYT, July 29
Lieberman and Rival Step Up Ads in Final Leg NYT, July 28
Poll Finds Democratic Rival Has Caught Up to Lieberman in Primary Race NYT, July 21
Lieberman Rival Hopes to Find Support in Issues Beyond Iraq NYT, July 19
Found at Eat The Press | The Huffington Post
“Ken-Jennings.com had 573,000 pageviews yesterday, up just slightly from last Tuesday’s, um, 1,800.”
— Ken Jennings, commenting on the reaction to the news stories saying he had insulted Jeopardy! More here.
[By one count, NewMexiKen,com had about 4,000 page views yesterday.]
Another of the media myths about Al Gore was that he wrongly claimed to have been the model for Oliver Barrett IV in Erich Segal’s wildly successful book (and the Oscar-nominated best picture that followed) Love Story. This was made out as one more example of Gore’s tendency to lie, or at least exaggerate. Gore himself claimed only to have said during a conversation with reporters on a late-night flight in 1997 that a reporter for The Nashville Tennessean had gotten Segal to acknowledge a connection to Gore during a book tour. Whatever Gore actually said, the media told the story through the 2000 election as if it was totally off the wall.
But it wasn’t. In late 1997 Melinda Henneberger in The New York Times, reported:
Those reports were half-true, Mr. Segal said: The character of the preppy Harvard hockey player Oliver Barrett 4th was modeled on both Mr. Gore and his college roommate, the actor Tommy Lee Jones.
But it was Mr. Jones who inspired the half of the character that was a sensitive stud, a macho athlete with the heart of a poet, Mr. Segal said. The author attributed to Mr. Gore only the character’s controlling father and feeling that his family was pressuring him to follow in Dad’s footsteps.
According to Henneberger, Segal stated that, though he knew her, Tipper Gore was not model for the book’s Jenny Cavilleri (played in the film by Ali MacGraw).
Do you remember learning during the 2000 election cycle that the story was in any way true?
In NewMexiKen’s copy of the Sunday New York Times an article about Senator Elizabeth Dole states she was the “first female cabinet secretary.” I wonder how many times the authors of the article, Adam Nagourney and Kate Zernike, have driven or walked by the Frances Perkins Building in Washington. That’s the headquarters for the Department of Labor, which Ms. Perkins headed from 1933-1945. She was the first woman cabinet member (and thereby the first woman ever in the presidential line of succession).
The online version of the story about Mrs. Dole has been corrected to read “the secretary of both transportation and labor.” It points out that the Senator is not doing well as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. That may be due to the temper of the public, but the word on Mrs. Dole in Washington always was “all style, no substance.”
Frances Perkins, by the way, went to court to maintain the right to keep her surname when she married in 1913.
Do they know about this in Santa Fe?
Here’s the link to the article.
Thanks to Steve Terrell for the pointer.
Daily Howler’s take on the Kornblut blunder:
[W]e won’t assume the report is “dishonest.” Though it’s understandably hard for most people to grasp, the national press corps—for all its celebrity—is an extremely unimpressive group of people. Yes, they do misconstrue on this scale, quite routinely; it’s entirely possible that Kornblut just bungled when she produced this groaning report. Indeed, it often seems that people get hired on the press corps’ highest levels only after proving their mediocrity. It often seems, when it comes to our celebrity press, that clear-thinkers need not apply.
As NewMexiKen has said, I’ve never seen a mainstream news report about something I was familiar with that did not have at least some inaccurate statements. (I started to correct this to “I’ve hardly ever,” but decided “never” was right.)
Here is what New York Times reporter Anne E. Kornblut wrote:
ROGERS, Ark., July 15 — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, returning to her red-state ties, chastised Democrats Saturday for taking on issues that arouse conservatives and turn out Republican voters rather than finding consensus on mainstream subjects.
Without mentioning specific subjects like gay marriage, Mrs. Clinton said: “We do things that are controversial. We do things that try to inflame their base.”
“We are wasting time,” the senator told a group of Democratic women here, on part of a two-day swing through a state that could provide an alternate hub to New York if she starts a national political campaign.
Here, via Atrios, is what Senator Clinton said:
You have to ask yourself, we have all these problems, and we have solutions sitting out there, why can’t we move in the right direction? And it really comes down to a difference in values and philosophy.
You know the nine women Democratic Senators, anybody see us on Larry King’s show? We put out what we call our Checklist for Change. I don’t know about you, but I am a list maker. I guess it’s like a part of the DNA for women. I make lists about lists. And so we were talking one day and saying, you know, we as individuals, we have all of this legislation, we can’t get it on the floor of the Senate. We can’t get a vote on it because the Republican majority wants to vote on other things. So we pulled all our best ideas together.
Wouldn’t this be a good agenda for America: safeguard America’s pensions; good jobs for Americans; make college affordable for all; protect America and our military families; prepare for future disasters; make America energy independent; make small business and healthcare affordable, invest in life saving science; and protect our air, land, and water.
You know, Blanche Lincoln has a bill to make healthcare affordable for small business, I have a bill I was talking to you about with respect to energy independence, we have legislation sitting in the Senate to address these problems.
But with the Republican majority, that’s not their priority. So we do other things, we do things that are controversial, we do things that try to inflame their base so that they can turn people out and vote for their candidates. I think we are wasting time, we are wasting lives, we need to get back to making America work again, in a bipartisan, nonpartisan way. [emphasis added to show quotes used by reporter]
Clinton didn’t chastise Democrats as Kornblut wrote. She chastised the Republican majority. Clinton’s “we” refers to the Senate not the Democratic party.
Joel Achenbach has a terrific column on the blurring of lines between journalism and blogging. He begins:
In the news media there is much talk of “interactivity,” of breaking down the wall between journalistic producers and consumers. No longer will the news be proprietary to a professional elite that attempts, in an Olympian voice, to speak down to the unwashed masses. Instead, everyone will be an equal, fully respected partner in the news process, including nitwits, fanatics, the extremely daft and the recently straitjacketed.
Follow the fuss but still haven’t gotten around to watching or reading Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner? Chicago Sun-Times television critic Doug Elfman has an edited transcript (following his column). Here’s a taste:
To just sit here, at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush, to be this close to the man. I feel like I’m dreaming. Somebody pinch me. You know what, I’m a pretty sound sleeper, that may not be enough. Somebody shoot me in the face.
Is he really not here tonight? The one guy who could have helped.
By the way, before I get started, if anybody needs anything at their tables, speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers and somebody from the NSA will be right over with a cocktail.
Journalism professor: Can anyone, for extra credit, give me two words to describe this day that will go down in history?
Silence
Professor: I’ll give you a clue — it has to do with President Bush.
Random student: “Mission accomplished!”
Girl #1 to her friend: Mission Impossible? What does Tom Cruise have to do with Bush?
Girl #2: Yeah, I know, that movie isn’t even out yet!–Silver Center, NYU
Please note, this was a journalism class. These students are presumably the journalists of our future.
Dan Froomkin, consistently one of the very best commentators on the White House — a must read, really — sums up the reaction to Stephen Colbert, including this:
“Here they were, holding a swanky party for themselves, and Colbert was essentially telling them that they’ve completely screwed up their number one job these past six years. Is it any surprise they were defensive?”
And, quoting Time TV critic James Poniewozik: “To the audience that would watch Colbert on Comedy Central, the pained, uncomfortable, perhaps-a-little-scared-to-laugh reaction shots were not signs of failure. They were the money shots. They were the whole point.”
And Joan Walsh at Salon: “For those who think the media shamed itself by rolling over for this administration, especially in the run-up to the Iraq war, Colbert’s skit is the gift that keeps on giving. Thank you, Stephen Colbert!”
The Albuquerque Journal seems to have trouble with math, claiming in an article by Paul Logan Saturday that the Gathering of Nations “attracts more than 150,000 people and members from more than 500 tribes.”
How do 150,000 people attend a 3-day event in an 18,000 seat arena?