Category: Media & Journalism

Woman of Mass Destruction

Judy [Miller] told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover “the same thing I’ve always covered – threats to our country.” If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

Maureen Dowd in the concluding paragraph of today’s column

Other quotables from the column:

“I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate’s Becky Sharp.”

“But investigative reporting is not stenography.”

Judging a Magazine by Its Cover

John and YokoThe best magazine cover of the last 40 years was Rolling Stone’s January 1981 cover photograph of a naked John Lennon curled up in a fetal position around his wife, Yoko Ono. That is the judgment of editors and art directors from about 50 of the nation’s top magazines, who were asked to pick the 40 best covers of the last 40 years, in honor of the 40th anniversary of the National Magazine Awards. The picture was taken by Annie Leibovitz just hours before Mr. Lennon was shot and killed on Dec. 8, 1980.

The second best was the August 1991 cover of Vanity Fair featuring a naked and pregnant Demi Moore, also photographed by Ms. Leibovitz. Coming in third was the April 1968 cover of Esquire showing a bare-chested Muhammad Ali, pierced by arrows for refusing to be inducted into the United States Army.

The New York Times

The 40 best covers list.

Here’s the top 10:

  1. Rolling Stone — Jan. 22, 1981 — John Lennon and Yoko Ono laying in bed
  2. Vanity Fair — Aug. 1991 — Nude pregnant Demi Moore
  3. Esquire — April 1968 — “The Passion of Muhammad Ali” — Ali with arrows in his body
  4. The New Yorker — March 29, 1976 — Drawing of New York from Hudson River and rest of the country to Pacific Ocean
  5. Esquire — May 1969 — Andy Warhol drowning in Campbell’s soup can — “The decline and collapse of American avant-garde”
  6. The New Yorker — Sept. 24, 2001 — 9/11 — Twin towers drawing in all black against a gray skyline
  7. National Lampoon — January 1973 — “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog” — Man pointing gun at terrified dog
  8. Esquire — October 1966 — “Oh my God — we hit a little girl.”
  9. Harper’s Bazaar — Sept. 1992 — Linda Evangelista holding up the letter “A” in magazine’s title: “Enter the Era of Elegance”
  10. National Geographic — June 1985 — Afghan girl — “Haunted eyes of an Afghan refugee’s fears”

Questions of Character

Paul Krugman concludes today’s column:

What we really need is political journalism based less on perceptions of personalities and more on actual facts. Schadenfreude aside, we should not be happy that stories about Mr. Bush’s boldness have given way to stories analyzing his facial tics. Think, instead, about how different the world would be today if, during the 2000 campaign, reporting had focused on the candidates’ fiscal policies instead of their wardrobes.

Best line of the day, so far

“This isn’t 1989, when the mainstream media was stuck with a couple of things it no longer has: comparatively archaic channels of distribution, and a dose of self-respect.”

Salon’s Ask the pilot (Patrick Smith) discussing the JetBlue emergency landing September 21. He says it was no big deal.

… as time went by the airline faced an interesting quandary: leave the TVs running, and sensational commentary was liable to scare the shit out of everyone on the plane; pull the plug, and people would quickly suspect the situation was more dire than the crew was letting on. The whole thing set up a weird voyeuristic triangle: The passengers believed they were watching themselves, when actually they were watching the rest of us watch them.

Good stuff, worth a click, as is this week’s column on outsourcing aircraft repair. Note: Salon requires a subscription or viewing a brief ad.

Get-out-of-jail-free card

Dan Froomkin rightly chastises Judith Miller:

So what was Miller doing in jail? Was it all just a misunderstanding? The most charitable explanation for Miller is that she somehow concluded that Libby wanted her to keep quiet, even while he was publicly — and privately — saying otherwise. The least charitable explanation is that going to jail was Miller’s way of transforming herself from a journalistic outcast (based on her gullible pre-war reporting) into a much-celebrated hero of press freedom.

Note to reporters: There is nothing intrinsically noble about keeping your sources’ secrets. Your job, in fact, is to expose them. And if a very senior government official, after telling you something in confidence, then tells you that you don’t have to keep it secret anymore, the proper response is “Hooray, now I can tell the world” — not “Sorry, that’s not good enough for me, I need that in triplicate.” And if you’re going to go to jail invoking important, time-honored journalistic principles, make sure those principles really apply.

Best line of the day, so far

“The way news is driven today is not through print,” [Jon] Stewart said. “I don’t consider print media as relevant.” When [Graydon] Carter argued that television news consistently siphons what first appears in print, as evidenced by its coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign, Stewart said: “I didn’t say you weren’t important; I said you’re at the children’s table.”

Jon Stewart as reported by Folio Magazine

Radio ratings

Ever been curious how the radio station you listen to does in the ratings? Radio & Records posts the Arbitron ratings for every market on a continuing basis. The charts include the call letters (but not the frequency), the owner, the format and the rating for the past several quarters. Of course, NPR and other non-commercial stations aren’t included.

The rating shown by Radio & Records is—I believe—the average number of persons over age 12 that listened to a radio station for at least five minutes during one quarter hour at some point during the day. This is expressed as a percentage of the total possible audience for that market.

Some reporters at least start to grow cojones

ANDERSON COOPER: Excuse me, Senator [Mary Landrieu], I’m sorry for interrupting. I haven’t heard that, because, for the last four days, I’ve been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated.

And when they hear politicians slap — you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. And there’s not enough facilities to take her up.

Do you get the anger that is out here?

When [Secretary Chertoff] cautioned [NPR’s Robert] Siegel about the danger of relying on “anecdotal” “rumors” of people in dire straits, Siegel said, no—these are facts presented by reporters who have covered war zones. There are 2,000 people at the convention center in need, he said. Having finally broken through the steel plate that is Chertoff’s skull, the secretary confessed he hadn’t heard those reports—reports that the television networks were documenting, live, with their cameras. Chertoff promised he’d look into the matter.

CNN ANCHOR SOLEDAD O’BRIEN [to FEMA Director Brown]: How is it possible that we’re getting better intel than you’re getting? …

FEMA has been on the ground for four days, going into the fifth day. Why no massive airdrop of food and water? In Banda Aceh, in Indonesia, they got food dropped two days after the tsunami struck. …

It’s five days that FEMA has been on the ground. The head of police says it’s been five days that FEMA has been there. The mayor, the former mayor, putting out SOS’s on Tuesday morning, crying on national television, saying please send in some troops. So the idea that, yes, I understand that you’re feeding people and trying to get in there now, but it’s Friday. It’s Friday. …

Above from Slate, “The Rebellion of the Talking Heads – Newscasters, sick of official lies and stonewalling, finally start snarling.” By Jack Shafer

The liberal media

The mainstream media in this country are dominated by liberals.

I was informed of this fact by Rush Limbaugh. And Thomas Sowell. And Ann Coulter. And Rich Lowry. And Bill O’Reilly. And William Safire. And Robert Novak. And William F. Buckley, Jr. And George Will.

And John Gibson. And Michelle Malkin. And David Brooks. And Tony Snow. And Tony Blankely. And Fred Barnes. And Britt Hume. And Larry Kudlow. And Sean Hannity. And David Horowitz. And William Kristol. And Hugh Hewitt.

And Oliver North. And Joe Scarborough. And Pat Buchanan. And John McLaughlin. And Cal Thomas. And Joe Klein. And James Kilpatrick. And Tucker Carlson. And Deroy Murdock. And Michael Savage. And Charles Krauthammer. And Stephen Moore. And Alan Keyes.

And Gary Bauer. And Mort Kondracke. And Andrew Sullivan. And Nicholas von Hoffman. And Neil Cavuto. And Matt Drudge. And Mike Rosen. And Dave Kopel. And John Caldara.

George McClure in the Denver Post.

Read the rest.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

Selig resembled the Paul Newman character in the movie “Hud,” who after a series of beatings for his escapes from a chain gang eagerly obeyed orders. “Yes, boss. Yes, boss,” he said repeatedly with a smile. Only Luke was faking it. Selig is sincere.

Murray Chass in The New York Times

It has been corrected in the online version, but they should send the writer and editor to “the box” for this one. The film with that dialogue is “Cool Hand Luke,” not “Hud.”

Bill Moyers

Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my guests were and what my stories were. Ten thousand dollars.

Gee, Ken, for $2.50 a week, you could pick up a copy of TV Guide on the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent you a coupon that can save you up to 62 percent.

In the speech, which you can read here and watch here, Moyers threatened to come out of retirement. Do it Bill — and bring Walter with you.

GOPBS

Jesus’ General has the new PBS logo and some upcoming programming highlights.

A Very Special Bert and Ernie Special

Sesame Street becomes Rapture Road after Pastor Bob and Freedomland Development Corp. run all of the brown people out of the neighborhood. Homeless, penniless, and desperate, Bert and Ernie accept the Lord Jesus into their lives and begin reparative therapy.

Trust…but validate

The New York Times made an error in the obituary of Col. David Hackworth last week, calling him the inspiration for Apocalypse Now character Kurtz (Marlon Brando) rather than, as he actually was, for character Kilgore (Robert Duvall). As Editor & Publisher notes, others blithely passed along the mistake:

Time magazine, NPR’s “Fresh Air” and “All Things Considered,” and London’s Sunday Mirror. It’s likely they all just cribbed from “the newspaper of record.”

Kurtz, of course, is based on the character of the same name in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Caught listening

If you are fond of radio as a once unique and quite special medium — and NewMexiKen is — you will enjoy Garrison Keillor’s take on its current state in The Nation, Confessions of a Listener. One paragraph:

The deregulation of radio was tough on good-neighbor radio because Clear Channel and other conglomerates were anxious to vacuum up every station in sight for fabulous sums of cash and turn them into robot repeaters. I dropped in to a broadcasting school last fall and saw kids being trained for radio careers as if radio were a branch of computer processing. They had no conception of the possibility of talking into a microphone to an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. I tried to suggest what a cheat this was, but the instructor was standing next to me. Clear Channel’s brand of robotics is not the future of broadcasting. With a whole generation turning to iPod and another generation discovering satellite radio and Internet radio, the robotic formatted-music station looks like a very marginal operation indeed. Training kids to do that is like teaching typewriter repair.

In fact this is just a great piece about the state of affairs in America, full of laughs and insights (as Keillor always is).

What they care about

According to [Robert] Novak, the Schiavo matter has his mainstream press colleagues more upset than anything since Vietnam! Translation: They didn’t care this much about Iraq. They didn’t care this much about Bush’s tax cuts. They don’t care this much about Social Security. They didn’t care this much about the Bush-Gore election—the election which totally changed our politics—or about that crackpot book by those Swift Boat Veterans. No—more than all else, they care about this. It’s a confession we find most illustrative.

The Daily Howler