Category: Media & Journalism

The Daily Show, simply the best

Rob Corddry: How does one report the facts in an unbiased way when the facts themselves are biased?

Jon Stewart: I’m sorry, Rob, did you say the facts are biased?

Corddry: That’s right Jon. From the names of our fallen soldiers to the gradual withdrawal of our allies to the growing insurgency, it’s become all too clear that facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda.

AND

Jon Stewart: Stephen, what do you think about this idea that we are hearing from Rumsfeld, and now Sen. Inhofe, that the press was somehow irresponsible for releasing these photos of abuse?

Stephen Colbert: Jon, I agree entirely with Secy Rumsfeld that the release of these photos was deplorable, but these actions of a few rogue journalists do not represent the vast majority of the American media.

Stewart: The journalists did something wrong?

Colbert: I’m just saying those journalists don’t represent the journalists I know. The journalists I know love America, but now all anybody wants to talk about is the bad journalists–the journalists that hurt America.

But what they don’t talk about is all the amazingly damaging things we haven’t reported on. Who didn’t uncover the flaws in our pre-war intelligence? Who gave a free pass on the Saddam-al Queda connection? Who dropped Aghanistan from the headlines at the first whiff of this Iraqi snipehunt? The United States press corps, that’s who. Heck, we didn’t even put this story on the front page. We tried to bury it on “60 Minutes II.” Who’s on that–Charlie Rose and Angela Lansbury?

Stewart: Stephen, what do you think is at play here?

Colbert: Politics, Jon, that’s what. Pure and simple. I think it’s pretty suspicious that these tortures took place during a Presidential campaign. This is a clear cut case of partisan sadism. You know, come to think of it, I’m pretty sure those Iraqi prisoners want Bush out of office too. You know I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if a pile of hooded, naked Iraqis has a job waiting for them in the Kerry Administration.

Help ’em out

The Post-Crescent in Wisconsin has a problem and they’ve written an editorial about it.

Letters to the editor, a staple of The Post-Crescent’s Views pages, are a way to take the political and social temperature of the Valley. A well-written letter allows readers to ponder different points of view, perhaps made more poignant because the author is someone you might know. At best, they should offer a full spectrum of beliefs and topics.

Recently, though, as the race for president heats up, we’ve been dealing with this quandary: How can we balance the perspectives and topics of our letters when many of our submissions have been coming only from one side?

We’ve been getting more letters critical of President Bush than those that support him. We’re not sure why, nor do we want to guess. But in today’s increasingly polarized political environment, we would prefer our offering to put forward a better sense of balance.

Since we depend upon you, our readers, to supply our letters, that goal can be difficult. We can’t run letters that we don’t have.

Finally, a myth to dispel: We don’t give our letters any sort of political litmus test to determine if they make it into print. If that were so, we wouldn’t run letters that take swings at who we are and what we print.

If you would like to help us “balance” things out, send us a letter, make a call or punch out an e-mail. Read the handy box at the bottom of the page for more information. We’d love to hear from you.

Link from various blogs, but primarily Jesus’ General.

[Update: The Campaign Desk has more recent developments.]

No show

NewMexiKen is so distraught that Ann Coulter was cancelled in Albuquerque tonight (laryngitis), that I thought some Coulterisms were called for.

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.”
– Ann Coulter, New York Observer, August 26, 2002

“We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.”
– Ann Coulter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, February 26, 2002

“While there is indisputably nothing cooler than having fought for your country, John Kerry’s status as a Vietnam veteran is unlikely to change a single vote. Military guys will support Bush, and liberals don’t admire bravery.”
– Ann Coulter column, February 4, 2004

“Finally, all the candidates are willing to sell out any of these other issues in service of the secret burning desire of all Democrats: abortion on demand. If they could just figure out a way to abort babies using solar power, that’s all we’d ever hear about.”
– Ann Coulter column, January 21, 2004

What You See Is Not What You Get

CJR Campaign Desk has an article explaining the differences between newspapers and their online versions — more than you might think.

The New York Times Online is not the same as the New York Times. The same holds true for the web sites of the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal. To be sure, many of the stories are the same and the newspaper’s banner may appear atop the Web page. But according to online editors at all the news organizations, online users are reading a different publication than the ink-and-paper product.

Best line of the day, so far

From Dan Kennedy’s Media Log at The Boston Phoenix.com.

You know, the Democrats all agree that George W. Bush isn’t a good president, either, and he wasn’t even democratically elected. What do you suppose Bumiller’s response would be if one of the candidates called for Haitian troops to remove Bush from office?

Reference is to The New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who seems to have made an ass of herself in the last Democratic debate.

Getting it right

NewMexiKen has long been troubled by the innaccuracies and misunderstanding found in even the presumed best news sources. CJR Campaign Desk does a good job of pointing them out, as least for the campaign. This report from Brian Montopoli is a good example.

One of the oldest rules of journalism is the hoary maxim given to green reporters by crusty city editors everywhere:

“No matter who said it, check it out; if your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

And each election year, that maxim is duly ignored by political reporters scrambling to make deadline. So it is that already, with snow still on the ground, partisan talking points have begun to find their way, unchallenged, into the reports of the mainstream campaign press. Writing on “Tapped,” Nick Confessore points out that Associated Press reporter Lolita Baldor essentially regurgitated a GOP press release in a story criticizing John Kerry’s defense voting record. Confessore also noted that Slate’s Fred Kaplan did his research on the same issue and got the facts right.

Baldor’s piece is almost completely devoid of context — relying on Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson, she writes that Kerry voted “against spending on weapons systems that have proven invaluable in the Persian Gulf, including the F-16 and F-15 fighter aircraft” — implying that Kerry serially voted down one weapon system after another.

Baldor is not alone. WendellGee points us to a nearly identical case on CNN last night, where Judy Woodruff, in an interview with Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), goes through most of a Republican-generated list of “something like 13 different weapons systems that they say the record shows Senator Kerry voted against” — apparently unaware that all of the systems were in the same defense appropriations bill. That’s exactly the mistake Baldor made.

As Kaplan points out:

Kerry was one of 16 senators (including five Republicans) to vote against a defense appropriations bill 14 years ago. He was also one of an unspecified number of senators to vote against a conference report on a defense bill nine years ago. The RNC takes these facts and extrapolates from them that he voted against a dozen weapons systems that were in those bills. The Republicans could have claimed, with equal logic, that Kerry voted to abolish the entire U.S. armed forces, but that might have raised suspicions.

Baldor and Woodruff found it easier to regurgitate partisan rhetoric than to research the nuances.

Reporters should resist the urge to lean on storylines crafted by political operatives. Whether RNC or DNC, they’re selling a political pitch, not a database.

Journalism-related program activities

From Body and Soul:

This morning I skimmed through this article in the New York Times on Arab-Americans who are raising large amounts of money for George Bush thinking it was a little flimsy. The headline — Arabs in U.S. Raising Money to Back Bush — is technically true, but the few examples cited hardly suggest any significant trend, and a figure mentioned in the article — Bush’s approval rating amont Arab-Americans is down to 38 percent — suggests a trend toward large-scale Arab-American financial support would be surprising.

I read the article too fast, and missed the obvious: Most of the Arabs the Times mentions aren’t Arabs.

Ah, the high journalistic standards of our paper of record.

Indeed, as Abu Aardvark points out, of the three principals in the article, one is Iranian, one is Pakistani and the third is an Arab, but a Lebanese Christian.

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe. Thomas Jefferson

From The American Prospect, Wake-Up Time by Eric Alterman and Michael Tomasky, an insightful look at the media with five prescriptions for correction. Money quote:

Are our national media — schoolyard silly during campaign 2000, by turns somnolent and sycophantic ever since — starting to rouse themselves from their long torpor? …

Don’t start dancing to the music just yet, though. Bad habits die hard, and we’ve all come to expect too little genuine journalism and far too much of what might be called “journalism-related program activity.”

The aggressive press

The blogsphere and even mainstream media — does The Daily Show count? — are pumped because the Washington press corps was aggressive this week on the Bush National Guard issue. (Whom do we thank, Michael Moore or Peter Jennings?)

NewMexiKen is somewhat less frenetic about the awakened press. I’ll wait and see if they show the same intensity regarding the more current war.

Important, If True

From CJR Campaign Desk —

During the Civil War, some northern newspapers, uncertain as to the reliability of dated dispatches sent overland by part-time correspondents at the front, resorted to a standard headline that read:

“Important, If True”

The post goes on to discuss how this phrase applies to today’s wildfire story about Kerry.

Casualties

Why do the media (and others) talk about 500 American casualties in Iraq? Casualty means “injured, killed, captured, or missing in action through engagement with an enemy” [American Heritage Dictionary]. There have been 500+ killed. Clearly many more, possibly hundreds more, have been wounded.

Let me read that again

Caption in the Santa Fe New Mexican

Kirt Kempter, a geologist, sifts through ash that fell in the Arroyo de Los Chamisos behind the Santa Fe High School Thursday morning. Kempter says the ash came from the Bandalier Tuff eruption 1.6 million years ago.

So, let me see if I got this right. It erupted 1.6 million years ago and fell Thursday morning?

Actually the article is rather interesting. New Mexico it seems “ranks fifth behind Hawaii, Alaska, California and Oregon in geological activity because of movement on the Rio Grande rift.”

I Was a Tool of Satan

Doug Marlette, Pulitizer Prize-winning cartoonist, writes of his confrontations with those that don’t understand free speech.

Last year, I drew a cartoon that showed a man in Middle Eastern apparel at the wheel of a Ryder truck hauling a nuclear warhead. The caption read, “What Would Mohammed Drive?” Besides referring to the vehicle that Timothy McVeigh rode into Oklahoma City, the drawing was a takeoff on the “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign created by Christian evangelicals to challenge the morality of owning gas-guzzling SUVs. The cartoon’s main target, of course, was the faith-based politics of a different denomination. Predictably, the Shiite hit the fan….

In my thirty-year career, I have regularly drawn cartoons that offended religious fundamentalists and true believers of every stripe, a fact that I tend to list in the “Accomplishments” column of my résumé. I have outraged Christians by skewering Jerry Falwell, Catholics by needling the pope, and Jews by criticizing Israel. Those who rise up against the expression of ideas are strikingly similar. No one is less tolerant than those demanding tolerance. Despite differences of culture and creed, they all seem to share the notion that there is only one way of looking at things, their way. What I have learned from years of this is one of the great lessons of all the world’s religions: we are all one in our humanness.

In my response, I reminded readers that my “What Would Mohammed Drive?” drawing was an assault not upon Islam but on the distortion of the Muslim religion by murderous fanatics – the followers of Mohammed who flew those planes into our buildings, to be sure, but also the Taliban killers of noncompliant women and destroyers of great art, the true believers who decapitated an American reporter, the young Palestinian suicide bombers taking out patrons of pizza parlors in the name of the Prophet Mohammed.

Then I gave my Journalism 101 lecture on the First Amendment, explaining that in this country we do not apologize for our opinions. Free speech is the linchpin of our republic. All other freedoms flow from it. After all, we don’t need a First Amendment to allow us to run boring, inoffensive cartoons. We need constitutional protection for our right to express unpopular views. If we can’t discuss the great issues of the day on the pages of our newspapers fearlessly, and without apology, where can we discuss them? In the streets with guns? In cafés with strapped-on bombs?