Media Business

Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Lait failed to inform readers that a critic of overcrowded jails is himself a convicted felon. [No, this is not a NewsBusted joke but check the bottom of the post if you want to make it one.]

What's more, Stephen Yagman is no petty one-time offender, notes Patterico:

There’s just one little thing about Yagman that The Times’s Matt Lait neglects to mention: Yagman is going to have a hard time continuing to represent these inmates . . . because he has been convicted of numerous felonies in federal court, and is likely headed to federal prison.

Indeed, the State Bar has taken notice, and has put Yagman on interim suspension. As the Metropolitan News-Enterprise reported on September 14:

When liberal journalists put on their political pundit hats to ostensibly handicap the policy stances of Republican politicians, you can rest assured that conservative or center-right stances will almost always be panned as political/electoral suicide.

Time magazine's Karen Tumulty is no exception in her recent Swampland blog post, "SCHIP: A Really Dumb Fight for Bush to Pick." in which the veteran reporter took President Bush to task for his veto threat for Democratic legislation that seeks to expand the size and mandate of the federally-backed State Children's Health Insurance Plans (SCHIP).

Most folks by now are certainly aware of the infamous taser incident that happened Monday at the University of Florida.

In a somewhat stunning aftershock (pun intended!), the editorial board of Colorado State University's student-run paper has offered possibly the finest example of Bush Derangement Syndrome to date by actually blaming this incident on - wait for it! - the current President of the United States.

Isn't that special?

Yet, even better was the simplicity of their statement, and the vulgarity included which will follow after the break so that only those who choose to be offended will be (h/t NBer wiwf):

As characteristically strange and bizarre as Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS is, chances are high that CBS is going to give him some kind of concession, monetary and otherwise.

Neil Cavuto, host of FNC's "Your World" made this point earlier this week stating that CBS has no real alternative other than a long, dragged out court case that will rehash its worst corporate moment. He's right:

Dan Rather is going to win.

I don't know if he's going to get the 70 million bucks he's demanding from CBS.

But I bet he gets close to that.

Jake Byrd, the celebrity-obsessed character of sketch comic Tony Barbieri, appeared on the Thursday night "Jimmy Kimmel Live" show to discuss his impromptu performance behind O.J. Simpson's lawyers.

He didn't say much, the clips said it all. Barbieri's performance was picked up by all of the cable news channels. WMV video available here.

Is Jake Byrd set to become the next Borat? Quite possibly so and for exactly the same reason. He makes a smart cultural critique in a silly and funny way.

"As a public relations effort, I mean, this is like the litigation equivalent of a suicide bombing. It just doesn't make any sense," noted MRC director of media analysis Tim Graham about former "CBS Evening News" anchor Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS. The NewsBusters senior editor was interviewed shortly after 5:30 p.m. Eastern on Thursday's "Big Story" by Fox News reporter Heather Nauert.

Video (3:04): Real (2.24 MB) and Windows (1.87 MB), plus MP3 audio (1.39 MB). [related links listed below fold]

Update/related item appended at bottom of post.

The statements in Dan Rather's $70 million lawsuit, filed Wednesday against CBS for terminating him nearly two years after his discredited story on President Bush's National Guard service, reflect a conspiratorial paranoia about how he sees himself as a victim of Bush White House pressure and is unable to accept responsibility for his sloppy and politically-driven story.

The former network star charged that he was made a "scapegoat" for the 2004 story because CBS wished to "pacify the White House." CBS management "coerced" him, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz on Thursday quoted the lawsuit, "into publicly apologizing and taking personal blame for alleged journalistic errors in the broadcast." Josh Howard, the Executive Producer at the time of the weekday 60 Minutes who was forced to resign, rejected Rather's claim that he was just a passive narrator, telling Kurtz: "He did every interview. He worked the sources over the phone. He was there in the room with the so-called document experts. He argued over every line in the script. It's laughable."

As a service to you the reader I'm watching the presidential news conference as covered on Fox News Channel. My goal here is to give you the questions the various reporters ask and if feasible, go back and clip video of the most biased questions.

Wrap-up, 11:27: There were no questions on the Hsu scandal and Hillary Clinton nor about Dan Rather's lawsuit, even though Memogate promulgated a bogus storyline intended to negatively impact Bush's 2004 reelection. The Jena Six controversy was raised by two reporters although it's had very little national media coverage. And unsurprisingly, no one asked about the Petreaus smear by MoveOn.org except Bill Sammon of the Washington Examiner (and also a Fox News contributor).

* * * * * * ** * * *

Bush turns over press conf to Michael Leavitt for q's on SCHIP, 11:20, Fox News fades out of press conference, as do other cable networks.

Bill Sammon, Washington Examiner, 11:19: What is your reaction to the MoveOn.org ad that mocked Petraeus. Would you like to see Democrats including presidential candidates repudiate the ad?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

That was the cry of many an alternative rock fan in D.C. in January 2005 when WHFS went from alt-rock to 99.1 El Zol, a Spanish language station playing mostly salsa music. [Although to be perfectly honest most music snobs agree that WHFS was past its prime in cutting edge programming, having become too corporate, etc.] Don't expect the same donning of sackloth and ashes to mourn the loss of persistent money-loser, Washington Post Radio.

Yes, the Washington broadsheet's radio edition, once described lovingly by a radio executive as "NPR on caffeine" will shut down in September, the Post's Paul Farhi reported in the August 28 paper.:

It should come as a surprise to nobody that revenue is down again for the Tribune Company, owner of news properties such as the LA Times and Chicago Tribune. This time the bleeding stopped at 5.9 percent. Circulation was down 5.4 percent. Classifieds are down 18.2 percent. Retail advertising sales are down 6 percent.

But it's not their fault, of course. This time the blame is "due to difficult year-over-year comparisons." Though one must wonder if their circulation would continue to have dropped had they heeded my suggestion that newspapers "get rid of the bias, the America-hating columnists, the socialist editorials, and the reporters pushing a gay/lesbian/transgendered/illegal alien/pro-abortion/anti-God/anti-gun agenda?"

Or they could continue doing what they're doing.

As NewsBusters reported earlier (here and here), the New York Times is likely to soon abandon its TimesSelect pay-subscription online service. That's hardly a surprise when you look at the numbers writes Brett Arends:

The New York Times Web site is extremely popular. According to figures tracked by Nielsen/NetRatings, nytimes.com attracted about 12.5 million readers worldwide in June, the month with the most recent data. That's a huge global audience for news, and a large multiple of the Times' print circulation.

The number willing to pay extra for access to TimesSelect?

Just 29% -- a mere 221,000. That figure has risen a miserable 8,000 since the start of the year.

The TimesSelect firewall at the contracting New York Times is coming down soon, according to a report by its growing rival, the New York Post:

The New York Times is poised to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content, The Post has learned.

..... The number of Web-only subscribers who pay $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year fell to just over 221,000 in June, down from more than 224,000 in April.

Not that it was a particularly insightful prediction, but yours truly wrote the following in November 2005 (first item at link), when the Times announced it had reached 135,000 online TimeSelect subscribers (current print subscribers get TimeSelect access free of charge):

Normally liberal media snobbery is irritating (and career-threatening if you're a young conservative journalist), but not when that snobbery is completely ineffectual to stop the thing which the whiney reporters hate. Schadenfreude is the word of the day after reading this Los Angeles Times piece about how "aghast" many reporters in the Wall Street Journal newsroom are at being employed by the son of Satan himself, Rupert Murdoch:

Reporters reacted bitterly to the prospect of Murdoch's gaining control of the Journal, which has long been regarded as a beacon of financial journalism.

They voiced concern that Murdoch would diminish the paper's quality, imbue it with some of the glitzy style of his crosstown New York Post and slant the Journal's news coverage to advance his business interests.

"People are aghast that this could have happened," said one reporter, who like others spoke on condition on anonymity. "It's a sickening realization to know that this really great iconic newspaper is [not only] no longer going to be independent, but is also going to be controlled by a man whose values are inimical to ours." [...]

In the New York Post, gossip columnist Liz Smith previewed some of the charges in Ed Klein’s book on CBS anchor Katie Couric, due at the end of August. It seems the Katie camp is already trying to do damage control and insist that the scoops that are leaking out are not really scoops, they’re all yawners. (See what happens when you hire a Hillary publicist like Matthew Hiltzik? Your media strategy suddenly sounds exactly like Hillary’s.) The only scooplet that Smith thought had power: "‘But the majority of people at 60 Minutes, including the correspondents, dislike her intensely. They think she's a lightweight.’ Well, that probably hurts, but Katie has to ignore it."

In today's Washington Post, Paul Farhi asks a question I've wondered: Why is it that every single story you hear about on cable is "developing," "breaking," or a "news alert?" Whatever happened to the regular TV news report?

This just in! There's no more news on TV, at least not on the cable news networks. Plain old news apparently just isn't good enough anymore, so TV news stories have been getting new and improved names.

President Bush's latest news conference? CNN labels it a "Developing Story." A car bombing in Baghdad? The banner on MSNBC reads, "Breaking News." A blown transformer in New York City? Fox News Channel is on it, with a graphic that announces, "Very Latest."

Ex-CBS anchor Dan Rather is stepping up his sour grapes routine against Katie Couric, telling TVWeek magazine that it's only a matter of time before his former employer cancels the "Evening News" entirely:

Dan Rather, who last month accused broadcast networks of dumbing down and tarting up their newscasts [a story which you heard here first], said he can foresee a time when media company executives retreat from evening news production.

“I think we’ll see the time when someone at the top says, ‘We can give this time back to affiliates,’” Mr. Rather said Monday in a discussion with TelevisionWeek Publisher and Editorial Director Chuck Ross at the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing convention in Washington.

Just a moment ago, radio host Rush Limbaugh was blasting the mainstream media's notion that the YouTube debates represent a revolution in American presidential debates.

Not so, says Limbaugh, at least in terms of the content of the questions asked. They're still as inane and moronic, or brilliant (in rare circumstances) as they've always been because they're the same inance, moronic, or brilliant (rare circumstances) people asking them.

Instead, Limbaugh insists, we are seeing a revolution in media technology being confused for a nascent political revolution.

Now couple that, the notion that "new voices" are being heard in the YouTube debates ,with the wild left-wing skew we've documented at NewsBusters, and you see the media's liberal bias at work in staging the 2008 election in terms of liberal issue battlegrounds.

In the July 22 Washington Post, writer Monica Hesse interviewed Ron DeFore of the SUV Owners of America (SUVOA), for her Style section front-pager, "A Man Who Wants SUVs to Get More R-E-S-P-E-C-T."

But far from respect, Hesse's interview at turns shifted from an almost "Daily Show"-like mockery to an unqualified parroting of liberal talking points. You can find her interview here, but I found these three questions particularly to be cheap shots:

Be honest: when you saw the news Sunday that a woman was going to be president in the next season of the hit series "24," you smelled something akin to when ABC made a similar announcement concerning "Commander in Chief," and CBS hired Katie Couric.

Well, according to Politico, the failure of both is actually not good news for Hillary Clinton (h/t Hot Air).

But, before we get there, what was also fascinating about this piece was how the producer of "Commander in Chief" admitted a political goal behind casting Geena Davis as the first female president (emphasis added throughout):

Two titans of the blogosphere were invited on CNN's "Reliable Sources" Sunday to discuss tomorrow's CNN/YouTube presidential debate.

On the left was former Wonkette blogger, and current Time.com editor Ana Marie Cox. On the right was Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds.

What ensued was a rather informative discussion about how the Internet continues to impact American politics.

Here were some of the key points made by Reynolds (video available here, h/t Hot Air):

It appears the BBC condones faking...audience phone calls, that is.

In a not so stunning revelation, the BBC admitted to allowing employees to call in to shows either asking for audience involvement, or offering prizes, when the network wasn't receiving enough real feedback.

Gotta love it.

One truly delicious example occurred during Comic Relief back in March (emphasis added, h/t Tim Graham):

Brian Stelter bids farewell to readers of TVNewser.com today. The New York Times recently hired the Towson University graduate as a media reporter and he begins that gig full time on Monday. You may have read his reporting before from our editor's picks or as occasionally excerpted in NewsBusters posts themselves.

Stelter has done an excellent job with TVNewser and I'm sure he'll do well at the Gray Lady. And if whatever's in the water starts getting to him, well, that's what we have Clay Waters of TimesWatch.org for. (Bring bottled water, Brian!)

But seriously, from one news junkie/blogger to another, good luck, Brian.

When the New York Times announced in 2005 a new premium web service wherein only folks willing to pay an extra fee would have access to the writing of certain columnists, most media watchers thought it would be a huge failure.

Well, after about two years, it seems critics might have been right.

According to Slate's Mickey Kaus, TimesSelect might be going the way of the dodo (emphasis added throughout, h/t Glenn Reynolds):

Patrick Ishmael of "NewsBuckit" has an answer for Noel's question about how the media will cover the Plame case dismissal.

Ishmael found an initial reports first left out any mention of Plame name leaker Richard Armitage.*:

It seems you can't swing a dead cat these days without whacking a Rupert Murdoch hit piece.

It must have been the New York Times' turn at the plate so to speak Thursday, and writer Richard Perez-Pena was more than up to the challenge.

After an introduction of Peter R. Kann, the Chairman and CEO of Dow Jones, the company Murdoch is trying to buy, Perez-Pena appeared loaded for bear (emphasis added throughout):

Mr. Kann, who had been advising the family against selling, expressed hope that Mr. Murdoch would not prevail, using an image of The Journal as a citadel trying to repel an invasion by tabloid barbarians.

"The drawbridge is up," Mr. Kann told the group. "So far, so good."

News Corp is a tabloid barbarian? Wow. Nice reference, wouldn't you agree? Yet, Perez-Pena was just getting warmed up:

The day after Independence Day, ABC reporter Terry Moran jotted down his thoughts on what makes some people become terrorists. His answer: freedom.

Rather than explore religious fanaticism or just plain depraved human wickedness, Moran insisted in a July 5 blog posting that modernity and the freedom of association it fosters is causing many a young Muslim male to descend into the hellish depths of terrorism.:

 

As the potential Dow Jones sale to Rupert Murdoch gets closer, the mogul was under fire from ABC on July 18. Correspondent Bianna Golodryga cited fears that the Wall Street Journal would begin to resemble the New York Post, already owned by Murdoch.

“Here is why this story is important. This is the paper he wants to buy: The Wall Street Journal. Now, one big news story, a business story that came out a few weeks ago, was the sale of Hilton Hotels.

If you're Keith Olbermann (file photo at right), these two contradictory notions are equally true.

The terrorist threat against America amounts to a bunch of hopeless nincompoops who are nothing more than armchair wannabe jihadists.

AND

George Bush is a massive failure at protecting this country from terrorist attacks.

Just take a look at items from his "The News Hole" blog from the past few months (emphasis mine).

From July 17's "Blogging the Countdown" entry:

On Monday night, CNN aired a special hour promoting the upcoming "CNN/YouTube" presidential debates. CNN is encouraging viewers to record their questions for the presidential candidates and post them on YouTube.com. In anticipation of this historic event, hosts John Roberts and Kiran Chetry shared just a few of the thousands of video submissions CNN has already received. Of the videos aired on Monday, a disproportionate number were distinctly liberal. Of the 19 individual videos shown (excluding some brief, zany clips), 10 were politically neutral, 8 were liberal or critical of conservative and/or Republican policies, and only 1 was clearly conservative.

Video (1:54): Real (1.39 MB) or Windows (1.16 MB), plus MP3 audio (652 kB)