Media Business

Last week my colleague Eric Ames addressed the bias and some misstatements of fact in Richard Stengel's recent attack on the Constitution/defense of ObamaCare here.

Today, Aaron Worthing over at Patterico's Pontification's ticked off 13 factual errors in the Time magazine editor's piece and systematically addressed each one.

It's an excellent piece. Here's an excerpt that I think addresses some of Stengel's biggest errors:

One might expect the reader’s advocate at a major newspaper to have some respect for the readers. Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton thinks anyone who complains about “crowdsourcing” Sarah Palin’s e-mails is ridiculous. With copy as spiky as his white hair, he began his Sunday column with a swipe:

If you read the mail to the ombudsman last week, you would think The Post organized a vigilante mob to burn Sarah Palin at the stake. That interpretation is complete balderdash.

The Associated Press is blatantly proving it’s going to make Campaign 2012 a long, biased slog for Republicans. Just take their news coverage of jokes. On Thursday, Democratic objections to Mitt Romney were front and center in an article titled "Democrats criticize Romney for ‘unemployed’ joke." But on Tuesday, President Obama’s lame joke about no "shovel-ready" jobs was relegated to paragraph 16 of an article titled "Obama pledges focus on job creation." (As if we haven't heard that pledge before.) The  Romney article began:

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a group of out-of-work Floridians Thursday that "I'm also unemployed," quickly drawing criticism from Democrats who said it showed the former Massachusetts governor and multimillionaire was out of touch.

Perhaps peeved that her weekend was wasted on the nothing-burger that was the release of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's official e-mail correspondence, Time magazine's Katy Steinmetz yesterday directed her ire at current Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell (R) for dumping the e-mails on reporters in cumbersome printed form rather than in electronic files:

"I've never seen the news media do this, and it is beyond reproachful for them to have done this," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell complained on the June 10 "Fox & Friends" regarding the New York Times and Washington Post calling for readers to volunteer to help them comb through the archive of Sarah Palin's official gubernatorial e-mail correspondence.

For the full segment, click the play button on the embed below the page break

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times are looking for readers to help them comb through every jot and tittle of Sarah Palin's official gubernnatorial e-mail correspondence.

For approaching three years, so-called journalists have been calling former Alaska governor Sarah Palin an idiot.

In an interview with the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz, Palin's employer at Fox News, Roger Ailes, marvelously said, "She's so smart she’s got the press corps running up the whole East Coast behind her bus”:

Sarah Palin is "running against the press, mocking them," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell argued on the June 2 edition of "Hannity," pointing to the media's consternation over the former Alaska governor's bus tour.

"She's having a field day running against them" and "knows exactly what she's doing," the Media Research Center founder added, pointing to polls showing Americans largely distrust liberal media outlets like the broadcast networks.

On Tuesday night’s edition of The Ed Show on MSNBC, substitute host Thomas Roberts promoted an upcoming segment: “He is convinced that al-Qaeda is out to get him. And he believes gay activists want to fire bomb his office. Who are we talking about? The delusional world of Roger Ailes, coming up.”

Roberts is shameless. He’s sitting on the same show where Ed Schultz spun delusions like “The Republicans... want to see you dead,” and they like it when women get incurable cancer. But Roberts was spreading stories from Rolling Stone writer Tim Dickinson, and interviewed him at the end of the Tuesday show.

Liberal radio host Ed Schultz's May 23rd attack on conservative talker Laura Ingraham as a "slut" was "reprehensible" and "could not have been more vile," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told viewers of the May 26 "Hannity."

That said, Bozell added, he should be commended for owning up to his transgression and offering a "man's apology" Wednesday night on his MSNBC "Ed Show" program.

The Associated Press today offered readers a 24-paragraph exclusive that practically promoted Frank Bailey's anti-Palin tell-all book that hits bookstores on May 24.

While the AP noted that "Palin’s attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story," it appears the news wire made no further attempt to provide balance to its May 23 story, which chiefly conveys the former staffer's perspective on Palin's tenure in office as Alaska governor.

Poynter Institute's Jim Romenesko wrote yesterday about how the editor of the Annapolis Capital sought to apologize to readers for a gauzy article about a lesbian couple that ran on Mother's Day.

Only his colleagues in the newsroom pressured him not to publish it, at least not in his original draft form:

Time magazine’s not being shy about who they like in 2012 GOP presidential field. A big spread in the May 23 edition is headlined "The Cool Kid: Jon Huntsman is a pro-civil union Mormon who spent nearly two years working for Obama." The main emphasis followed: 

He is, after all, a pro-civil-union Mormon who has just finished nearly two years of service for Obama in the land many Americans consider the new evil empire. He is pro-environment — a little too green for many in his party — and hardly anyone knows who he is. Though Huntsman's path to the nomination is a certified long shot, you have to wonder why so many on both the right and left seem to be freaking out at the prospect of his jumping into the race.

In surveying the wreckage of the Katie Couric experiment at CBS – $75 million flushed away for a distant third-place finish each week – the liberal journalists are blaming elderly viewers for not accepting Sunny Katie. Here’s James Rainey in the Los Angeles Times:

A change-averse viewership doubtless greeted the initial formatting changes for Couric's "Evening News" as confirmation that "America's Sweetheart," straight from her sunny a.m. perch, didn't have the gravitas for the job. Actually, those impressions had little to do with the newscast that emerged over Couric's five-year tenure.

And what, pray tell, proves Couric’s gravitas? Bashing Sarah Palin, of course, as uninformed. Rainey didn’t ask how Couric would have performed if the tables were turned and Palin was the one holding the microphone like a baseball bat:

Today marks 174 years that the Baltimore Sun has been in print. As part of their celebration, the Charm City broadsheet has an "Historic Baltimore Sun front pages" feature that includes a mix of momentous events in Baltimore, American and world history such as the 1904 fire, the Lincoln assassination, and D-Day.

But it's also a feature that's capped off with two gushy Obama-related front pages.

The President’s secret meetings with Fareed Zakaria – the same reporter who openly used a CNN network broadcast to promote Obama in 2008 – show a clear and disturbing double standard at CNN.

For decades, the liberal media have repeatedly condemned conservatives in the media who communicated privately with Republican presidents. They furiously attacked George Will in 1980 when he advised candidate Ronald Reagan, and trounced on Roger Ailes when he sent President Bush a note about the new war on terror in the wake of September 11th.  Neither of them was a reporter.

First of Four Parts

When liberal investor George Soros gave $1.8 million to National Public Radio, it became part of the firestorm of controversy that jeopardized NPR's federal funding. But that gift only hints at the widespread influence the controversial billionaire has on the mainstream media. Soros, who spent $27 million trying to defeat President Bush in 2004, has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets - including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC.

Prominent journalists like ABC's Christiane Amanpour and former Washington Post editor and now Vice President Len Downie serve on boards of operations that take Soros cash. This despite the Society of Professional Journalist's ethical code stating: "avoid all conflicts real or perceived.

Rachel Maddow has engaged in a strange--sinister?--irony.  On her MSNBC show last night, one moment Maddow was condemning the late Senator Joe McCarthy for encouraging people to "turn in their friends" in the entertainment industry. The next moment, Maddow was urging her viewers to . . . turn in someone in the entertainment industry--the animator of Mike Huckabee's history series for kids.

Maddow devoted a sarcastic segment to mocking Huckabee's series of DVDs on American history.  Along the way she accused Huckabee of engaging in revisionist history. Her example was the way a Huckabee DVD described Ronald Reagan's testimony as a friendly witness at a McCarthy hearing, in his role as president of the Screen Actors Guild, as Reagan having "worked against Communism in Hollywood."

Maddow then said this: "We asked [Huckabee's production company] today who had done the animation on these DVDs.  They would not tell us.  If you know who brought this amazing animated sauce to life, please get in touch with us.  We would like to know."

View video after the jump.

Some traditional media outlets, faced with harsh economic realities in the digital age, have begun to turn ideologically inward in the hopes of shoring up support among an enthusiastic and sympathetic audience. The goal is to raise the floor of potential readers or viewers, even while the ceiling drops.

The New York Times, for its part, has decided to revamp its Sunday opinion section - currently called Week in Review, but which might change its name to Sunday Review - to place more emphasis on opinion content. The move may be rooted in the recognition that opinion sells. For the Times generally, it means a more overt, in-your-face liberalism.

Sorry, Chris Matthews, maybe next year. 

You'd think the MSNBC "Hardball" host would be a shoo-in for the Media Research Center's annual "Obamagasm Award," but the 2011 prize went to Evan Thomas of Newsweek for declaring the president "stand[s] above the country, above — above the world. He’s sort of God." 

The "Obamagasm award" was just one of a handful of DisHonors mockingly awarded journalists and Hollywood lefties Saturday night at the 2011 Media Research Center Gala and DisHonors Awards. 

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, columnist and author Ann Coulter, radio host Neal Boortz, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Red State blogger Erick Erickson were among the conservative heavyweights participating in the festivities.

[For a lengthy excerpt of the Gala that includes Neal Boortz announcing the Obamagasm Award nominees, click play on the first embedded video below the page break]

How convenient. Via Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry's Audit Bureau of Circulations, in issuing its March 31, 2011 circulation figures, tells us we shouldn't try to compare this year's numbers to last year's:

Because of the new and redefined categories of circulation on this FAS-FAX report, ABC recommends not making any direct comparisons of March 2011 data to prior audit periods.

As readers will see, if the ABC was really interested in enabling us to make apples-to-apples comparisons, it could have done so with appropriate definitional caveats. But it didn't; instead, it revised its definition of "total circulation" this year without disclosing the impact of the switch.

I've made the comparisons where possible for daily editions anyway, and they follow after the jump (original info links: March 31, 2011; March 31, 2010; Boston Globe data obtained here):

Even at MSNBC, which gets crushed of course by Fox News in every prime-time slot, Cenk Uygur manages to come in dead last in ratings among his liberal peers.  

So when Cenk claims that he doesn't want to cover Donald Trump but is forced to do so by The Donald's popularity, the baloney-meter starts screaming. Uygur opened his show last evening with a long segment on Trump, all the while apologizing to his audience for doing so. 

View video after the jump.

The votes are in and CBS, do we have a treat for you.

We received nearly 1,800 responses from our Facebook fans proposing who you should hire to replace Katie Couric. Ten people were recommended most frequently, listed below the page break.

Other entertaining suggestions include:

Rumor has it that CBS News is going to name Scott Pelley as Couric's successor. But what's the rush? You've been in last place for well over a decade. Another few days won't matter. Do not make (another) rash, premature, impulsive decision. Vet all your options – especially when the MRC’s 500,000 members are coming to the rescue.

I'm pleased to announce that the Media Research Center has launched a national search committee and is soliciting recommendations for the next CBS Evening News anchor.

It's now official.

Katie Couric is leaving the HMS "Evening News" on a life raft, having skillfully piloted the newscast to lower ratings depths during her time at the helm.

Equally liberal "60 Minutes" co-host Scott Pelley will likely take the conn, the New York Daily News is reporting:

Until now, MSNBC's "Lean Forward" ad campaign had largely avoided wearing the network's leftward slant as a badge of pride. Sure, there were hints here and there that "Lean Forward" really means "left-leaning," but the older ads were subtle compared to the latest batch which beat you over the head with their liberal take on major political issues.

For example, you can expect to see MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell in this spot lamenting that ObamaCare didn't go far enough to the Left: