Journalistic Issues

If you ever wanted to know how easy it easy to distract a reporter, and how short is the attention span of the Washington press corps, watch how a whole team of journalists saved the day as a mother duck and her ducklings tried to cross the street.

The reporters were waiting for Karl Rove to come out and make an appearance, but apparently Rove had a paddling up his sleeve, and instead of waiting to pepper Karl Rove with questions about his grand jury testimony, the gaggle of reporters rushed to the aid of the gaggle of ducks.

Watch the Media Heroism Slideshow to see how an entire group of reporters risked life and limb for ducks and put a temporary pause on harassing a lameduck's henchman.

Reuters reports that in a survey of ten countries, citizens of the U.S. and England have a low regard for the media.

Britain may have a sophisticated media industry but it also has some of the most sceptical consumers, with nearly two-thirds (64 percent) believing the media does not report all sides of the story.

A 10-country opinion poll for Reuters, the BBC and the Media Centre found British and U.S. consumers out on a limb when it comes to public levels of trust in the media.

Overall trust in the media in Britain has bounced back over the past four years, from a low of 29 percent trusting in 2002 to 47 percent today. But this is still below the 10-country average of 63 percent.

Eight medical groups have recognized that abortion increases a woman's risk of developing breast cancer. Twenty-eight of 37 worldwide studies have linked induced abortion with breast cancer. This dangerous link was first suspected back in 1957, and recent studies continue to report the life-threatening risk.

Yet in the last several months, Glamour magazine has twice attempted to deny such a link to its readers. Its most recent effort is a May 2006 article, "The New Lies About Women's Health" by Brian Alexander (WARNING: Photo of rear female nudity). What medical personnel does Glamour cite for its article? People such as Dr. Herb Brown (.pdf file), who has been medical director at Planned Parenthood of San Antonio. Geesh. Conflict of interest, anyone?

While researching media coverage of the Duke lacrosse story, I came across a March 29 USA Today story, “Rape allegations cast pall at Duke.”

Let’s look at USA Today's story which ran just five days after the media began reporting on the rape allegation and its fallout. I think even those of you with a low opinion of MSM will be shocked by the story’s blatant bias.

USA Today reporter Sal Ruibal’s story begins:

The flier being distributed outside Duke's student union Wednesday night looked like a wanted poster: 40 faces of young men, smiling smugly for the camera.

What was most disturbing to those gathered was the possibility several of the Duke men's lacrosse players whose photos were arranged in those neat rows may have committed criminal charges, including forcible rape and sodomy.

In an article entitled "Powell Forces Rice to Defend Iraq Planning," Associated Press writer Libby Quaid claims,

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice found herself knocked off message Sunday, forced to defend prewar planning and troop levels against an unlikely critic - Colin Powell, her predecessor at the State Department ... Powell sideswiped her by revisiting the question of whether the U.S. had a large enough force to oust Saddam Hussein and then secure the peace.

The truth is that the only one doing the sideswiping, knocking, and forcing were Sunday hosts Bob Schieffer (on CBS' Face the Nation (link)) and Wolf Blitzer (on CNN's Late Edition (transcript)), along with Quaid herself.

At the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, President Bush first appeared with Steve Bridges, who's made a name for himself impersonating Bush on national television. Bush would say something and the impersonator would say what he "really" thought. RightWinged has a video of the routine.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Members of the White House Correspondents' Association, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen --

BUSH IMPERSONATOR: Here I am.

(Laughter)

Here I am at another one of these dang press dinners. Could be home asleep, little Barney curled up at my feet. But no, I've got to pretend I like being here.

(Laughter)

The media really ticks me off. The way they try to embarrass me by not editing what I say.

(Laughter)

Whenever newspaper corporations report disappointing quarterly earnings numbers – which is quite frequent these days as recently reported by NewsBusters – they always cite the Internet as a problem for subscription and advertising rates. Well, The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released results of a new study on Internet usage and penetration, and the news is not good for the drive by media. The data show a huge year-over-year increase in the number of adults using the Internet:

“While the share of internet users who report positive impacts has grown, the sheer size of the internet population also continues to increase. Surveys fielded in 2006 show that internet penetration among adults in the U.S. has hit an all-time high. While the percentage of Americans who say they use the internet has continued to fluctuate slightly, our latest survey, fielded February 15 – April 6, 2006 shows that fully 73% of respondents (about 147 million adults) are internet users, up from 66% (about 133 million adults) in our January 2005 survey.”

So 14 million more American adults are using the Internet than in Pew’s January 2005 poll. This represents a 10.5 percent year-over-year increase. Yet, maybe most telling are the generational differences in Internet usage:

Meredith Vieira just can’t help herself. The View co-host will soon be taking over for Katie Couric on the Today show. One would think that she would try and reign in her bias. Apparently not, as she opened the April 26 edition of The View with another attack on President Bush:

Vieira: "...I’m a little peeved when I hear the President say there’s not much we can do about this, folks. According to the President, the American people have got to understand that what happens elsewhere in the world affects the price of gasoline that you pay here, but where is his responsibility in all this? Five and a half years and we’re dealing with these gas prices? It’s ridiculous."

Video clip (37 seconds): Real (1.1 MB) or Windows Media (1.3 MB), plus MP3 audio (220 KB)

MediaBistro runs an email from NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller sent to liberal journalist Murray Waas, in which Keller claims the Bush adminstration is "declaring war at home on the values they profess to be promoting abroad."

"I'm not sure journalists fully appreciate the threat confronting us -- The Times in the eavesdropping case, the Post for its CIA prison stories, and everyone else who has tried to look behind the war on terror. Maybe we're suffering a bit of subpoena fatigue. Maybe some people are a little intimidated by the way the White House plays the soft-on-terror card.

"Whatever the reason, I worry that we're not as worried as we should be. No president likes reporters sniffing after his secrets, but most come to realize that accountability is the price of power in our democracy. Some officials in this administration, and their more vociferous cheerleaders, seem to have a special animus towards reporters doing their jobs. There's sometimes a vindictive tone in way they talk about dragging reporters before grand juries and in the hints that reporters who look too hard into the public's business risk being branded traitors. I don't know how far action will follow rhetoric, but some days it sounds like the administration is declaring war at home on the values they profess to be promoting abroad."

At the end of her interview on this morning's 'Today', Katie Couric asked Kaavya Viswanathan why she had wanted to come on the show. Couric's implication was clear: the Harvard undergrad caught in a plagiarism scandal had done herself absolutely no good by her appearance.

The Harvard Crimson recently broke the story of the numerous passages in Viswanathan's coming-of-age novel that bear striking similarities to lines from two books by Megan McCafferty. Isn't there something derivative, by the way, to the feel of the book's very title: "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life"? Amazon listing here.

Add Cokie and Steve Roberts to the growing list of journalists praising the Washington Post and New York Times stories which exposed ongoing secret anti-terrorism efforts and also won Pulitzer Prizes. The latest joint syndicated column by the married couple, ABC News reporter Cokie Roberts and long-time New York Times reporter Steve Roberts who now teaches at George Washington University, championed how the Pulitzer Prizes prove the necessity of newspapers because "they recognize the sort of journalism -- courageous, costly and comprehensive -- that only papers can provide." Specifically, the duo declared: "The biggest story that newspapers unearthed last year was the abuse of power by the Bush administration." The two admiringly cited how "the Post won an award for revealing a system of secret prisons maintained by the CIA in Eastern Europe to interrogate terrorism suspects. The Times disclosed a program of clandestine government eavesdropping that many lawyers have denounced as illegal."

TV Newser reports on some of Dan Rather's remarks at a panel discussion of the National Association of Broadcasters.

Dan Rather, the Former Anchor and Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News, issued a clarion call on the broadcast networks to prioritize international coverage during his appearance at NAB.

Arguing that "American journalism needs a spine transplant," Rather told the RTNDA/NAB Super Session on "The Shape of Things to Come" that "at a time when the United States needs more foreign coverage than ever, there's less of it."

Rather said broadcast network coverage of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America is "awful." For this, he said, there is "no excuse."

New York Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson gave a lecture last week called "The Future of the New York Times." In it she drops this bomb:

She distinguished the Times from many bloggers, saying, "We believe in a journalism of verification rather than assertion."

Oh really, do you? Would that be anything like the verification done on Jayson Blair when he fabricated his own fabrications while the Times socially promoted him up through the ranks based on skin color? Or would that be like the verification done in the attribution of Rick Bragg's bylines? Or perhaps she's talking about the verification done on Nik Cohn's fabrications. Because I'm sure she's not talking about Michael Finkel's fabrications or A.J. Lieblings fabrications, or even when Jesse McKinley accepted a $50,000 "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" makeover. Maybe she's talking about the verification done on Bernard Weinraub's plagiarism, I just don't know.

Jonathan Last writes about the evils of the Internet for the Philly Inquirer, and by evil he means blogs.

Sunday's off-lead story by David Cloud is on Mary McCarthy, the CIA analyst fired for leaking classified information about suspected terrorists allegedly being held in secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. It comes under the comforting headline "Colleagues Say C.I.A. Analyst Played by Rules."

"On Thursday, the C.I.A. fired Ms. McCarthy, 61, accusing her of leaking information to reporters about overseas prisons operated by the agency in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. But despite Ms. McCarthy's independent streak, some colleagues who worked with her at the White House and other offices during her intelligence career say they cannot imagine her as a leaker of classified information."

Tech site Red Herring says the traditional media continues to lose out in advertising revenue.

In another clear sign that times are changing for the advertising industry, a new report said that Internet advertising revenues in the United States in 2005 totaled $12.5 billion, an all-time, single-year record.

The report, released Thursday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, said the 2005 total represents a 30 percent increase over 2004. Revenue in the fourth quarter of 2005 was $3.6 billion, a 34 percent boost from the same period in 2004.

“Interactive advertising continues to experience tremendous growth as marketers experience its overall effectiveness in building brands and delivering online and offline sales,” said Greg Stuart, chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

At least one leading mainstream journalists isn't too happy about the revelation Friday that on Thursday the CIA fired an official who admitted being the leaker of top secret information about CIA prisons overseas used to hold al-Qaeda suspects. Bob Schieffer didn't withhold his personal opinion from his newscast as he introduced a CBS Evening News story by asserting that “it is no secret that the current administration does not like its people hanging out with news reporters without permission” and he described the firing as “a first -- a dubious first, to be sure.”

Citing the Washington Post story on the then-secret prisons and the New York Times article disclosing terrorist surveillance efforts, both of which won Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, NPR's Nina Totenberg declared on Inside Washington that nefarious Bush administration practices justified the decision to reward the two newspapers: "It's a good thing that they won for those intelligence stories because the Bush administration is investigating now and is threatening to subpoena and conceivably jail those reporters. So I think it's important that those stories be rewarded as something important to have done." (Transcripts follow.)

The New York Times says Fox News commentator Tony Snow is in negotiations to become the next press secretary. Snow is said to be valued for his connections in the Washington media. Anonymous sources told the Times that he had surgery for colon cancer last year and is waiting on a doctor's approval before taking such a high-pressure job.

Republicans said that Tony Snow, a commentator for Fox News and a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush's father, was in negotiations for the job of White House press secretary. Mr. Snow would replace Scott McClellan, who announced Wednesday that he was resigning....

Mr. Snow is the host of his own radio program and comes from the news operation that flashes from every television in the West Wing.

Phil Hall writes in the Media Industry Newsletter that today's journalists are mediocre and the writing is poor. He counts off several reasons why that's the case, including number three: blogs. Blogs, he says, are nothing more than "hit-and-run" journalism.

As any editor and/or publisher will attest, finding qualified writers is too often the proverbial needle-in-the-haystack search. This is particularly acute in attracting entry-level journalists who are straight out of college and are eager to make their mark in the business. But while editors and publishers grit their teeth and dig through the piles of curriculum vitas, perhaps it is time to ask a question that many people would prefer not to acknowledge: Why are there so many mediocre writers coming into journalism today? The answer can be divided into four parts....

After hearing that Sami Al-Arian confessed to a dirty laundry list of terrorism related activities, I was eager to see how the liberal St. Petersburg Times would handle the story. Today they posted an editorial about "The Real Al-Arian," writing about all the horrible things he has done and lies he told. But is that an accurate account of the role the Times played in defending him? Maybe when you consider it is a newspaper that employs a former ACLU director as a columnist and has a Huffinton Post contributor for a reporter and an F.B.I. wiretap exposing a Times reporter acting as Al-Arian's media coach.

With the benefit of this hindsight, hindsight that the rest of us had little problem seeing in foresight, let's take a look at some past quotes. One has to wonder why a huge newspaper with vast resources couldn't see what the rest of us saw so easily.

Robyn Blumner: "...[USF President] Genshaft's stated intention to fire tenured computer science professor Sami Al-Arian due to the swirl of controversy over his activist Islamist views. Here Genshaft cannot deflect blame for besmirching the university's reputation. She made the call, and it's once again the wrong one for academic freedom and free speech...

To be sure, this year’s Pulitzer Prize announcement has generated quite an outrage. Almost universally throughout the conservative blogosphere, the revelation that three of the recipients wrote stories about top-secret military information that conceivably compromised America’s War on Terror met with shock and dismay.

No better example of such disgust was apparent Tuesday than on the radio program of Bill Bennett. As reported by Editor & Publisher: “On his national radio program today, William Bennett, the former Reagan and George H.W. Bush administration official and now a CNN commentator, said that three reporters who won Pulitzer Prizes yesterday were not ‘worthy of an award’ but rather ‘worthy of jail.’" The article continued: “He identified them as Dana Priest of The Washington Post, who wrote about the CIA's ‘secret prisons’ in Europe, and James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times, who exposed the National Security Agency's domestic (a.k.a. terrorist) spy program.”

E&P continued:

  Winners of the biggest prize of all, the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for excellence in journalism, were announced.

Brent Baker has already discussed some of the winners, given to journalists who undermined the anti-terror program. Romenesko has a good compilation of all of them.

Check out the winners of the 2006 Pulitzer Prizes
* Public Service: New Orleans Times-Picayune; Biloxi Sun Herald.
* Breaking News: Times-Picayune.
* Investigative Reporting: Susan Schmidt, James V. Grimaldi and R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post.
* Explanatory Reporting: David Finkel of the Washington Post.
* Beat Reporting: Dana Priest of the Washington Post.
* National Reporting: James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times; staffs of the San Diego Union-Tribune and Copley News Service.

The annual Pulitzer Prize awards announced Monday night, by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, rewarded Washington Post and New York Times reporters who exposed -- and thus undermined -- secret anti-terrorism efforts, as well as a Washington Post critic who mocked Vice President Cheney's outdoor apparel and ridiculed the supposed 1950s-era clothing worn by then-Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' kids. The Pulitzer board gave the “Beat Reporting” award to Dana Priest of the Washington Post “for her persistent, painstaking reports on secret 'black site' prisons and other controversial features of the government’s counterterrorism campaign.” The “National Reporting” award was won by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times “for their carefully sourced stories on secret domestic eavesdropping that stirred a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty.” The duo infamously penned the damaging December 16 article, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.”

Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan grabbed the “Criticism” award “for her witty, closely observed essays that transform fashion criticism into cultural criticism.” In a January 2005 piece featured by the Post in a new page created to showcase her Pulitzer-winning work, Givhan complained that at a gathering of world leaders to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Dick Cheney “was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.”

David S. Hirschman, online editor of Editor and Publisher, wonders what newspaper editors can do to "reclaim their power as arbiters of public taste." With the advent of blogs, no longer does a "small coterie of journalists" decide what is important. It's not likely that ten years ago Editor and Publisher would have admitted publicly the power wielded by so few editors and TV heads, but now the cat is out of the bag.

In the past, in the days of ink-stained wretches and typesetting, it was the editors and publishers who set the news agenda. A small coterie of journalists decided what was most important, what went on page one, what was to be emphasized day after day. In effect, they would separate the important from the superficial, and could to large degree push what they wanted to and create the "water cooler" issue of the day.

Of course, this is still true to some extent. The New York Times' Bill Keller, the Washington Post's Len Downie, and the Los Angeles Times' Dean Baquet still determine what tens of millions of Americans will wake up to every morning on their doorstep, or go to bed with online the night before.

Poor John Green. The executive producer of ABC’s weekend “Good Morning America” broadcasts got a month-long involuntary vacation after his private e-mails were exposed saying “Bush makes me sick,” and that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has “Jew shame.”

Once the e-mails were publicized, the people inside the media were agitated. How many of them are equally guilty? How many people inside the liberal media send snarky anti-Bush notes to each other every day? The New York Times lamented the “chilling effect.”

As the Meredith Vieira incident shows us, network anchors and talk show hosts can display their biases off the air by where they go and speak...or march. At the tail end of "Hardball" Thursday night, MRC's Geoff Dickens found MSNBC host Chris Matthews promoted Rosie O'Donnell and her new HBO documentary on her gay-family cruises. But the real eye-opening part for media watchdogs was Matthews admitting he spoke at an event for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay-left lobbying group, in Philadelphia. (Sure enough, here's a picture, with the Matthews mane in a frostier phase. And wow! See another media speaker, NPR "Fresh Air" hostess Terry Gross, whose show originates from Philly.) Matthews explained:

CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer praised Katie Couric’s selection as his successor in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer aired during the 4pm EDT hour, and again in the 7pm EDT hour, of Thursday's The Situation Room. As MRC analyst Brian Boyd reported here, CBS correspondent Andy Rooney appeared on the April 5 Imus in the Morning radio program, where he told Don Imus that he was "not enthusiastic" about Couric’s hiring, and that "I don’t know anybody at CBS News who is pleased that she’s coming here." When Schieffer was asked about Rooney’s comments, he politely disagreed with his colleague.

Bob Schieffer: "Well, if he says he didn’t know anyone I, I hate to tell you, Andy, but you must have not talked to me, because I’m pleased she’s coming here, so I’d have to question you on that. You know, I, I learned a long time ago that I let everybody speak for themselves. That’s Andy’s view. That’s what, you know, that’s what Andy does. He, he speaks his mind. I, I just don’t agree with him. He’s a great friend of mine but I don’t agree with him on that."

As Katie Couric announces she is jumping from NBC’s “Today” show, which she’s co-hosted for 15 years, to the anchor slot of the “CBS Evening News,” Edward Wyatt gamely argues in Thursday’s Business Day how Couric actually has roots as a hard news reporter (“Coming Back to Hard News”) and carried those over to her Today show segments, which Wyatt repackages as “tough assignments.”

“But she has showed that she can handle tough assignments with aplomb and has been unafraid to take certain risks.”

Those admirable “risks,” in Wyatt’s view, are composed of Couric putting a condom on a model of a penis, bringing a camera to her own colonoscopy, and criticizing a former Klansman.