Posted 7:43 PM by Peter Fallow
PRESS CORPSES? Tony Adragna of Quasipundit fame points out a story I missed: Dana Milbank's scary rides on presidential press corps charter flights. Apparently these planes are often quite rickety. Milbank sees sinister motives:

Is the Bush administration trying to kill the White House press corps? No doubt such an action would be politically popular. But members of the press corps, not surprisingly, view this possibility in a different light. Hence the concern over what seems increasingly to be a potential murder weapon: the dreaded press charter.

The question of presidential murder hangs in the air until the ninth graph:

White House spokeswoman Anne Womack said the administration is not culpable in the attempted murder of the press corps; previous administrations had their own dubious charters. The travel office solicits bids from a number of airlines and charter companies -- she did not know which ones -- and then sends a list of bids to the White House Correspondents' Association, which makes the choice. "It's ultimately a decision the correspondents' association makes," she said. But members of the association said they feel pressure from the White House to select cheap bidders -- in part because the government pays for a number of stenographers and aides who travel on the plane.

It's interesting that this Milbank piece was published on the same day that the "American Prospect" article on the Bush "blacklist" came out (see below). In it, Milbank is mentioned prominently as one of the White House reporters crushed under the jackboot of the all-powerful Bush spin machine. Coincidence? I think not!

Posted 4:50 PM by Peter Fallow
THIN-SKINNED WASHINGTON MEDIA: Here's a story from "The American Prospect" that's actually kind of funny. Apparently the White House press corps thinks the Bush administration has a "blacklist" (great word choice, that) for reporters who don't give glowing reports on the President's doings.

What strikes many journalists, though, isn't so much the Bushies' toughness but their unnecessary roughness -- the administration's oddly methodical, oversensitive, and aggressive responses to minor, unimportant, or thoroughly imagined slights. "Everyone expects them to be vigilant, to protect their boss -- that goes with the territory," says one correspondent. "But there's an over-the-top quality here." ...Journalists working on projects that fit the White House line...enjoy the royal treatment: spoon-fed chronology, high-level interviews, and juicy anecdotes galore. Reporters deemed disrespectful of the party line...get a different kind of treatment: angry calls to the boss, lack of cooperation on routine requests (such as travel schedules), and other petty -- and not so petty -- reprisals.

Doesn't that sound a lot like complaints people had about the Clinton administration? I realize that TAP is an ideologically driven liberal publication, but this really strikes me as whining. It's rare for presidential administrations (or any public figure, for that matter) to be overwhelmingly accomodating to adversarial reporters. As an example of the blacklist in action, TAP declares Bob Woodward's recent "10 Days in September" piece "interminable" and suggests it was nothing but an elaborate exercise in spin:

In the Post's breathless account of the days after 9-11, the president and his staff are always resolute, action is always decisive, and pressure is always met by grace.

Nowhere does TAP suggest that administration officials might be leery of the media because, pre-9/11, they largely portrayed Bush as right-wing buffoon who stole the election. Also, you would barely know that this administration is involved in the most serious challenge to face the nation since the height of the Cold War. All you hear is whining, whining, whining.

"What September 11 has done," says one White House reporter, "is heightened their arrogance."

And this from a reporting pool that voted something like 90 percent for Clinton? No wonder the media is in such ill repute these days.

Posted 1:57 PM by Peter Fallow
ANOTHER BIAS UPDATE: Michelangelo Signorile of the "New York Press" gives a semi-review of Bernard Goldberg's "Bias" and raises an already tired complaint: What about conservative commentators such as Alan Keyes? They're all over the TV.

True enough. I agree that conservative pundits get a fair shake on the news shows. But that still doesn't address the bias in a lot of the reporting. Consider this item from the Media Research Center. Two prominent talking heads (Dan Rather and Katie Couric), two solidly biased takes on campaign finance reform. Hell, click all over the MRC's site. There are plenty of other examples.

But Signorile is after bigger fish:

That gets at what is the real bias in television media: money. At this point, producers slap on anything if they think it’ll bring in viewers. And if it doesn’t work out, it hits the trash bin.

Well, duh, Michelangelo. It's called the "market." It works well, too. Look into it sometime. FInally, there's this "puhleeze" moment:

In one particular anecdote that has received a lot of attention, Goldberg quotes an unnamed CBS staffer on a conference call labeling former Family Research Council head Gary Bauer "the little nut from the Christian group."...What counts is this: Has Gary Bauer gotten his mug on tv and put forth his agenda? You better believe it–nauseatingly so, and a lot more often than those of us left of center have.

Forget that much of the coverage of people like Gary Bauer (whose views I don't agree with or care for) is disparaging; the fact that Bauer is allowed to speak AT ALL is an affront to a hard-core ideologue like Signorile. Furthermore, it's hard to believe he can't see that coverage of some important issues (race, crime, welfare, homosexuality, immigration) almost always comes from a left-of-center point of view. But then, that's where the good liberal gatekeepers believe the "center" is, anyway.

Posted 11:51 AM by Peter Fallow
QUICK BIAS UPDATE: Also from Romenesko is this link to a story about Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura telling reports to go read Bernard Goldberg's "Bias."

"I strongly suggest, each and every one of you read this book and go home and look in the mirror,'' Ventura lectured a group of reporters. "Because I've been right all along.''

Posted 11:45 AM by Peter Fallow
KOOKY MEDIA MEGALOMANIAC ALERT: Ted Turner tells students at Brown what he thinks of the 9/11 hijackers:

“I think they were brave,” Turner said of the 19 men involved in the terrorist acts, adding that they “might have been a little nuts.”

He also had this dire warning:

“The environment will collapse in your lifetime,” he said.

According to this story, Turner also praised Fidel Castro. The Projo story also has this tidbit. After saying that the 9/11 hijackers were brave, Turner did this:

He asked for a show of hands of people who would act as suicide bombers for their country and got none.

Thank God for THAT. (And thank God for Jim Romenesko, who provided these links and many of the other ones I publicize.)

Posted 8:42 AM by Peter Fallow
SNARK ATTACK! Peter Carlson of the "Washington Post" has penned a snarky commentary on a John J. Miller article from the "National Review" that reports on editorial changes at the "Reader's Digest." Carlson sarcastically massages a couple of liberal soft spots, among them guilt by association with Joe McCarthy and a not-so-subtle sneering at the Cold War-era anti-communist slant of "Reader's Digest." (As if that were a bad thing; after all, didn't Susan Sontag once say that the average reader of "Reader's Digest" knew more of the awful truth about the Soviet Union than did the average reader of "The Nation"?) But the real thrust of the article is conservative hypocrisy about media bias:

The problem began, Miller says, when the magazine's tough old conservative editors left in the 1990s and were replaced by people such as top editor Eric Schrier, a man with mysterious political views. "Each of his predecessors . . . was a known conservative," Miller writes. "Yet Schrier is a political mystery. People who work with him daily don't know his views on fundamental issues." Well, you can imagine the chaos caused when writers don't know their editor's political views! Why, they just don't know what to think. Or worse, they start thinking for themselves. ....Outraged, I called Jacqueline Leo, the magazine's new editor in chief, and asked her about Miller's story. "It's silly," she said. "One of the things that amused me is that this is the very same group that is always beating their breasts about press bias, and now they're complaining that we don't have enough of it."

I'm sure this had them high-fiving each other in the "Post" newsroom. But let's see if Carlson's reasoning passes what Stanley Crouch calls the "flip test." Imagine if, say, the "Utne Reader" (the closest lefty equivalent to "Reader's Digest") switched editorial staff; suddenly, articles from "National Review" or the "Weekly Standard" start showing up alongside the obligatory paeans to the vegan lifestyle. Do you really think media critic Eric Alterman of "The Nation" wouldn't write a scathing piece bemoaning Utne's abandonment of "progressive" journalism? And after said Alterman piece was published, could you really picture Peter Carlson dissing Alterman for advocating blatantly biased journalism? I rest my case. And the argument that it's only conservatives screaming about media bias? Liberals deny that it even exists and won't seriously analyze it. That's a form of hypocrisy, too.

I haven't read Miller's article (it's not linked at NRO yet) and it certainly could be a flawed piece. But it doesn't really strike me as overly hypocritical that conservatives would want to hold onto one of the few mainstream, high-circulation magazines that has traditionally held a rightward tilt. Here's what you didn't get from Carlson's article: Magazines are all about "niche audiences." "Reader's Digest" is an entirely different animal than "Time" or "Newsweek" or the "Washington Post." It's doesn't carry breaking news, and it has traditionally served a niche that is older and more conservative, just as "Utne Reader" serves a niche that is more liberal. If "Digest" is abandoning its core audience, it's eventually going to show up in the bottom line.

UPDATE: The NRO boys are down on "The Corner" talking about Carlson's article here and here. And here is Miller's original article.

Posted 7:40 AM by Peter Fallow
'60 MINUTES' UNFAIR TO KUWAIT? Also in the "Weekly Standard" is this piece about how "60 Minutes" misportrayed Kuwaiti sentiment toward America in the post-9/11 world. The author, Claudia Winkler, makes a good case that Mike Wallace & company only put Kuwaitis who were anti-American on camera, when in fact there is much greater diversity of opinion in the country we liberated from Saddam Hussein in 1991. Winkler's story also shows that Islamists are putting a lot of pressure on moderate government officials in Kuwait.

I did a quick search over at Little Green Footballs (the Media Minder of the Arab press) and found a couple of examples of Kuwaitis defying the Islamists (here and here). It's a hopeful sign.

Posted 7:21 AM by Peter Fallow
JOURNALISTS....PRAYING? Fred Barnes of the "Weekly Standard" has this story today about an upswing in religiosity among the Washington press corps. It seems that the number of journalists attending an annual dinner for Christian journalists given by columnist Cal Thomas has increased in recent years. (I personally think more journalists showed up because the original gathering was held in the bar of the Washington Hilton.) But it wasn't all seriousness. At the end of Tony Snow's speech, there was this little exchange:

His final point was that we must pray for our enemies because even in them we "see the face of God." At this point, he looked at Sam Donaldson of ABC-TV in the audience. "Sam, you're the face of God." Donaldson snapped back, "That's a terrible thing to say about God." Snow got the last word. "Sam," he said, "I said God has a sense of humor."

Posted 2:21 PM by Peter Fallow
KINSLEY LEAVING: Romenesko is just now reporting that "Slate" editor Michael Kinsley will be stepping down (Romenesko links to a WSJ story that requires registration). Kinsley has been battling Parkinson's for several years now.

Posted 11:53 AM by Peter Fallow
MEDIA CRITICS STAY IN THEIR SAFETY ZONE: Matt Welch points out that media critics who lambaste the "Houston Chronicle" for not doing enough serious reporting on Enron have completely overlooked the Houston newspaper that has been on Enron's case for a long time: The "Houston Business Journal."

Posted 8:54 AM by Peter Fallow
DEJA VU: It appears that Howell Raines is doing more shaking up at the "New York Times." According to this story from "New York Magazine" (link via Romenesko) Raines is yanking people out of bureaus and shuffling responsibilities, leading to turmoil and resignations. Sounding like Dilbert's Pointy-Haired Boss, Raines says it's all being done so the Times can have "a fast-metabolism reaction to news." Raines also says he's going to "aggresively affect people's lives." (Maybe all the well-deserved criticism of the Times is having an effect on Raines, who feels he has to "shake things up" to show he's in control, Captain Queeg style.)

People already don't like it:

In contrast, staffers feel that Raines (who declined to comment) is looking for "unencumbered" reporters. "I don't think Howell wants people bitching about how they can't spend time on the road," says one reporter. "He's looking for 30-year-olds with no spouse and no children, people who can file from four datelines in five days. It's the model of what a national correspondent was like when Howell was on the national staff."

On a much smaller scale, this was what it was like when the mid-sized paper I worked at in a small Southern city was swallowed up by a giant media company. Lots and lots of turmoil and stress, lots of lives aggressively affected. And very little good came from it.

Posted 8:42 AM by Peter Fallow
THE DEAD ZONE: If you've ever wondered about how the obituary department works, read this column by "Washington Post" ombudsman Michael Getler (link via Romenesko). The Post obviously takes obits much more seriously than just about any place I've ever worked. Heck, the last paper I worked for would print ANYTHING the family of the deceased wanted as long as they paid for it. We got some doozies, and I wish I had kept some. They ranged from very touching to very silly.

UPDATE: Here's a poignant nuts-and-bolts story about what a news/obit clerk does every day. (Link via Romenesko.) These people are really the unsung heroes of the newsroom, because anytime they pick up the phone, there's no telling what kind of world they're going to get plunged into.

Posted 8:29 AM by Peter Fallow
HOWIE'S BEEN BUSY: There's just a boatload of stuff in Howie Kurtz's columns today (they're here and here.) Kurtz says many major media outlets are using Enron as a springboard to call for greater reforms and more regulations. He also gives the "Houston Chronicle" a fair amount of grief for treating Ken Lay with kid gloves. But there's so much more: Mormons, "Dilbert"-esque media layoff memos, another book about Bush that paints him as clueless. Just go check Howie out.

Posted 8:18 AM by Peter Fallow
SPIN IN PRACTICE: I lifted this little item from "USA Today." It's an excerpt from a media column by Peter Johnson. I'll just quote the item verbatim:

Here's evidence that numbers can be interpreted differently. Some headlines from Friday's newspapers:

"Gannett net falls 16% on economy, ad slump" — Wall Street Journal. "Gannett's Quarterly Profit Falls 16%" — New York Times. "Gannett profit down in 2001" — Washington Post. "Gannett earnings top expectations" — USA TODAY, published by Gannett.

Posted 8:13 AM by Peter Fallow
WEB STORIES LEAD TO LAWSUIT: Here's an interesting story from "Editor and Publisher" about the long arm of the Web. A Virginia prison warden is trying to sue two newspapers in Connecticut that wrote about poor conditions for Connecticut inmates housed in a Virginia prison. The case is under appeal.

Last August, U.S. Senior District Judge Glen M. Williams ruled Warden Stanley Young could sue in Virginia. The articles were "accessible 24 hours a day in Virginia" via the newspapers' Web sites, Williams wrote. "Any harm suffered by Young from the circulation of these articles on the Internet would occur primarily in Virginia," Williams wrote in his 27-page opinion. The judge cited cases that held a corporation liable for sending letters into a state and that held Hustler magazine could be sued for libel in New Hampshire, in part because the magazine is marketed there.

This could really lead to a proliferation of lawsuits against newspapers. Think about it; some guy who might call the newsroom and complain about his name being listed in the "Police Blotter" page could claim he was being defamed on a truly global scale.

Posted 11:37 AM by Peter Fallow
BIAS ON THE AIR: In the latest online issue of "The American Enterprise," Jonah Goldberg writes a typically funny piece on some fluffy "60 Minutes" coverage of Sen. Jim Jeffords. While "60 Minutes" fawned over Jeffords for nobly following his conscience by leaving the GOP, Goldberg reports on what the CBS newsmagazine left out:

An alternate version of events, discussed openly in Washington, is that Jeffords bolted because a) he was afraid that 98-year-old Senator Strom Thurmond was about to die, throwing the GOP, and Jeffords specifically, into minority status, leaving him with no power; and b) his precious Northeast Dairy Compact, a byzantine bit of milk socialism cherished by dairy farmers in Vermont and reviled by economists, consumers, and more efficient dairy farmers, was on the verge of getting axed. Pundits from George Stephanopoulos to Norman Ornstein all but declared Jeffords had no choice but to leave the party if he lost his milk subsidies.

Goldberg then sums it up nicely:

Jeffords has become an icon among the media precisely because he fulfills their incessant insistence that the GOP is too conservative. Few are interested in the actual facts of why Jeffords left. Since December alone there have been hundreds of stories about Jeffords, yet according to a cursory Nexis search only about a dozen make any mention at all of the Dairy Compact. Instead, he is touted as a Churchillian figure.

I don't really see a vast left-wing media conspiracy out there. I think the GOP is perceived as "too conservative" because the center has been defined to the left over the past 30 years, especially among the social groups that comprise the media elite.

Posted 7:35 AM by Peter Fallow
MEDIA MINDER READS HIS MAIL: Letters, I get letters. There's not much going on today, so let's look back at what some people have written me over the past few weeks.

Fellow copy editor Tom Mangan has been sniffing around this blog for clues to my identity. Without going into too many details, he makes a good case in a private e-mail he sent me. I'm not saying if he's right or wrong. But he's certainly done his homework, and he certainly knows a lot about how certain big media companies work.
# # #
Last week I posted an item I saw at "The Occasional" about cochlear implants being "genocide" for deaf culture. Bill Quick, who has his own excellent blog, sent a reply that really got me thinking:

A few years back I researched and wrote a novel in which several of the main characters were deaf. The research involved was enormous, and at that time I became aware of the "deaf world" controversy, which really isn't a left-right ideological thing, and extends much more widely than just the issue of implants. (For instance, do a search on the word "Eythe..." The wish-legend behind the word will rip your heart out...)

I have a great deal of sympathy for the deaf, who are as varied in their complexity as are the hearing. There is a physical (neurological difference, for instance, between those born deaf, and those with acquired deafness. One can make a real case that, once a born-deaf person acquires full use of sign, they have essentially become a different race from all others - their perceptions, for instance, are differently modulated than those that hear. So are their thought patterns, which are much more spatially oriented than those of the hearing - which figures, given that sign is a spatial language.

Hearing is by far the most important sense - without it, and without a stringent effort to infuse speech of some kind, a human being never becomes human in any sense we understand. Try to imagine thinking without words to think with, for instance. Try to imagine thinking in timesence, without any way to formulate for yourself "before," "tomorrow," "then," "if" or even "now." (Which is where the untrained deaf do live - solely in the now).

That's deep. And it is something that I simply never thought of. I saw an item that looked like one of those ridiculous PC things John Leo writes about and posted it with little thought. This forced me to think a little deeper about it. I can see how the end of "deaf culture" would be a kind of loss, but I still think that a world with as little deafness as possible is still something to strive for. This may sound extreme, and maybe it's not a perfect analogy, but nobody's mourning the loss of "smallpox culture" or "leprosy culture," and they existed for thousands of years, too.
# # #
A reader named Erin King wrote me a short note after reading some of my "Profiles in Discourage" series:

The pictures the "profiles in discourage" paint in my head are too frightfully real. You rock, media-minded.

Hmm. I rock. How about that?
# # #
I've received a couple other letters, but I'm not going to get into them here. Thanks again to everyone who has written e-mails. They've been overwhelmingly supportive.

Posted 3:49 PM by Peter Fallow
A QUIET DAY: It's Saturday, and a day of blogging rest. I went out and about because the weather was so nice here today (mid-50s, lots of sun). I'm back home now. I'll make a quick go-round and see if there's anything worth commenting on/linking to.

Posted 8:15 AM by Peter Fallow
UN-'BIAS'-ED AL NEUHARTH: As if anybody really cares, Al Neuharth weighs in on Bernard Goldberg's "Bias." Al's against it. Period. I loved Al's casual name-dropping of Peter Jennings, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw as "longtime" acquaintances. Nice touch. But the best quote comes from the "Feedback" section "USA Today" always runs with Al. (Now THAT'S fairness!) From Tom Bray at "The Detroit News:" "Mr. Neuharth's argument reminds me of the old legal adage: If the facts aren't on your side, argue the law. If the law isn't on your side, argue the facts. If neither is on your side, pound the table. Saying Mr. Goldberg is a jerk doesn't make the unpleasant truth about media bias go away."

Posted 8:04 AM by Peter Fallow
'32 DAYS IN NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER': "The New Republic" has a hilarious parody of that Bob Woodward-penned "Washington Post" series on the Bush administration's reaction to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. (Link via Romensko.) Here's a sample:

The night before, chatting with Attorney General John Ashcroft in the greenroom before their appearances on "Larry King Live," enjoying a Diet Coke and some slices of pineapple, Woodward had offhandedly mentioned the story, and already the calls were coming in. But perhaps Woodward's comment to Ashcroft was not offhanded at all. He was no novice in this town. He knew how leaking begins.

Posted 7:56 AM by Peter Fallow
CROUCH UPDATE: Stanley Crouch writes about a new HBO documentary, "The Middle Passage," that seems to provide an accurate assessment of how slavery actually worked. And, as usual, Crouch expands on it eloquently and in unexpected ways:

It is an unsettling film, surprising in its construction and its indictment of Europeans and Africans, who are just as brutal and immoral as the whites to whom they sell the captured...I would recommend it to anyone who would understand one of the great costs paid in human suffering for what has become the modern world. We see what it took to produce those magnificent citizens who, at their best, have redefined for the better the worlds into which they arrived as human cargo....it is surely one of the most important things I have ever seen on television — for its humanity, not its rhetoric. And by pulling the covers off an Africa that has been given too much slack too often on the slave trade issue, it is morally monumental.

Posted 7:48 AM by Peter Fallow
BLAME RIGHT FOR JOURNALIST'S KIDNAPPING: The Media Research Center has this link to a letter to Romenesko that blames the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl on years of conservative compliants about liberal bias in the media. I'm serious. Here's an excerpt:

"In fact, the WSJ editorial board has for years persisted, along with other conservative commentators, to label journalists as political tools in service of a larger political agenda. The kidnappers of Mr. Pearl insist that he is a political tool, a spy, for some foreign government (one day the U.S., the next day Israel.) Where could they have possibly gotten the idea that journalists are not the dedicated professionals they claim to be but are instead something else in disguise?"

Posted 7:32 AM by Peter Fallow
A NEW BOOK ON RACE: Author Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn says the so-called "race experts" that are so often quoted in the mass media are not engaged in "some kind of bizarre conspiracy to keep racism alive. But the way they understand race has actually created a new racial etiquette, an etiquette as rigid as any that existed under old-fashioned white supremacy in pre-civil rights America." The daughter of "Culture of Narcissism" author Christopher Lasch has written a new book entitled "Race Experts" that paints a damning portrait of how the triumphant, transcendent civil rights movement has been turned into another form of pop-culture therapy. According to "Spiked," here's what they have wrought:

The USA that once called on immigrants to join its nation and fulfil the American dream can now only offer diversity, difference and division - different peoples with different mindsets, different interests and different beliefs who happen to live in the same geographical space.

Posted 7:06 AM by Peter Fallow
THE CRYBABY GAMES: In honor of the start of the Olympics, William Powers of the "National Journal" comes out with a story about how the media has turned the Games into a three-week tearjerker via those "Up Close and Personal" features:

As every Games-watcher knows, in the past few decades, the U.S. media have transformed the Olympics into an enormous public therapy session, in which athletes sit down with their journalist-shrinks and share all the details of their most anguishing personal experiences, particularly any trauma linked to the three D's: disease, death, and divorce.

I want to go a little further. I believe those "Up Close And Personal" features that began around the time of the 1976 Games have become ubiquitous. They're not about athletes anymore. You can hardly watch a local news broadcast or read a local paper without one of these little "triumph against impossible odds" stories coming into view. Powers provides the explanation why:

In a country as rich and successful as ours, where medicine works wonders, most people are comfortable, and life is generally good, personal hardship is increasingly rare -- and thus, a kind of news. Watching the Olympic tearjerkers, it's tempting to kvetch that everyone has their problems, because everyone does. But it's also an inescapable fact that Americans live longer and better, and simply have it easier, than any other major civilization has ever had it.

That's reminiscent of what Tom Wolfe wrote in "Hooking Up" to describe life in America circa 2000: "The average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink." And that's a story the media spends precious little time reporting on.

Posted 1:14 PM by Peter Fallow
BIAS WATCH: Tom Mangan, our copy queue is empty. May I take a moment and post something? Thanks.

First, Andrew Sullivan discusses a shameful hatchet job that's starting against Judge Charles Pickering Jr., a Bush nominee for a federal post. The evidence indicates that Pickering is anything but a racist, but in a lot of people's minds (in the newsroom of the "New York Times," for example), all you have to say is "white Mississippi judge" and there's an automatic presumption of bigotry.

Next, the Opinion Journal links to this story about NYT reporter Joel Greenberg, who recently penned a front-page story about "war resisters" in the Israeli military without mentioning that he was one himself 20 years ago. James Taranto excerpts a passage from Greenberg's article that goes like this:Protests by army reservists after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which Mr. Sharon, as defense minister, took all the way to Beirut, are widely considered to have contributed to a subsequent military pullback to southern Lebanon, from which Israel withdrew two years ago. Taranto then boils it all down into a nice "nut graf." Note that "are widely considered"--a classic passive-voice dodge by which reporters slip their own opinions into purportedly objective stories. But the problem here isn't just that Greenberg is biased; it's that he has failed to disclose his own involvement in the story on which he's reporting.

Posted 9:30 AM by Peter Fallow
NPR BLACKLIST: Jeff Jacoby describes how NPR caved in to pressure from Islamic groups and effectively blacklisted terrorism expert Steve Emerson. (Link via Romenesko.) As we all know, Emerson's prediction of a massive terrorist attack carried out by Islamic extremists on American soil came true. Jacoby nails the crux of the issue:

That a network subsidized with tax dollars refuses to let its listeners hear from someone of Emerson's caliber and expertise is appalling. That it does so in deference to an ugly smear campaign is shameful. But the real scandal is what the blacklisting of Emerson is but a symptom of: NPR's unwillingness to report accurately on the danger posed by Islamist fanaticism.

Posted 8:01 AM by Peter Fallow
SHOUT-OUT TIME: I received 387 visits yesterday, a new record. I owe a big thank-you to Ken Layne for steering folks in this direction. I also want to thank some other folks who've seen fit to post nice things about me, such as Amy Welborn and a couple of others that I can't remember right now. If you folks show back up in my referrers, I'll give you a shout-out, too. Also, thanks to folks who sent encouraging e-mails about what I'm doing here. Thanks a lot.

However, there was also this post from fellow copy editor Tom Mangan, in reference to the part of my bio where I mention posting anonymously from work:

I hate to burst anyone's balloons, but unless the Minder is encrypting and elaborately rerouting his transmissions to blogspot.com to erase his tracks, his bosses can find out who he is in about 15 seconds if they take a mind to. Sorta bugs me that this guy fancies himself a conservative but has no qualms about goofing off on the company's dime. What kind of belief in the pluck and initiative that makes America great is that?

The balloon is intact, Tom. I know that my bosses could find out who I am if they wanted to, but I've been informed by my Amazing Techie Girlfriend (who does IT at the paper) that it's highly unlikely they'd do so because of the huge volume of Internet traffic at our offices. Audits just aren't done, unless they've got very specific information. The main reason I'm doing this anonymously is because some of the personal observations and experiences I post involve people who still work for that big media company, many of whom are in this building. And you'll note that not only am I not identifying myself, I'm also not identifying the company or anyone associated with it.

As for "goofing off on the company's dime," well, I'm guilty as charged. Yep, I waste a total of about 30 minutes of work time doing this blog (mostly I post from home, or whip posts into shape there before hitting the "send" button from work). That's not too bad, considering that I don't get any breaks and every night we're generally so slammed that I have to eat dinner at my desk while reading proofs. You ever sent anyone a personal e-mail from work, Tom? Or perhaps surfed over to "The Onion" while waiting for copy to come in? That's pretty much what I'm doing with this blog during work hours. Sorry to have betrayed the entire conservative movement. I know liberals have lofty standards that they live up to every day. (P.S. I did enjoy most of Tom's Web site, especially the cliche section and the Seven Questions. In fact, I'm gonna add it to my Perma-links, just to show that there's no hard feelings.)

UPDATE: Bob Owen is another blogger who said nice things about me. Check him out here.

Posted 3:19 PM by Peter Fallow
TWO MEDIA-BIAS QUICKIES: Glenn "Tha Bloggfatha" Reynolds links this story illustrating how biased (and often inaccurate) "studies" make their way into news reports. And Bill Quick points out an all-too-common phenomenon: "The agenda-driven ideological tirade masquerading as a straight news report."

Posted 12:32 PM by Peter Fallow
IDENTITY POLITICS PARODY? I don't know if this is a joke or not, but apparently there's a movement out there (way, way out there) that equates cochlear implants with genocide because the operation will end deafness and thus destroy "deaf culture." Check this Web site out. (Link found via The Occasional.) And people on the left wonder why they're no longer relevant.

Posted 12:16 PM by Peter Fallow
NEWSBOT: Here's a story that ought to have journalists worried: A machine that writes as well (or better) than a lot of famous, well-paid reporters I've read. (Link via PEJ.) Quoting the OJR story, the computer (you can check it out here) is "a natural language processing algorithm, uses artificial intelligence techniques to cull through news reports published online, sort them, and summarize them." OK, so it doesn't really replace writers and editors, but it may replace the guy who puts together those "roundup" or "briefs" packages that you see so often in big newspapers.

Posted 12:05 PM by Peter Fallow
TYSON'S TIRED BEE-ATCHES: Matt Labash of "The Weekly Standard" reports on an underreported aside from the recent Mike Tyson-Lennox Lewis press conference brawl.

...after a journalist yelled out to Tyson that he belonged in a straitjacket, Tyson gathered himself, began massaging his crotch, then called the male journalist a "white bitch" before promising him that "I'm gonna f--- you 'til you love me."

Labash then offers a dissertation on the evolution of prison lingo: According to my vast network of sources in correctional facilities...overtly threatening to make a male rival your "bitch" is the mark of an amateur, an anachronistic threat that instills about as much fear as boasting that you are a "mean motorscooter," or that you're about to serve up a "knuckle sandwich."

The rest of the piece discusses how prison-speak has seeped into popular culture, and how that's not necessarily a good thing. (Damn that prison-industrial complex!)

Posted 11:53 AM by Peter Fallow
PANTY RANT: Check out this Johnny Taliban rant from the Last Page. Among the choice lines: "Former friends of Johnny Taliban have speculated that if he had just perpetuated his post-adolescent angst by getting his testicles pierced and inking on some really rad tats that Johnny Taliban could have one day become the manager of a Starbucks."

Posted 9:51 AM by Peter Fallow
CORRECTIONS HALL OF FAME: The "Palm Beach Post" issued this hilarious correction for a gaffe on a photo credit about the Three Stooges. (Link via Romenesko.)

I'm glad to see papers trying to bring a sense of humor to corrections. Of course, we'll have a long way to catch up with Britain's "The Guardian." I know they've been absolutely clueless during the War on Terrorism, but they do have a funny corrections page that's written by Ian Mayes. Here's a funny story that highlights some of their more humorous clarifications. For more American corrections, go here.

Posted 9:17 AM by Peter Fallow
OP/ED MACHINATIONS REVEALED! Will Vehrs, one of the Quasipundit guys, has an interesting link to a story that reveals how the editorial department of the "Richmond Times-Dispatch" works. It's a funny and informative read.

Posted 7:18 PM by Peter Fallow
SEARCHING FOR MEDIA BIAS: Here's a good one. MSNBC ombudsman Dan Fisher charts his Web site's biases, or lack thereof, by hitting the search engine. He has some interesting findings. As far as labeling, MSNBC does skew to the left (i.e. conservative groups are identified as such more often than liberal groups) but labeling in general doesn't happen as often as you might think.

Posted 6:23 PM by Peter Fallow
CROUCH AGAIN: Stanley Crouch is back with another bull's-eye column about the cult of black victimology, this time for the "Los Angeles Times." (Link via Front Page.) Choice lines:

Between 1994 and 1999, 45,000 black men and women were murdered in this country. Do we ever hear the civil-rights establishment address this? Hardly...Had 2% of those 45,000 mentioned earlier--1,125 people--been killed by white racists in just six years, the civil-rights establishment would have marched away its feet, its calves and would now be hopping along on its knees, waving placards, singing and giving speech upon speech upon speech about how government had to stop "this genocide of our young black people."

Regular readers of this blog probably have noticed that I refer to Crouch a lot. That's because it was his writings that first got me questioning my liberal assumptions surrounding racial issues. His elegant liner notes for Wynton Marsalis' albums, plus his books "Notes of a Hanging Judge" and "The All-American Skin Game," were my gateway drugs to Second Thoughts. Thanks a lot, Stan.

Posted 5:34 PM by Peter Fallow
SHE'S THERE: The Amazing Techie Girlfriend arrived in one piece in Salt Lake City. She said the flight was uneventful except for six bawling, sneezing brats behind her. Also says the mountains there are incredibly beautiful. More later.

Posted 12:36 PM by Peter Fallow
DEATH IN A SMALL TOWN: Romenesko also has this story (and this one) about a raid on an adult book store in Johnston, R.I., that resulted in the suicide of a prominent local man. The local media apparently went way overboard in telling the story of the arrests of several men who were engaged in mutual masturbation inside an adult theater. (They were charged with indecent exposure, a misdemeanor.)

That the "Providence Journal" way overhyped the story is shameful. But pro-gay groups aren't helping themselves by claiming it's a flagrant example of homophobia run rampant, and it's equally shameful that they're capitalizing on a man's suicide to do so. I fully believe that people have the absolute right to do whatever they want in the privacy of their bedrooms, but these guys weren't in their bedrooms. They were in a public place, engaged in public sex acts. Following the "broken windows" theory, businesses that allow that sort of thing to go on can do real damage to a community. (I know; I've seen it happen. The last paper I worked at had a real problem with male "cruisers" hanging around near our building late at night. Despite several staff members witnessing sex acts in semi-public places, we never wrote a story about it.) The residents of Johnston are well within their rights to want that kind of public activity driven from their town. I mean, how is this substantially different from a crusade to rid a town of street-walking hookers? Hardly anyone screams when straight men are arrested for soliciting prostitutes or masturbating in a peep show, and the media doesn't wring its hands about it too much, either. This story bears watching; I suspect that some journalism school will use it as a "case study" in media coverage of homosexuality, which will only reinforce the idea that you shouldn't comment on things such as anonymous public sex between gay men.

Posted 11:47 AM by Peter Fallow
FISK OR RALL - THE ANONYMOUS SOURCE? Cynthia Cotts' weekly "Village Voice" Press Clippings column ponders the fate of "Wall Street Journal" reporter Daniel Pearl (link via Romenesko). Her column includes this interesting quote:

"One war correspondent speculated that Pearl is 'paying the price for U.S. hubris'—that is, for a government that pursues foreign policies based entirely on self-interest, while forgetting that unilateralism has consequences and can 'piss people off.' "

The people who kidnapped Pearl are not anti-globalization protesters who are expressing their rage the only way they can. They are terrorists who are demanding that the U.S. release Pakistanis in custody. They are of the same ilk as those who murdered 3,000 innocents on our soil and caused billions in property damage. Some of our policies may have been wrong in the past, but fighting terrorism is self-defense, not "hubris" or "self-interest."

Posted 9:50 AM by Peter Fallow
'EVACUATED, MEDICATED, DEDICATED': That's been the motto of employees of tabloid giant American Media Inc. in the months since anthrax killed one of their co-workers and sickened another. This "Chicaco Tribune" story (link via PEJ) tells what they've been up to since their office was struck. One quote indicates that they've kept their minds on their work:

"There is good news," said Steve Coz, editorial director of the six tabs, over a breakfast of scrambled eggs. "Liza Minnelli rehabbed herself for her upcoming wedding."

I know the media caught a lot of flak (some deserved) for freaking out during the anthrax scare. But I've got to tell you, it was a fairly scary time at our paper. We had an anthrax hoax in our newsroom that had my gut in knots for a couple of days until we found out it was nothing. The thing was, the woman who got the questionable letter sits about 15 feet away from me. (Also, all the mail for the newspaper was sorted on our floor, and that is an assload of mail.) The haz-mat guys came (it was like their 15th stop of the day) and we had to move into another department and work for four days. Some good did come out of this, though. It forced the company to completely revamp its mail-handling operation.

Posted 9:29 AM by Peter Fallow
SHE'S LEAVING ON A JET PLANE: Today the Amazing Techie Girlfriend took off to Salt Lake City to provide tech support for our newspaper's coverage of the Winter Olympics. She'll be gone for three weeks. (Argh!) So I'm kind of sad today. I'll miss her. But the blogging must go on. I hope she can funnel me some information about security out there. I can tell you, security was significantly higher at the airport than the last time I visited one about a year ago.

Posted 6:34 PM by Peter Fallow
WHY JOHNNY CAN'T READ: Here's the winner of the year's most unfortunate book title: "Homeschooling for Dummies."

Posted 12:14 PM by Peter Fallow
LETTERS, CROUCH GETS LETTERS: Stanley Crouch opens his mailbag and finds some criticism of a recent column where he pointed out that Alex Haley's "Roots" was a fraud. Crouch wades in with his usual fearlessness:

"The basic idea of those doing the scolding is that it is my duty as a black writer to speak only well of the Negro. I should never engage in "doing the white man's work" by "tearing down" other Afro-Americans. To do otherwise is only to curry favor from "that old pale thing," as Malcolm X described the white man. I don't buy any of that. I do have a duty, but it is not to somebody's skin color, regardless of what they do."

And Crouch, as he has done so many times before, debunks the silly genuflecting before Africa that has been a corrosive element of African-American thought for more than three decades:

"I would say the book and miniseries helped the pointless Afro-American romance with Africa — a romance that lets Africans off the hook. This has been consistent for about 30 years, but it seems to be abating finally in the face of the truth that Africans were not a bunch of noble savages overrun by the demon white man, but were indispensable to the success of the slave trade. And they still sell slaves."

Crouch also returns to one of his constant themes: the recognition that African-Americans are not African, but quintessentially American. Indeed, despite coming here as slaves beginning 300 years ago, they have contributed much to our elusive American identity, both in concrete achievements and in the more silent and unseen ways of culture:

"The reality that should be made clear to those who still want to bow down before "the motherland" is harsh but true: Given our having grown up in — and helped create! — a very sophisticated society, and given the fact that, as of now, American Negroes are the most remarkable black people in the world, we have much, much more to offer Africans than they have to offer us."

Posted 11:23 AM by Peter Fallow
OBJECTIVITIY MAKES STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: The "Minneapolis Star-Tribune" won't call militant Palestinian groups such as Hamas terrorists. "We also take extra care to avoid the term 'terrorist' in articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of the emotional and heated nature of that dispute," said assistant managing editor Roger Buoen. (In other words, it's OK to piss off the Jews in our community, not OK to piss off the Muslims.) This bizarre little double standard comes via today's Opinion Journal.

Posted 9:22 AM by Peter Fallow
ARIANNA GETS THE FINGER: Maybe I'm late getting to this, but I haven't read or heard a whole lot about Ben Stein flipping off Arianna Huffington on CNN's "Talkback Live" until today. (Link via FAIR.) Pretty wild story.

Posted 9:01 AM by Peter Fallow
SPINNING GLOBAL WARMING: An article in the "San Francisco Chronicle" takes the media to task for jumping all over contradictory research on temperatures in Antarctica as proof that the theory of global warming is in trouble. (Link via Project for Excellence in Journalism.) OK, maybe the media goofed in reporting this particular study; we do it all the time and with a wide variety of scientific data. But it seems to me that there are some serious questions about global warming that are underreported by the media. Reading this article, you sure wouldn't know that there were any:

"Contrary to the insinuations, "global warming is real and happening right now," declared Peter T. Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago, lead author of the Nature paper. He said the cooling trend in Antarctica appears to be a surprising, regional exception to the overall planetary warming -- that's all."

Well, there's ample evidence that the theory of global warming is open to debate. Too bad most of the media doesn't see it that way.

Posted 8:36 AM by Peter Fallow
OPINIONS FOR SALE: Howie Kurtz has an item today that sounds like something that could have happened in my "Profiles in Discourage" days. It seems a "Washington Times" ad rep offered to sell environmental activist Andy Stahl a $9,450 ad to answer crticism of environmentalism from the Times. Stahl was offered the ad to counter that report about environmentalists placing Canadian lynx hairs on a rubbing post in order to protect a forest. The editorial side of the Times says the ad rep was way out of line and in no way represents the newspaper's policy. I dunno; I've worked at places that were so desperate to add new "revenue streams" that this kind of stunt doesn't surprise me in the least. That mid-sized newspaper in the South that I worked at a couple of years ago had no problem with slapping an ad on Page 1 despite the protestations of the staff (it ended up not generating the revenue they hoped it would).

Posted 8:05 AM by Peter Fallow
PATRIOTS WIN: The Super Bowl turned out to be a pretty decent game. And stunner of stunners, the Patriots defeated the Rams 20-17 on a last-second field goal. I still wish the Steelers could have made it there. Oh well.

Posted 8:03 AM by Peter Fallow
THE LAST PAGE: Sitting at the end of the Internet is a hot new blog called the Last Page. It's about IT-related nightmares and movies and other stuff. Go check it out. The chick that writes it has a lot of attitude, plus I hear she's a real hottie!

Posted 11:52 AM by Peter Fallow
QUIET TODAY: OK, I won't be posting anything today (except this, of course). I'm at work and the Super Bowl is coming on. I simply cannot edit copy, blog and watch sports on TV at the same time. If I do, my blogging will suffer! Though in all honesty, I'm not too hyped about the Super Bowl since my Steelers crapped out. Go Rams, I guess.

Posted 11:45 AM by Peter Fallow
THE 'ROOT CAUSES' OF MEDIA BIAS: If you really want to get a peek into the mind-set of the left-wing intellectuals who dominate our major universities and influence future journalists, give this article from something called "The Center for Book Culture" a look. (Link via Arts and Letters Daily.) It's written by Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of something called "Media Ecology" (????) at New York University who wrote "The Bush Dyslexicon," a collection that purports to show that since The Prez don't talk real good, he isn't fit to rule. Miller's article can be summed up thusly: people who don't agree with Mark Crispin Miller are anti-intellectual dolts, and their sometimes unsophisticated criticism of the enlightened Mark Crispin Millers of the world threatens to engulf us all in a dark night of right-wing censorship and bad grammar. It's one of the most contemptuous screeds I've seen in a long time.

Miller received an angry, mildly obscene e-mail from someone named "Fred" after one of Bush's speeches. Instead of shrugging it off as the rantings of a crank, Miller instead sees sinister undertones: "Any act of critical intelligence, any reasoned effort to see through the mask of power, enrages types like Fred...Fred cast that feeble speech of W's, which thrilled no-one, as if it had been one of Hitler's finest--a rafter-rattling diatribe that really put it to, or up, the assholes of the left."

Thrilled no-one, that is, within the faculty lounge of New York University. But to people like Miller, it was comparable to one of "Hitler's finest." (And he's surprised that people get pissed off at him!) Miller then gets uglier:

"With his fantasy about our Chief Executive's revenge upon the left-wing anus, for example, Fred reveals himself as much less interested in understanding Bush's programs than in bunking with him in a prison cell, where he could dance around and wave a pom-pom every time the president turns out some underweight progressive first offender."

So criticism of left-wing views from the right fits into a "meta-narrative" of prison rape (with Miller suddenly cast in the role of Bush's "bitch") all because somebody, somewhere doesn't like his silly little book. And this is the crude argument forwarded by an "intellectual." Of course, it's not really Bonehead Fred's fault. Powerful, sinister forces are actually behind the two-line e-mail that has sent shudders through Miller's delicate sensibilities. Miller blames "society" and the profit-driven "mass media":

"For example, there's the crucial fact that, by and large, such random jeers were not spontaneous eruptions of mass sentiment, but outbursts systematically provoked by a vast media-political complex that profited enormously, and profits still, by playing to the Fred in all of us...Indeed, the Fox News Channel has itself long been an enterprise that runs primarily on the bile of its half-educated viewers, as Roger Ailes, the outfit's crusty overseer, concedes: "There's a whole country that elitists will never acknowledge. What people deeply resent out there are those in the 'blue' states thinking they're smarter. There's a touch of that in our news." The same seething "touch" pervades every offering from the GOP's immense semi-official agitprop machine, from multi-millionaire Big Liars like Rush Limbaugh down to all the local yokels fulminating on the air from sea to shining sea."

The Mark Crispin Millers of the world, who educate future members of the media, have nothing but sneering contempt for the millions of decent, ordinary Americans who vote Republican (about half of the country, in other words). They see mobs armed with pitchforks and torches coming to destroy the beleaguered progressive castle, all funded by lying, manipulative, limosine-riding, cigar-smoking plutocrats in top hats and tails.

"Those hooked on such propaganda have been well-trained by its authors to scream into the nearest telephone, or pound out a threatening e-mail, at the slightest hint of what they might perceive as "liberal bias" by the corporate media. Not long ago, such smart technologies were warmly hailed...for their democratizing influence in, say, Manila under Marcos, Moscow under Gorbachev, Beijing under Deng Xiao-Ping... While there's some truth to that heroic formulation, it tends to blind us to the anti-democratic uses of such speedy gadgets here on the domestic front. The likes of Fred...hit the keyboards not to broaden the debate but to abort it, taking their wild cyber-shots either to intimidate the heretics or to discourage others from paying attention...Such repressive tactics, we should note, are anti-intellectual in the deepest and most frightening sense--i.e., opposed to any rational attempt to jolt the public out of acquiescence."

That's right; those who disagree with Miller haven't exercised free will; they've been "trained" by their right-wing Illuminati puppet masters! Technology that allows more voices into the debate is not liberating; it actually "aborts" the debate by allowing "intimidation" via raw, unsophisticated communication to mix with the reasoned voices of professors of "Media Ecology." (Poor wittle best-selling author Mark Crispin Miller! Some people wote nasty weviews of his book at Amazon.com and hurt his wittle feelings! Wah!)

Miller's peevish little outburst is indicative of how out of touch with reality the academic left is; as late as February 2002 they're still trying to do whatever is necessary to "jolt the public out of acquiescence," even when the events of Sept. 11 couldn't have delineated the line between good and evil more clearly, especially for those on the Left. As Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are fundamentalist, racist, sexist, fascist fanatics who seek to impose the most inflexible theocracy imaginable on the world and are willing to use mass murder to accomplish it. Opposing them is not "acquiescence"; it is common sense.

"In bringing down the World Trade Center (a mile from where I sit right now) and ravaging the Pentagon, the terrorists not only murdered thousands, and left tens of thousands more bereft, and devastated lower Manhattan, and sparked the wreckage of the local and the national economy. Through that spectacular atrocity, the killers also managed, at one blow, to knock the brains clean out of countless good Americans."

On the contrary, the Sept. 11 attacks reminded people that their country and its freedoms are worth defending, a radical idea that leftists knocked clean out of their brains decades ago and, apparently, far too many have failed to recover.

Posted 10:15 AM by Peter Fallow
ARAB PRESS UNDER PRESSURE: That Al-Jazeera videotape of an interview with bin Laden never aired "because the interview was conducted under duress and the questions were dictated to its correspondent," according to this story from "The Washington Post." (Link via Drudge.)

I'm sorry. I don't buy that. Almost every other interview with bin Laden has been conducted in a tightly controlled manner; what makes this one so much different? I still think Al-Jazeera didn't want to air it because it would have shown the world what an arrogant fool bin Laden is.

Posted 10:03 AM by Peter Fallow
CHECK THIS OUT: The February issue of the "New Criterion" is out, and as always, the Notes And Comments section is well worth reading. This month, it tackles the Cornel West controversy at Harvard and the controversy over the "diverse" firefighters memorial in New York. An added bonus for Mark Steyn fans is his review of Tony Kushner's "Homebody/Kabul." And there's a fine essay by Paul Hollander on the persistence of leftist ideas after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Posted 2:03 PM by Peter Fallow
WHAT THE...: While sniffing around in my referrers (best not to think too long about THAT) I discovered some kind words and linkage from two bloggers out there. The Dreaded Purple Master (aka Daniel Taylor) and the Kloognome. Thanks, guys. I think I'll add you to my Perma-links.

Posted 9:25 AM by Peter Fallow
A DAY AT THE F.A.I.R.: Speaking of FAIR, they've got some real doozies over there today. First, Norman Solomon complains that "countless reporters and pundits had proclaimed GWB and FDR to be kindred inspirational leaders" and then fails to cite a single example. Solomon also drops this line down from Fantasyland: "Ever since Roosevelt's death in April 1945 after more than 12 years as president, many Republican leaders have sought to move the United States out from under the enormous political umbrella created by the New Deal -- bitterly opposed by most wealthy interests and the well-heeled press... Yet, in 2002, FDR's mindset -- fervently shared by many millions of Americans -- is scarcely discernible through today's media fog." Is this the same "well-heeled press" that rarely meets a government program, handout or regulation it doesn't like? Or whose members vote 90 percent Democratic?

FAIR also had this link to an article by John Chuckman in "Counterpunch" about the "myth" of the liberal media. First, Chuckman discusses how "liberal" changed from its original meaning of support for individual freedom into some kind of slur: "How was this fine word reduced to shabbiness? The answer is through endless repetition of the parody in magazines, newspapers, and on television. That's not exactly prima facie evidence for liberal bias in the media." How stunningly wrong can you be? Beginning in the 1950s, the label "liberal" was co-opted by the political and cultural Left to deflect attention away from the Marxism at its core. Norman Podhoretz and others insisted for years that the "classical liberal" label applied to them and their kind, but they eventually gave up and settled on "neo-conservative" to describe their views. And it's really only considered a parody among conservatives; I'm sure most liberals consider the label a compliment.

The rest of Chuckman's article just regurgitates the old line that the media isn't conservative because the big corporations that own it aren't conservative. As I've written before, we're not talking about corporate boardrooms; we're talking about corporate cultures. And amazingly, Chuckman closes with this little laundry list: "Did the press ever reveal to the American people what a manipulative monster J. Edgar Hoover was? Did the press tell people, while he was destroying people's lives, that Joe McCarthy was a desperate drunk trying to revive a failing political career? Such questions are endless, and the answer to virtually all of them is 'no.' "

This is nothing but a lie, and a stupid one at that; how else but through the press did Americans learn these and many other unpleasant truths?

Posted 9:01 AM by Peter Fallow
SILENCE IN ZIMBABWE: Zimbabwe's Parliament passed stringent new laws designed to muzzle the media. I mentioned this yesterday. Here's what's going on:

"The measures, which must still be signed into law by President Robert Mugabe, give the government broad powers to license journalists, register media organizations under strict terms laid down by the state, and impose severe penalties for infringements."

OK, let's see...has FAIR jumped on this yet? Let's surf over there quickly....nope. Not a word.

Posted 8:26 AM by Peter Fallow
'COLORING' REVISITED: The new online issue of "Commentary" is out, and it features a book review of William McGowan's "Coloring The News." I know I've been pointing this book out a lot over the past couple of weeks, but I can't emphasize how much more important this book is than Bernard Goldberg's "Bias." Let's face it: Goldberg's stuff about Dan Rather's "bitches" is a whole lot sexier than a fairly dry dissection of the drive for diversity at newspapers you've probably never heard of (Burlington, Vermont, for example). But I've lived through the kind of ham-handed diversity enforcement that McGowan describes (see the Profiles in Discourage series at the right). Commentary's reviewer, Vincent Carroll of the "Rocky Mountain News," is absolutely correct when he writes:

"One of the justifications for this heavy emphasis on diversity at major newspapers and television stations has been that it would help produce deeper and fairer reporting. But in chapters devoted to issues ranging from immigration to affirmative action to homosexuality, McGowan shows that this is not the case at all. On the contrary, the various internal quota schemes have been accompanied by an enforced conformity of views about race."

To get an idea of what he's talking about, check out this "review" of McGowan's book from a black journalist. It's hard to tell if he even read it; he just dismisses McGowan's arguments out of hand and implies that he's a racist for even raising the issues. As more people hear about this book, expect more of the same from even more prominent voices.

Posted 7:59 AM by Peter Fallow
ADDED TO UNABLOGGER: The Unablogger has added Media Minded to his list of permanent links. That's cool, just so long as the Amazing Techie Girlfriend doesn't catch me surfing over there. 'Preesh, Una.

Posted 7:07 AM by Peter Fallow
HITCHENS VS. SULLIVAN: I just watched the tail end of C-SPAN's call-in show with Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan. It was, as the British would say, cracking good stuff. These two gentlemen obviously disagree about a great many things, but it was pleasant to watch two great minds debate and spar without getting ugly. They had some scintillating exchanges on religion (Sullivan pro, Hitchens con), and both agreed that William Safire is the most intellectually honest big-time columnist out there today. There were even a few good phone calls, including some guy from Texas who said, "thank you, Complaint-SPAN!" I wish I had gotten up earlier to watch the whole thing. I'm sure it will be repeated today, though.

Posted 9:42 PM by Peter Fallow
AL-JAZEERA'S HIDDEN VIDEO: The Amazing Techie Girlfriend and I just got home from a night of bar-hopping, flipped on CNN and watched the Osama bin Laden interview which Al-Jazeera has been sitting on for a couple of months. Stunning stuff. It pretty much confirms that bin Laden is an arrogant fool who miscalculated American resolve on so many levels that it boggles the imagination. But what's really galling is Al-Jazeera's immediate denunciation of CNN for acquiring the video and the lame-ass reasons they cite for not airing it back in late October. (Not newsworthy? COME ON!!). It's obvious they considered it unhelpful to the cause of bin Ladenism to air it at the precise moment the United States was claiming an overwhelming victory against al-Qaeda. And it's equally obvious that they are in Al-Qaeda's back pocket. Al-Jazeera would have done much better by claiming the video was a fabrication, as they did with the other bin Laden video that showed him bragging about the Sept. 11 attacks. But I'm sure that will be the spin emanating from the rest of the Arab media in the days ahead. Are you out there yet, Charles Johnson?

Posted 12:37 PM by Peter Fallow
DESECRATING THE ALTERMAN: Best of the Web today disses a lame Eric Alterman "review" of Bernard Goldberg's "Bias." Choice lines:

"Alterman's "argument" is not only wrong, it's too silly even to take at face value. He answers charges that reporters are biased in their news coverage by pointing out that conservative commentators are able to get a fair shake. It's as if a Philip Morris executive answered charges that his company produces deadly products by pointing to the wholesomeness of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese."

And then this:

"True, this column is written in a self-righteous, peevish tone--but it's exactly the same self-righteous, peevish tone that characterizes everything else Alterman writes. In fact, it's a tone that corresponds perfectly to conservative stereotypes of the left. Imagine if Rush Limbaugh--and we're not suggesting Rush has anything to do with this, just using him as an example--could create a liberal caricature to act as a foil. Wouldn't he look a lot like Alterman?"

P.S. If you click on the link to "The Nation" piece, you'll notice at the bottom that Alterman admits that he wouldn't be able to follow the Enron story "were it not for the energetic reporting of the folks at Media Whores Online (www.mediawhoresonline.com) and the thoughtful analysis at Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo website (www.j-marshall.com/talk). Check 'em out." Well, Mr. Marshall's site is certainly worth recommending (I don't always agree with him, but I do stop by regularly), but Media Whores?? Jesus, is he joking or something?? An admission like that ought to put a huge dent in Alterman's credibility as a "serious" media critic.

Posted 8:53 AM by Peter Fallow
PRESS MUZZLE FOR ZIMBABWE: President Robert Mugabe is trying to go to extraordinary lengths to silence the press in Zimbabwe. Earlier this month, "The Spectator" reported on how the world is not hearing the truth about the confiscation of Zimbabwe's white-owned farms (and the growing famine threat) because of Mugabe's strong-arm tactics with the media. But the news has been quietly reaching the outside world, thanks in part to one brave woman and her regular e-mail updates on the situation.

I wonder if the Marxists over at FAIR will jump on this the way they've jumped on phantom issues such as press criticism (in New York opinion pages, of all places!) of the anti-globalization protesters descending on Manhattan. Sure enough, a quick search of FAIR found just seven hits for "Zimbabwe," none dealing with the current media lockdown there. But then, what is there to criticize about Mugabe's "progressive" leadership?

Posted 6:50 AM by Peter Fallow
BAD CALL: Jonathan V. Last of "The Weekly Standard" points out a bit of bad judgment by the media. The "Palm Springs Desert Sun" had covered the soft treatment a school security guard received for having sexual relations with a 17-year-old student. The paper's opinion page editor penned an outraged editorial, which prompted a response column from 13-year-old Lindsay Llarena that defended the officer and defamed the victim:

"The girl should’ve known not to do this, unless she wasn’t brought up to know right from wrong. ... Everybody makes mistakes, nobody's perfect, and there is no perfect world...Look at Bill Clinton. He was an honorable person. He ran our country, and he had an affair. He didn't even get a punishment, and his authority ranked above police officers."

Now we finally understand Clinton's legacy: 13-year-olds understand not only the intricacies of digital penetration, but also how to smear the victim. She knows enough to ignore important facts of the case, portray the victim as morally impure, suggest that the act was harmless and mutual, and finally dismiss it under the rubric of "everyone does it." Kind of like Lanny Davis.

Obviously, Vast is using the piece to engage in a bit of gratuitous Clinton-bashing (not that there's anything WRONG with that), but I think the deeper problem rests with the newspaper:

It (probably) isn't fair to beat up on Lindsay, so I won't. She's dumb and selfish and 13. But what about the adults? When asked why the paper chose to run Lindsay's piece, (opinion editor Cindy) Uken says cautiously, "We thought it was the right thing to do."

Wrong. This is a stunningly bad call. What's next, publishing letters from the friends of rapists describing how their victims were "begging for it"? You can postulate all you want about the wealthy, liberal California mind-set and the shameless indulgence of the whims of spoiled children. I've got my own theories on why publishing this 13-year-old child's column was "the right thing to do" in the eyes of the "Desert Sun."

1) They really, truly believed they were providing "fair and balanced" coverage of a controversial issue. This could happen after a long, contentious staff meeting where it is decided that the high and lofty journalistic standard of complete, total, absolute, non-judgmental objectivity trumps ordinary human decency and common sense. (I've seen similar things happen, albeit over far less controversial issues.)

2) They figured a provocative and controversial column would generate a lot of attention in the community. Cynics may call it pandering to sell papers, but editors can easily defend it by calling it a "community dialogue."

Thing is, they probably weren't counting on the "Wall Street Journal" or the "Weekly Standard" to be reading, too.

Posted 6:26 AM by Peter Fallow
COMEDY GOES CONSERVATIVE: I don't know if anyone else has noticed this (I'm sure they have) but I just stumbled across this piece by comedian Larry Miller from "The Weekly Standard" that is both smart and funny. The subject: Johnny Taliban. Here's some choice lines:

Of course, many Americans on the call-in shows are rationalizing what he did. One mental giant reflected, "Let's not judge him too quickly. I did some wild things when I was nineteen, too." Like what, hack off feet in Sierra Leone? The Taliban was not a search for self.

Okay, everyone, from the top again, with feeling: The Taliban was a death cult, a collection of devils who skinned their own alive to maintain fear, who blasphemed every time they used the word "God," whose least horrible accomplishment was the vicious way they treated their women. They were a bloodlust burrito wrapped in heat and hate, so joining them wasn't a wacky alternative to interning for Amnesty International; it was evil.

Hopefully writing for "The Weekly Standard" won't damage his career. Damn Hollywood liberals!

On a personal note, The Amazing Techie Girlfriend was in the TV audience one time for Larry Miller. It was way back in the 1980s. Techie Girlfriend and her family were on vacation in Los Angeles, and just for kicks joined the studio audience for one of George Schlatter's comedy shows. She actually got some airtime. They cut to her lovely face for a few reaction shots that they used over and over again for other comedians.

Posted 11:21 AM by Peter Fallow
OOPS! From the Off the Record column in this week's "New York Observer:"

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The New York Times, was recently on C-Span giving a speech on the history of The Times that included a surprising addition to his own family’s history. As PoliticsNY.com first noted, in the speech, Mr. Sulzberger said this regarding The Times’ coverage of the Holocaust: "We terribly regret that we did not do our journalistic job. We did not fully publicize the full horrors perpetrated by Adolph Ochs and his wretched Third Reich." Unless Mr. Sulzberger knows something we don’t, Adolph Ochs–the founder of The New York Times and Mr. Sulzberger’s great-grandfather–had nothing to do with Adolf Hitler. Mr. Sulzberger told Off the Record, "I just wanted to make sure the audience was awake.

Posted 8:59 AM by Peter Fallow
THE SPORTSWRITERS: Chris Rose of the New Orleans "Times-Picayune" (perhaps the greatest newspaper name in history) talks about the boneheads who showed up for Super Bowl "Media Day" Tuesday (link via Romenesko). That got me thinking about something I saw on one of those NFL Films "Super Highlights From The Super Bowl" thingees on ESPN late one night. It was one of those crazy guys from the old Raiders (Matuzak, Long, Hendricks, I can't remember which) talking about the media at the Super Bowl. I can't remember it verbatim, but it went something like this:

"You guys show up here a week before the game, come to Media Day, eat all the free food, drink all the free beer, and don't ask a single serious question. You come to the practices, eat all the free food, drink all the free beer, and don't ask a single serious question. Then on the day of the game, you sit in the press box, eat all the free food, drink all the free beer, and when the game's over, you come up to us and say, 'What happened out there today?' "

(Full disclosure: I was a former sports guy, but I never covered anything bigger than a Division I college football game.)

Posted 7:59 AM by Peter Fallow
LAYNE IT ON THICK: Ken Layne does a dance all over the Project for Excellence In Journalism's study of media credibility that I highlighted the other day. Thing is, Layne is much funnier than I am. Check it out.

Posted 2:35 PM by Peter Fallow
JOURNALISTS, GRAB YOUR CALCULATORS: The folks over at the Statistical Assessment Service have released their Dubious Data Awards for 2001. Highlights: The Michael A. Bellesiles controversy and the "plague" of shark attacks this past summer.

The realm of statistics is one of the most common places where journalists screw up. They either misinterpret numbers or accept some advocacy group's statistics as being absolute truth without doing a little digging. Of course, some of this is sheer laziness. But a lot of it has to do with smaller newspaper staffs being forced to do much more.

Posted 9:31 AM by Peter Fallow
'COLORING' BACKLASH: Eugene Kane, a columnist at the "Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel," has written a piece about William McGowan's "Coloring The News" that's short on substance and long on ad hominem attacks on the author. Like this one: "McGowan strikes me as one of the white journalists who long for the days of all-white newsrooms, all-white society pages, and no black faces in the newspaper unless they were charged with a crime." And this gem: "In McGowan's mind, the cause of journalism has been hurt by the inclusion of more minority voices." What, Big Daddy Kane can read minds? Maybe he should try reading the book. Actually, it's not the inclusion of minority voices that bothers McGowan; it's the unquestioning acceptance of anything those "voices" say, no matter how distorted or wrong-headed it may be. Kane himself provides a perfect example:

"Many don't seem to recognize I write from a "black" perspective, meaning, as a product of my upbringing, my education and the way I view the world." I'm just going to come right out and say it. What is this mystical "black perspective"? How is it so radically different from the "white perspective"? Black writer Albert Murray, in the indispensible "Omni-Americans," wrote these words more than 30 years ago, but they seem to be long forgotten: "American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mullatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other."

Kane continues: "Some readers appear to think my views are presented as some sort of indictment against white society. Actually, I'm just "thinking black" out loud." I'm not familiar enough with Kane's work to know his views, but virtually every large metro daily has the "Negro media spokesman" Murray also described in "The Omni-Americans."

"No Negro media spokesman really needs to be anything more than a very special kind of entertainer who uses charts, graphs, and monographs as his stage props. All he ever has to do is keep his gossip obscene enough, and then pretend (with a militancy nice enough) to be upset about the miserable plight of his white-ridden or his black-ridden "brothers" and he can make himself a fairly sizable income and keep himself in a limelight of sorts as long as this kind of thing pleases enough white people enough."

Kane continues: "It's strange to have this book railing against affirmative action and making wild claims about an influx of minority journalists who threaten to take over - and erode the quality of - the national media at this particular time. Truth is, the number of African-American journalists at U.S. newspapers declined in 2001 to a paltry 5.3%, according to the latest surveys. Black journalists have been fleeing the business at an unfettered rate the last few years due to rampant dissatisfaction."

I don't buy that. You can't blame newspapers if blacks in college choose to major in, say, education instead of journalism. Or choose to become civil servants. No amount of special scholarships or internships will ever change that. Every newspaper I've ever worked for has bent over backwards to recruit and retain black journalists. Those who've left dissatisfied have done so because they were thrust into positions that they simply didn't have the experience for (i.e. straight out of college and thrown onto a demanding beat that would challenge even a veteran journalist). But because the percentage of minority journalists is not equal to the percentage of minorities in the nation, subtle and not-so-subtle accusations of racism are hurled. Stanley Crouch, in "the All-American Skin Game," wrote some choice words after speaking at Unity '94, a confab of minority journalists that harangued the major media companies to improve diversity. "Things have changed to such a large extent that the rhetoric of those who seek greater present influence on the media is far out of line with the reality of metamorphoses that is at the heart of the national matter."

And Crouch, a columnist with the "Daily News" and formerly at the "Village Voice," knows the Eugene Kanes of the world: "While nearing or breaking into six figures, this kind of person waves the bloody shirt of racism, even questions the value of success, and dismisses personal achievement, publicly and privately wondering if it was all worth the sweat and the aggravation. Daily, they slink back to their fine homes in town or in the suburbs, suffering from the slings and arrows of white male power." Crouch also knows the high price of these attitudes: "This way of handling things has two serious catches. The white people know it's a con and laugh about it privately, but the young black and Hispanic kids who are afraid of "selling out" often do far less than their best because excellence is now color-coded."

All of these issues, and more, are addressed in McGowan's book. It's too bad folks in Milwaukee will only get one side of the story.

Posted 8:36 AM by Peter Fallow
COLLEGE CALUMNY: Matt Welch (who dubbed this blog "fine" yesterday; thanks, Matt!) shares memories of a politically correct witch hunt at his college newspaper. Surely John Leo wrote about this somewhere.

We never had anything nearly that goofy happen at my college paper (it was a small school and had a small, twice-weekly rag) but I do remember one semi-outrageous incident. In my junior year, the editor of the paper was a flaming Chomskyite leftist. At the time I considered myself a solid liberal and generally agreed with some of his views, but then he went off the deep end. In the last paper of the year he penned a long, angry screed on the editorial page titled "Why I Hate America." It was the typical stuff: slavery, racism, sexism, military-industrial complex, CIA, blah, blah, blah. The photo that accompanied the column showed this guy wrapped in an American flag, beams of pure hate emanating from his creepy gray eyes. We read and re-read the column. Surely this is a joke, right? There's some kind of sophisticated satire in here that we're just not getting, right?. But no, there was no punch line. And here's the really screwed-up part: This guy, who was graduating, ran the column in the paper's final edition of the school year. No one could possibly respond to it until the fall. But by then, it was pretty much forgotten.

Posted 8:19 AM by Peter Fallow
LYING AS A MORAL VIRTUE: Slate's Scott Shuger has an interesting column today on "The Case for Lying About Terrorists." The column is about doctoring photos of terrorists for propaganda purposes, but it also makes a point aabout the ego-fueled members of the media who trawl for information that could damage our campaign against terrorism while claiming they're defending the First Amendment:

...as Churchill said, "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." In other words, war is about defending fundamental principles, and the protection of first truths often requires sacrificing secondary and tertiary ones. And the United States shouldn't try to project an image around the world of never lying but rather one of not lying about what's important. The first truth in this case—that the world's stability and liberty requires neutralizing Bin Laden—clearly trumps the principle that all government-issued depictions of people should be unaltered.

Or that the media has the right to know everything our government is doing to fight terrorism.

Posted 4:49 PM by Peter Fallow
'PROFILES IN DISCOURAGE - PART III': Background: Many years ago, the Media Minder worked at a midsized (circulation 60,000) newspaper in a midsized Southern city (population just under 100,000). It was a solid, if unremarkable, paper that was owned by a small chain. However, in the mid-1990s the newspaper was sold to one of the nation's media giants. And insanity ensued. Today, we'll explore the wonderful world of diversity as seen through one company's narrow ideological blinders.

We got our first taste of corporate-mandated "diversity" not long after the media behemoth swallowed up our daily paper. It came in the form of....diversity training! Argh!

If you've ever worked for a big corporation, you probably know the drill. Everybody files into a conference room. The lights dim. A PowerPoint presentation is made about the different communication techniques of different ethnic groups ("Hispanic people tend to use more hand gestures...Black people tend to speak loudly...Asians tend to be more deferential") that only seemed to reinforce stereotypes. Also, there was a short video. The only part that stuck in my mind was the segment where the white actor complained to another white actor about a black co-worker getting a promotion solely because of his skin color. The video warned against the dangers of making broad assumptions about people or situations without complete information, but the real message was clear: DO NOT QUESTION THE COMPANY'S AFFIRMATIVE-ACTION POLICIES! EVER! OR YOU'LL LOOK LIKE THE BIGOT IN THE VIDEO!

Then came The Confessional. The moderator asked people to describe their personal experiences with discrimination. At this point, the new human resource director and the new, ambitious publisher (both minorities) began taking notes. Only a handful of people stepped forward to relate their stories under the watchful eyes of our new management team. A longtime employee from advertising who had moved to this Southern town from California related how racist the city was 15 years ago, but that it was somewhat better now (our new publisher was also from California). I related a story about some rednecks yelling racial slurs at a black high school classmate of mine (gotta look appropriately liberal for the new bosses, ya know). A white pressman told a story (stupidly, I thought, given the atmosphere) of being surrounded and threatened by a group of black youths. That got the mentor asking questions (in fact, he was the only penitent that was grilled): "How did that make you feel? Why do you think they did that? Had you done anything to provoke them?" Interestingly, none of the rank-and-file blacks came forward with an atrocity tale of white racism. I'm not sure if that's because they didn't have any, or because they didn't want to be appearing to play the victim card in front of their white co-workers. Or maybe they just didn't want be questioned about it by a fake-happy, uptalking Stalinist homosexual (yes, he shared his "coming out" story with us).

Then we played The Card Game. In our case, we played what we thought was a variation on Hearts, but nobody could talk to each other. After much confusion, we found out at the end that each player had been given different rules by which to play (i.e. diamonds were trumps for one person, clubs were trumps for another, you don't have to follow suit, you must follow suit, etcetera). It was a bizarre little exercise that was supposed to teach us an important lesson about how cross-cultural communication could lead to misunderstandings, but it was a real dud. (For me, anyway. Apparently it was a real "aha" moment for several people. Or maybe they were play-acting for our new bosses. It was hard to tell.) I mean, nobody can talk, we're interacting in one extremely narrow way, and everybody's playing by different rules. Despite our nation's many problems along racial lines, that seemed to me a grossly exaggerated parody of how Americans of different ethnic groups actually communicate with each other.

A few months later we suffered through another uncomfortable situation. A corporate diversity monitor from HQ (a minority) was sent to "mentor" us on ways to get more minority "voices" in the paper. His first question to the group appeared to serve as some kind of ideological litmus test: "How many people here have seen an independent black film in the past six months?" No one of any race raised their hand. Where in the hell did THAT question come from, I wondered. Independent films of any kind were rarely seen in this town, much less any directed by blacks. Then, he let us know in no uncertain terms that we were falling down on the job of "reflecting our community" and that it could become a "performance issue" if we didn't improve. There was actually someone at HQ who counted the number of minorities we featured in the paper, a common practice that William McGowan has detailed in his book "Coloring The News." By the time this guy was done with us, no one felt very positive toward our new company. It was apparent that it was going to micro-manage nearly every detail of our news operation.

Coming soon: In the never-ending quest for diversity, I saw some truly bizarre hiring practices. The next "Profiles in Discourage" will study the phenomenon of white people with "black-sounding" names. (Hint: It's apparently a way to get your foot in the door with a certain huge media company.)

Posted 9:42 AM by Peter Fallow
MEDIA BACKS WAR, BUT BABBLES ON: Howie Kurtz reports today on a study that's critical of the media, but nonetheless indicates that we've been pretty much on the correct side in the War on Terrorism. The study, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, found that "Overall, the media coverage has been 'demonstrably pro-administration,' the group says, with half of all reports containing only viewpoints that favor American policies and 13 percent mostly pro-United States. By December, though, as the United States was wrapping up its military victory, 42 percent of stories presented a mixture of pro-U.S. and dissenting views." But the study also chides the media for its over-reliance on analysis and opinion, and blames the Pentagon for limiting press access.

The report, available here, does have some valuable findings, but it seems to suggest that the media have failed to do their jobs properly because they've been too biased toward the administration. I know that skepticism is vital for the news media, but this report is shot through with the wrong sort of skepticism. I just don't get it; here is a case where, for perhaps the first time since World War II, good and evil have been defined with shocking clarity. The mass murder of nearly 3,000 civilians and the brutal subjugation of an impoverished nation, both done by a regime that made it clear that it would extend its evil vision around the globe, are clearly causes worth fighting for. But the Project for Excellence in Journalism would have journalists watch their every word because they're supposed to be detached from the passions of the mob. Here's an excerpt from the report:

On talk shows, journalists often seemed to luxuriate in sounding not like knowledgeable experts on TV stages, but like anyone else standing in a barroom.

The death of Osama Bin Laden's third in command for CNN's Margaret Carlson on December 17 was "another reason to be cheerful."

"Having Osama bin Laden on trial in the United States of America is a nightmare," Cokie Roberts declared on ABC's This Week November 18. "With any luck, you know, he is—he is found dead."

"Anyone else standing in a barroom." There's a fair amount of contempt for the common man dripping from that formulation, and illustrates the kind of myopia that guides too many in the media. I suppose CNN and ABC News should have had spokesmen for Al Qaeda on to defend themselves. Maybe the Project for Excellence in Journalism could then deem the networks "fair and balanced."

The report also includes a deceptive comparison: "As the story moved to the war in Afghanistan, however, analysis and opinion swelled — so much so that the level of factualness declined to levels lower than those seen in the middle of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal." How much did it "swell"? A whole 11 percent, from 25 percent in the weeks after to Sept. 11 to 36 percent in December. And the comparison with the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal is not accurate, because that story, in which, for a long time, only two people really knew the "factualness," was being heavily "spun" by the "official sources" and by highly partisan groups on both sides of the story. It was a far more ambiguous and far more political event, and can't be compared with a war where press secrecy serves an important strategic purpose.

There was also this interesting finding that Howie Kurtz put in his column: "Is Fox News the most pro-American network? On CNN's "NewsNight with Aaron Brown," 77 percent of the war-related assessments were entirely supportive of the administration, compared with 56 percent on Fox's "Special Report with Brit Hume." (Another 22 percent of segments on the Hume program were mostly supportive.) The "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" also carried segments that offered only pro-administration sentiments 77 percent of the time. "So much for the supposed liberal slant of PBS," the report says." I was surprised that Fox was more critical of the administration than CNN (kind of makes me wonder about their methodology), but there is no way Jim Lehrer's support for a just and popular war wipes out the slanted, lefty-liberal journalism of PBS' "Frontline" or "P.O.V."

Posted 6:12 PM by Peter Fallow
CORRECTION: I failed to note earlier that Charles Johnson over at Little Green Footballs has added me to his big list of Anti-Idiotarians! Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Posted 12:13 PM by Peter Fallow
JONAH'S LATE ON JOHNNY TALIBAN: Jonah Goldberg's Friday column discusses the media's reluctance to report on whether the revelation that John Walker's dad was gay had any influence on his decision to join the Taliban. Goldberg makes some absolutely correct points: "Which is why, I think, if John Walker Lindh had decided to join the skinheads or some mountain militia and made it into the papers by via domestic, Oklahoma-city-style terrorism the press would have seen it as validation. They would have yelled from the mountaintops that the "right" is filled with "homophobic rage" and other such silliness. It would have been Matthew Shepherd time a million." Goldberg is essentially right in this observation, too: "The press was caught by surprise because this guy had gone overseas to hate America. The pages of the usual script got jumbled. All of a sudden it seemed, if for a moment, that homosexuality might have something to do with hating America, or terrorism, or who knows what, and the press collectively and subconsciously said, "we're not going to touch this one." And here, too: "As for the Left, they too got caught by surprise. They had so much trouble accepting the fact that people can simultaneously hate America and be worse than America, they missed their opportunity to blame the Talibanization of Johnny Walker on his homophobia."

Well, not all of the Left missed it.

Almost a month ago, prominent gay commentator Michaelangelo Signorile postulated that John Walker may have joined the Taliban after discovering that his father was gay. Signorile reached this conclusion despite a lack of evidence about whether the conversion occurred before or after his father's revelation. Ignoring the path Walker voluntarily started down with the apparent blessing of a family that seemed to say "Whatever, dude," Signorile instead suggested that "the ingrained, religion-based hatred of homosexuality in American society may have caused John Walker to have a visceral reaction upon learning of his father’s supposed involvement with a man." Well, since we're not sure when this conversion occurred, isn't it possible that it was Islam that may have caused him to have a "visceral reaction" to his father's supposed involvement with a man? It seems entirely possible that Walker's tolerant, Marin County upbringing could have been undermined by radical Islamic beliefs. After all, the Taliban are the guys who would throw homosexuals from tall buildings. What about the "ingrained, religious-based hatred of homosexuality" in Islamic societies?

Signorile also seemed astonished by media reports that Walker's interest in hip-hop could have served as a bridge to radical Islam, as if there were no connections at all between the two. Well, it would seem that there are many, many links, as this article suggests. Indeed, there is virtually no reporting in the mainstream press about the relationship between hard-core rap and the racist ideology of the Nation of Islam. Here's a chilling article about what one rap superstar is really singing about.

My personal take is this (again, it's all speculation): Walker learned to hate "racist Amerikka" by becoming immersed in the works of rappers associated with the Nation of Islam. Then, after reading "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," he learned about the truer Islam that X embraced late in his life. Seeking some sort of spiritual connection in an anything-goes household, Walker then became an enthusiastic convert to a radical, non-American religion that nonetheless didn't demonize people that "looked like him." In the end, it was probably a confluence of forces that drove him from the arms of America and into the arms of the Taliban. But discussions about Islamic homophobia, or the corrosive effects of a genre of rap (i.e. Ice Cube, Public Enemy) that Stanley Crouch has dubbed "Afro-fascist" won't be taking place in the mainstream media anytime soon.

Posted 8:41 AM by Peter Fallow
J-SCHOOL MAIL CALL: Tim Blair gets a letter from a snot-nosed Cornell j-school kid. And Ken Layne relates his own experiences with j-school grads:

"I'm talking about people who went to college right out of high school and majored in Journalism (?) and then got hired by an actual daily newspaper with no experience whatsoever."

Posted 8:30 AM by Peter Fallow
A QUIET DAY TODAY: I won't be posting much today. The Amazing Techie Girlfriend's parents are in town, and we're going to go out and about. I think a new chair for the computer station is on the agenda. Plus, the weather here is amazingly warm for this time of year (50 degrees). I'll get back into it more tomorrow.

Posted 8:24 AM by Peter Fallow
MEDIA MINDER MILESTONE: This site went over the 1,000-visit mark sometime yesterday evening! I've reached that milestone in less than two weeks. To put that in perspective, a blog I was doing before this one got like 25 hits in two weeks. Thanks to everyone who has stopped by, and a big thank-you to Rand Simberg and Bill Quick for making me perma-links, and to Little Green Footballs and Shiloh Bucher for giving me some positive posts. And thanks for the e-mails from Fritz Schranck and Dave Dilatush, and the mysterious TVs. (Apologies to anyone out there that I've missed.) I hope you continue to enjoy reading the site. Next week I'm going to add another update to the "Profiles in Discourage" series, so stay tuned for that.

Posted 12:35 PM by Peter Fallow
SO LONG, LEWIS: The "New Criterion," that high-brow journal of criticism, bids an acerbic farewell to longtime "New York Times" columnist Anthony Lewis. The best line is a description of Lewis' farewell column: "In the short space of seven-hundred-odd words it manages to push eighteen left-liberal hot buttons and stand up for twenty-seven—some say thirty-two —articles of East Coast establishment orthodoxy."

I was a little late this time around, but I generally check in with the "New Criterion" monthly. True, articles such as "The Asymmetrical George Moore" don't appeal to me, but the "Notes & Comments" is almost always an enjoyable read.

Posted 10:13 AM by Peter Fallow
J-SCHOOL DOWN UNDER: Tim Blair has a typically funny discussion on the importance of a journalism-school education. A choice line from Blair:

"But other graduates certainly do learn something at j-school. I'm not sure what is it is, though … arrogance? Snobbishness? Elitism? A combination of all three?"

Like Blair, I didn't go to j-school, either. But I've certainly encountered plenty of people who meet the above description. And news executives tend to genuflect before j-school grads when it's hiring time. Here's a personal story.

Way back in 1989, I was a sports writer on a small daily (it was the place where I GROSSED $11,436 in 12 months). I wanted to be a news reporter, so I applied for a job at a similar-sized paper. Well, I get there, and I've got my clips (story samples) of the newsy coverage of a town's attempts to acquire a minor-league baseball team. I thought I had a good shot at the job until the editor looked at me and said, "So-and-so State University - that's not exactly a bastion of journalism, is it?" I couldn't believe he actually had the nerve to say something like that to a job candidate who had driven 600 miles to seek employment at his paper. Needless to say, I didn't get the job, and I meekly left his office. But nowadays, I tell people that I jumped up and yelled, "Who you callin' a bastion? I know who my daddy is!" and went storming out of the office. A much better story.

By the way, I found out later that the guy they hired (a recent j-school grad) was fired six months later because he sucked at his job.

Posted 9:18 AM by Peter Fallow
'COLORING' OUTSIDE THE LINES: I finally found a negative review of William McGowan's "Coloring the News." It showed up in the "Washington Monthly," which is now bi-monthly, which may explain why it's taken so long to surface.

The review, by Seth Mnoonkin, a "former senior correspondent for inside.com and Brill's Content" (in other words, an out-of-work journalist) is pretty weak. He spends half the article describing the inside baseball of how the book came to be published and obsessing on a discredited "New Republic" article on diversity at the "Washington Post" (read a discussion of that here) before getting to the real criticism. "McGowan's book demonstrates an impressive ability to misinterpret and misreport facts," Mnoonkin writes, while citing but a single instance where it does so. But this is a review that raises many questions that go unanswered, such as this one:

"Coloring the News is filled with canards and an unsophisticated tendency to see conspiracies behind every door even as it fails to recognize the tremendous change that has occurred in American newsrooms over the past six years." What "tremendous change" is this guy talking about? As a real, live journalist in a real, live newsroom, I can guarantee you that very little has changed on the diversity front, and economically, virtually nothing has changed. I've seen jobs go unfilled for months while papers boosted their profits.

About that economic angle. Mnoonkin thinks this book should have been written in the mid-1990s, back when job-scared Angry White Males were marching on the castle with pitchforks in hand: "Efforts to diversify the country's newsrooms were often forced and clumsy, and many people, black and white, had legitimate gripes. There was a growing backlash against affirmative action." But then, magically, things improved! People immediately quit bitching about questionable hiring practices, because there were jobs a-plenty (though not anywhere I've worked). "Affirmative action in the newsroom ... became less pressing as the economy got better and there were more jobs to be had. And the country's news directors, editors, and publishers have become more nuanced in their efforts to broaden the makeup of their operations. " (Wait until my "Profiles in Discourage" chapter about white job candidates with "black-sounding" names.) First of all, the economy is most decidedly not getting better, especially in newsrooms. Thousands have been laid off in the past few months. Secondly, the problem with affirmative-action practices at big news companies is that they aren't just the "cast a wider net" kind; they almost always link news executives' salaries, bonuses and promotions to quotas, though they're more likely to be called "goals."

That's the problem with this review. It focuses too much on affirmative-action issues, and ignores what McGowan was really talking about: the unquestioned assumptions that surround coverage of racial issues and "diversity."

Posted 8:15 AM by Peter Fallow
'ECONOMIC DUNCES': Larry Elder has a column today over at "Front Page" about journalists and economic cluelessness. Elder saw a newspaper article referring to deficit spending as "a potent recession cure when administered properly," without any kind of dissenting view presented (this is very common). Sensing that something was wrong, he sent the article to economics professor George Reisman. Elder used a Q-and-A format for part of his column:

"Elder: I know you're not a journalist, but isn't it unfair to make this statement, "Deficit spending is a potent recession cure when administered properly," as if it's a fact?

Reisman: No, it is definitely not a fact, and it displays considerable ignorance which leaves out of account any alternative point of view..."

I can understand how this happens. When I was in college, the Survey of Economics class I took probably devoted 80 percent of study time to the Keynesian school. I think the Austrian school (Von Mises, Hayek) was mentioned briefly. Of course, after the fall of communisim, those Austrian guys were proven right. But that's just part and parcel of the bias inherent in the universities, which are under firm control of the ideological left. A couple of years ago, David Horowitz wrote about this phenomenon (and Von Mises and Hayek in particular) in "Marginalizing Conservative Ideas."

Posted 12:18 PM by Peter Fallow
THE FUTURE IS ONLINE: The print-vs.-Web debate heats up over at Romenesko's letters page (always a fun read). Slate publisher Scott Moore weighs in, writing that "the long-term economics of magazines ... as well as of newspapers is highly dubious." He makes a pretty compelling case, though I personally don't think printed newspapers are going to go away until the debut of the ultimate handheld gizmo with the ultra-fast Internet connection that's so affordable and easy to use that everyone will just have to own one.

Posted 11:45 AM by Peter Fallow
AARON BROWN UPDATE: Glenn "Tha Blogfatha" Reynolds posts an update on Aaron Brown from this "Slate" article. As The Professor says, it's "being forwarded around CNN with some glee." Not a very flattering portrait of Mr. Brown. Scott Shuger's killer lines: "Brown's problem isn't just that he salts his ceaseless patter with references to his many, many years of experience as a reporter (which were mainly spent not in New York, Washington, or Tokyo, but in Seattle, where he was known behind his back as "Arrogant Brown") and to his deep knowledge of the inner workings of journalism. He also just doesn't understand that he himself doesn't have any fresh information and that his sole reason for existence is to cue people who do."

Posted 9:57 AM by Peter Fallow
YELLOW JOURNALISM WRAPPED IN RED, WHITE AND BLUE: The "Columbia Journalism Review" has finally posted its enjoyable "Darts & Laurels" feature. This month's "dart" highlights some dirty reporting at two competitive Wilkes-Barre, Pa., newspapers. One paper, the "Citizens' Voice," accused the editor of the competing "Times Leader" of not being properly patriotic because he "stood silent" during the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance at a local board meeting. Later, the "Citizens' Voice" attacked an educator because he was seen not standing during the Pledge of Allegiance at his school. This was not some post 9/11 witch hunt for the unpatriotic; both attacks had some dubious ulterior motives.

This kind of crap goes on fairly regularly out in the hinterlands, especially among those vaunted "family-owned" newspapers that are supposed to be so much more objective than the corporate-controlled dailies. The thing is, the family-owned outfits often have their own petty, small-town vendettas and biases, and there's no corporate standards to reign them in. For example, the first newspaper I ever worked for put meetings of the Kiwanis Club on the FRONT PAGE! Why? Because the paper's owner and publisher was a member! This wasn't some tri-weekly in a town of 3,000; this was a family-owned, 25,000-circulation, six-day-a-week afternoon paper in a town with a population of roughly 45,000. That paper was something else. I think I'm gonna include those days in a future "Profiles in Discourage - The Early Years." A quick hint: In 1989, my GROSS pay from that paper (January to December) was $11,436! And that is not a typo! I've still got the W-2's to prove it!

Posted 9:15 AM by Peter Fallow
UN-CIVIL CENSORSHIP: Lloyd Grove reports today on a censorship controversy at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. It seems that Chairman May Frances Berry, who proved she was a Stalinist during the drafting of the commission's Florida election report, is trying to block the publication of a book review in the commission's "Civil Rights Journal." The reason? Because it mentions commissioners Abigail Thernstrom and Christopher Edley. If you remember, Berry tried everything in her power to block the publication of Thernstrom's dissenting opinion to the commission's highly slanted Florida election report. "Mary Frances Berry is a totalitarian. She's a book-burner, and she constantly lies," Thernstrom told Grove.

Posted 8:57 AM by Peter Fallow
BROADCAST SNIFFS AT PRINT: Someone e-mailed me this little doozy that appeared in a recent issue of the "Washington Post." (Second item.) This happened at a CNN media junket.

"CNN stars (Paula) Zahn and (Aaron) Brown appeared onstage to demonstrate their skill at live satellite interviews (with Nic Robertson in New York and Christiane Amanpour in Mogadishu) and to sniff at questions put to them by the critics.

When USA Today's Robert Bianco reminded Brown that CNN has done its share of shark attack and car chase coverage, Brown wanted to know what paper he was from.

"That's the paper with all the color pictures, right?" Brown sniffed. Zahn, a world-class sniffer, told critics that CNN's sole mission is to cover the news and that on her morning show "you will continue to see us . . . interview the Pakistani ambassador to the U.N. while our competitors are making mixed drinks -- on their set."

Aaron Brown: That's the little twerp with the bad dye job, right?

Posted 1:24 PM by Peter Fallow
SO LONG, NEWSPRINT: There's another story proclaiming the impending death of newspapers at "Shift." (Link via Romenesko.) Choice quote: "Over the next ten to twenty years -- and this is a conservative estimate -- newspapers will have to substantially re-invent themselves or they will perish. In some cases, maybe only the online version will exist; I already know many people -- and this has to be considered a major concern among newpaper publishers -- who used to buy or subscribe to a daily that now just check out the (free) online version. If the print version does survive, it will look much different -- perhaps it will primarily be service-oriented, like a gigantic Life section or something." I agree that newspapers must re-invent themselves, but I'm not so sure they'll just become "service-oriented." I know, the Web has the immediacy of television and all that (heck, I'm on it for a large part of the day) but personally, I think there's something about the feel of a newspaper spread out in front of you at a diner that can't be replicated by even the nicest handheld gizmo. (Yes, I admit it; I'm "biased" here.) It's one of those things that's going to take a while to wean people off of culturally. It's kind of like the online shopping thing; techno-geeks predicted that in 10 years we'd be ordering everything we need from the Web for home delivery, when it's pretty obvious that we just like going out to the mall, traffic woes and all. It's cultural.

As for newspapers, I think we'll be seeing even more "synergy" between the print and online editions. (For example, "for in-depth coverage, see www.yournewspaper.com," or a story might be a "print exclusive" or a "Web exclusive"). It might also mean that the print edition becomes the home for longer analysis-type stories or "enterprise," while the Web becomes the home for breaking news. The Sept. 11 attacks might have been a litmus test for the future of news organizations. And how did newspapers do? Well, ours had its biggest sales week ever, and our Web site saw its most hits ever. Newspaper circulation is up for the year. So are visits to newspaper Web sites.

Posted 12:26 PM by Peter Fallow
CROUCH REVISITED: Stanley Crouch reminds us why he is one of our foremost authorities on jazz and American society in his most recent "Daily News" column, which coincided with Martin Luther King Jr. Day: "In its all-American essence, jazz is even more than a great art form. It symbolizes the best of our nation, every one of its democratic ideals. It expresses the belief that people should be respected no matter where they come from. It proves that we can be individuals and work together, and that if we are sensitive enough we can make a stronger collective through our very individuality." And here's an interview that took place after the terrorism attacks that reminds us why he's one of our most important commentators on a variety of subjects. Here's a choice exchange:

Q:What do you think about this wave of Black Patriotism? Some in progressive movements and the Black left are upset with this.

Crouch: "F**k them. The people who are upset think that everyone Black should take their position. In other words, they feel that Black people's attitude towards America should be thumbs down. The so-called progressives do not believe everything is thumbs down in America, which is how come they are in America. This is one of the few countries were you can talk about how bad the country is, and you can teach at its universities. I am not opposed to that. But I am saying that if you hate America and you are still getting paid at a public university for exposing your views, then you need to face the fact that you are an example of the freedom of this country that you claim to hate. You cannot do that in any of the countries that you claim to be supporting or understanding. None of these people could live under an Osama Bin Laden."

And here's his response to a column he didn't like in something called "Drastic Magazine." Great stuff.

Posted 9:28 AM by Peter Fallow
KINGSOLVER ATTACKS: Novelist Barbara Kingsolver, who gained infamy after Sept. 11 for her anti-American rants, is considering legal action against the "Wall Street Journal" for misquoting her, according to this "Boston Globe" story (second item; link via Romensko). Apparently, the much-circulated quote from the "San Francisco Chronicle" that goes: ''In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder?'' lost the question mark in numerous reprints, including the WSJ. ''My detractors have essentially fabricated a reason that people should not listen to me,'' Kingsolver says. ''It's as if someone took an angry rant out of the mouth of Captain Ahab and [presented] it as Herman Melville's opinion ... When it happens to you, it's a shocking reawakening that you should be absolutely skeptical about what you read.''

Needless to say, she's got a pretty weak case. I mean, there was no punctuation problem with the words that came before the infamous quote: "Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union." Nor was there misplaced punctuation in this quote: "I fear the sound of saber-rattling, dread that not just my taxes but even my children are being dragged to the cause of death in the wake of death." You can re-read the entire column here.

Another piece she wrote included this doozy: "It leaves me feeling chilled and forsaken to imagine kissing my children goodbye some morning and, by nightfall, having all the beauty of my days reduced to a symbol claimed by opportunistic military men as an act of war." You can re-read that column here.

This is probably old news to most bloggers, who jumped all over these and other idiotic statements from our literary classes. But I thought a reminder would be appropriate.

Posted 8:28 AM by Peter Fallow
CRACKS IN BIAS FACADE: The Media Reseach Center reports that at least one broadcast journalist has conceded that most journalists skew left in outlook. Av Westin, a former vice president of ABC News, told the "Boston Globe," "I think by and large, people in the news business bat from the left side of the plate." The Globe story, about Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias," elicited responses from people in the media business. Deborah Potter, former network news correspondent and executive director of NewsLab, said: ‘I have yet to see a body of evidence that suggests the reporting that gets on the air reflects any political bias.’" But others were more realistic. Said Rick Kaplan, former CNN President: "Searching for the unbiased human being is an impossible task...What makes journalists skilled is that they know how to be fair." And David Laventhol, Publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review: "Journalists have a certain worldview based on being in Manhattan...that isn’t per se liberal, but if you look at people there, they lean’ in that direction."

I think Kaplan hits the nail on the head. Finding the unbiased reporter is impossible. But good journalism dictates fairness. How do you achieve fairness? When reporting, either avoid labels like "conservative" or "liberal" altogether, or use them properly and consistently. Avoid "one-source" stories. Give the opposing side a fair hearing. And occasionally, take the time to vigorously challenge your assumptions about many issues. The last one may be the most important, but it's also the most difficult.

Posted 8:10 AM by Peter Fallow
DERBY GOES BLOGGING: "National Review" old-timer John Derbyshire gives blogging a shot today. He says he's going to make it a monthly feature. Today's Derby Blogwatch: Weird schlubs can't speak freely; Paula Zahn's babealiciousness difficult to discern; buy my book when it comes out; nyet to Russian-English translation software; rating the libraries; gun-wielding Chinese cook is Man of the Month; mathematicians do it longer.

Posted 11:49 AM by Peter Fallow
USA TODAY GETS RACIAL: John J. Miller of "The National Review" takes "USA Today" to task for this article on the lack of minorities at the highest levels of government. After dissecting the paper's apparent support for the racial gerrymandering of congressional districts, Miller goes right to the heart of the problem: "What gerrymandering has done is create a generation of Bobby Rushes and Maxine Waters — radical-left politicians who have no ability or even desire to build multiracial voting coalitions that can succeed at the statewide level." This story is once again indicative of the kind of pervasive media bias that Bernard Goldberg's book apparently doesn't address: the unquestioning acceptance of "diversity" as society's greatest good. I've been saying it for a couple of weeks now: Ignore "Bias" and read William McGowan's "Coloring The News."

Posted 9:02 AM by Peter Fallow
CPJ BLASTS ISRAEL'S ATTACK: The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement condemning Israel's destruction of the Palestinian Authorities' TV and radio studios. "We condemn this reprehensible attack," said CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper. "By repeatedly targeting these media, Israel is not only depriving the Palestinian public of news and information, but also placing all journalists covering conflicts at risk by potentially undermining their civilian status." Sounds like journalists sticking up for journalists. But Charles Johnson has pointed out that the Palestinian media are little more than propaganda mouthpieces calling for the destruction of Israel. Slate's Annie Applebaum reports:

"Worst of all are the TV programs for children. I was shown some of these when in Israel a few years ago and can testify to their creepiness: I distinctly remember groups of little girls chanting, "Death to Israel" while smiling adults looked on with approval. Even when they don't advocate violence, children's television does persistently broadcast the message that all of Israel is really Palestine, and that all of Israel therefore belongs to the Arabs."

Posted 8:25 AM by Peter Fallow
F.A.I.R. -LY WEAK: Fairness And Accuracy In Reporting placed this column in the "Arizona Republic" to debunk the liberal-bias charges in Bernard Goldberg's "Bias." Once you get past the ad hominem attacks, FAIR appears to have an argument with some meat on its bones: "Goldberg marshals little documentation for his claim that the news is packed with the views of liberal advocacy groups and rarely includes conservative opinions. In reality, year after year, right-leaning think tanks are cited in far more broadcast and print reports than either centrist or left-leaning think tanks."

Sure enough, that survey shows that in 1999, those think tanks that FAIR defines as right-leaning received 51 percent of media citations; those think tanks that FAIR defines as centrist received 35 percent; and those think tanks that FAIR defines as progressive or left-leaning received 13 percent. But part of the problem is the definition of "centrist." In my view, what's defined as "the center" has drifted leftward over the past couple of decades. Also, FAIR leaves out the large array of "think tanks" that are funded by the Ford Foundation, which gives out nearly $1 billion a year to liberal causes.

But there's a much deeper problem with FAIR's analysis. Right-leaning think tanks are quoted so often in the press because they are virtually the only conservative voices out there to challenge the vast stream of studies and surveys flowing from America's biggest left-leaning think tanks - the major universities. That's a big reason that organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution exist in the first place; to counter and fact-check the slanted information flowing from universities. After all, whose study on, say, poverty carries the greater weight: the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute's or Harvard's? I rest my case.

Posted 6:57 AM by Peter Fallow
TREATING TABLOIDS LIKE PORN: Romenesko posts a link to a story from the "Atlanta Journal-Constitution" about grocery stores covering up the covers of tabloid newspapers because of their racy photos. The plastic wrap also extends to Cosmo and Redbook. This seems a bit silly to me. There's nothing there that can't be seen on daytime TV.

Posted 6:09 PM by Peter Fallow
J-SCHOOL JOKES: Ken Layne has posted links to something called the "Ink Syndicate" and its School of Journalism, and it is absolutely hilarious. I think I'm gonna add this to my permanent links. And maybe this true story, too.

Like a whole lot of other journalists I've met, I never went to J-school, and I've encountered plenty of people who went to "prestigious" J-schools who weren't very good at their jobs, yet still tried to big-time me and everyone around them because they had a fancy education.

Posted 3:09 PM by Peter Fallow
MEDIA SLAP FIGHT! Eric Alterman of "The Nation" replies to the Opinion Journal's James Taranto at Romenesko's letters page for this little item. And then Taranto fires right back. Too funny.

Posted 1:18 PM by Peter Fallow
WHAT BIASED MEDIA? From a straight news story (not an analysis or opinion piece) in the Jan. 17 "Washington Post": "In November, researchers announced that they had made the first human embryo clones, giving immediacy to warnings by religious conservatives and others that science is no longer serving the nation's moral will. At the same time, the United States was fighting a war to free a faraway nation from the grip of religious conservatives who were denounced for imposing their moral code on others." So the Post is equating the murderous, irrational Taliban with Americans who have moral qualms about cloning. Interesting. I found this at the Media Research Center's Web site.

Posted 12:43 PM by Peter Fallow
SLIP-UPS GALORE: Opinion Journal has a hilarious look at some boneheaded stumbles that have appeared in "The Nation" in recent weeks. Seems they just can't figure out which baseball team Bush was part-owner of, and what the connection with Enron was. But in light of all the plagiarism stuff that's floating around, this was the item that was really funny: "Columnist Eric Alterman apparently borrowed a phrase from George Will in 1989--then, 12 years later, accused Will of plagiarizing him."

Posted 9:11 AM by Peter Fallow
'PROFILES IN DISCOURAGE - PART II': Background: Many years ago, the Media Minder worked at a midsized (circulation 60,000) newspaper in a midsized Southern city (population just under 100,000). It was a solid, if unremarkable, paper that was owned by a small chain. However, in the mid-1990s the newspaper was sold to one of the nation's media giants. And insanity ensued. Today's installment is the story of the Ku Klux Klan rally that damn near erupted into a full-scale race riot, thanks to the "crusading" (for jounalism awards) efforts of this newspaper.

In 1997, we received word that the Ku Klux Klan was going to march in our fair city in the fall. Many of us who had worked at the paper before it was swallowed up by that huge media corporation were like, "Eh, OK. Put the story low on the local front, because hate-group monitors such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and others go out of their way to emphasize that these nuts are craving publicity and confrontation." We'd followed the same strategy at a much smaller paper I had worked at when the Klan came to town. The result was that about a dozen people came out to watch about a dozen Klansmen march around and holler for about a half-hour. That was it.

But in the budget meeting that day, it became obvious that we were not going to have anything like that. Our new, ambitious executive editor was adamant that this was a major story that needed to be the lead story on the front page. We politely raised objections and cited previous journalistic experiences with the KKK, but he would have none of it. He let us know in no uncertain terms that as a minority he was deeply offended by the Klan, and he didn't seem to understand why we weren't more outraged that they were coming to "our town." That was the cue for us white people to shut up, because apparently we just didn't "get it." He seemed to take our reluctance to give the KKK story more prominent play as some remnant of an Old South mentality, which, in the stifling PC atmosphere, was difficult (and possibly career-limiting) to refute.

Once we got started on this story, it took on a life of its own. The first day's screaming headline in 85-point type was followed up almost daily with incremental updates. One Sunday we ran a longish story on the Klan's horrifying history (which everyone knew already), along with the predictably outraged editorials. Our local NAACP chapter uncharacteristically got up in arms, with the branch's president quoted as saying the Klan march was a "challenge to his manhood" that he intended to meet head-on. The local TV station was all over the story, too.

The march itself was unbelieveable. I don't think the city had seen anything quite like it since the Civil Rights era. Something like 2,000 people showed up to scream and jeer at about two dozen KKK assholes. There were several scuffles and a dozen or so arrests. Klansmen were pelted with rocks and eggs, and some of them had their hoods pulled off. Now that all sounds well and good, and I certainly feel no sympathy for these racist monsters, but this was EXACTLY what the Klan wanted! They got to portray themselves as brave defenders of the white race to their "target audience." They were videotaping the whole spectacle to use in recruiting. And we'd set the table for them!

The Klan leader we quoted thought the march was a big success. "We recruited some new members today," he said. But he apparently thought there was more to be done in our town. The Klan applied for another march permit, but the city turned them down when we quoted their leader as saying there would be a repeat of Greensboro if people came out and threw rocks. (Greensboro, N.C. was where five communists were murdered by Klansmen and Nazis at an anti-Klan rally in 1979.)

Once again, our newspaper went all out to stir up a racial hornet's nest. Once again, it failed to garner any journalism awards. And the community was beginning to see our new "enlightened" ownership for what it was: people absolutely convinced of their own moral righteousness who fly in from other parts of the country and try to score some quick journalism awards so they can get kicked farther up the corporate ladder.

Posted 12:37 PM by Peter Fallow
TODAY'S PULL QUOTE: "It putrefies the essence." - Director David Lynch, deflecting questions about changes he made in "Mulholland Drive," from a story in "USA Today."

Posted 12:24 PM by Peter Fallow
A GOOD, QUICK TAKE ON BIAS: David Mastio, an editorial writer at USA TODAY, makes an interesting point about media bias in a letter that appears at Romenesko's letters page: "Isn't it possible that both critiques of mainstream journalism are true? Right-wingers are right that reporters and editors tend to have a mildly-liberalish view of the world that is reflected in their writing and story choice, particularly on social issues and in partisan showdowns between Democrats and Republicans. Left-wingers are right that much of the media, particularly TV, have a very narrow view of what the political debate is, leaving out many on the extremes until their ideas begin to influence the center. From where I sit, neither argument contradicts the other."

This seems true to me, though I personally believe that the big problem with media bias is that those who engage in it aren't aware they're doing it. They think their views are centrist (and therefore unbiased) because they come from a milieu where the "center" has been gradually redefined to the left over the past 30 or so years.

Posted 10:44 AM by Peter Fallow
BERNIE STRIKES BACK: Bernard Goldberg of "Bias" fame responds to his critics in this column from the "Washington Post."

Posted 10:18 AM by Peter Fallow
AND THE DISHONOR GOES TO...: The folks at the Media Research Center have released their "Dishonor Awards" for 2001. Give it a look.

Posted 7:55 AM by Peter Fallow
CHANNELLING MARK TWAIN: Norman Solomon of FAIR assumes the persona of the great American novelist in this silly little piece from FAIR. He chides the U.S. for supplying aid to Angola and making it one of the most heavily landmined countries on Earth, but a simple Internet search found that most of the mines in that country come from the former Soviet bloc. He also fails to mention that Cuba once had 50,000 troops in Angola. (Didn't Lenin say "facts are stubborn things"?) Additionally, he trots out the dubious assertion that U.S. bombing in Afghanistan has killed thousands, an assertion easily parried by Mark Steyn.

Posted 7:27 AM by Peter Fallow
LET IT SNOW: It is snowing here! We're supposed to get a few inches, which means the area will be in crisis mode for a couple of days. I'm off to the grocery store for eggs, milk, bread and beer.

Posted 7:25 AM by Peter Fallow
'BLACK HAWK DOWN': The Amazing Techie Girlfriend and I went to see "Black Hawk Down" yesterday. Excellent. The battle scenes are great, though not quite as great as "Saving Private Ryan." And it doesn't quite tug at the heartstrings the way "Ryan" did. But it's definitely worth seeing.

Posted 7:23 AM by Peter Fallow
KRUGMAN-ENRON: Andrew Sullivan has been doing his research into the Paul Krugman/Enron debate. And it's pretty damning stuff. Check it out here.

Posted 9:52 AM by Peter Fallow
'PROFILES IN DISCOURAGE - PART I': Background: Many years ago, the Media Minder worked at a midsized (circulation 60,000) newspaper in a midsized Southern city (population just under 100,000). It was a solid, if unremarkable, paper that was owned by a small chain. However, in the mid-1990s the newspaper was sold to one of the nation's media giants. At the time, the Media Minder and other staffers saw this as a blessing. "We're now wired into some serious resources," we naively thought. "This is gonna be a very good thing." Our main hope was that our new management would encourage us to do more hard-hitting journalism, and that did happen. But then came a special report that perfectly summarized the mind-set of our new bosses and the direction we were heading in: "The Deadly Housing Project." (Not the series' actual name.) This story had it all: sensationalized, slanted reporting, plowing ahead with the "racism" thesis even when the facts didn't support it, the portrayal of blacks as helpless victims instead of people who have any control over their own lives. It was a supremely disillusioning experience, and all I was doing was laying it out. Read on.

In the mid-1990s, my small Southern city was struck by a series of newsworthy deaths. Within the space of a year, three or four black men had been killed trying to dash across a freeway that ran beside their public housing project. The reason? A pedestrian bridge over the freeway was locked. Why had it been locked? The residents of the housing project requested that the city lock it to prevent drug dealers and other scum from invading their neighborhood. You're probably thinking, "Well, you write one longish story explaining all this, then move on to the next day's news." Oh no. This was a springboard for a weeklong series on the terrible plight of poor black people who were "isolated" (false) and "forced" to dash across a freeway so they could take part in the life of the community (again, false). It was ready-made melodrama about the terrible effects of "institutional racism" that fell apart under ordinary scrutiny.

Here are the facts, as revealed from our own coverage:
1) The locked pedestrian bridge was not the only way into or out of the housing project. There was a large road running into the complex, and the pedestrian bridge merely saved 5-10 minutes of walking time for people trying to get into the downtown area. That's why people got killed dashing across the freeway: they were trying to save some time.
2) The housing project had been around for several years before the freeway was built, and was thus not as isolated as it eventually became. Because of the area's geography, there was no alternative but to site the freeway along the south side of the project. This did eliminate one road entrance to the complex, but that also led to the construction of the pedestrian bridge. Editorials we ran used this as evidence of environmental racism; the city puts black people way out there by the freeway where nobody can see them. But the truth was that the city had been moving toward the far more progressive "scattered site" public housing for years. (Scattered site housing seeks to integrate poor people into the community at large by placing complexes and projects into middle- and upper-class communities).
3) Again, the pedestrian bridge was locked by request of the complex's residents, who voted for it in their resident's coucil meeting. And, as we pointed out through police statistics and resident interviews, the locking of the bridge had actually helped reduce crime in the neighborhood! Yet our editorials demanded that the bridge be unlocked in order to "save lives."

So the paper plowed ahead with the "institutional racism" thesis, which is incredibly flexible and can be used to explain a great many things. In editorials, we blamed the city both for doing too much (locking the bridge) AND not doing enough (failing to have a higher police presence in the project). It was plain to see we would have blamed the city if they'd put more police there (harassment!) and left the bridge unlocked (benign neglect of a simple solution to the problem!).

A real "aha" moment came on the day the city's public housing director responded to allegations that the project's apartments were poorly maintained. Granted, the guy didn't help himself by declaring that the project was nicer than a lot of condos in the city. (They were much nicer than the projects near an elementary school I attended in the 1970s in a larger Southern city. They were also as nice as some apartments I've lived in.) In my eyes, he was just a bureaucrat trying to defend his job. I had written a fairly straightforward headline along the lines of "City housing manager defends Smith Homes (not the project's name)." Boring, but fair. Our ambitious executive editor then decided to change the placement and headline of the story. It went from the bottom of the page to a position "above the fold." He made me change the headline to "Jones (not his name): Smith Homes 'nicer than many condos' " The justification was obvious: We'd just spent a week explaining what a shithole this place was, and here was this guy trying to defend it! The nerve! The executive editor said, "We've got to have a headline with more impact. We need to let everybody see what a bootlicker this guy is." (The city housing director was black, therefore he was automatically a "bootlicker" for trying to defend his fiefdom.)

The entire series was apparently designed to garner some journalism awards (it didn't) and win the paper's new managers approval among the city's minorities (it did). The net result was that the city added a few more bus lines into the project. But the series did cause a stir in the community. When spot-on criticism was presented in letters to the editor, the series was defended (internally) as casting light on a long-overlooked part of the community. But this light illuminated nothing. In the end, it was a celebration of black victimhood and the never-ending white racism (overt, subtle and institutional) that forced poor black men to run for their lives across a busy freeway. And it just might have been the last nail in the coffin of my liberalism.

Look for more "Profiles In Discourage" in this space in the weeks ahead, including the story of a Ku Klux Klan march that damn near became a full-fledge race riot, thanks to this same newspaper's inflammatory coverage.

Posted 3:06 PM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON PHONY 'ROOTS': The consistently excellent Stanley Crouch weighs in on the return of "Roots" in this column. Choice Crouchian riff: "Since 'Roots' has brought millions of black tourist dollars to Gambia, one Gambian said to me, 'Yes, it is a lie but it is a good lie.' The book remains an opportunistic insult to black people, and no amount of excuses will change that harsh fact."

People tend to overlook Crouch. He was hot a few years ago, but then he delved into fiction with "Don't The Moon Look Lonesome" and got savaged by the critics. But he has always brought refreshing honesty to our Great Racial Debate, and for that he's been labeled a black conservative (as if it were an insult). The truth is, his views are far more complex. Here's a profile of Crouch from Salon.

Posted 2:40 PM by Peter Fallow
DIGGING UP 'ROOTS': Tomorrow, NBC will air a special on the 25th anniversary of the television landmark "Roots." There will be a lot of media back-slapping for bringing an important and too-often-overlooked part of American history to light. The only problem, as Eric Fettmann points out, is that a lot of Alex Haley's work is false or plagiarised, and has been proven so in a court of law. Fettmann's words: "True, Haley's literary fraud doesn't alter the historical reality of slavery and its evils, or the pernicious lasting effect it had on America. But there's a pernicious paternalism at work when it's suggested that an ostensible work of history shouldn't be held to account merely because its heart is in the right place."

Posted 10:39 AM by Peter Fallow
THAT OTHER MEDIA BIAS BOOK: William McGowan's "Coloring The News" has its own Web site. Give it a look. There's a link to the book's preface, where McGowan deconstructs the media glorification of Dr. Patrick Chavis, the "other guy" in the notorious Bakke affirmative-action decision. Chavis ended up having his medical license suspended for "gross negligence and incompetence," and there was a virtual media blackout on the story. Pretty damning stuff, and it makes a much stronger case than Bernard Goldberg's "Bias."

Posted 6:31 PM by Peter Fallow
TODAY'S PULL QUOTE: (Read this out loud in your best PePe LePew or Inspector Clouseau voice.) "I have nothing in common with this new world of fashion, which has been reduced to mere window-dressing. Elegance and beauty have been banished. I feel like a dove that has been stabbed." - Recently retired fashion giant Yves Saint Laurent, quoted in "Paris Match" and reported in Jan. 11 editions of "USA Today."

Posted 2:48 PM by Peter Fallow
HOW BIAS CAN HAPPEN: Michael Getler, the ombudsman of "The Washington Post," points out that many readers complained about the photo treatment used in a recent story on the Cornel West-Larry Summers blow-up at Harvard. Readers weren't happy that the Summers photo showed a calm, erudite-looking scholar, while West's was more unflattering, showing the professor "apparently yelling into a microphone," as Getler writes. Having seen that particular story when it was in print, I can kind of see the readers' point. But how did it happen? Apparently, there were no other photos of West in the Post's archive, and AP said they didn't have any, either. Quick explanation: In the rush to publish, shit happens sometimes. Deadlines MUST be met. But readers often aren't very understanding. (Though it's hard, REAL HARD, for me to believe that there's a Post conspiracy to hold Dr. West up to ridicule.)

Posted 1:06 PM by Peter Fallow
ANOTHER SHOUT-OUT: Big ups to Bill Quick for putting in a kind word for the Media Minder. A hearty thank-you from the belly of the Eastern Liberal Media Establishment beast!! Permanent linkage pending.

Posted 12:17 PM by Peter Fallow
BIASED? HELL, THEY'RE JUST LOUSY: That's the thrust of this "New York Observer" piece by Nicholas von Hoffman about the Bernard Goldberg brouhaha. But he does point out something that's been missing in this debate about media bias: That Other Book: "The (William) McGowan book ("Coloring the News"), a more in-depth and sober look at bias, contains some doozies of examples of stories so disturbing to the liberal gestalt that The Times solved the problem by simply not covering them, and, indeed, when it comes to bias, the most underhanded form is silence," von Hoffman writes.

Von Hoffman also deals with that pesky question of media ownership, and makes a great point that the folks at FAIR (see below) should remember: "Bernie would have served the cause better if he’d tried to place the bias question within the larger one of the concentration of media ownership. The Jan. 7-14 issue of The Nation describes how so few control so much. The issue comes replete with a chart showing the 10 largest media companies who own popular American culture. But count your blessings. In Italy there are three private television networks and one major government network. The three private ones are owned by Silvio Berlusconi, and guess what? He’s the prime minister, so maybe he has a little influence over the government network also."

Posted 11:41 AM by Peter Fallow
SHOUT-OUT TIME: Big ups to Rand Simberg for pointing out my existence to fellow bloggers! Thanks for steering some traffic my way. Consider yourself permanently (and, of course, anonymously) linked!!!

Posted 11:36 AM by Peter Fallow
NO FAIR, F.A.I.R: Those little Marxists at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting ("Keeping An Eye On The Mouthpieces Of The Ruling Class Since 1987") will be hosting a party on Jan. 22 to celebrate their 15th anniversary. Guess who the guest speaker is? Noam "Manufacturing Consent" Chomsky!!!! I hope some writer can attend this little shindig and give it the dressing-down it deserves. This is the equivalent of Accuracy In Media or the Media Research Center inviting David Duke to speak.

No that anyone really pays much attention to them, but I just don't get these FAIR guys. They apparently exist solely to debunk the idea of liberal media bias by pointing out that the media is owned by huge corporations and is therefore inherently conservative. For the most part, I think it's a specious argument; after all, we're not talking about corporate boards, we're talking about corporate cultures. There have certainly been instances where big media corporations have soft-pedaled some stories because of an unethical conflict of interest. But in my mind it's far outweighed by a corporate culture where issues such as abortion, religious freedom, affirmative action, welfare reform, crime & punishment, the courts, the military, etc., will only get covered (or not covered) in a certain way.

Posted 10:20 AM by Peter Fallow
MEDIA BIAS MYTH? Blogger Jeff Jarvis, a longtime journalist at some big publications, has been posting a lot about media bias recently. I generally like Jeff's stuff, but I've got to disagree with his premise. Basically, he says media bias is a big myth. Well, I work at a big newspaper, too, and have worked at newspapers of various sizes for the past 12 years. As a former liberal who has become a conservative, I can report that it ain't no myth. Jarvis himself explains why:

"They say that the bias hounds are merely arguing that most reporters are liberal, rather than being part of liberal cabal."
That's what I say, too, and sometime I'll get around to posting some real-world examples I've encountered. In light of all that's been written about media bias, it certainly seems like a reasonable, real-world explanation. After all, reports and surveys indicate that something like 93 percent of journalists vote Democratic.

"But I still say that is an indication of a conspiracy mentality, of paranoia."
So pointing out that there's a large group of people (journalists) who shape public opinion and hold very similar views is a "conspiracy mentality." Interesting. When "the media" pointed out that a lot of President Bush's appointees happened to be members of the Federalist Society, that was considered quite a scoop because it indicated a certain level of "bias" among a group of people who are supposed to be objective.

"I still say that is a simplistic view of the world that does not take into account the intelligence, sincerity, professionalism, independence, and stubbornness of both reporters and their audiences. It is essentially insulting to both."
Well, I say you can be intelligent, sincere, professional, independent and stubborn and STILL be biased! In fact, some of the most biased people in history were wildly successful at getting their message out BECAUSE they had all of those traits.

"The media neighborhood is crowded with conservative bastions once you get past the NY Times and Washington Post: Tribune Company, Dow Jones, Time Inc., News Corp., Hearst, to name a few."
Come on. Tribune Company, Time Inc., Hearst are NOT especially conservative (especially TIME); News Corp.'s newspapers are mostly in England and Australia. I noticed he failed to mention two of America's biggest chains: Gannett (motto: diversity uber alles) and Knight-Ridder. Most definitely liberal. He also should have included the L.A. Times and the Boston Globe with the NY Times and WaPo in his short list of big-time bastions of liberalism.

"In the end, liberal media bias is still a conspiracy theory and it is born out of one simple fact: Conservatives are by nature paranoid."
Let's see: Who's trying desperately to find a vast conspiracy in this Enron mess? Or the "military-industrial complex"? Or the "prison-industrial complex"? Or the JFK assassination? Or the CIA selling crack cocaine? If there's one hallmark of liberal investigative journalism, it's unwavering faith in the conspiracy theory. That's partly because Marxist-influenced thought (face it, that's what's taught in universities; it's certainly what I was taught and once accepted) is basically the mother of all conspiracy theories.

"The truth is that everyone -- reporters, editors, executives, newsmakers, and most especially readers -- has a perspective (a nicer word than bias) and inevitably view(s) the world through or around that perspective. That is not bias. That is the free give-and-take of democracy and individual expression."
Trevor Butterworth, in a "Washington Post" review of William McGowan's "Coloring the News," answers this one: "Certainly, no journalism conference is complete without some genius making the objective claim that there is no such thing as objectivity. But while a God's-eye-view of how the universe really works is beyond the reach of mortal thought, the idea of journalistic objectivity never resided in such grand epistemological goals; its aim was fairness -- to ensure that readers hear both sides of an issue. Skepticism -- the permanent itch of the fourth estate -- derives from the corruptibility of facts and people, and not from academic unease with the metaphysics of being. It's a fair bet that (Jacques) Derrida expects fair and factual reporting in his morning newspaper -- otherwise, what use would news be?" Makes sense to me.

So just as I decry the PC fundamendalists, I decry the MB (media bias) inquisitors; they all assume that we, the audience, we the people, are too stupid to be able to judge on our own what is true and what is sensible and what we believe. That is a bias shared by the media and anti-media alike, by left and right alike; that is an undemocratic and essentially insulting bias."
It seems to me that there wouldn't be "media bias inquisitors" if some folks in the "audience" hadn't pointed out the media bias in the first place (i.e. the Smartertimes guy). Judging by Bernard Goldberg's book sales, there's obviously an "audience" for this sort of thing. But in Jarvis' view, Goldberg's whistleblowing is equated with an undemocratic paternalism, when in fact Goldberg should be applauded for being the watchdog of the watchdogs. Jarvis also assumes that the media have no real-world consequences, when they clearly do. Just one example: Statistics that grossly inflate the number of women who are assaulted each year have been (with few exceptions) accepted without question by the media. This drumbeat of false information, widely disseminated in the press, lead to the passage of the Violence Against Women Act that sought to federalize certain crimes. (For a more thorough discussion, see Christina Hoff Summers' "Who Stole Feminism?")

Posted 8:04 AM by Peter Fallow
TEXAS TWO-STEP: Apparently there are a lot of sensitive newspaper readers in Austin, Texas, according to this Editor And Publisher" story. When the local "American Statesman" ran its annual "Year In Music" section, folks didn't like the art on the cover - a burning amplifier. The image reminded a lot of readers of the World Trade Center. Local talk radio helped inflame the masses (pardon the pun), forcing editor (and former "Charlotte Observer" bigwig) Rich Oppel to issue a written apology. Nevertheless, Oppel still managed to blame talk radio for its "bumper sticker patriotism." Well, isn't it possible that readers felt it was inappropriate to use the WTC attack as a platform for a "compelling layout"? This whole decision to get "edgy" with the music section smacks of a newspaper trying to win an award from the Society for Newspaper Design. I know a couple of months have passed since Sept. 11. But was there no one on the staff willing (or able) to say, "Hang on, folks. This picture doesn't seem right right now"?

Posted 7:35 AM by Peter Fallow
TODAY'S PULL QUOTE: "If this had been falafel, it would have been an international incident." - Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's "Daily Show," discussing Bush's run-in with that killer pretzel.

Posted 7:29 PM by Peter Fallow
IT GOES DOWN EASIER: Journalistic blogger Tim Blair recounts his feelings about "small voices" in this post about Bush's recent pretzel peril. I agree that "real people" (that's what we called "small voices" at one of the places I worked) can provide vital context, but it can get carried to ridiculous extremes. For example, at the last place I worked we asked "real people" their opinion on the Elian Gonzalez mess after it all went down. As expected, we got a range of opinion that pretty much mirrored what everyone else in the country was saying. But then we found a guy who had been one of the Cuban fighters captured during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Now he had a hell of a story to tell.

Posted 7:04 PM by Peter Fallow
WHY FOREIGN NEWS TAKES A BACK SEAT: Michael Parks, former editor of the L.A. Times, tells why in this article from CJR. "Over the years, newspaper executives had seized on market surveys to put new emphasis on local coverage and, they hoped, to halt declining readership, particularly among youth." A couple of the newspapers I've worked at have been afraid to make a move without checking it out with marketing. The last place I worked even invited a marketing rep to the daily budget meeting (to those who don't know, that's where editors sort out what stories go where in the paper). He or she would make suggestions: "That story would play well with our 18-to-35s." "That story would be of interest to our readers in such-and-such ZIP code." Fortunately, I don't have to go to budget meetings anymore.

Posted 6:44 PM by Peter Fallow
PROFILES IN CLUELESSNESS: Matt Welch dishes the dirt on high-profile print journalists who appear to be out of touch with reality in this take on watching CNN's "Reliable Sources." Funny stuff.

Posted 6:37 PM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON NEWSROOM DIVERSITY: The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent, evenhanded and generally favorable review of William McGowan's "Coloring The News." The review was written by Peter Schrag, a former editorial page editor at The Sacramento Bee. Choice quotes:

"During the past decade, a great many newsrooms, driven by publishers, militant organizations of minority journalists, and mandated 'diversity training,' have suffered from a stultifying orthodoxy that regards any skepticism about race preferences -- and indeed even the phrase -- as racist."

And if you've ever had to sit through one, you know this is true: "Diversity management seminars, (McGowan) says (I think correctly), 'often amount to little more than Maoist-style self-criticism sessions that create the very racial and ethnic divisiveness they are supposed to help overcome.'

Posted 6:33 PM by Peter Fallow
IN THE 'POST,' OF ALL PLACES: The Washington Post published this favorable review of William McGowan's "Coloring The News." (There's another favorable review in CJR.) It's been interesting to note the huge blow-up over Bernard Goldberg's apparently weaker "Bias" compared with this work, which seems to have been much more scrupulously researched. I think that's because "diversity" is an issue most liberal journalists would rather avoid if they can. The Post explains why in this ready-made book jacket blurb: "McGowan has done nothing but deconstruct the idea of diversity throughout 'Coloring the News' -- first, by showing the confounding effect of what doesn't get reported in diversity issues; and second, by exposing the bogus pluralism of newsrooms that try to mirror American demography in every way except for diversity in political, religious and class affiliations."

Posted 6:26 PM by Peter Fallow
DOWN WITH 'THE BOONDOCKS': Aaron McGruder, the artist who draws the highly politicized syndicated comic strip "Boondocks," gets a fawning story from The Nation for his cartoons since Sept. 11. Most of them have been harshly critical of the efforts to stamp out terrorism at home and abroad. McGruder is quoted as saying: "Sometimes, I do look around and say to myself, 'Gee, I'm the only one saying some of these things.' That can make you a little paranoid. But I don't think that's a reflection on me so much as it is a reflection on how narrow the discussion has become in most of the media today. The media has become so conglomerated that there really are very few avenues left for people to express dissent." Really? Some 250 newspapers, including several biggies and "conglomerates," run his comic strip every day, so it would seem that McGruder has a lot of "avenues to express dissent."

His reaction to the terrorist attacks? Shock, then reflexive leftist anti-Americanism, followed by a rank opportunism perhaps born of the knowledge that he is virtually the only African-American cartoonist of note working for major newspapers (a fact that no doubt inoculates him from any serious criticism from publishers desperate to have "diversity" even on the comics pages): "I watched five straight days of television. I was shocked by what happened. But I was also shocked by the simplistic nature of a lot of the commentary -- this whole 'good' versus 'evil' analysis that sounded like something from fifth grade. And I started to recognize that this was going to be a defining moment in my career."

It has to be noted that this Nation story, written by John Nichols, also praised the Afghanistan coverage of cartoonist Ted Rall, which many bloggers have been ripping to shreds with regularity.