Posted 8:15 AM by Peter Fallow
RACE AND MEDIA COVERAGE: The "Los Angeles Times" weighs in on what it believes are differences in coverage when white and minority children are murdered.

"We tend to, in the media, on the national level, place more weight with children who are white, children who come from economic circumstances that are middle or upper level, and we tend to dismiss ... children from personal situations that are too complicated or messy," said Kelly McBride, a member of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute, a journalistic think tank in St. Petersburg, Fla.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. Anyone remember Rilya Wilson, the young black girl in Florida who disappeared while in foster care? She was all over the news back in May. Or Sherrice Iverson, the black girl who was raped and murdered by a young white male in a restroom at a Nevada casino? That was a huge story a couple of years ago. As at least one person quoted by the "Times" points out (correctly, it seems to me), media coverage in this day and age depends more on the circumstances of a particular case and less on the race of the victims. Of course, for a large percentage of our professionally aggrieved class, it's forever 1930 in Amerikkka, and only a thin veneer of false media civility prevents headlines that scream "Bigger Thomas captured."

All this fretting over which race gets more coverage when its children are murdered reminds me of a quote from Albert Murray's excellent book "The Omni-Americans."

"..in spite of their common destiny and deeper interests, the people of the United States are being misled by misinformation to insist on exaggerating their ethnic differences. The problem is not the existence of ethnic differences, as is so often assumed, but the intrusion of such differences into areas where they do not belong."

Amen to that.

Posted 7:50 AM by Peter Fallow
STUPID STUFF I'VE OVERHEARD AT WORK: OK, I can't find much I want to blog about, so I've decided to start a new series, "Stupid Stuff I've Overheard at Work." All quotes and comments are certified 100 percent accurate. Read 'em and weep:

ME: "Well, I don't really agree with a lot of what Alan Keyes says, but you've got to admit he's a hell of a public speaker."
SENIOR EDITOR: "Yeah. So was Hitler."

# # #

REPORTER: "I've got to go to Louisiana next week for a story. Do I need to get malaria shots?" (She wasn't kidding, either.)

# # #

REPORTER: "All this patriotism crap scares me. It's just going to give all the rednecks an excuse to rub the flag in our faces." (Overheard on Sept. 17, my first day back at work after the terrorist attacks.)

# # #

(After a lunch date with a black reporter and his sullen girlfriend. Both are of a middle-class background.)
ME: "Your girlfriend's kind of a quiet one, huh?"
BLACK REPORTER: "No, she just has problems with white males." (Offered matter-of-factly, with no sense that such a position might be a little troubling to the white male he just dined with.)
ME: "Oh ... Any reason? I mean, I don't mean to pry, but did something bad happen to her personally in junior high or something?"
BLACK REPORTER: "No. She was just a history major in college, so she learned a lot about how racist this society is." (Delivered in same, matter-of-fact monotone.)
ME: "Oh."
(Long, nervous silence as I ponder whether to raise some objections, and whether raising said objections would only serve to label me as a racist in a workplace where said black reporter was one of our black publisher's pets.)
ME: "Uh, OK. I'll see you later."

More updates will be posted as they come back to me.

Posted 7:03 AM by Peter Fallow
WHEN CELEBRITIES ATTACK: This is one of those snarky stories that's just fun to read. A group of Chicago-area journalists recently interviewed Harrison Ford, who acted like he really didn't want to be there.

Ironically, we are facing Ford's churlishness because we're helping him publicize his upcoming movie. Here's how the Hollywood publicity machine works: A star makes a movie. Then he or she embarks on a tour to promote it, which means talking to the press. This is why people like Ford and Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt appear on "The Late Show with David Letterman" and "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." Stars don't appear on these shows for fun; they go because they want people to see their upcoming films. After all, the bigger the audience, the bigger the paycheck. And so, essentially, we are helping Ford get richer while he slowly reduces us to the size of tsetse flies.

(Link via Romenesko.)

Posted 7:13 AM by Peter Fallow
MARXISTS AND ISLAMISTS, LIVING TOGETHER: In an excellent column, Jonathan Rauch points out similarities between Marxism, the most destructive political and social force of the 20th century, and Islamism, potentially the most destructive political and social force of the 21st century. Check this out:

Marxism and Islamism are utopian, promising a future in which harmony, equity, and altruism will replace conflict, unfairness, and corruption. Both embrace historicism, the doctrine that ineluctable historical laws -- economic in one case, divine in the other -- make eventual triumph inevitable. Each is fundamentally anti-nationalist, hostile to the very notion of the nation-state; today's states and borders are illegitimate artifacts of an oppressive order, ultimately to be replaced by Communism or a Caliphate. Accordingly, both movements conceive of themselves as inherently internationalist, operating across borders as readily as within them. Though these movements regard seizing and using state power as essential, they do not want control of any particular government; they want control of the world.

And this:

For ultimately, both have as their greatest asset -- and perhaps their deepest similarity -- a genius for disguising a brutal and self-serving political agenda as a quasi-religious mission of world salvation. Both claim not only to solve all political and social problems, but to answer all questions worth asking. Both thus inspire fanatical devotion worldwide. Each movement's local varieties are always idiosyncratic, but everywhere the followers recognize a commonality of interest. That shared interest is to tie down and harass the United States, to destabilize pro-American regimes, to foment class or religious conflict, and to weaken the capitalist West.

Just go read the whole thing.

Posted 6:40 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The "Boston Globe" reports on journalists who have donated money to Democrat Robert Reich's campaign for governor of Massachusetts. This would be a violation of the ethics agreement I have to sign every year at my paper, though I personally don't see what's all that wrong with giving money to the politician of your choice.

Posted 6:30 AM by Peter Fallow
THE MEDIA'S STOCK-OPTION 'DILEMMA': Howard Kurtz has a useful column today on on media companies practicing the same financial shenanigans that they're getting so outraged about. The headline writer charitably calls it a "dilemma." Check it out.

Posted 6:17 AM by Peter Fallow
WHOOPS! The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill has expressed "shock and outrage" over a headline in the Trenton, N.J., "Trentonian." The headline, over a story about a fire at a mental hospital, was "Roasted Nuts." (Fortunately, no one was killed in the fire.)

I have to admit that I find it kind of funny, in an "oh my God they, actually did it" kind of way. But it was in exceedingly bad taste. (Little-known fact: Copy editors often write funny or bad-taste headlines that are not for publication, just for our own entertainment.) Clearly, an apology was in order, and the copy editor who wrote the headline did apologize the next day in print. However...that just wasn't good enough for the professionally aggrieved folks at NAMI:

"Under the Americans with Disabilities Act and potentially other federal and state laws, the headline provides prima facie evidence of a hostile work environment for people with mental illnesses or their family members," warned NAMI executive director Richard C. Birkel, Ph.D. Statistically, that may include as many as 20 percent of Trentonian employees. He advised Bonfield to take "affirmative, remedial actions" for the benefit of both the newspaper's employees and the broader community. NAMI also is investigating potential legal action.

Ah, yes. We'll perfect society and human nature any way we can, even if it means taking it to court. (Link via Romenesko.)

Posted 10:41 AM by Peter Fallow
ANTHRAX UPDATE: The "Weekly Standard" has found an interesting, and vastly underreported, angle on the anthrax investigation. It's a Pakistani man in New Jersey who used fraud to purchase a $100,000 "fine particulate mixer" last summer. The Pakistani man fled the country, and the expensive mixer can't be located. Check it out.

Posted 10:27 AM by Peter Fallow
PRIOR RESTRAINT: A reporter for the "Forward," a Jewish newspaper, was intimidated into leaving a meeting at the American Muslim Council's headquarters in Washington. He was warned that it would "not be good for your health" to be here.

Could you imagine, I asked him, the outrage that would have followed if an official at a Jewish organization had kicked a reporter from an Arab paper out of an event? He apologized, saying he retracted any comment that I may have found threatening. "Sometimes people flare up," he told me, referring to the crowd. "I just wanted to protect us, the council, and you from that."

Here's the whole story.

Posted 6:55 AM by Peter Fallow
CLINE ON THE CASE: Andrew Cline of the excellent Rhetorica.net points out a Howard Kurtz column in the "Washington Post" that makes the same point about a "Washington Post" piece that I did yesterday. It's simply ridiculous to think that a presidential speech will mystically send the stock market soaring.

Posted 6:51 AM by Peter Fallow
THE SULZBERGER-BUSH DIRTY LAND GRAB: Slate's Jack Shafer points out similarities in two allegedly "shady" real estate deals involving President Bush and ... "New York Times" publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. Check this out:

If the Bush deal is, as (Nicholas) Kristof wrote in his conclusion, "a sordid tale of cronyism, of misuse of power, of cozy backroom money-grubbing—a more pressing threat to American business than outright criminality," then what is the Times Co. deal? Watch the Times op-ed page for the answer.

Posted 8:16 AM by Peter Fallow
RED INK IN THE 'TIMES': Andrew Stuttaford points out a disgraceful article that appeared in the "New York Times" recently: A Q&A on the recent corporate scandals -- with a member of the Communist Party USA! That's a fair and balanced perspective. There's not much more I can add to Stuttaford's excellent piece. Just go check it out.

Posted 8:08 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON THE PRESIDENT: Here's another "Washington Post" story that grabbed my attention:

BIRMINGHAM, July 15 -- For the second time in as many weeks, President Bush offered reassuring words today about the nation's economy. And for the second time, investors drove stock prices steeply down just after his address.

My God! Bush failed to utter the magic words to save our vastly complex, multi-trillion-dollar economy from catastrophe! What a buffoon! Later, the president failed to cure a country ham, noting that the ham was fine just as it was:

Today, Bush again belittled "number-crunchers" who "talk about this number here, and that number there." But then, suggesting Americans "build on the good statistics we're beginning to see," he rattled off several: 6 percent first-quarter growth, higher durable goods orders and retail sales, low inflation and interest rates, and higher productivity. "In spite of the fact that we've been in a slump for a while," he said, "this economy is coming back. . . . Our economy is fundamentally strong."

If you don't believe Bush, then maybe you'll believe this guy.

Posted 7:35 AM by Peter Fallow
THE MEDIA & THE PRESIDENT: A story in today's "Washington Post" about President Bush and his involvement in the Harken Energy Corp. raises more questions than it answers.

When President Bush was recently questioned about Harken, he told reporters to "go look at the minutes" of the board of director's meeting. But Dana Milbank complains that White House officials then "failed" to provide the records. Check out this, and pay attention to the language used:

But Bush's aides quickly rescinded the invitation. A couple of days later, Dan Bartlett, Bush's communications director, said Bush would not ask Harken for the minutes. "He personally would not have access to them," Bartlett said. "These are company documents. I can't release something I don't have." Curiously, the about-face repeated the rationale Bush's then-spokeswoman, Karen Hughes, used in October 1994 in Bush's first gubernatorial run in Texas. "He has no way to make a company release records," Hughes told the San Antonio Express-News. So while Bush himself says, "You need to look back on the directors' minutes" to settle the matter, his aides for eight years have said they will not provide the minutes.

Questions: What's so outrageous about White House officials basically saying "Go do your own homework"? Serious reporters would do the research required to find the Harken minutes instead of waiting for a handout from the administration. So Dana Milbank has got to do a little extra work. Boo hoo hoo. After eight years of the Clinton administration obfuscating its scandals, why are we suddenly so surprised when a president is less than forthcoming with information that could be used to smear him? Sad to say, but this seems to be business as usual in Washington and not a sign of a hyper-secretive White House. It's spin control, and it's been practiced by Democrats and Republicans alike for decades.

Posted 7:14 AM by Peter Fallow
THE MEDIA & LEAKS: A memo from Donald Rumsfeld on security leaks in the Pentagon ... has been leaked to the press. Rumsfeld's memo, attached to an unclassified CIA report, calls for Pentagon staffers to keep their mouths shut about secret attack plans. Apparently, the Iraq attack plan that was recently obtained by the "New York Times" "infuriated" Rumsfeld.

It infuriated me, too. For about a minute. Then I started thinking: What if that leak was disinformation? And what if Rumsfeld's leaked memo urging that the leaks stop is part of that disinformation campaign? Hmmm.

But seriously, this is a potential problem. Here's the excerpts from the story:

Intelligence officials were furious in September when Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that the United States had intercepted a call between two associates of Osama bin Laden suggesting their involvement. Intelligence officials said later that the release of the highly classified information caused Al Qaeda operatives to stop using telephones. According to the CIA report distributed by Rumsfeld, captured fighters have stated that Al Qaeda operatives are extremely security-conscious and have altered their practices in response to what they have learned in the press about Pentagon capabilities.

You can't really blame the media for Orrin Hatch's goof. But leaks such as the Iraq attack plan shouldn't have been reported. Where was a responsible editor to say, "Hold on, this is real national security issue. We can't run it." If the "Times" had acquired information that the D-Day invasion in World War II was going to take place on June 6, 1944, in Normandy and not Calais, would they have published it? I don't think so.

Posted 7:05 AM by Peter Fallow
PEARL'S MURDERERS CONVICTED: The Last Page weighs in with what she considers to be a fairer sentence than hanging. I tend to agree.

Posted 7:03 AM by Peter Fallow
PRESS FREEDOM IN ZIMBABWE: An American reporter has been found not guilty of knowingly publishing a false story about a political murder in Zimbabwe. However, he's been deported. While many elements of the left see "repression" in strongly expressed contrary opinions, there's little condemnation of Robert Mugabe's totalitarian crackdown on the media. I guess being a Third World socialist gives you a free pass to practice actual censorship.

Posted 8:13 AM by Peter Fallow
POWERS THAT BE: Another useful column by Bill Powers of the "National Jounal." This one takes journalists to task for a failure of original thinking in reporting on the scandals of the day:

The media can't and shouldn't control the fatuities of pols who wander into our space, but we can control our own impulse to turn all news into a rerun. Is it really necessary for every media person from Maureen Dowd to Bill O'Reilly to trot out the robber barons of a hundred years ago, whenever Enron, Martha Stewart, and WorldCom are under discussion? Are the constant references to the Gilded Age (or the "second Gilded Age," as Robert Novak called it) doing anything to make this story more compelling or understandable?

To me, they're doing the opposite. To label the current global political situation "the Great Game" -- a phrase coined by Rudyard Kipling to describe a completely different world -- as The New York Times did recently in a headline is to cover it with dust and cobwebs. Aren't writers supposed to invent new ways of describing the world? Every time I see one of these creaking references, I get the same sinking feeling I have when a historian comes on TV to observe, with studied sagacity, that if you think the current scandal is wild, you don't know about Teapot Dome. It's all happened before, you see.

Just read the whole thing.

Posted 8:08 AM by Peter Fallow
FAKING THE NEWS: A group of anonymous leftists has placed fake issues of the local newspaper in the boxes of the "Seattle Times." The fakes are titled the "Seattle Crimes." Police are unsure if a crime has actually been committed. In an e-mail exchange, the editors of the "Crimes" reveal why they released their fake paper, which focuses on racial issues:

"The mainstream media... do not cover these issues adequately." said the Crimes' editors. "If they cover them at all, they do so with a bias, one that is very often racist. And the best way to call out racist media seemed to be to go right into their turf." The Crimes went into that turf with its own bias: The editors say there is police brutality and institutional racism at the Seattle Police Department. And they think the message got across to those who read the paper. "People seem to love it! Some of us have sat on buses or in restaurants or at our jobs watching people crack up as they read it. That's pretty cool," the editors wrote. "We've also watched people start up some pretty dope conversations about racism, police brutality, and related issues. Everybody should be talking to each other about these issues."

I wonder if those "dope conversations" include this uncomfortable topic. It certainly touches on the issues the "Crimes" raises.

Posted 7:41 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON THE LEFT: I must rush out and purchase the latest book by Martin Amis. It's called "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million." Here's what the "Los Angeles Times" says about it:

Koba the Dread ("Koba" was Stalin's childhood nickname) is about what Amis calls the "chief lacuna" of the 20th century: the failure of Western intellectuals to condemn the grotesque horrors perpetrated in the USSR even as they were happening, and their reluctance to fully repudiate some of their communist sympathies since. (To put this in perspective, the horrors include the murder of some 20 million people and the misery of almost everybody else.)

And this:

...the book does a brilliant job of rubbing the left's face in the mountains of corpses that resulted from its favorite political philosophy. That it has been done more thoroughly before isn't quite the point, since those who did it, most notably Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the historian Robert Conquest, are still sometimes seen as reactionary while a Marxist historian like Eric Hobsbawm is given an adulatory press.

Posted 7:02 AM by Peter Fallow
ACTUAL PROOF OF SLANDER: Just when I thought Ann Coulter was being a tad overblown about liberals slandering conservatives, here comes a story that at least partially confirms her charges. (Link via Romenesko.) NPR tried to connect the Traditional Values Coalition to last fall's anthrax attacks? I mean, I can see connecting the racist Christian Identity movement to the attacks, but the Traditional Values Coalition is fairly mainstream (even though I don't agree with many of their positions). This story ought to resonate with all the lefties who bitch and moan about their views being unfairly lumped in with radicals.

On second thought, it probably won't resonate at all.

Posted 7:39 AM by Peter Fallow
SUMMER IN THE 'CITY JOURNAL': The ever-useful "City Journal" has finally posted its summer issue, and Heather MacDonald is on the case. This story is about black police officers who don't think media charges of "racist police brutality" hold much water. And check this passage out:

The long-running race racket that has so distorted our national discourse shows no signs of letting up, but that is only because we have been listening to the wrong people. For every Al Sharpton or Eric Adams, there is at least one Carl McLaughlin or Tony Barksdale, who speak of American opportunity and fairness. There is no inherent reason why only the victimologists should be granted legitimacy as representatives of black interests, especially since so few of them are elected. Why not at least give equal time to a Wilbur Chapman, say, when he argues that the “biggest impediment to minority advancement is white guilt” and asserts that, whatever the remaining problems in American race relations, “the bottom line is: no one can stop me from getting my piece of the American dream”?

Just go read the whole issue. There's a ton of good, blog-worthy material in there.

Posted 7:28 AM by Peter Fallow
MISSING MCGOWAN: This is interesting. The "New York Review of Books" has a review round-up of several recent books on journalism. It's written by the estimable Russell Baker. But noticeably absent is William McGowan's "Coloring the News." That's pretty ironic in light of the National Press Club award it just won (see item below). A couple of months ago, the "New York Times" said it wouldn't review McGowan's book because it is critical of the Times. (Here's a letter on that, and here's Nat Hentoff on the Times' refusal to review the book.) Draw your own conclusions.

Posted 7:09 AM by Peter Fallow
DEBATE ABOUT THE FUTURE OF PRINT: Arnold Kling sees newspapers slowly dying out as the Internet assumes even greater dominace. Sidney Goldberg disagrees. Joe-Bob says check it out.

Posted 7:05 AM by Peter Fallow
A POSITIVE SIGN: I was giving a quick look to this list of National Press Club award winners, and I noticed that William McGowan's "Coloring The News" won the Rowse/Press Criticism - Single Entry - Book award. That's good news. It means that the journalistic establishment is willing to seriously consider criticism of that most delicate newsroom subject - race relations. Frequent readers of this blog know I've been hyping this book for months as far more important than Bernard Goldberg's "Bias." For more on McGowan's book, check out his Web site.

Posted 6:53 AM by Peter Fallow
'FATHER, SON AND HOLY GOAT': I saw this on TV while on vacation, and I'm glad to see someone has commented on it. If you're just tuning in, it seems a goat was born in Florida with what appears to be a white No. 3 on its side. Now, for those of you who don't follow NASCAR, No. 3 was the late Dale Earnhardt's number. (I'm not a NASCAR fan, but being a Southern boy who worked in the sports department at three newspapers in the South, I'm familiar.) Apparently, people are flocking to see this magical goat named Lil' Dale, thinking that it is some kind of beyond-the-grave message from The Intimidator. (You'd think he'd have chosen something more intimidating than a goat.)

I don't think there's any more that I can add to this.

Posted 6:35 AM by Peter Fallow
PALESTINIAN BABY KILLERS: This will probably be blogged everywhere today, but the "New Republic" has an excellent column on that infamous picture of the suicide-bomber baby that surfaced a couple of weeks ago.

After first denying relation to the infant shahid, Redwan Abu Turki acknowledged both his grandchild and the authenticity of the photograph, even as he claimed the get-up was nothing but a joke. "The picture was taken just for the fun of it," he shrugged. After all, in the streets of Gaza and Jenin, suicide bombers are heroes. Wondered the baby's uncle, "What's all the fuss about?" Now, cultural humor is an elusive and arbitrary phenomenon. In the West, Stalinist atrocity is recalled far more blithely than Nazi horror ... Jewish culture--and Israeli culture in particular--has some spectacular black humor ... But in the Jewish case, the engine of laughter is the bleakest moment of victimhood, survival from which engenders humor as a coping mechanism. The Abu Turki family, by contrast, is having a chuckle over murdering Jews in bus shelters, supermarkets, nightclubs, and pizzerias. They laugh to celebrate murder--and the consequent death of their own child--not to overcome it.

And this:

It doesn't surprise me," Palestinian Labor Minister Ghassan Khatib enigmatically remarked about the picture. "I know exactly the mentality of the Palestinian people, and I know exactly the way they think." Khatib reveals the true horror of the photograph: its normative place in the Palestinian mind, at least as Khatib understands it. A baby set to detonate in a Jerusalem sandbox in order to establish a fundamentalist nightmare between the river and the sea is a punch line in Ramallah, to the eternal sorrow of Hanan Ashrawi and Sari Nusseibeh. Khatib's blasé testimony suggests, in a nauseatingly profound way, the depths of Palestinian acclimation to suicide bombing.

Posted 5:38 AM by Peter Fallow
WATCHDOG WATCHES HIMSELF: Via Romenesko comes this story of a newspaper hiring a city council member to cover the city council and the subsequent resignation of two of the paper's three full-time employees. It's a serious conflict-of-interest story, but one of the publishers is MAYOR of a neighboring town:

Barbara Bobo, who is in her fifth term as Millport mayor, said politics and journalism often "dovetail" at small weeklies such as the Northport and West Alabama newspapers. She said she believed Allison could remain unbiased in his coverage of town business. She cited herself as an example. "I write the town’s news. I don’t have a reporter there," she said of Millport. As a mayor-reporter, she said, "you have to use common sense in your coverage. It’s not like there’s a whole lot going on."

Readers are right to worry about examples of bias in the "New York Times" or the "Washington Post." But remember, there's a huge swath of the country that gets its news from podunk papers such as these, and they are absolutely loaded with their own bizarre biases. In the early days of this blog, I wrote about my how the powers that be at my first newspaper deemed the monthly meeting of a small civic club to be front-page news. Now, this wasn't a tiny weekly paper. This was a daily with a circulation of about 25,000 that had a heavy wire-service presence on its front page. However, every month, stripped across the top, would be that club's meeting, right above the latest news from the Middle East and the president's speech to Congress. And why? Because the publisher was a member. Unbelievable, but far too common.

Posted 6:55 AM by Peter Fallow
YENTA SANS STREISAND: Here's is a blog that is well worth your time. Check out the Media Yenta, who is "a mensch who works within the Hollywood system. Enjoy the commentary with creative typos." Funny stuff.

Posted 6:45 AM by Peter Fallow
'CREATE TWO, THREE, MANY TED RALLS': Sorry to paraphrase Che Guevara's famous call for a multiplicity of Vietnams, but that seems to be the point of this story from "The Nation." In the apparent atmosphere of incipient fascism goin' down in John Ashcroft's Amerikkka, brave editorial cartoonists of Rall's ilk are needed more than ever. Rall himself is trotted out to complain about "censorship" after many newspapers dropped his cartoon in the wake of his outrageous "Terror Widows" cartoon and people criticized him for his gross insensitivity. (There's that "strongly voiced criticism masking as oppression" argument again. As I've written before, many on the Left are really starting to sound like Ann Coulter.)

Posted 6:12 AM by Peter Fallow
FUN AT SPINSANITY: While I was on vacation, Henry Hanks e-mailed me a link to this Spinsanity story that attacks both FAIR and the MRC, media watchdogs of the left and right, respectively. Today, a reader criticizes Spinsanity for the piece, and Spinsanity responds.

Posted 5:56 AM by Peter Fallow
MEDIA BIAS AND THE MIDDLE EAST: Here's a long piece from the "American Journalism Review" on perceptions of either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli bias in the coverage of the Middle East conflict. I tend to agree with the author's conclusion that the "bias," such as it is, isn't a deliberate thing. It's more a function of ignorance:

"I think bias is a strong word and term to describe what's out there," says Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "There are problems – problems of ignorance, of lack of perspective. There are problems of people with no knowledge being parachuted into a situation and producing incomplete coverage.... But I am certainly not one to say that the American media is biased against Israel."

AJR also includes this related column on Mideast media bias. As I've written before, sometimes what the public perceives as "bias" in coverage choices is often the result of some entirely plausible breakdown in the newsgathering process - an assignment gets switched to another reporter or photographer, or an editor handling a certain beat is absent from work and another editor unfamiliar with that beat steps up to fill in. These snafus happen all the time.

Posted 5:31 AM by Peter Fallow
'EMBRACE THE BLOG': Here's an interesting story from the "American Journalism Review." It tells journalists to view blogs as another avenue for disseminating information to the public. Here's some excerpts:

The simple, linear structure of Weblogs has long served the narrative needs of software developers and teenage diarists alike. Now blogging is confronting journalism, with the rise of current-events blogs that deconstruct news coverage, spew opinion and even scoop the big media from time to time. The best news bloggers are articulate, independent thinkers. In some ways, they are the antithesis of traditional journalists: unedited, unabashedly opinionated, sporadic and personal.

And this:

Blogs can be a rich resource, an easy publishing tool and a repository for notebook overflow. I seriously doubt they'll usurp online newspapers in five years--but newsrooms could borrow a few tricks from today's bloggers to make their own journalism better.

Posted 5:24 AM by Peter Fallow
BACK TO THE GRIND: After a delightful week's vacation, I'm back to work. A splendid time was had by all. I'm sorry to say I didn't miss the blogging all that much.

Posted 7:18 AM by Peter Fallow
OUT OF THE OFFICE: The Media Minder will be closed until Monday, July 8 for a well-deserved vacation. In the meantime, check out the fine bunch o' blogs to your right. I hope everyone has a happy and safe Fourth of July. Cheers!

Posted 9:40 AM by Peter Fallow
INTO ACADEMIA: Two articles of note in the "New Republic." First, Peter Berkowitz criticizes postmodern maven Stanley Fish for two pieces he wrote in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Here's part of Berkowitz's analysis:

His current argument about the relevance of postmodernism to September 11 and the world it created has this same, characteristically charming audacity about it. It is also rank sophistry. Either Fish is confused about exactly what postmodernism means, or he is willing to say anything--no matter how internally inconsistent--to win an argument. Or maybe both.

And here's the part that addresses campus speech codes. It ought to be relevant to those elements of the left who see "oppression" in strongly worded contrary opinions:

Hate speech--"speech hurtful to women, blacks, Hispanics, and gays"--is one thing, argues Fish. But political speech, such as criticism of the U.S. war effort, or the expression of sympathy for Al Qaeda, is quite another, he argues, noting that political speech lies at the heart of what is protected by the First Amendment. He's right on that last point. But Fish's flight into formal distinctions obscures the underlying reality. Campus speech codes encourage students, faculty, and administrators to recharacterize political opinions with which they disagree as statements that are hurtful and oppressive and which therefore must be forbidden. This produces habits of mind and intellectual norms that, when the winds shift, are easily extended to other topics and issues, posing a looming menace to the free inquiry to which our universities should be unflinchingly committed.

Next, Eric Arnesen deconstructs advocates of "whiteness studies" in a very long piece. A key excerpt:

If, after a decade of "theorizing," the concept of whiteness remains a muddled catch-all, something that seeks academic and political legitimation as a cover for its intellectual incoherence, its proponents' goals, too, remain unclear. In response to the left's perennial question--"What is to be done?"--Roediger might answer: bring about a withering away of whiteness, or alternatively, an abolition of whiteness. Ian F. Haney Lópezhas argued that whiteness, since it "perpetuates injurious racial identities," "should be abandoned." Whites should "renounce their racial identity as it is currently constituted in the interests of social justice." That scholar-activists of whiteness and its abolition can seriously advocate these outlandish propositions is surely a reflection of their disillusionment with the often naïve class politics that they once advocated, and a rejection of the romanticized white working class that they once championed. It also reflects, to some degree, a methodological preference among some segments of the academic left for the cultural studies-ish interpretation of texts over "old-fashioned" archival research.

Just read the whole thing.

Posted 8:50 AM by Peter Fallow
LEAKS AND BOUNDS: Jack Shafer of Slate has an interesting piece today on the "Washington Post" trashing one of its own stories in order to protect secret sources. It all revolves around that June 20 story on the NSA receiving messages about the Sept. 11 attacks on Sept. 10. Apparently, that angle had been reported as early as 11 days after Sept. 11.

Posted 8:42 AM by Peter Fallow
REGISTER A COMPLAINT: J.D. Lasica of "Online Journalism Review" has a series of articles on newspaper Web sites and those damned intrusive registration forms we've got to fill out.

I HATE registering for sites. HATE IT! It's complete bullshit so that my e-mail inbox can get flooded with spam. And here's the clueless newspaper executive defending the decision to go to registration:

"Two years ago if you asked anybody in the industry, the response would have been overwhelmingly negative," says Elaine Zinngrabe, executive producer of Latimes.com. "In 2002 we've come to realize that it's a business necessity. Consumers are becoming savvy about opt-out and privacy policies, and they've come to expect this sort of customer interaction."

What hogwash.

Posted 8:31 AM by Peter Fallow
BIAS AND FAIRNESS: Susanna Cornett has an excellent post today on this story from the "Washington Post." Susanna says everything I would have said, so go check it out.

Posted 6:07 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON THE LEFT: Here's an e-mail from a reader about yesterday's Warbloggerwatch post:

Dear Media-minded.

When you write this sentence.

"While we're at it, it's worth checking out Gitlin's much-blogged article from a couple of months ago on the knee-jerk anti-American left."

Its clear that you are endorsing Gitlin's view that there is an anti-american element to the left. WARBLOGGERWATCH! was within bounds to make this point.

Geez. Some on the left are really starting to sound like Ann Coulter. One more time: There certainly seem to be certain elements of the left that are anti-American. And elsewhere on the left side of the political spectrum, there are people whose views, while not anti-American per se, certainly qualify them as "useful idiots" of terrorists. To paraphrase George Orwell "Pacifism is objectively pro-Islamofascist."

Meanwhile, here's another article from a prominent leftist decrying the anti-American tendencies of many on the left. Michael Walzer of "Dissent" wrote "Can There Be a Decent Left?" about the response of many on the left to the attacks of Sept. 11. Check it out. And here are endorsements of Walzer's piece from (gasp!) David Horowitz and "National Review."

Posted 5:22 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON COURIC-COULTER: Here's Lloyd Grove's report. And Henry Hanks has been all over the story.

OK, so Couric wasn't being honest in the exchange about calling Reagan an "airhead." I'm still not a Coulter fan, because she practices the same scorched-earth policy she accuses liberals of engaging in.Not only that, Katie looks 1,000 times better in a short skirt than Ann does.

Posted 10:27 AM by Peter Fallow
FACT-CHECKING A-GO-GO: Tim Blair looks into some dubious-sounding quotes from Shimon Peres that were reported in the Australian media. Was it a mistranslation, or a deliberate attempt to distort the news? Check it out.

Posted 8:11 AM by Peter Fallow
KEEP THE LETTERS COMING: The "Boston Globe" has a story today on how pro-Israeli advocates are pressuring media outlets to provide more balance in their coverage of the Middle East. Here's two telling quotes:

''I've never seen anything like this,'' said WBUR-FM general manager Jane Christo. ''The rhetoric and the hysteria [are] really high.'' Added NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin: ''It's just part of the landscape now. I don't think any journalism organization worth its salt can do this kind of story without coming under criticism.''

Keep the pressure on them.

Posted 7:49 AM by Peter Fallow
I MADE WARBLOGGERWATCH! Hey! I've arrived! And I'm not even a "warblogger." One of the twits at Warbloggerwatch is taking me to task for referring to the "knee-jerk anti-American left." However, the idiot ignored (deliberately or undeliberately - it's hard to tell with these guys) the painfully obvious fact that I was referring to this article from veteran leftist writer Todd Gitlin that appeared in "Mother Jones" back in January. Gitlin was the one writing about the "knee-jerk anti-American left." I was just agreeing with him. So much for expecting intellectual honesty from some of my critics.

It's so ironic. Neale Talbot outlines a slew of standard leftist positions that apparently are above criticism, then blames me for pointing out one of the most trenchant criticisms of some of those silly ideas from a leading man of the left. Check out what Gitlin wrote:

But in the wake of September 11 there erupted something more primal and reflexive than criticism: a kind of left-wing fundamentalism, a negative faith in America the ugly. In this cartoon view of the world, there is nothing worse than American power—not the woman-enslaving Taliban, not an unrepentant Al Qaeda committed to killing civilians as they please—and America is nothing but a self-seeking bully. It does not face genuine dilemmas. It never has legitimate reason to do what it does. When its rulers' views command popularity, this can only be because the entire population has been brainwashed, or rendered moronic, or shares in its leaders' monstrous values.

Or this passage:

Soft anti-Americans, by contrast, sincerely want U.S. policies to change—though by their lights, such turnabouts are well-nigh unimaginable—but they commit the grave moral error of viewing the mass murderer (if not the mass murder) as nothing more than an outgrowth of U.S. policy. They not only note but gloat that the United States built up Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan as a counterfoil to the Russians. In this thinking, Al Qaeda is an effect, not a cause; a symptom, not a disease. The initiative, the power to cause, is always American. But here moral reasoning runs off the rails. Who can hold a symptom accountable? To the left-wing fundamentalist, the only interesting or important brutality is at least indirectly the United States' doing. Thus, sanctions against Iraq are denounced, but the cynical mass murderer Saddam Hussein, who permits his people to die, remains an afterthought. Were America to vanish, so, presumably, would the miseries of Iraq and Egypt.

This inability to exercise self-criticism, the anti-Americanism wrapped in moral piety and the dishonest manner in which debates are framed encapsulates why I parted ways with the left a decade ago, and it seems a nice summation of the numb-nuts at Warbloggerwatch. For what it's worth, I never meant to write that I consider all elements of the left to be knee-jerk anti-Americans. However, there are still plenty of doofuses out there that piss me and others off when they spout their nonsense, and we're going to continue to call them on their bullshit.

Posted 6:51 AM by Peter Fallow
COURIC VS. COULTER: Ann Coulter, who called Katie Couric the "Eva Braun of morning television" in her new book, "Slander," was just interviewed by Katie on the "Today" show. Didn't see all of it, but it looks like Katie managed to keep it on an even keel. Coulter didn't come off as very credible, in my opinion. I say that even though I agree with the thesis of "Slander": Conservatives are far too often portrayed as semi-Nazis or worse.

Posted 6:41 AM by Peter Fallow
INTERNET POWER: I missed this yesterday. Slate reports on Thomas Mallon, who wrote a scathing review of "Portraits of Grief," the vignettes of the World Trade Center victims that ran in the "New York Times" in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Mallon wrote his piece in the small-circulation journal "American Scholar," and the article wasn't available online. Tim Noah, who wrote the Slate story, has his own theory on why there weren't howls of outrage over Mallon's dissent.

Chatterbox interprets this not as shocked silence but as a reluctance by the public to acknowledge what is so obviously true about the "Portraits."

Another possible explanation: The power of the Internet (and not just the Blogosphere). If the piece had appeared online, I'm certain it would have been linked to by someone (Arts and Letters Daily probably would have done it). E-mails would have started flying, and in a week or so, there might have been a story in a newspaper or magazine somewhere. Now that Noah's piece has appeared on Slate, I'm sure Mallon will get a response. After all, the guy is saying nasty things about dead people he didn't know personally, so what does he expect?

Posted 6:29 AM by Peter Fallow
OH MY OMBUDSGOD! There's a new media blog out there tracking what newspaper ombudsmen do. It's the OmbudsGod. Check it out.

Posted 5:43 AM by Peter Fallow
ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE LEFT: Todd Gitlin bemoans the rise of anti-Semitism among some elements of the left in this excellent article:

This is no incidental issue, no negligible distraction. A Left that cares for the rights of humanity cannot cavalierly tolerate the systematic abuse of any people -- whatever you think of Israel's or any other country's foreign policy. Any student movement worthy of the name must face the ugly history that long made anti-Semitism the acceptable racism, face it and break from it.

While we're at it, it's worth checking out Gitlin's much-blogged article from a couple of months ago on the knee-jerk anti-American left. Here it is.

Posted 5:30 AM by Peter Fallow
WHEN OMBUDSMEN ATTACK! Two interesting ombudsmen-related pieces worth pointing out today.

The first is from "Washington Post" ombud Michael Getler, who works in a dig at FAIR for running with a false story of free-speech oppression at President Bush's commencement address at Ohio State University, a story that has been thoroughly debunked.

Next, "Boston Globe" ombud Christine Chinlund gives clueless Beantown readers a primer in spotting the difference between an opinion column and a genuine news column. Hey, sometimes it's hard for us in the business to tell the difference, Christine.

Posted 5:22 AM by Peter Fallow
ANN LANDERS, RIP: As you all know, advice columnist Ann Landers died the other day. She was a newspaper staple. We'll miss her.