MEDIA BIAS UPDATE, PART 10,345: Here's one of those pieces I missed last week. Neal Gabler, writing in the Los Angeles Times, makes points both strong and weak in this opinion piece about media bias.

Discussing charges of whether big media are biased to the left or to the right, Gabler raises a provocative point:

But there is a third and more disturbing possibility in which both sides have gotten it wrong. Looking at it philosophically rather than ideologically, the real media war today isn't between liberals and conservatives but between two entirely different journalistic mind-sets: those who believe in advocacy, and those who believe in objectivity -- or, at the very least, in the appearance of objectivity. And what we are witnessing is not just a political skirmish but a battle for the soul of American journalism.

He then launches into a brief history of American journalism, reminding us that newspapers of the not-too-distant past were unabashedly biased, and also describing how the "idea of professionalization" that arose during the Progressive Era steered us toward the objectivity model that now dominates most major media outlets.

However, Gabler misses a major chunk of U.S. history when discussing the era of supposed "objectivity" in the media. ("The anchormen at NBC or CBS were seldom accused of bias back then" Gabler writes.) In the process, he somewhat mischaracterizes conservative media criticism of the press.

That chunk of U.S. history is the tumultuous 1960s, the era when most of today's top news executives came of age. While most acolytes of the old New Left are firmly ensconced in academia -- and educating the next generation of journalists -- there are enough of their old comrades in journalism to raise concern. (Think Lowell Bergman, the 60 Minutes producer portrayed by Al Pacino in The Insider. He was a former comrade of David Horowitz's at Ramparts magazine. Unlike Horowitz, he has not renounced his radical past.) The fact that the right is disturbed when 89 percent of journalists voted Democratic in 1992 is part and parcel of the basic conservative critique of society's general leftward turn over the past 30-40 years. But Gabler even denies that has happened:

Lest they lend credence to charges of bias, mainstream news outlets seem to be bending over backward to prove they are not liberal and harbor no animus toward the Republican administration, even though the political spectrum has shifted so far right over the last decade that thinking once considered centrist is now seen as liberal.

I disagree with his charge that the political spectrum has "shifted so far to the right." At the very least, it lacks any context. In my opinion, the Republicans of 2002 do not really look and sound like the Republicans of 1990. (Democrats, meanwhile, sound exactly the same.) And sure, we've got welfare reform and tax cuts, but is society really any more conservative than it was 10 years ago? Popular culture tells me no -- for reasons both good and bad. At best, mainstream news outlets are trying (and too often failing) to prove their lack of animus toward the Republican administration because of the effective efforts of groups such as the Media Research Center. And also because of the next good point Gabler makes:

The dirty little secret of network newscasts, and of most major newspapers, is not that they are manned by liberal proselytizers. It is that they are trying to attract the widest possible viewership, or readership, and that doing so necessitates that they be as inoffensive as possible. That is why investigative reports seem so toothless, gumming away at government boondoggles or consumer fraud or corrupt politicians that are unlikely to infuriate either the left or the right.

But Gabler again loses me when he discusses what he calls "advocates." Apparently, they're almost all right-wingers, and apparently, they are gathering attention to themselves all out of proportion to their slice of the media pie. (No mention of the obvious advocacy that seeps into "objective" news stories based on studies from left-leaning groups such as People for the American Way or the Center for Science in the Public Interest, or on the ways opinion polls get manipulated for what appears to be political motives. See these guys for more.)

Yet, one would never guess this by the way the advocates have been driving the news. Cable's influence is magnified exponentially by the fact that its audience is more energized and its reports deeply impassioned. It grabs attention while the networks and newspapers studiously avoid attention. It makes news while the traditional networks break news.

I have to wonder if Gabler is watching the same cable news channels I'm watching. MSNBC impassioned? Come on. The only energized audiences I see on cable news are on CNN's Talk Back Live. I watch cable news all during the day, and if anything, it's pretty boring unless there's breaking news. But Gabler doesn't see it that way, and he makes an unfair comparison:

Just compare Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings to O'Reilly, Brit Hume, Chris Matthews and Kudlow and Cramer. Though he calls his show a "no-spin zone," Fox's O'Reilly grills his guests, smirks at their answers and shakes his head in disbelief when he hears what he regards as a liberal opinion. MSNBC's Matthews was once an aide to Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill, but he too plays the cable game by roasting liberalism on a spit that spins as fast as a jet turbine. Similarly, Hume on Fox can barely conceal his agony when he has to report a criticism of President Bush. For these guys, Bill Clinton and Tom Daschle, not Osama bin Laden and his ilk, are the real threats to America.

Rather, Brokaw and Jennings are basically highly paid news readers. O'Reilly, Matthews, and Kudlow & Cramer are obviously hosting opinion-driven talk shows. (I'm not even going to entertain his characterization of Britt Hume, which is patently unfair and dishonest.) Obviously, there's a difference. Why doesn't Gabler acknowledge that?

In conclusion, I think Gabler raised some important issues. But he seems to see only the few "successes" conservatives have had in a couple of high-profile stories (think Clinton's sex scandals) and ignores the slanted "objective" coverage of issues touching on economics, race, crime, affirmative action, abortion, immigration, feminism and many more. In my opinion, these are more important than the horse-race coverage of politics and whether one party's mouthpieces are getting more face time on the evening news.

POWER OF THE BLOGOSPHERE: I'm sure everyone everywhere has blogged about this, but here's that article from the Boston Globe on the Blogosphere's impact on the Trent Lott story. I rather liked Walter Shapiro's quote at the end:

''Like every revolution,'' he says, blogging ''is overhyped on the way up, overscorned on the way down, and settles into the middle realm of reality.''

So true.

ON THE BEAT: Here's one I missed from last week, but it is well worth a look. Hank Stuever, a Style reporter for the Washington Post, reports on a story he wrote about a car show in D.C. What makes this piece truly enjoyable is the inside look at how a real, live newsroom operates. Check it out. And check out his other diary entries from last week, here, here and here.

CHARACTER-FREE NEWSROOMS: David Shaw, media critic for the Los Angeles Times, bemoans the absence of real characters from newsrooms in a fine article.

I kind of agree with him. When I took my current job at a much bigger paper a couple of years ago, I noticed that many of my colleagues seemed depressingly similar: a lot of the men have JFK haircuts and expensive suits, a lot of the women are aerobicized fashion plates, and both groups never smile -- ever. It was a far cry from my days at smaller papers, where I worked alongside failed stand-up comedians, heavy drinkers, chain smokers, convicted felons, co-worker love triangles (and quadrangles), editors who cursed loudly and threw stuff against the wall, paste-up men with liquor bottles hidden beside the wax machine, pressmen who drank beer on Friday nights after the bosses had gone home, and many more characters. And though I'm very happy in my new job, I miss the old days sometimes.

BACK TO WORK: I'm back after a fantastic holiday. I visited two wonderful families, saw some old friends and ate a ton of great food. Now it's back to the grind of work -- and blogging. We'll see what's out there today.

HOW THE LOTT STORY GOT MISSED: Paul Janensch, a former newspaper editor who is now a journalism instructor, explains how the Trent Lott story may have been missed by the media when it first broke:

How could Washington journalists, supposedly the cream of the crop, have failed to pick up on Lott's statement at the beginning? (And many of you thought they were all liberals eager to bash conservatives.)

When I worked in Washington, I was struck by how boring it can be to cover a carefully scripted event. Often the reporters there already know how they will frame their stories and don't pay attention to what's actually said at a Congressional hearing or a press briefing.

Or a birthday party.

Hmm. This echoes what I wrote the other day.

POWERS SURGE: In light of Trent Lott's announcement that he will step down as majority leader, I present William Powers' excellent take on the whole situation:

Why the Lott story took off so slowly is a good question. But just as good, and in some ways more intriguing, is the opposite question of why this story took off at all, and once it did, why it had such staying power. After all, Lott is not the first national political figure to say or do something that most people found deeply wrong. In a television interview just last year, Sen. Robert C. Byrd twice used the phrase "white niggers." But when Byrd apologized, the story went away. There are countless other examples of pols who spoke or behaved offensively, performed some act of contrition, and returned to business as usual.

Why do some transgressors become such pariahs that they are driven out of public life (think Jim Wright, Bob Packwood), while others not only survive their ignominy but go on to prosper (Bill Clinton)? Every scandal is different, of course, and the rules of the game change over time. It's hard to imagine Ted Kennedy, or any other national figure, surviving a Chappaquiddick-like incident today.

But there is one factor that plays a huge role in all these stories, and yet it has been scarcely mentioned in the last few weeks: goodwill. I mean that free-floating sense of generosity and tolerance that allows us to excuse errors, often very grievous ones, made by certain public figures. Over time, as they emerge into public consciousness, some pols manage to build up major stores of this stuff, and it keeps them afloat in a time of scandal. Others accrue little or no goodwill, and when these unfortunate souls get in trouble, they sink like a stone.

Based on the events of the last week, we can safely place Lott among the goodwill-deficient. It's true his story took several days to get traction, but once it did, it soon became clear that very few people in politics or the media had warm feelings of any kind about the Senate majority leader.

Just go read the whole thing.

MEDIA BIAS UPDATE, PART 3,964: Michael Kelly continues his short series on media bias. (Here's the first part.) This time, he's got some statistics from the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

There's one passage I wanted to highlight from Kelly's latest column:

To this, we journalists argue that we -- unique among humans -- are able to see the world and its events free from the prejudices of our own vantage points. How can this be? Because, we say, of our professional training and discipline.

But we don't have any professional training or discipline. Journalism is not a profession in the sense of medicine or law or science. Journalists do not go through years of brutal academic apprenticeship designed to inculcate adherence to an agreed-upon code of ethics (such as the Hippocratic oath) or an agreed-upon method of truth-determining (such as the method of scientific inquiry). We are not required to meet any standards of knowledge. We are not certified. We operate under no mandated professional set of rules. We need not even be decently educated, as consumers of news frequently notice.

And even if we really were trained professionals, we still would not be able to attain the godlike ability to perceive and present the "objective" truth on all matters that come before us. Because we are, in fact, not unique among humans.

Amen to that.

That's about all I've got time for today, folks. It's going to be one of those days.

SPRINGSTEEN MUST BE BUSY: Eric Alterman has a scathing review of Bob Woodward's "Bush at War." Alterman makes some good points, and Bob Woodward is certainly an easy target, but one question keeps nagging me: If Woodward had used his "unorthodox sourcing and journalistic writing techniques" to make the president look like a complete jackass, do you think Alterman would still be critical of the book? Discuss among yourselves.

MORE ON LOTT: National Review has a column on the bashing Trent Lott is taking in newspapers in his home region. Here's the "nut graf" (or grafs):

Thoughtful conservatives here, as in the rest of the country, share a deep philosophical commitment to color-blindness under the law — combined with a Jack Kemp-like enthusiasm for market-based anti-poverty incentives that would be particularly beneficial to black Americans trapped in downtrodden neighborhoods.

While rejecting racial preferences under the law, we also realize that racism still exists and still is hurtful....Conservative defenders of Mr. Lott may have reason to react against "politically correct" tendencies to see racists behind every tree. But words such as Lott uttered, words that truly are racially divisive on their face, only feed those leftist tendencies to conflate benevolent conservative policy positions with the daily racism on golf courses and in restaurants that black Americans still experience.

Just go read the whole thing.

THE TIMES HAVE PASSED THE TIMES BY: The Weekly Standard has a nice piece on the Augusta National brouhaha at the New York Times. But it's not mere Times-bashing. Here's a longish excerpt that I think is pretty important:

No paper in the country takes itself as seriously as the Times does, and it is hard to imagine another paper acting quite as the Times did in this case. Yet the story of the spiked columns is about more than the Times. In fact, it is a story about the old--i.e., the establishment--media. And the story shows why their influence has waned.

By "establishment media" I mean the several national newspapers of 50 and 60 years ago, including the Times, later joined by the TV networks. They determined what was news. And for them, news had a certain authority. Indeed, as Walter Lippmann contended, news precluded argument--or at least any argument that might conflict with what the "news" was believed to support.

That understanding of news still has adherents in high places at the Times. That explains why there was no rush to get the dissenting columns into print. It also explains why, as Jack Shafer, the press writer for slate.com, has written, the Times so scrupulously avoids self-criticism.

The Times doesn't provide forums--as other papers do--where its work can be questioned. It has no ombudsman, nor an in-house media reporter allowed to treat the Times like any other institution. And why not? Because such forums and such writers are unnecessary. News, you see, precludes argument.

The problem with that understanding of news--and of doing journalism--is that in the long run it isn't going to prove adequate. As regards public affairs, man--especially democratic man--is made for argument. In "The Revolt of the Elites," the sociologist Christopher Lasch explained why. It is only in the course of argument, he wrote, that "we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn."

The article also mentions bloggers (several by name and URL) who are helping promote arguments and debates on matters of public interest. Check it out.

LILEKS ON PIZZA: I'm one of many fans of James Lileks, and, judging by the quote I ripped off from one of his posts earlier this year, he's a fan of this blog, too. However, I've got to say the guy has some bizarre tastes in pizza.

A quarter-inch of sauce? Wow. I used to work at Domino's in college, and occasionally we would get orders for pizza with extra sauce. It was once my misfortune to sample one of these pies, and it was simply awful. With each bite, the sauce would squirt out of the corners of my mouth. The overload of thick red liquid had transformed the crust into a soggy mess, and overpowered the cheese and toppings. Ugh. Give me light sauce every time. (Holds up better in transit, by the way.) Or, if you really want to be my friend, send me a white pie. It has no tomato sauce at all. Just lots of cheese, garlic and a thin layer of olive oil. Pure heaven, especially with pepperoni, mushrooms, black olives and onions.

Any thoughts out there on this? What's your favorite pizza? Leave a comment below if you'd like.

HERE'S THE SCOOP: Sridhar Pappu of the New York Observer has the inside story on how those two spiked Augusta National columns were resurrected in the New York Times. It's so good, so chock-full of juicy insider stuff, that I'm not going to bother excerpting any of it. Just go read it.

MISSISSIPPI MEMORIES: Gregory Favre, who works for the Poynter Institute, has an excellent piece today on the "Old Mississippi" Trent Lott was fondly recalling during Strom Thurmond's birthday party. In the column, Favre also recalls brave white journalists such as Hodding Carter II:

Carter owned and edited the Delta Democrat Times in Greenville and won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials condemning racial bigotry. The Mississippi House once passed a resolution —89-19— calling Carter a liar. He then wrote that by a vote of one to zero the House contained 89 liars. "Those 89 character mobbers can go to hell, collectively or singly, and wait till I back down," he said.

It's hard to imagine ANY newspaper editor writing words like that these days. Then again, the stakes were much higher. Carter was a lone voice working in the midst of a low-level guerrilla war.

INTERNET LIBEL CASE: A Virginia court has thrown out a prison warden's suit against two Connecticut newspapers that could have had a chilling effect on Internet news postings. (In a nutshell, the warden believed that negative stories about him posted on the papers' Web sites could be read in his home state of Virginia, which is much different from a news story published in a paper hundreds of miles away that no one in your hometown would ever read.) Here's the story.

MORE ON GORE: In a short, piquant piece, The American Prowler looks at an Al Gore story that was somehow overlooked by the Vast Right-Wing Media Conspiracy. Check it out.

TAKE A TABLET: Editor & Publisher takes a look at a PC designed specifically for reading online newspapers. Very interesting, though I still wonder about the practicality of this. I guess it would appeal to people like the Amazing Techie Girlfriend who are already toting around an assload of electronics crap everywhere they go.

BIASED LANGUAGE: John Rosenberg of Discriminations points out a newspaper editorial that uses subtle yet biased language to cast conservatives in a negative light. Here's the passage John identified in the Gainesville (Ga.) Times:

Ironically, some conservative commentators are among Lott's strongest critics. They know that his presence will continue to hurt the GOP's credibility with minority voters and its ability to expand its diversity.

And John nails the reason why this passage made it into print:

Why is it ironical that conservatives are among Lott's harshest critics? Because conservatives are so widely thought to be racists.

I'm reminded of an incident at my own paper several months ago. While editing a profile of a developer, I came across a description of the story's subject as "politically conservative yet personally generous." Now, this story had already been through two senior editors who are paid at a scale far above my own, and neither of them noticed this patently unfair description of conservatives. So I changed the passage to read "politically conservative and personally generous."

Nobody really seemed to notice; it was such a minor thing, anyway. But to me, it was a perfect example of the mind-set of far too many of my colleagues.

For the record, I don't encounter this kind of bias every day. But it certainly crops up from time to time.

MEDIA BIAS UPDATE, PART 3,976: Jeff Jacoby takes on the argument that the media are turning right. Check it out.

MORE ON LOTT: Howard Kurtz summarizes the media's slow reaction to Trent Lott's pro-segregation comments at Strom Thurmond's birthday party.

The other day, I blogged about possible reasons for a slow reaction to Lott in the editorial pages. Today, Kurtz details reasons why reporters on hand when the remarks were made may have been asleep at the switch:

Baltimore Sun reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis says there was so much "tongue-in-cheek" talk at Thurmond's birthday party "that a lot of us probably tuned out remarks that we might have been more careful listening to if it hadn't been such a jubilant atmosphere. Most people were writing this as a featury 100th-birthday bash."

This makes some sense to me. It would have been one thing if Lott made his comments during a political speech at a more formal event. I can guarantee you there would have been an immediate reaction. These comments came at an informal event, and Thurmond's birthday was a story that was almost certainly a low priority for news organizations that were covering it. Of course, the media (prodded by bloggers, as Kurtz points out) have made this into a huge story since then.

AND FINALLY: I have to give a big shout out to the Amazing Techie Girlfriend, who proved her prowess with machinery the other night by properly reconnecting the VCR to our new digital cable box after I had screwed it up and then formatting the remote to run EVERYTHING! Thanks, hon. You're a marvel.

(P.S. She made me do this.)

CONSERVATIVE MEDIA COMMENTARY THAT'S DUMB: The usually excellent David Brooks sinks to that level with this silly little piece in the Weekly Standard. He's apparently bemoaning the fact that the gossip-fueled celebrity coverage of Britney, Mariah, Jacko and others has overlooked the sad tale of Liesel Pritzke, some mega-rich kid engaged in a trust-fund battle with her family:

If this were the 1930s, the entire country would be up in arms over this story. Life magazine would put it on the cover. Society pages all over the nation would write about nothing else.

Today, of course, there is no Life. Nor are there society pages. Inherited wealth doesn't have the prestige it used to have. The aristocratic network of big money families is no longer very important. You can still get a few people to care about crack-ups in the Bingham, Koch, or Pritzker families, but these stories are midgets compared to the epic soap operas, which concern Whitney, Mariah, Michael Jackson, and such.

We've become more democratic in our scandal-mongering, more infatuated with the commercial/media phenoms and less with the rarefied upper crust. We've become more American and less pseudo-European.

I suppose that's good news, but I wouldn't mind seeing more of Liesel Pritzker.

Brooks does a lot of wonderful writing and reporting (I especially loved his book "Bobos in Paradise"), but I just don't understand his pining for the days when naked worship of actual plutocrats was considered OK. I'm all for inherited wealth, but I'm also all for the very democratic and very American spirit that, at its best, minimizes in-your-face displays of wealth and privilege.

POWERS UP: William Powers has a characteristically smart assessment of The New York Times. Check it out.

PUBLISHER SILENCES AUGUSTA DEBATE: Talk about a classic example of conflict of interest. Check this out:

The club appears to get special treatment in the local newspaper, the Augusta Chronicle, owned by publisher William "Billy" Morris III, a longtime Augusta National member. According to sources, Morris recently called his editors and demanded that a long profile of Burk scheduled to appear on a Sunday front page be shoved back to pages 10 and 11. He killed the accompanying Burk question and answer sidebar.

Morris also refused to run a recent piece by a writer who agreed in principle with Augusta's position, but nevertheless urged the club to give in and admit a woman for the good of the game and the tournament. Morris did not return telephone calls seeking response, and his paper's president, general manager and executive editor declined to comment.

It's buried in this long article on the brouhaha at Augusta National.

This is ridiculous. It doesn't matter how you feel about the issue (and personally, I think the golf club is correct because of the right of free association). In an ideal world, Morris should have excused himself from any discussions about Augusta National. But this is a perfect example of the small-town, protect-the-sacred-cow mentality that prevails at a lot of smaller newspapers.

CONTRADICTORY CROUCH? Stanley Crouch, whom I greatly admire, weighs in on the Trent Lott controversy today. Crouch was loudly calling for Lott's resignation a couple of years ago when news of Lott's association with the Council of Conservative Citizens first surfaced. Because Crouch believes only a couple of columnists at the New York Times joined him in his crusade (I think there were a bit more than that), he writes this (and gets linked on Romenesko's Media News for it):

That proved to me that all the talk about a liberal media bias was bunk - at least when it comes to race.

Sorry, Stanley. Lazy coverage of one senator does not a trend make. (Guess he never read this guy's book.) Later, Crouch writes this:

Lott might survive all this. He is not black. If he were, and if he had associated with a racist black organization, the media would have pressed his pants while he was wearing them.

This is odd. Crouch has written for years about how black politicians and public figures almost never come under fire from the media for associating with the racist Nation of Islam. He's always been one of the few black writers brave enough to point out the double standards involved in so much coverage of racial issues. Then again, he had made the Lott thing a bit of a personal campaign the other year.

MEDIA BIAS UPDATE, PART 2,938: Here's one I missed the other day. Michael Kelly writes what promises to be the first in a series on media bias. He's got some numbers that make it hard to believe that members of the media just woke up one day during Campaign 2000, decided, "Hey, what the hell. Let's go right on this one!" and have been doing nothing but the same ever since. I'm sure that will be news to the co-workers I hear bitching around the coffee pot about the "disaster" in store for this country under Bush.

Furthermore, I really, really, really wish I could publish excerpts from the "newsletters" that each department at the paper posts on our companywide Intranet. (Hint: The balance that seems to be showing up in my colleagues' political reporting certainly isn't reflected in their opinions on President Bush, the GOP in general or what they view as the simpleminded, TV-manipulated tastes of the American people.) In its own way, it would be almost as revealing as Michelangelo Signorile's discovery that a sub-editor at the Washington Times holds some dubious neo-Confederate views that he expresses on like-minded Web sites in his time away from work. (See below.)

IT'S DEAN'S WORLD, WE'RE JUST LIVING IN IT: Dean Esmay, lord and master of Dean's World, has a nice post on the various political and news publications in America. (Hint: There's news and then there's "Nooz.") Check it out.

SIGNORILE WATCH: In light of the recent national coverage of Howell Raines' ill-advised crusade against the Augusta National Golf Club, Michelangelo Signorile has put on his investigative-reporter's cap and unveiled what he apparently considers a much greater crime: An assistant national editor at the Washington Times who holds some questionable views on the South's role in the Civil War.

First of all, I have to wonder how much influence an "assistant national editor" wields at the 100,000-circulation Washington Times. (Robert Stacy McCain is not even listed on this staff directory.) Judging by the infrequency of his writing (I can only find three bylined stories by him in the past month) and the fact that he's not considered important enough to have his e-mail address published, I'll wager that this guy is a glorified copy editor who gets to write an occasional article or opinion piece and has negotiated to get the title "assistant national editor." (I've seen it happen before at smaller newspapers. Heck, I was once offered the title "assistant copy desk chief." It would have been more work without an increase in pay. I declined.) Equating McCain's influence to that of Howell Raines, the executive editor of arguably the world's most influential newspaper, doesn't even begin to pass the smell test.

I agree with Signorile that some of McCain's views are reprehensible, and I'm not even going to defend them. But don't journalists, in their roles outside of the newsroom, get to exercise freedom of speech? (A lot of journalistic codes of ethics say no, but I think they're wrong. That's a whole other post, though.) Howell Raines is being criticized for the quixotic campaign he's leading in his role as executive editor. Signorile is criticizing McCain for views he espouses outside of the pages of the Washington Times. To me, there's a big difference. The former is legitimate criticism of a very public figure in a very public role at the nation's top newspaper. The latter smacks of a Stalinist witch hunt against a relatively insignificant writer at a much smaller newspaper. You can almost see the headlines if this concept were carried to its logical conclusion: "Reporter who covers gender issues once purchased copy of Penthouse." Or "Redskins beat writer actually a Cowboys fan."

Signorile also is alarmed that some of McCain's work has appeared on a racist Web site:

Some of McCain’s Washington Times articles are reprinted, presumably with his and his paper’s permission, on a creepy website called American Renaissance (to which McCain has written at least one letter to the editor, offering "warm congratulations" on an article). Here’s what the respected Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about that site: "Edited by white separatist Jared Taylor, American Renaissance is a magazine with a highfalutin tone that links IQ levels to racial groups and promotes eugenics, the ‘science’ of improving the human race through selective breeding."

It's true that three of McCain's articles from the Washington Times have appeared on the American Renaissance's Web site. It's also true that a quick search found at least one article from the the Washington Post that has been reprinted there, too, presumably with the Post's permission. Applying Signorile's "logic," it seems that Washington's "other" newspaper is now tainted through guilt by association with white supremacists. But that seems to be the thrust of this whole article. It's a not-so-subtle attempt to link a newspaper that doesn't pretend to be anything but conservative to racists.

Of course, the big question is whether McCain's views have slanted his reporting. Signorile claims they have, but the evidence he presents is pretty flimsy:

These viewpoints offer background for and insight into some of McCain’s pieces in The Washington Times. This past October he warned about the "Backlash Building in White America," as the headline of his article blared, and he interviewed and promoted an obscure professor who claimed "that society should combat white nationalists in part by acknowledging the legitimacy of some of their grievances" and that white nationalism is "the monster that identity politics created." (Yes, blame it all on blacks themselves!)

I'll let you read the article in question to see what you think, but the Q&A with Carol Swain is hardly advocating the position that the Old South was right. And contrary to what Signorile writes, Swain is hardly obscure. She is a professor at Vanderbilt University who has, according to this Web site, made several appearances in the national media and placed articles in top newspapers and journals. And, as you can tell from the photo, she's also black. Signorile left that bit out, if he was aware of it at all. (Here's more on Swain here and here.) Swain's views are certainly provocative, but there's absolutely zero evidence that she's singing the praises of white supremacists or "blaming" black people for anything. Here's an excerpt of what she said in her interview with McCain:

The white nationalists use the language of civil rights, [which] condemns discrimination against individuals on the basis of their race, national origin, gender. What the white nationalists say is that discrimination is wrong, it's unfair, it's unconstitutional, and most Americans agree. But they follow that up by saying that white people are discriminated against, that in fact they are the most discriminated-against group in America. ... Multiculturalism provided white nationalists with the language to justify a parallel form of identity politics for white Americans. If all people have the right to protect their distinct cultural, political and genetic identity then, the white nationalists say, white people have the same rights. They use the language that minorities have developed and apply it to white people, and it works just as well. I think multiculturalism itself has gone too far. It takes us too far from the American ideal of having one national identity. And it encourages all groups to think in terms of distinct group interests that compete with the interests of all other Americans.

So an article that is critical of white supremacists AND multiculturalism is cited as "proof" that McCain's views have influenced his reporting? That's pretty weak.

One more thing: Signorile makes it sound as if the New York Times' Augusta crusade is a campaign for gender equity that has come under fire from a bunch of angry, white, straight males. He completely ignores the fact that the issue is more about the right of free association than anything else. And that makes Signorile's column even more dishonest.

RIGHT-WING MEDIA BIAS UPDATE: National Review editors weigh in on the latest DNC talking point making the rounds in the media. Here's a bit I really liked from someone I don't usually like -- Rush Limbaugh:

Rush, as usual, got it right. In response to Daschle, he noted the new prominence of some conservative or right-leaning news outlets, and said, "Suddenly these liberal politicians have to fight in the arena of ideas . . . I'm sure Sen. Daschle would love it if nobody were out there" contradicting him on points of policy, but "that's not how free speech works."

Amen to that.

LOTT'S OF BAD NEWS: Howard Kurtz has a nice roundup on the Trent Lott fiasco today. Check it out.

As for Kurtz's question about why there were virtually no editorials about the incident over the weekend, I have a possible explanation. The story was reported in newspapers on Saturday. (Strange, considering Lott made the statements Thursday. Possibly he made them Thursday night, too late for newspaper deadlines for Friday editions.) Op-Ed pages for big Sunday sections are almost always done in advance, generally by Friday afternoon. It's entirely possible that the "lack of outrage" lefties are crying about could be blamed on something as simple as a production schedule. (Apparently, Lott is getting it good today all over the place. That's because the Op-Ed folks, who almost always work Sunday-Thursday or Monday-Friday, are now back at work.) It's not an excuse, just a possible explanation.

My personal view is that Lott's remarks were outrageous, and he should step down as majority leader. If he hasn't learned by now that the "glorious" Southern past includes monstrous crimes that were contrary to everything in the American creed, then he is not fit to lead the Senate Republicans. But it goes further than that. Not only does he make Republicans look bad; he also makes white Southerners look bad. Those still blind enough to see white sheets and burning crosses as the defining symbols of life below the Mason-Dixon line have just gotten some extra ammo.

ELITE MEDIA? David Shaw, the media critic for the Los Angeles Times, wrote an interesting article the other day on what he sees as the disconnect between "elite" journalists and the people they cover. He makes a few good points, such as this one:

The natural sympathy that most journalists feel for the underdog and for the downtrodden prevents the media from ignoring the poor. The fascination that the American public has with the rich and famous prevents the media from ignoring the upper strata of society. But newspapers seldom write about the middle class, the working class -- white- or blue-collar.

I think that's true to an extent. You see plenty of coverage of the struggles of poor people, and lots of coverage of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, yet comparatively little on the challenges of middle-class life. But I think Shaw's class analysis could use a little more context (there's that damn word again), especially here:

The median annual salary for "experienced reporters" working at newspapers with more than 250,000 daily circulation -- the 40 largest papers in the country -- was about $56,000 last year, according to a newspaper industry study. Pay for "senior reporters" -- and for top reporters and editors at the largest of these papers -- is substantially more. But median income for all U.S. workers over 15 is about $31,500.

I don't doubt that reporters at the top papers are paid well; in fact, when I accepted this new job at a much bigger paper, my pay nearly doubled. However, I'm certain that those 40 largest papers are also located in the 40 largest cities, which means the cost of living is much, much higher. For example, I noted that my current pay is nearly double what I was making at a newspaper with a circulation of roughly 55,000. But my rent more than doubled (for a smaller apartment), and groceries, gasoline and other essentials are more expensive. I tried to calculate my ratio of expenses to pay here and at my old job and concluded that my new salary is equivalent to a slight pay increase at my old job. In other words, for my market, I'm right smack-dab in the middle of the middle class.

The piece also includes the obligatory moaning about the lack of diversity in newsrooms. It's true that the percentages at newspapers don't match the percentages in the general population, but compared with other professions such as medicine and law, journalism is staggeringly diverse.

All in all, though, it's not a bad column. Check it out.

I'M BACK: I've been fighting what feels like a bizarre type of flu, but I'm feeling well enough to blog. Thanks for your patience.

TIMES OUT OF MIND: Dave Shiflett rips into The New York Times. I especially loved this bit:

Howell Raines, according to insiders and outsiders alike, is an intellectual bully. Like many in his tribe, he mistakes his personal obsessions with Universal Objective Truth, including his obsession with a private golf club's membership policies. In the Augusta matter, he has embarrassed his paper by giving this non-story more coverage than the Times might lavish on a medium-sized African war.

Ouch.

RIGHT-WING MEDIA BIAS? E.J. Dionne claims the right has "won" the media-bias argument, even though he denies that it existed in the first place:

To the extent that there has been a bias in the establishment media, it has been less a liberal tilt than a preference for the values of the educated, professional class -- which, surprise, surprise, is roughly the class position of most journalists.

This meant that on social and cultural issues -- abortion and religion come to mind -- journalism was not particularly hospitable to conservative voices. But on economic issues -- especially free trade and balanced budgets -- the press tilted toward the center or even toward moderate conservatism. You might say that the two groups most likely to be mistreated by the media were religious conservatives and trade unionists.

What an arrogant and evasive passage. The "values of the educated, professional class" reflect the sort of elitist liberalism that conservatives have bemoaned for decades. Calling it something that sounds prettier doesn't change that. And if you've got a group of so-called "objective" journalists who vote Democratic at something like an 80-percent clip, isn't that a problem? As for Dionne's bit on social issues, well, what he leaves out is as important as what he puts in. Dionne is right about abortion and religion not getting covered properly. But how about affirmative action (especially the horrendous coverage of Proposition 209 in California) or virtually any story that touches on race? How about immigration? Or homosexuality? Or AIDS? Apparently, those controversial and divisive issues don't count in Dionne's reckoning.

As for the economic angle, well, most of the liberal journalists I work with want their 401(k) to do well. They like their Volvos with their "Visualize World Peace" bumper stickers, and they love their Crate & Barrel home decor. But that doesn't make them eligible for membership in the Cato Institute. There's a lot of evidence that even liberal journalists, much like liberal politicians, will argue for balanced budgets and responsible government spending while crusading against cuts to social programs. (Mickey Kaus, a liberal, has been faithfully documenting big media's resistance to any evidence of progress in welfare reform for a couple of years now.)

And once again, let me repeat: Conservatives are glad to be finally getting a fair shake in the field of punditry. Indeed, most of the intellectually engaging and entertaining writers on editorial pages these days come from the right. But conservatives (and a few liberals) also agree that a huge amount of bias slips into straight news coverage, often in the form of supplying "context" to a story. (The New York Times is notorious for doing this, and is rightfully blasted for it by its many critics.) Hell, I closely read dozens of stories every week that go into our newspaper. Does screaming left-leaning bias leap out from every story? Of course not, and I believe conservatives hurt their case by suggesting that it does. But there's still enough to cause concern and to make me grumble as I push the "send" button.

ROONE ARLEDGE DIES: I'm saddened to hear of his passing. He was the chairman of ABC News and thus bears some responsibility for the rise of Peter Jennings. But he will forever be remembered as the inventor of Monday Night Football and ABC's Wide World of Sports, and as the driving force behind the Olympics becoming a must-see event. If MNF were the only thing he'd done, it would have been enough to make him a broadcasting legend. Rest in peace, Roone, and thanks for giving us an excuse to drink beer on Mondays.

SEGREGATION AND THE MEDIA: Go read this piece on the Census Bureau's study of racial-segregation levels in America's cities. It makes an interesting point: Cities with less segregation are also among the fastest-growing cities, largely because they have lower taxes and fewer regulations. Meanwhile, cities with more segregation are losing population, have higher taxes and grapple with more regulations.

The story made me wonder how different news organizations might have reported the Census story when it first broke. I did a Google News search and here's what turned up:

From the Washington Times:

Black Americans experienced a notable decline in residential segregation between 1980 and 2000, but they remain the most racially isolated of minority groups, according to a newly released report from the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2000, blacks were 10 percent more likely to interact with whites than 20 years ago, the study, "Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation in the United States: 1980-2000," found, creating a black-white relationship that is less segregated than ever before.

Here's how The Associated Press reported it, and how it appeared in Newsday:

America's metropolitan areas became more integrated during the 1990s, as renovated inner cities attracted whites and immigrants while more blacks moved out to the suburbs, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday.

Here's the Census Bureau's press release on the study:

African-Americans experienced modest but consistent declines in residential segregation from 1980 to 2000, according to a two-year analysis of census data by the U.S. Census Bureau. The study found that segregation patterns were mixed for Hispanics, Asians and Pacific Islanders, and American Indians and Alaska Natives. Despite the declines, African-Americans remained the most highly segregated group.

And here's language straight from the study:

The trend for Blacks or African Americans is clearest of all -- declines in segregation were observed over the 1980 to 2000 period across all dimensions of segregation we considered.

But then look at how Reuters covered it, via ABC:

Blacks remain the most highly segregated minority group in neighborhoods across the United States, despite changes over the last 20 years, the U.S. Census Bureau said on Wednesday. Billed as one of the agency's most exhaustive studies ever of residential segregation, the report on trends between 1980 and 2000 showed Hispanics were the next most segregated group, followed by Asians, American Indians and Alaska natives.

It's clear that there are still many in the media who consciously or unconsciously choose to downplay any good news about race relations in this country. Stories such as this go against the blacks-as-eternal-victims script that is so ingrained in the minds of a lot of journalists, so they spin it in a way that confirms their worldview. (And Reuters should have said "past 20 years," not "last 20 years." Sorry. It's a copy-desk thing.) Maybe this guy can enlighten us.

SNIPER UPDATE: The new issue of the American Journalism Review is out, and it includes three articles on coverage of the D.C. sniper case. This one is the most interesting. It's a look at how media-fueled "profiling" that focused exclusively on white, middle-aged men may have hindered the manhunt.

CAREER-LIMITING MOVE: That's what this story could represent for two New York Times sports columnists who allegedly had articles killed because they took a position contrary to the paper's ongoing crusade against the Augusta National Golf Club. Taking an internal dispute to the pages of a competing paper? Wow. These guys could be facing some serious career repercussions, especially under a control-freak regime like Howell Raines' Times. Granted, Dave Anderson is a legend, and you generally don't gut-shoot a legend, and Harvey Araton has worked there for years, but it'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

UPDATE: Susanna Cornett weighs in on the story.

MORE ON GORE: The blog world is familiar with Al Gore's "discovery" last week of the sudden appearance of a vast right-wing conspiracy in the national media, a bias that's driven by one cable news network (whose ratings are still far behind the broadcast networks), a handful of talk-radio blowhards and one conservative newspaper, The Washington Times, which sports an awe-inspiring circulation of just over 100,000. (By way of comparison, that's about half the circulation of a mid-sized paper like the Charlotte Observer, and less than a tenth the circulation of the New York Times.) Well, I found a nice response to Gore's position at The American Prowler. Let's revisit what Gore said:

"Something" -- he doesn't define what something is -- "will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play the game, The Washington Times and the others. And then they'll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they'll start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they've pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these R.N.C. talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist."

Forget the underlying assumption that the American people (and now, apparently, huge swaths of the media) are automatons whose minds are clay in the hands of the Scaife-funded right-wing spin masters. (Apparently, Gore believes "responsible" voters should ignore the thousands of alternative media outlets now available and only get their news from "mainstream" newspapers and networks that far too often get their "talking points" from the Democratic National Committee. See Henry Hanks' research on this.) The Prowler nails the crux of the issue:

Is it possible that the RNC and the media are responding to the zeitgeist, not driving it? This is inconceivable to Gore because he assumes the American people would never, unless snookered, favor Republican or conservative ideas. Unable to admit this possibility, the Democrats' explanations for defeat grow ever more elaborate. The obvious explanation -- the American people just don't trust liberalism, especially when their lives are at stake -- is too difficult to bear, so alternative theories must be faked up.

Just go read the whole thing.

DROP THE OBJECTIVITY: Lots of people have seen and written about this piece from Las Vegas Review-Journal editor Thomas Mitchell in which he calls for journalists to drop the pretense of objectivity in covering politics. All I'll add is that I think it's a concept I would support, in theory at least. It would certainly remove any doubts about "media bias," but it would be nearly impossible to implement overnight. First and foremost, there would be tremendous institutional resistance to it from the usual suspects (J-schools, hand-wringing professional organizations, book-writing journalists.) Secondly, a lot of readers would raise a stink, and if there's anything nervous, bottom-line-driven publishers hate, it's readers who raise a stink. So don't hold your breath waiting for this idea to take hold at newspapers.

For more on Mitchell, check out this from Andrew Cline's Rhetorica blog.

SHAFER -- THE ONE TO HAVE WHEN YOU'RE HAVING MORE THAN ONE: Jack Shafer, the media critic for Slate, has done it again with this examination of a ridiculously slanted Page One story from the New York Times.The article in question was highly critical of Republican attempts to dismantle the seniority system for congressional leadership, yet buried in the piece is the admission that it's the same thing Democrats have been trying to do for years. Here's the clincher:

Oddly, I don't recall a Page One New York Times story about Democrats "Reining in 'Cardinals of Spending' " when they changed the system. Should we attribute today's peculiar treatment to 1) ahistorical news judgment; 2) pervasive liberal bias at the New York Times (which I don't oppose in principle); or should we cite it as 3) an example of a reporter capitalizing on the top editors' political prejudices to write his way onto Page One?

Excellent as usual. Check it out.

THE BAGHDAD BUGLE: Here's an interesting look at the media in Iraq. To sum up their coverage of America, George W. Bush bad, Gwyneth Paltrow good. And then there's this:

The return of U.N. arms inspectors to Iraq was big news internationally with foreign reporters, TV crews and photographers chasing them everywhere. But Iraq's media carried only brief Foreign Ministry announcements listing the sites they investigated.

Meanwhile, events that barely register elsewhere can be big news in Iraq. On a recent day the daily Al-Jumhuriya reported that "a demonstration took place in New Bedford to protest the American threats of military aggression against Iraq." The story was about a march in New Bedford, Mass. attended by about 200 people.

Dude. The Iraqi press covers anti-war protests in the U.S. much more thoroughly than the New York Times or the Washington Post, man! Perhaps those ANSWER supporters who are unhappy with the coverage here can take out a subscription to Al-Jumhuriya to get news that's free of the inherent right-wing, war-mongering corporate bias that we are force-fed here in Amerikkka.

Or, to save postage in the long term, they could just move to Iraq. Preferably right next door to a hidden military "command-and-control" center.

RIGHT-WING MEDIA BIAS? Howard Kurtz has a good column today on errors that have appeared in The Washington Times that could be linked to editorial page editor Tony Blankley's desire to shed a negative light on John McCain and Jim Jeffords. With that in mind, check out Andrew Cline's list of biases that the media carry.

RAINES EVERY DAY: I'm sure this is everywhere today, because it was linked on Drudge last night, but check out this Newsweek article on the activist journalism being practiced at the New York Times under Executive Editor Howell Raines. It's pretty good.

I wish I had more time to comment on it, but this is going to be Another One of Those Weeks at work. I'm sure other newspaper folks out there know what the run-up to Christmas is like. You've got huge sections because there are a lot more retail ads in the paper, and there's a lot of advance work to do. So I'll be slammed this week, and posting may be light to non-existent. But thanks for stopping by.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL!

UPDATE: After doing a bit of reading, I feel compelled to link to a couple of excellent Thanksgiving-related columns that celebrate the true diversity of this great nation and remind us of the many ways that Americans, at our very best, remain a beacon of hope for humanity.

First is Andrew Sullivan's wonderful 1996 column that he republished on his Web site. Among three things Sullivan was thankful for is this:

Second, I'm thankful for the American talent for contradiction. The country that sustained slavery for longer than any other civilised country is also the country that has perhaps struggled more honestly for the notion of racial equality than any other. The country that has a genuine public ethic of classlessness also has the most extreme economic inequality in the developed world. The country that is most obsessed with pressing the edge of modernity also has the oldest intact constitution in the world. The country that still contains a powerful religious right has also pushed the equality of homosexuals further than ever before in history. A country that cannot officially celebrate Christmas (it would erase the boundary between church and state) is also one of the most deeply religious nations on the planet. Americans have learnt how to reconcile the necessary contradictions not simply because their country is physically big enough to contain them, but because it is spiritually big enough to contain them. Americans have learnt how to reconcile the necessary contradictions of modern life with a verve and a serenity few others can muster. It is a deeply reassuring achievement.

Next is Stanley Crouch's Thanksgiving column:

But, somehow, even for all our troubles, I do have to say that I would rather be singing the blues in America than living anywhere else. There is something so special about our nation. Much of that special quality comes from how hard we have fought to move this country beyond all its shortcomings. For all the miles we have to go before sleep, we have done so well that we are appalled by things that are very common outside this country.

When we think of how race used to be in this nation - even when it was at its very worst and the redneck flag flapped unchallenged in the minds of white Southerners - we can look at something like Rwanda and know that Negroes were never slaughtered here on the scale that Africans were in that tragic bloodbath.

A few months ago, when I looked at a tape of a woman being stoned to death in Iran and heard that hysterical self-righteousness screaming through the air as her white clothing and white face covering turned red before she fell, I knew there were horrors under which people live that Americans can only imagine.

At such times, I often think of how marvelously the Rev. Calvin Butts spoke at Yankee Stadium in the memorial following 9/11. We had heard those words so often, beginning with "My country 'tis of thee," but he made them sound new and absolutely true. At that moment, the soul of Harlem became the soul of our country, and for that we should be most thankful.

In this nation, at the right moment, anyone can speak for all of us and we will recognize ourselves in that single person because our country is about doing the work to make it all for one and one for all - in our sorrow, in our triumphs, in our humanity.

I updated this late Friday night after a couple of beers and a lovely day spent with the Amazing Techie Girlfriend and her parents. Here's a snapshot:

Four native Southerners enjoying a jaunt through the big city. Everywhere we go, we encounter every conceivable skin tone and every conceivable language and dialect, but this amazing diversity has become so mundane and unremarkable that we almost forget how special it really is. Along the way, we enjoy a most American menu: bagels and coffee for breakfast, turkey leftovers and iced tea and pumpkin pie for lunch, and wonderful, spicy Thai food for dinner. (And England's Bass ale late at night.)

In short, we had the whole world -- in our refrigerator, on our sidewalks, and in our ears and eyes. And I had to sit down and blog about it to appreciate the beauty -- and simplicity -- of it all.

Among the thousands of things we have to be thankful for, that must rank near the top.

TEED OFF: The great Jack Shafer takes a look at the New York Times' crusade against Augusta National and its policy against admitting women as members.(The headline: "The New York Times' Augusta blog"):

As crusades go, the intensity of the Times' against Augusta, which included a Nov. 18 editorial urging Tiger Woods to boycott the Masters in protest, seems somewhat out of proportion. If Augusta's ban is such a godawful thing (and I'm not saying that it isn't), then where was the Times all those decades that the club was practicing its unholy discrimination—out shooting the back nine? A Nexis search of "New York Times and August National and women and member" before this summer's confrontation produces less than three stories a year going back to 1990 and none before. This indicates that either the Times overlooked one of the decade's greatest injustices until alerted to it by Johnson and Burk's summer duel, or that the Times found a story that it could conveniently exploit for months to the smug satisfaction of its liberal readers: A nation of 140 million women against a men's club of 300.

Calling the Times on its posturing last week was the Kansas City Star's crotchety business columnist Jerry Heaster. "Instead of encouraging Tiger Woods to boycott the Masters, the New York Times should make its own statement by refusing to cover the prestigious golf tournament until Augusta National admits a female member," Heaster wrote.

That would free up the sports pages for the Times to pursue additional crusades for social justice in baseball (no black owners), swimming (what a white sport!), hockey (still not enough American-born), stock-car racing (too Southern), and yachting (how about scholarships for poor folks?).

Just go read the whole thing.

AWARD-WINNING NAME-CALLER: Howard Kurtz has a column today about New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that has an appropriate headline:

"The Man Who Calls Bush A Liar"

I think that pretty much sums up the appeal, and the intellectual honesty, of Paul Krugman.

In other Krugman news, he was named columnist of the year by Editor & Publisher. It seems he was chosen for his talent at "sticking it to The Man."

TAKING AIM:The Columbia Journalism Review has posted its Darts & Laurels roundup of the good, the bad and the ugly in the world of journalism. Check it out.

AD AGE: Meet Ms. New Republic and Mr. National Review, based on a quick check of the advertising in each political magazine. Check it out. It's a pretty fun read from The American Prowler.

BLOWHARD ALERT: There's an interesting article from the Los Angeles Times up at Romenesko today. David Shaw, the LAT's media critic, interviews Jay Harris, the former San Jose Mercury News publisher who caused a stir last year when he resigned to protest what he saw as the destruction wrought on journalism by the drive for profits. In Sunday's interview, he makes one good point and a few not-so-good points. Here's the good one:

But Harris thinks he's been preaching to the choir. He thinks journalists talk too much to each other -- and not just in speeches. He thinks many stories they write and broadcast, ostensibly to enlighten the public, are also -- even if only subconsciously -- aimed primarily at their colleagues and their sources, rather than the reading and viewing public.

This is so true, especially when one newspaper is trying to catch up to the coverage of another. Reporters will jump through hoops to find some subtle little nuance or extra little factoid that the competing paper missed, but which adds next to nothing to the narrative. A lot of other pundits have pointed out how this approach is especially problematic for political coverage. The impact of political decisions on everyday voters often gets lost amid coverage that celebrates the chess moves of the political game in Washington or the state capital.

But then Harris runs off the rails with this statement:

Harris is not alone in either his concerns or his efforts, but I think he's right when he says, "Democracy is less vital now than it once was. Not only are voting and the level of civic engagement and participation down, but even among those who vote, the level of discourse has declined, in quantity and quality, on issues related to the common good.''

Apparently, "democracy" is only practiced in the pages of "good newspapers." To Harris, the only significance of the vast media choices we have today is this: the process has been dumbed down. All those Web sites, blogs, radio stations, magazines and cable news channels are so much white noise. Harris goes on to blame "the media" for not doing a good job of reporting on the most important issue of the last election: Bush's imperial plans for world domination:

Only 39.3% of the country's voting-age citizens turned out for the recent election -- the second-lowest total since 1942 -- and Harris thinks the turnout would have been better (and maybe the results would have been different) had the news media done a better job of covering the Bush administration's foreign and economic policies.

"There are forums," he says, "where you'll hear very thoughtful discussions about how America, as the one hyper-power in the world, should conduct itself, what our guiding principles should be. This raises important questions of national security and of empire, and yet these issues were not discussed much during the campaign.

(I've been toying with a kooky theory on why voter turnout is so poor, and it has nothing to do with the media. I may fully articulate it someday into a post, but it kind of boils down to this: Voter turnout is poor because most people are content with our political system. They don't see either party as likely to implement radical changes. But more on that at a later date.)

Bush's foreign and economic policies haven't been covered properly? Where is the proof for that? Reading between the lines, it seems that, for Harris, the "proof" lies in the fact that the Republicans were such big winners on election day. And he blames the media for not fulfilling its role as Democratic Party cheerleader:

Although the media have addressed these issues in election post-mortems, they've largely done so, Harris says, by "laying much of the responsibility on the Democrats' doorstep ... for their decision not to campaign on those issues and not to draw serious distinctions between themselves and the president.

"But I think it's fair to wonder ... no matter where you come down on the issue itself: If we had covered all this in a more compelling way, would it have shifted the focus of the debate?"

In other words, perhaps an increase in the amount of slanted, left-liberal reporting, which has driven millions of potential readers to the Internet and elsewhere, could have saved American democracy from itself. If you believe that, I've got some free-falling newspaper stock I'd like to sell you.

HEADLINE NEWS: Here's a fun column from the Washington Post. Metro columnist Bob Levy writes about the headlines he's collected over the years. I won't spoil it by excerpting any. Just go read them for yourself.

MEDIA CONSOLIDATION: IT'S NO BIG DEAL: Benjamin Compaine, a research consultant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Program on Internet and Telecoms Convergence, has written a provocative article asserting that media conglomeration is not as widespread as believed and is not as much of a problem as many make it out to be, anyway. That should stir some debate. (In fact, a lively discussion is under way in the comments to the article.)

I think the writer makes some good points. He's weakest on the economic argument and strongest on the analysis of media content and vast number of choices available today. He echoes the Matt Welch Reason article I blogged about yesterday. Check out Compaine's article, and if you care, tell me what you think in the comments section. (Warning: It's very long. And I mean Compaine's article, not the comments section.)

MATT WELCH ROUNDUP: Blogging journalist Matt Welch gives recent hand-wringing books about the state of American journalism a good, solid reaming in this mega-review from Reason. Because I'm so busy today, just go check it out. It's well worth your time.

GOOD FOR WHAT AILES YOU: The American Prowler, which I don't visit often enough, has a nice piece on the brouhaha surrounding Fox News chairman Roger Ailes' letter to President Bush in the days after Sept. 11.

This whole thing about Ailes giving Bush advice seems like it's being blown way out of proportion. After all, the letter appears to be fairly generic and innocuous, and frankly I'd be a lot more shocked if someone inside the White House WASN'T telling Bush that the American public wants him to take the "harshest measures possible" against the terrorists who attacked us. There are certainly some ethical concerns here, but it's not like Democrats haven't enjoyed the same close contact with a prominent media executive -- and with a lot less outrage. Check out this post from the Media Research Center on former CNN chief Rick Kaplan's much more intimate involvement with President Clinton's administration. MRC sums it up best:

Bottom line: Media ethicists may properly question the appropriateness of the Ailes communication to the White House, but the media hypocrisy on this issue is overwhelming.

Excellent point.

'A NATURAL FOR THE TIMES': The New York Observer takes a look at the New York Times' "ownership" of the Augusta National story. I loved this part, from the Observer's inside guy at the times:

Of course, the story is a natural for The Times, the source acknowledged. "You have an old white guy at a country club who doesn’t want women to come in. Every women’s group in the country will eat it up, and we’re a liberal paper, so the feeling is: ‘Let’s jump on it.’"

Give it a look.

IT'S NOT POKER, BUT IT STILL INVOLVES CARDS: This looks like fun for copy editors. Some newsies at the New York Post have invented a board game called Man Bites Dog. The object is to come up with one of those great headlines you wish you could write every day:

Players are dealt a hand of five cards, each containing a tab-friendly word or phrase. But not all are created equal. "Sues" is worth five points, while "Drugs" scores 25 and "Bizarre" goes for 50 points. Playing a hand such as "Romantic Mob Boss Falls For 340-lb Judge" would earn you a whopping 150 points, if not a copy-desk job. The first player to score 500 wins.

Could be a gas after a beer or 10.

BRITISH PRESS ROUNDUP: Ben Sheriff of the excellent Layman's Logic sent me this story on the state of the media in Britain. The author believes English newspapers are the best in the world:

This is not about The Sunday Times. It is about the totality of the British press. So let me go even further than I went a few sentences ago. We probably have the best press in the world. We certainly have the best press in the English-speaking world and, yes, I include the United States. Have I forgotten about its greatest newspaper, The New York Times? No, I have not. I read it every day for six years. It demands to be taken seriously. God knows it takes itself seriously. You feel it is doing you a favour allowing you to read it.

It has some great writers and it is truly a paper of record. But a newspaper is about more than its editorial content. Appearance is important — especially when the competition is fierce. The New York Times has little competition, which may explain why its layout makes an accountant’s balance sheet look exciting and its headlines have all the verve and panache of an insurance company’s actuary presenting his annual report. Deeply serious, deeply responsible — and deeply boring.

The high-minded — Douglas Hurd, perhaps — will argue that being boring does not matter so long as the paper upholds certain standards. Well, I’m sorry, but it does matter. Journalism, however serious, must be popular. If serious journalism is not popular it betrays its seriousness. I don’t mean populist or even likeable and comfortable. I mean “of the people”. The more people it speaks to, the better. And choice is even more important. We are well served in this country — probably too well served for the comfort of some newspaper owners who have to turn a profit.

The author makes some good points. Certainly, the vast majority of American newspapers of all sizes are rather straightforward and fairly dull, and more salacious stories are generally not given the same prominent play they receive in England. But it also must be noted that the newspaper market in England is much different than it is here. In America, virtually every town has its own Daily Bugle, and big national papers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today don't have circulation numbers as huge as you'd expect. That's not quite the case in England. Yes, there are small local dailies, but by and large, huge national newspapers dominate the market and reap circulation numbers that the big papers in the U.S. can only dream of. For example, on this list of the world's 100 biggest newspapers, there are only seven American newspapers, and only four of those have circulations over 1 million. (And remember, the USA has a population of about 280 million.) Great Britain, with a population of about 58 million, has eight newspapers in the top 100, and five newspapers with circulations over 1 million.

Obviously, newspapers are a much bigger business in Britain than they are in the U.S. As such, there is the kind of intense competition that makes for a lively press. Unfortunately, there are problems, too. A lot of the big British papers are pure tabloids, pandering to the lowest common denominator. But even the serious papers have some credibility issues caused by the pressure to be first with the news. In an excellent overview of the difference between British and American papers, you find this nugget buried near the end:

Even British journalists concede that the dark side of their emphasis on speed and exclusivity is the persistent problem of inaccuracy. Indeed, that problem is so great that The Associated Press is particularly hesitant to pick up material from the national newspapers unless it can be independently confirmed.

One highly visible example: The Times reported at the top of page one on December 8, "Mullah Muhammad Omar was last night being held captive as the Taleban lost control of their spiritual stronghold Kandahar in a major breakthrough for the American-led coalition." The New York Times, on the other hand, acknowledged that report but added that the American military was "unable to confirm" it. Nor could anyone else.

So the British and American newspaper models each have plusses and minuses. Perhaps we could learn from each other, like we have in so many other fields.

On another note, Andrew Sullivan had a piece in the Sunday Times of London on media bias in Britain. Check it out.

LET'S GET PERSONAL: Slate's Jack Shafer has a nice piece today on The Wall Street Journal's "Personal Journal," the lifestyle section the paper recently launched:

It would be unfair to describe "Personal Journal" as the paper's "Women's Section." Men buy art, houses, cars, and travel. They invest, go to movies, read books, and are even known to shop via catalog, all topics that "Personal Journal" covers expertly. But only an unreconstructed feminist would ignore PJ's potential chick factor. How many men would pose the question, "Is a face-lift ever allowed as a work or medical tax deduction?" as Mary Dirkes of Lathrup Village, Mich., did in the "Ask Personal Journal" column in October. (No, came the ruling from writer Lynn Asinof, unless surgery is needed to correct a facial deformity.)

Shafer mostly approves of the mission of "Personal Journal," and points out that the Journal has actually been publishing so-called "lighter" stories for years. Check it out.

MEDIA JUSTICE: Reuters, the wire service that routinely puts the word terrorist in scare quotes (i.e., Palestinian "terrorists" gunned down 12 Israelis today) and has been accused of slanted, dubious reporting on the Middle East, reportedly has received the worst press coverage of any British media company in the past year. I suppose there is justice in the world.

PRESS RELEASES GO IN THE ROUND FILE: Here's an interesting story. It seems the New York Post is not ashamed to admit that it is throwing away press releases without even looking at them.

Bravo, I say. You simply cannot imagine the amount of crap that gets mailed to newspapers every day. It boggles the mind. But beyond the sheer volume of junk mail, there's simply a basic distrust of PR folks. If you want the perfect example of why this is, read the photo caption in the link above. Here goes:

Faye Penn, features editor, N.Y. Post. Photo taken with a Sanyo 5300 camera phone being released and marketed by Sprint in the U.S. this month. Gibbs & Soell is handling PR.

Good. God.

FIRED COLUMNIST UPDATE: Yesterday, I blogged about the sports columnist from the Westchester (N.Y.) Journal News who resigned for allegedly plagiarizing another article on a retarded football player. As a comment on that post indicated, Bill Dedman has issued a correction. The article he found on Lexis Nexis was NOT the same as the one that appeared in the newspaper. (See Romenesko's Letters page and scroll down.)

By the way, Romenesko has been redesigned and looks pretty spiffy. In a nod to its blog-like nature, Poynter has added comments to each post.

Did I mention that I love Romenesko's Media News? Hell, I rip off 90 percent of my material from there.

'HI!! I'M BARRY BONDS AND YOU'RE NOT': That was the memorable headline on a Sports Illustrated cover story several years ago about baseball superstar Barry Bonds' jerk quotient. With that in mind, check out this piece from Slate suggesting that Bonds' unpleasant media persona is actually sophisticated manipulation of the journalistic mob.

As a former sports reporter and editor, I can appreciate the writer's inside look at the post-game press conference. Now, I don't want to give you the illusion that I ever covered anything major. Low-level Division I college football and basketball were as big as it got for me. I mostly covered prep stuff. But the number of stupid questions you hear from journalists at sporting events is truly mind-boggling, regardless of the level of competition. I think the reason you hear so many of these screamers is the herd mentality of sportswriters, who feel like they have to ask SOMETHING, ANYTHING to appear as hard-working as their media brethren. I quickly learned that most of the important questions would be asked within the first two minutes of the press conference, so there was no need to do much more than sit back and listen. And heck, at big college sporting events, the sports information directors SUPPLY you with quote transcripts, anyway. You could easily write a solid story from those alone as you eat the free food they provide in the press box.

SOMETHING'S FISHY: Here's an interesting story from Romenesko. A sports columnist for the Westchester (N.Y.) Journal News has been forced to resign for allegedly plagiarizing another journalist's work in a column about a mentally retarded football player. However, Bill Dedman of Power Reporting did a little digging and discovered that there's not much "there" there. (I'm familiar with Dedman, a Pulitzer winner, because I engaged in a polite yet spirited debate on newsroom diversity with him several months ago; the links are here, then here.) Dedman, who specializes in computer-assisted reporting, whipped out some of his fancy software and revealed that the "plagiarism" amounted to a few words, and nothing substantial at that:

-- The longest matching phrase in the two columns is nine words: "Waverly led with just a few seconds left."

-- If you set a more stringent filter (matches of six-word phrases), you get these additional repetitions: "goes to Northwest High School in," "close to the West Virginia border," "Frantz went back to his sideline," and "the Waverly players were pointing, too." Hardly the heart of the narrative.

So what's the deal? The explanation may be this: The accused columnist, Barry Stanton, has worked for Gannett since 1976. In other words, he's reached that level of seniority where his higher pay scale may have become a problem for the media conglomerate. It sounds pretty cold-blooded, but I've heard plenty of stories indicating that this kind of thing has happened before with Gannett. They know there are plenty of young journalists just out of school who would love to have Stanton's job, and they don't have to pay them nearly as much. It sucks.

Gee, and all this after I sang the praises (kinda) of corporate journalism in the post below. Not like I ever really had any illusions.

"TAKE IN MORE MONEY THAN YOU SPEND, WRITE GOOD STORIES, AND DON'T SCREW UP": That's the (paraphrased) advice to newspapers in this enjoyable column by Michael E. Waller, a former publisher of the Baltimore Sun who tackles some tough questions about corporate ownership. Waller's column was inspired by a new book that, for the umpteenth time, complains about the ruin corporate-owned newspapers have brought to the industry. Waller says the book makes some valid points, but he points out that the glorious past before Gannett and Knight-Ridder "took over" wasn't always that glorious. Check it out.

I've blogged before about my experiences at family-owned vs. corporate-owned papers. Hands down, corporate is better. The pay is better, the working conditions are better, and the corporation, which can often make the newsgathering process more complex than it needs to be with its edicts and mandates and programs and formulas and goals and such, nonetheless prevents the sort of arbitrary pettiness I've seen at the family-owned level. This arbitrary pettiness includes refusing to report on certain politicians for purely personal reasons, or placing the monthly meeting of the Civitans on the paper's front page because the publisher is a member. That simply wouldn't fly at a corporate-owned paper.

REAL WORLD INTERCEDES AGAIN: Apologies for the lack of posts this week. I had to work early yesterday, I had a doctor's appointment today, and I'll be working early (during my regular blogging hours) again on Wednesday and Thursday. Hopefully I'll be able to get back into it by Friday or next week.

MORE ELECTION COVERAGE -- 2004 ELECTION COVERAGE! Andrew Cline at the excellent Rhetorica blog has started blogging about the 2004 election. Remember, it's November of 2002! Now that's getting ahead of the curve!

APOLOGIES TO ALL: I haven't been posting much the past few days because work has been on my ass like a cheap pair of pants. I may post some things tomorrow. Then again, I may not. In either case, regular blogging will resume Monday for sure. Thank you to all for stopping by, and please patronize the bloggers on the right side of this page.

A BIASED REPORT: The United States is ranked 17th in the world in press freedom, according to some group called Reporters Without Borders. And that's all it took to set Susanna Cornett off. Check it out.

BOGUS NEWS ON THE MARCH: Newspaper readers in New Jersey, beware! Someone may be placing fake copies of an election-themed special issue of The Jersey Journal in your front yard. You have been warned.

MORE ON WAR PROTESTS: Editor & Publisher reports that the hand-wringing continues over the coverage of anti-war rallies across the country. Many major newspapers, such as The New York Times, felt they didn't do enough; apparently the Times' sister paper, The Boston Globe, feels like it did too much. A telling quote:

The Boston Globe, which sent a reporter to the Washington demonstration by bus, devoted a front-page Associated Press photograph to the story in Oct. 27's paper, along with an 882-word article and staff photograph on A29. "It seems to me a staff-written story and a front-page article might have been a bit much," says National Editor Kenneth Cooper. This might surprise many who would expect the traditionally liberal Globe to cover the rally in-depth. "There have been many protests in Washington," Cooper explains. "We don't cover all of them. A protest there with 100,000 people is actually kind of middling. ... If another protest happened on the same topic with the same amount of people, we'd probably do less."

Along those same lines, I'd like to point out something I missed yesterday. Coverage of the anti-war rallies has invariably failed to provide much information on the forces behind them. The excellent Ombudsgod did some digging around the blogosphere and elsewhere, and he discovered that ANSWER is affiliated with the Workers World Party, which apparently still thinks Stalin was a good guy who was simply misunderstood. Check it out.

TAKE A TABLET: Editor & Publisher has a story today on the debut of the Tablet PC, a handheld electronic device for reading newspapers that has some promise. It sounds like the graphics are great, but I'm still concerned about the size. It's roughly the same dimensions as standard letter-sized paper, it's an inch thick and it weighs 3 pounds. Too big to fit in you pocket, but perhaps about right for the now-ubiquitous "commuter bags" everyone (except me) seems to be carrying.

WHERE DO YOU PUT THE NEWS? I'm sure a lot of folks will be blogging about the wave of newspapers apologizing for their coverage of anti-war rallies across the nation. It certainly seems strange to me, considering that polls indicate Americans on the whole support military action against Iraq. It seems entirely possible that the size of the protests could represent successful organization by anti-war forces rather than some huge groundswell of popular support for their position. Also, I have to wonder if papers would be groveling this much to pacify anti-abortion protesters. But I'd like to point out a passage from Washington Post ombusdsman Michael Getler's weekly column that illustrates the difficult decisions that have to be made regarding the placement of news stories in the paper:

There was a lot of competition for a place on that Sunday front page: two stories about the horrendous attempt to rescue hostages from a Moscow theater, two follow-up stories to the sniper capture, and timely political stories about races in Maryland and Minnesota. That left one spot, and there was internal lobbying to claim it. Senior Post editors said it was a "close call" but they felt that the story from Mexico about the reported setbacks to two Bush initiatives, combined with a photograph from the Washington demonstrations, was the weightier way to go. Besides, they argued, most people also read the Metro section.

That sounds logical, but I'm with the complaining readers on this. Washington gets a lot of protest rallies, and most go into Metro. But this was one big demonstration -- a lot bigger, these Post editors acknowledge, than they expected -- and it was not about some narrow special interest. People had traveled here from all over the country. Post editors, in my view, fumbled this one, not because they are pro-war but because they were surprised at the turnout, and talked themselves into a compromise solution that pushed the story inside.

These sorts of debates go on every day in newsrooms, and not just in the news section. I'm glad Getler gave the public a glimpse of how it works.