THE MEDIA & THE WAR: Editor & Publisher continues its survey of the war stance at the nation's 50 biggest newspapers. In the latest installment, the magazine examines the impact of the State of the Union speech and Hans Blix's report to the U.N. (Hint: Little has changed.) Check it out.

A NEW PAPER IN TOWN: Here's a good article on the L.A. Examiner, the new weekly paper coming to Los Angeles. Ken Layne is the managing editor, and Matt Welch (I found this story on his blog) is involved somehow. I wish those guys the best of luck in their new venture. God knows L.A. could use another newspaper. Now, all the city needs is an NFL team.

THE MEDIA & THE WAR: Editor & Publisher asked a bunch of journalists what they thought about the build-up to the coming war with Iraq. The consensus? There is none. Check it out.

One thing: I thought this was an exceedingly stupid line:

Now that the Super Bowl and Golden Globes are over, Americans are finally ready to debate an attack on Iraq.

Right. There's been no debate on Iraq, because we were all too busy wondering if Friends would win Best Comedy again. Jesus H. Christ, that's silly on so many levels, I don't even know where to begin.

1919 NEWSPAPERS = 2003 NEWSPAPERS? The Boston Globe's fine Ideas section had an interesting Q&A session Sunday with one of the professors who wrote a new introduction to Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check, the muckracking writer's left-leaning expose of journalistic excesses in the early 20th century. (Sample quote: "A modern newspaper, seen from the point of view of the workers, is a gigantic munition-factory, in which the propertied class manufactures mental bombs and gas-shells for the annihilation of its enemies.")

The Q&A is an interesting reminder that early media criticism in this country came from the left and was aimed at the so-called "capitalist press." The journalism practiced at that time by William Randolph Hearst and others was decidedly unsympathetic to working-class perspectives, but I have to wonder if the same criticism can be made today. Sure, you'll see puff pieces on the lifestyles of the rich and famous in current newspapers, but the idea that today the media only serve "the agenda, ideology, and policies of the monied elites who owned and controlled the newspapers" seems a bit of a reach. While business coverage may not be as hard-hitting as a Marxist academic might like it to be, there's no denying that there's plenty of sympathetic coverage on the plight of the poor. If the introduction to The Brass Check is analyzing today's media environment through the lens of a socialist pamphlet from 1919, then I'm not sure it's of much value.

ARAB MEDIA: The National Review has a couple of pieces today on media coverage in the Middle East.

First, there's a look at the evasions and distortions that are so common in journalism in the Arab world. It should be familiar to anyone who reads the voluminous Little Green Footballs.

Next, there's a story about the images being beamed to Iraqi citizens by the state-run TV station run by Saddam Hussein's son Uday:

Anyone watching Iraqi satellite television these days might easily conclude that the whole world is rising against the United States and in support of president Saddam Hussein. The channel — owned by Saddam's eldest son, Uday — is broadcasting images of the despot being showered with rose petals. These images fade into portraits of some of Iraq's "noble friends," including the American Noam Chomsky, Britain's Tony Benn, France's Jean-Marie Le Pen, Austria's Jörg Haider, and Russia's Gennadi Zyuganov. These in turn fade into images of antiwar rallies from London to San Francisco, and passing by Berlin.

It's difficult to resist the temptation to say something really nasty about the anti-war movement, because I know that there are people who genuinely believe they are making a difference through their protests.

But two words keep leaping into my mind:

Useful Idiots.

'STEALING' PAPERS: Fritz Schranck, proprietor of Sneaking Suspicions, had an interesting post over the weekend on a recent court case regarding efforts by a candidate for sheriff to buy up the entire press run of a small paper in order to prevent the public from reading endorsements on election day. Check it out.

ANTI-WAR POSTMORTEM: Editor & Publisher writes that newspapers did a more thorough job of covering the recent anti-war marches. And here's why:

Under scrutiny from both antiwar advocates and media-watchdog groups, most major U.S. newspapers took seriously the sentiment percolating from large rallies Jan. 18 in Washington, San Francisco, and a host of smaller cities.

The lesson: Never underestimate the power of letters to the editor complaining about coverage -- especially if you hold left-leaning views.

Once again, I notice that there is no mention of the Stalinist sympathies of A.N.S.W.E.R., the group that organized the rallies (though there is a reference to Ramsey Clark's defense of Slobodan Milosevic). And once again, go read this piece by James Lileks to understand why.

AMERICA'S CRUMMY NEWSPAPERS: British journalist Nick Denton has a nice post about the reasons America's newspapers are a lot less interesting than the ones across the pond. I liked this excerpt:

All these criticisms beg the question: given that the US media market is the most lucrative in the world, why is the journalism not more vigorous? It depends whom you ask. The shrivelled intelligentsia bemoans the poverty of public-service broadcasting; liberals cite ownership by media conglomerates; conservatives blame consistent liberal bias, and suffocating political correctness; and hard-scrabble reporters the pernicious effects of ethics courses at modern journalism schools.

The underlying cause is prosaic. The United States sprawls across a continent, its population is more dispersed than that of the UK or France, and its media market is geographically fragmented.

That last bit is something you don't see brought up often, and I'm glad to see Nick doing it. (Link via Instapundit.)

THE MEDIA & THE MARCHERS: Byron York reports on the recent anti-war marches, and digs up more dirt on ANSWER. And he also chides the media for ignoring ANSWER's Stalinist roots:

Newspaper reports largely ignored what was said on the stage; the New York Times and Washington Post failed to mention much of anything that was said by ANSWER's speakers. The Times editorial page said the demonstration "represented what appears to be a large segment of the American public . . . [and was] impressive for the obvious mainstream roots of the marchers."

Yesterday's Bleat by James Lileks perfectly summed up why the media didn't dig too deeply into the background of the march organizers:

The bias isn’t a sin of commission; it's a sin of omission. There are things some people in the news-gathering business just don’t see. We all have blind spots, and perhaps for reporters in the mainstream media one of those blind spots is the unsavory nature of some of their coreligionists. They don’t know, because they haven’t bothered to look. The idea of investigating who’s behind a peace rally doesn’t occur to them because they’re not inclined to think there might be anything unsavory about the organizers.

Of course, there's a lot more good stuff in there. Check it out.

VIEWER MAIL: I love it when my readers send in ready-made blog entries. Here's one. I'm just going to copy and paste it:

DId you see this?

The first sentence of the last graph is so great--he's basically telling the reader that he/she should be GRATEFUL that movie stars take time out their busy lives to embrace causes we, the masses, are too dumb to follow.

Like vegetarian stars who make movies shot on film (film=gelatin=dead Bossie).

Personally, I wonder if Laurie David has convinced Jerry Seinfeld, the source of all her wealth, to give up his car collection.

Does Gwynnie P. insist that movie crews use electric vehicles?

I want a star to act good, look good and shut up.

That last line is classic.

KRUGMAN SPEAKS! Howard Kurtz interviews Paul Krugman for the Washington Post today. Here's an excerpt:

Whatever happened to the liberal media?

Paul Krugman thinks it's a myth. Doesn't exist. A figment of the conservative imagination.

"Probably a majority of reporters are registered Democrats or vote Democratic," he says. "But a heavy majority of editors are Republican. The corporations that control most media are Republican. There are operations like Fox News which are unabashedly part of the Republican enterprise and operations like CNN which are carefully evenhanded. The Times is actually -- it's clear the editorial page is mildly liberal and most of the staff must be mildly liberal. But in reporting on issues, most of the time it bends over backwards to find two sides to every story.

"There's an organized machine on the right. There really is a lot of money and professional right-wingers out there to influence the media. There's nothing comparable on the left."

First of all, how in the hell does Krugman, who, as Kurtz writes, "rarely ventures from his Ivy League enclave to either Washington or New York and almost never talks to the people he is writing about," know that most editors are Republican? That has most certainly not been my experience in 13 years of journalism at papers both large and small. And if top news executives are parachuting in to the budget meeting to command that this or that story be covered or not covered, well, I haven't seen it. As for the Times being evenhanded, well, there's ample evidence to indicate that Krugman is not being honest on this count, unless you define "evenhanded" as "mildly liberal."

And then the last bit. It's true that "there is a lot of money and professional right-wingers out there to influence the media." I'm sure you're referring to the well-financed right-leaning think tanks out there. But there are also a lot of well-financed left-leaning think tanks out there. Of course, they're not acknowledged as such. They're called elite universities. You know, places like ... Princeton. These are multi-billion-dollar organizations that have the kind of access to column inches and air time that Richard Mellon Scaife would envy.

But then again, it all depends on what the definition of "liberal" is.

ALTERMAN ON E&P: Eric Alterman has a column for Editor & Publisher that questions the conservative claim that the New York Times is leading an anti-war campaign. The snark that is Alterman's trademark is noticeably absent, which is a relief, but we still get some ridiculous claims:

It is an article of faith among conservatives -- and some not-so conservatives -- that The New York Times under Executive Editor Howell Raines has become a daily version of The Nation: a leftist organ not just on its editorial pages but also on its news pages.

The Nation? No. But an objective paper committed to a fair portrayal of both sides of many contentious issues? Hardly. In fact, I don't think there's a major paper in this country that practices as much slanted reporting as the Times does. And then there's this, which has rapidly become gospel among many on the left:

The idea that the reporting of such views constitutes an antiwar crusade may come naturally to a conservative punditocracy that has been coddled in recent times by a news cycle driven by Fox News Channel, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, the New York Post, Rush Limbaugh, and the like, but it's awfully difficult to defend as a journalistic proposition.

Let's go over this again. A cable news channel with a fraction of the viewership of the No. 3 network, a newspaper with a circulation that's not even 1/10th of the New York Times, the editorial page of a single large-circulation daily paper (which itself is published just five days a week), a New-York-centric tabloid that people read mainly for its crazy headlines, and the world of talk radio (a big format, but one of dozens at U.S. radio stations) are not "driving the news cycle." The hands on the wheel are the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and a half-dozen other huge daily papers; ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS on TV; and NPR on radio.

Let me put it this way, Eric. When the "Moonie Times" or Rush get to the point where they can place dozens of correspondents on the ground in Iraq, or establish bureaus in the world's major capitals, or place reporters in every region of this country, then you might have a point. Otherwise, it really sounds like you're whining about conservatives just getting a seat at the media table.

And the kid's table, at that.

A BLOGOSPHERE SCOOP! Check it out here on J-Log. (Hint: It's about AOL.)

CENTRAL PARK, REVISITED: The Columbia Journalism Review has an amazingly one-sided article arguing that the sensationalized media coverage of the Central Park jogger case led to the railroading of a group of innocent young black men.

Well, that's at least partially correct. We now know those poor young men were innocent, and the media certainly bears some blame for creating an atmosphere that made it easier for them to be found guilty. But not for the reasons LynNell Hancock, the author of the piece, lays out. By selectively comparing media coverage of various high-profile hate crimes in New York, she paints an image of a media beast largely fueled by racial animosity rather than the public's justified fear of violent crime.

Perhaps in a search for high-profile scalps, she especially singles out Pete Hamill:

In his April 23, 1989, piece in the Post, Pete Hamill, the celebrated city columnist, painted a menacing backdrop that would color the coverage to come:

"They were coming downtown from a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference and ignorance. They were coming from a land with no fathers . . . . They were coming from the anarchic province of the poor. And driven by a collective fury, brimming with the rippling energies of youth, their minds teeming with the violent images of the streets and the movies, they had only one goal: to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich. The enemies were white."

After a long discussion of the media frenzy that surrounded the Central Park case and the recent exoneration of the accused, Hancock then develops selective amnesia regarding another high-profile crime: The mob of whites who murdered Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in 1989. (The 1986 murder of a young black man in Howard Beach only receives passing mention as well.)

Meanwhile, at the same time the first Central Park jogger trial was going on, thirty white teens in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, cornered sixteen-year-old Yusef Hawkins near a used-car lot and shot him dead. New York Newsday referred to those arrested as “white young men.” The Daily News called them “a gang of thirty white teens.” The city’s leaders were equally subdued. Mayor Koch painted the killing as “an enormous tragedy.”

The impression one gets from this passage is that New York newspapers buried this shocking crime on page 20. The truth, of course, is somewhat different. It received as much sensationalistic coverage as the Central Park jogger case, and became another racial crusade for Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

A quick Google search turned up this document that studies stereotypical coverage of Italian-Americans in the media. An excerpt:

The Bensonhurst case resulted in extensive coverage in the print media, the bulk of it reporting on the circumstances of the killing and the subsequent criminal trials ... New York City newspapers were obviously a major forum ... an INFOTRAC search yieled 147 entries associated with the name "Yusuf Hawkins" from the New York Times alone. The incident received feature coverage in national news magazines like Time and Newsweek, and was the subject of a cover story in New York Magazine.

And after blaming Hamill for painting "a menacing backdrop that would color the coverage to come" in the Central Park case, it's telling that Hancock completely ignores what he wrote about Bensonhurst in an Aug. 29 Post column with the delicate headline "The Lesson of Howard Beach Was Lost on the Punks of Guidoville":

In a column inspired by ugly altercations between Bensonhurst residents and predominantly Black protest marchers, The Post's Pete Hamill (1989) derisively catalogued local styles like "tattoos" and the "Guido cut, the hair cut straight across the back of the neck". Demonstrating the ear of Bernard Shaw's Professor Higgins, Hamill reserved extended comment for the local jargon, the few words and phrases that make up the language of Guidoville: "Ey, wah, ming, mah... 'Ev, I like to get some a dat... Whassamatta wit you, Joonyuh... I truckin' tole huh, I says to huh, I says, I dough wan no truckin' backtawk, and den I slap huh in da truckin' mout', I mean, in the mout', cause dat's all a trucking broad respects, a rap in da mout ... Huh mudthuh tells huh to be home oirly, says to huh, Who you truckin' gonna listen ta, ya truckin' mudthuh aw me? Mah... "

The portrayal of Italian American "insularity" entailed the repudiation of core middle class, American values. Underscoring the false arrogance of "Guidoville", Hamill wrote that "The Guido decides early that homework is for jerks. So is work... Go to a library? Read a book? Finish high school? Go to a university? Figget abo't it! Om gonna go work construkshun, eight bills an hour!"

Although Hamill attempts to distinguish "Guido" from the majority of "respectable" people in Bensonhurst, this was undermined by the use of group stereotypes for Italian Americans.

Now, re-read the passage at the top about the Central Park defendants, which appears to be a column that blames root causes such as poverty and media depictions of violence. Can you imagine Hamill writing a piece about them using black slang and referring to them as "homeys" or " my niggaz" or something similar? You can be assured it would have been the last column Hamill would have written as a professional journalist.

In summary, Hancock is correct about sensationalized press coverage influencing the Central Park case. It's one of the drawbacks of living in a society with a free press, and can be expected to occur more frequently in a highly competitive media market like New York. But this column, with its selective, slanted use of sources, only serves as a warning to reporters that they should go easy on minorities when it comes to crime coverage or risk being labeled racists in America's leading journalism review. William McGowan, call your office!

DON'T GO CHANGING: The Hartford Courant recently reduced the size of its TV book, sparking howls of outrage from readers. The change was made for financial reasons:

The TV book is a reader service, but advertisers don't seem very interested in it. Deleting 16 pages from TV Week is expected to save the newspaper at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

I'm still baffled by the reliance of so many people on the TV book. If you've got cable, you've certainly got the TV Guide Channel. If you've got digital cable, you've certainly got that Guide button on your remote control. Learn how to use them, people.

But seriously, few things generate as much reader mail as monkeying with the TV book or the comics page. Yank Apartment 3-G and you'll get more angry letters than if you'd published an editorial in favor of child molestation.

BIAS UPDATE, PART 21,038: David Shaw, media critic for the Los Angeles Times, channels Andrew Cline in this column on the eternal question of media bias:

We're biased in favor of change, as opposed to the status quo. We're biased in favor of bad news, rather than good news. We're biased in favor of conflict rather than harmony.

Increasingly, we're biased in favor of sensationalism, scandal, celebrities and violence, as opposed to serious, insightful coverage of the important issues of the day.

But most of the time, on most stories, I don't think most reporters and editors are biased in the way that our most virulent critics suggest. We don't, consciously or subconsciously, slant our stories to fit our ideology.

The thesis for Shaw's story fits nicely with Cline's list of structural biases that are more of an influence on the media than ideology. For the most part, I agree with that analysis. However, far too many stories emerge in newspapers that don't fit the pattern Cline lays out so well. Generally, these stories touch on the issues of race, crime, immigration, homosexuality, abortion and religion, and while it may not always be a question of bias per se, it is often a question of fairness, as in: failing to quote sources holding opposing views to the thesis of the story, ignoring contrary evidence or statistics, etc. (I personally believe that the coverage of what I call the horse-race nature of politics is much fairer than many conservatives claim. Except, perhaps, in the pages of the New York Times.) The presence of slanted coverage on these important issues raises serious doubts about the media's "objectivity."

Of course, I'm sure Andrew, like myself, would doubt that any person can be completely, perfectly objective. That reminded of a book review for William McGowan's Coloring The News that I blogged about in the early days of this site, and this passage in particular:

Certainly, no journalism conference is complete without some genius making the objective claim that there is no such thing as objectivity. But while a God's-eye-view of how the universe really works is beyond the reach of mortal thought, the idea of journalistic objectivity never resided in such grand epistemological goals; its aim was fairness -- to ensure that readers hear both sides of an issue. Skepticism -- the permanent itch of the fourth estate -- derives from the corruptibility of facts and people, and not from academic unease with the metaphysics of being. It's a fair bet that Derrida expects fair and factual reporting in his morning newspaper -- otherwise, what use would news be?

That's as good a summary of the conservative "media bias" argument as I've seen.

ENDANGERED REPORTING: Reason has an excellent piece up today on the ways in which environmental lobbyists often resemble their corporate brethren when it comes to influencing media coverage:

Gurney and Sharpe are certainly correct that corporate chieftains sometimes do not tell the truth. We have Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco to remind us of that fact. But politicians, bureaucrats, academicians, lawyers, and yes, even environmental activists also sometimes engage in spin. It is not as though environmental organizations have been laggards in trying to attract the attention of reporters to their causes and their scientific claims. One of the main jobs of a reporter is to try to figure out who is trustworthy and to explain the potential biases of their sources to their readers, listeners, or viewers.

Just go read the whole thing.

HOWELL RAINES, CULTURAL COMMISSAR: The New York Observer has a good & snarky piece on Howell Raines' drive to beef up the New York Times' Style section. Enjoy.

ETHICAL WOES: Is it ethical for the New York Times allow the CIA to edit a book about the agency by a Times reporter? According to Editor & Publisher, no, it isn't. Here's the melodramatic lead-in to the story:

What would Americans think if they knew that their best newspaper, The New York Times, had allowed one of its national-security reporters to negotiate a book deal that needed the approval of the CIA?

What would they say if they knew the CIA was editing the book while the country is days or weeks away from a war with Iraq and is counting on the Times to monitor the intelligence agency?

They would be properly horrified.

One of the golden rules of journalism is that you can't let your source control your content. Another is that you must avoid making financial deals with the people you cover. The reasons are obvious. Reporters turn themselves into pretzels to prove their reporting isn't compromised. And their credibility becomes a casualty of their relationships.

I can understand the concerns, but I have to say: What's the big deal here? For one thing, the CIA is editing sections of the book written by a former agent, NOT the parts written by the reporter. (It seems prudent to me.) Secondly, I have to wonder how much freedom does ANY reporter have when it comes to covering a supersecret intelligence agency? And nowhere in the article is there any indication that the reporter has made a financial deal with the CIA.

In my opinion, putting the story of the CIA's battles against the KGB in the 1980s into the historical record supercedes any "conflict of interest." After all, isn't journalism about writing the first draft of history?

WINTER IN THE 'CITY': The new City Journal is out, and I recommend this harrowing story about teaching in an inner-city school in Washington, D.C. Check it out.

BANNED IN BOSTON? Here's an interesting story. Reporters at the Boston Herald are protesting the hiring of Virginia Buckingham, a former director of the Massachusetts Port Authority, as an editorial page writer at the paper.

Several Herald staffers contacted yesterday did not want to speak publicly. But they indicated there is widespread concern about Buckingham's hiring. The biggest questions, they say, are whether readers will constantly be scrutinizing editorials for ulterior motives and whether, as an ex-GOP operative, she can sit in on editorial board meetings with Democratic pols and policy makers and be perceived as a journalist rather than as an antagonist.

Here's a link to the actual letter the reporters sent to the editorial page editor. I especially loved this bit: "She is familiar to most as a GOP political operative, with all the baggage that entails." It really makes you wonder if these reporters think "Democratic political operatives" in similar positions carry no such baggage.

But a journalism professor asks, "What's the big deal?"

But why should this matter to the reporters? Their concern is to maintain the wall between news pages and editorial pages; ensure that readers are aware of the difference; and fight to prevent the editorial-page views from slopping into their own copy and their editors' news choices. ... By protesting the choice of an edit writer, Herald reporters are suggesting to the public that what is printed there does in fact tarnish the news coverage. They are admitting a link that they should be rejecting and denying.

I'm with the prof on this one. (All links via Romenesko.)

MEDIA BIAS UPDATE, PART 14,392: John Leo has a response to charges of "conservative media bias." He aims a good bit of his column at E.J. Dionne, who wrote an opinion piece that I blogged about back in December:

Call it the daily disconnect between the newsroom and the general populace. Huge majorities of Americans oppose racial preferences, want immigration limited, resent benefits for illegal immigrants, support the death penalty, are morally troubled by cloning, oppose gay marriage, look favorably on the boy scouts, support parental-consent laws on abortion and want a ban on partial-birth abortion.

In the newsroom, huge majorities take the opposite opinions. When those opinions shine through, as they regularly do in framing and selection of stories, readers and viewers begin to look elsewhere for their information.

Dionne, appearing on CNN's "Reliable Sources," acknowledged that the media have had a bias, "the bias of the educated upper-middle class," which is "not so good," he said, for religious conservatives, unions and the poor.

Yes, and it's also not so good for the military, law enforcement, nonreligious conservatives and people who are proud of America despite its frequent blunders.

Just go read the whole thing.

DROP YOUR STOCKS & GRAB YOUR ....: Here's a prime example of a newspaper taking its commitment to "objectivity" to ridiculous lengths. It seems the New York Times is going to force its top editors and columnists to sell all stock they own -- except their NYT stock. Even the Poynter Institute thinks this is a bad idea:

Some industry observers, however, such as Keith Woods, who teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., believe the stock restrictions are too harsh. "It's like asking a reporter not to vote," he told E&P. Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, said such limits mean "everyone has to become a monk."

For one thing, the stock ownership thing would ban people like me from doing my job. It's not because I'm a huge Wall Street wheeler and dealer. I just happen to have a Roth IRA invested in a mutual fund, which includes dozens of companies in every industry imaginable. So now I've got to sell off a good chunk of my retirement just to remain "objective"? Ridiculous.

Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus rips the Times' policy in a must-read piece. Choice cuts:

What's deeply annoying about Raines and his henchperson Gerald Boyd isn't their liberalism, or their bias, but their insistent pretense that what they are doing isn't liberal or biased but just straightforward objective newspapering the way the Times has always done it. ("Call it journalism.") They're selling their product dishonestly, sneakily trying to trade on the credibility earned in an earlier, different time. The truth would set them free. There's nothing wrong with being a crusading liberal newspaper, after all.

With regards to the proposed policy, Kaus has this:

Will this fool anyone? That would seem to be the idea. As Michael Kinsley has noted, such rules ban only the appearance of bias, not the actuality of bias. NYT Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse marched in a big pro-Roe, pro-choice demonstration a few years back. Does anybody think she's changed her mind since? Will they think she's changed her mind if she now refrains from marching?

This reminds me of an interview with Raines I saw several months ago where he claimed that he wasn't politically biased because when it comes to voting, he's a registered independent.

Pffft.

MEDIA SLAPFIGHT: Jonathan V. Last of the Weekly Standard alerted me to a mini-brouhaha between his colleague J. Bottum and Boston Phoenix media critic Dan Kennedy. It all began with this column from Bottum on reports from China about a TV broadcast of performance artist Zhu Yu eating what he claims was an aborted fetus. Kennedy responded in his blog by pointing out that Asian baby-eating stories are widely thought to be urban myths. But he goes beyond that. One of the links Kennedy uses to debunk the story claims the baby-eating story is a version of the "blood libel," the idea that a culture regularly eats the young of another culture, and Kennedy clearly had that in mind when he wrote this conclusion:

Call it performance art, conservative-style: libeling an entire people in order to make a political point. Bottum, and the Standard, should apologize for this miserable piece of work.

Yet if you read Bottum's piece, he never singles out the Chinese for blame. To my ear, the tone of the piece was about a decline in human values, not Chinese values. Bottum reiterates that in this follow-up piece answering his critics, and notes that while some stories about Asian baby-eating are indeed urban legends, it's not entirely clear that Zhu wasn't eating a fetus.

That brought another response from Kennedy. Let's look at some of the points he raises:

In essense, Bottum challenges his critics to prove that it didn't happen. Hasn't he ever heard the tired-but-true saw that you can't prove a negative? There really is no documentary evidence that it did happen, and plenty of reason to be skeptical.

Well, it's clear Zhu ate something; no one disputes that. But Kennedy has clearly made up his mind. Anyway, let's plow on:

Bottum asserts that the very fact that these stories are circulating -- and that Chinese performance artist Zhu Yu claims to have eaten a stillborn baby -- says something important about the culture, regardless of whether these stories are actually true. His conclusion: "The picture of a culture of death is being created in front of us. Don't look at the individual pieces as they are held up, one by one. Look at the puzzle that's being filled in." Actually, I suspect he could have written a pretty good column about what it means that such apparently bogus stories are circulating. But that's not what he wrote last Friday. Is it really necessary to say that the truth matters?

I don't know if Kennedy misread Bottum's piece or is merely being disingenuous. Once again, the "truth" is this: Zhu was clearly depicted eating something. No one is denying that. It's pretty clear that the point Bottum was trying to make is that it doesn't matter if Zhu actually ate a baby or not. What matters is that our common human culture has reached a degraded condition when a depiction of such an act can be considered "art" or "entertainment." This is not a new conservative argument, and Bottom wasn't out of line for making it.

The headline on the e-mail version of my piece -- though not the Web version -- referred to Bottum's original post as a "blood libel." Bottum notes that the About.com urban-legends site that I referred to uses the phrase "blood libel," and then casually adds that "this is where the Boston Phoenix lifted the 'blood libel' bit." Lifted? Is Bottum always this careless with language? Hey, J. Bo, look at my first post again. I not only linked to the About.com piece, but I also quoted from it, including the "blood libel" bit. Since when did quoting become "lifting"?

This last bit is too pedantic and silly to even comment on.

LABOR STRIKE WITH NO TEETH: Workers at the Associated Press are getting tough in their negotiations for a new labor contract. They're going to engage in a byline strike. Problem is, it may not have much impact:

Will anyone notice, since many newspapers routinely delete AP bylines and edit stories down?

Perhaps not, says Tony Winton, an AP radio/TV reporter in Miami and Newspaper Guild spokesman. "We're the anonymous unsung heroes of the news business. But the statement we're trying to make is to the people we directly work for. We hope that people in the nation's newsrooms will notice."

It's been the style at almost every place I've worked to delete the bylines on AP stories and just go with "By The Associated Press." If this is the plan to draw attention to their plight, it might not work.

BIAS? WHAT BIAS? Henry Hanks points out some dubious media spin on Jeb Bush's inaugural speech. Check it out.

NEWSPAPER NOTES: Here's a quick look at some newspaper-related stories out there today:

Editor & Publisher looks at what's in store for the industry 2003. Read about it here.

Interesting. Circulation at the biggest American newspapers rose in 2002 despite the fact that more and more people get their news from the Internet. Here's the story.

WORKPLACE LIBERALS: Here's a nice piece in the American Prowler that echoes how I get through my workdays in an overwhelmingly liberal newsroom. The writer isn't a reporter, but I've lifted the pertinent quotes:

Where I work, they all think I'm a liberal like them, but not because of anything I've said or done. Rather, they think so because of what I haven't said or done. Namely, I haven't said: "I'm not a liberal." In not saying this, I have enabled their illusions to survive....

My reluctance to tell my peers that I am, in fact, a very bad person has to do with several factors. First and foremost, I am at work, and I don't seek or appreciate the intrusion of global politics into my job -- there is enough of the office variety as it is. I see no reason why the most divisive issues of the day need to be debated in an environment where people are ostensibly being compensated to think about other things. Given the political affinities of my colleagues, I also recognize the wisdom of silence. It might be a bit of a stretch to think that being conservative in an office full of liberals could get you fired, but given the state of the economy in New York, one hesitates to find out.

Fortunately, my current position requires little forbearance on my part. People are very polite and professional, and there are no fire-breathers. Politics is in the background and one finds it easy to agree with general sentiments -- anger at corporate scandals, anxiety about terrorism, and the like. And I don't have the energy to get into debates when the few occasions have presented themselves, because there is too much real work to do. This is one of the blessings of my current work situation: people are usually too damn busy to debate Trent Lott, taxes, or hitting Saddam.

Anyone else have similar experiences? Leave a comment if you like.

RELIGION AND THE MEDIA: The Weekly Standard has a provocative piece up today that essentially labels Democrats "the party of the unbelievers." The thrust of the article, based on another article that appeared in The Public Interest, is this:

As secularists have grown more numerous, they have become an important Democratic voting bloc. In 1992, three out of four voted for Clinton, while religious conservatives chose Bush by two to one. Today, say Bolce and De Maio, secularists are as large and loyal a Democratic constituency as organized labor: In 2000, both "comprised about 16 percent of the white electorate, and both backed Gore with two-thirds of their votes."

Another striking finding is the intensity of many secularists' dislike of conservative Christians--vastly greater than any dislike of Jews of Catholics discernible in the survey data from the University of Michigan that the authors analyze. "One has to reach back to pre-New Deal America," they write, "when political divisions between Catholics and Protestants encapsulated local ethno-cultural cleavages over prohibition, immigration, public education, and blue laws, to find a period when voting behavior was influenced by this degree of antipathy toward a religious group."

The media get plenty of blame for this:

For while half the story, the GOP activism of religious traditionalists, is boringly familiar, the other half, the secularists' preference for the Democrats, passes nearly unnoticed in the prestige press. Consider some figures:

-The New York Times and Washington Post ran 682 stories about the GOP and evangelical or fundamentalist Christians between 1990 and 2000. During the same period, they ran 43 stories identifying secularists with the Democratic party.

-The network news shows, meanwhile, were abundantly covering the political activities and policy preferences of conservative Christians--but never reported the Democratic voting and policy activism of those without religion.

-Although the religion gap has dwarfed the gender gap in recent elections, the latter has had vastly more coverage--392 stories in the Times and Post in 1990-2000. In those same years, all of 14 stories pointed out the traditionalist-secularist divide between the parties.

Those statistics reveal the antipathy toward religious conservatives that many in the mainstream press harbor. In many ways, of course, the religious right brings it on itself when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson grab the spotlight with their ridiculous utterances and overreaching political advocacy. But only quoting extremists as being representative of a significant group of religious Americans is akin to quoting the New Black Panther Party as being representative of a significant group of black Americans: it paints a slanted picture. The Standard has a theory on why the media stay silent on the Democrats' "lack of faith":

As for why the Democrats' secularist support goes unreported, Bolce and De Maio articulate well the obvious explanation. Mostly secularists and Democratic voters themselves, elite journalists tend to see the influence of conservative Christians as a danger and therefore a story. At the same time, they are all too aware that Americans at large remain a predominantly religious people; thus, journalists "implicitly understand the political ramifications of characterizing the Democrats" as the party of unbelievers--a group even more disliked than Conservative Christians.

I agree with the first part of the paragraph. Something that is viewed as a danger is obviously a much bigger story than something that is not. That's the very definition of "news." But the last bit edges into conspiracy-theory-land by suggesting that journalists are actively covering up the Democrats' dirty little secret for political reasons. I just don't see it. After all, our political traditions dictate the separation of church and state, and skepticism of religion filtering into government fits well within that tradition. And I certainly believe that the activities of some of these groups deserve scrutiny.

However, I still believe too much of the coverage of religious conservatives is negative. (Most of the religious people in my family aren't politically active -- in the words of that Police song, they believe that "there is no political solution" -- and view Falwell and Robinson as demagogues.) And while this article makes some excellent points, I'm afraid it won't elevate the discourse. Loud elements of the Left will claim that this is a new skin for an old GOP talking point about "those godless Democrats." Loud elements of the Right will use it as proof of that unsupportable position. And around and around we'll go.

CAIR PACKAGE: Kathleen Parker weighs in on recent attempts by CAIR to silence any criticism of Islam. She's concerned for the safety of journalists. Why?

Because if you poke fun at the prophet of Islam -- or even suggest anything that remotely smacks of irreverence -- you will live (maybe) to regret it.

Check it out.

HOROWITZ WATCH: I don't visit David Horowitz's Frontpagemag as often as I used to, because I find the tone much too harsh sometimes. But there is an absolutely harrowing entry on Horowitz's blog on an outrageous example of anti-Israel bias in the Los Angeles Times. Please, read it to the end, and keep the memory of the bravery of Noam Apter in your mind.

I also liked these comments from another post in regards to the question of media bias:

Liberals still don't get it. There's no big liberal audience for liberal talk show hosts because they control taxpayer funded NPR and all the metropolitan newspapers; or for liberal cable, because they control the networks and PBS with ten times the audience; or for liberal think tanks, because universities are the liberal think tanks.

(And of course there's Brookings, the Progressive Policy Institute and dozens of other liberal 501(c)3s on top of the trillion dollar university system).

In last Sunday's LA Times, Neil Gabler, professor at the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC pretended to be unable to detect liberal bias in the media, including leftwing papers like the one he was writing in. Perhaps that's because he also failed to notice that the Annenberg School is run by a former Clinton Administration official and -- like journalism schools across the country -- its faculty is one hundred percent leftwing. People who call themselves liberals and democrats yet participate and run a system that ruthlessly excludes any view that is not on the left are probably incapable of making sensible comments about the political world we live in anyway.

Again, it's a bit screedy, but there's a grain of truth in there about the liberal cocoon that surrounds so many of those involved in the highest levels of academia and the media.

ADVANTAGE: MEDIA MINDER! Benjamin Compaine has penned an article for Foreign Policy on some of the myths of global media consolidation. It appears to be a re-write of an article that I blogged about back in November.

HOW MISTAKES HAPPEN: From the Sacramento Bee's ombudsman, here's an interesting and informative article on what can go wrong and why in the daily rush to publish a newspaper. Check it out.

IGNORING BLACK ACHIEVEMENT? There's a strange article at the Los Angeles Times today that accuses the media of "ignoring" important contributions by blacks. Discussing the annual parade of end-of-year stories that summarize what happened in the news over the past 12 months, Tim Rutten noticed something:

Still, before the warm glow of retrospection fades entirely, it's worth taking note of one of the most interesting domestic stories that went largely unremarked upon in our annual summing up:

At the end of 2002, the secretary of State, the president's national security advisor, the CEO of the world's largest media company, the head of the world's biggest financial services firm, the CEO of the world's largest mortgage lender, the leader of American Express, as well as the globe's most recognized athlete and the finest actress and actor in the world, as selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, all had one thing in common:

Every single one is African American.

I have to wonder: Why must the media be antagonized for failing to celebrate the fact that two of the Bush administration's top advisors, who came into office in January of 2001, are black? Did the media somehow fail to comment on this fact when it was made public more than two years ago? And did the media really drop the ball in pointing out Halle Berry and Denzel Washington's remarkable achievements? As I recall, it was that the lead story on Oscar night, and for days afterward. (For what it's worth, I've seen that accomplishment prominently celebrated in year-end stories. Maybe Rutten should read more.) And I notice that Rutten ignores the overly fawning coverage that was given all year to Notre Dame football coach Tyrone Willingham, one of the few blacks to reach the pinnacle of college coaching success.

Stanley Crouch offers up some of his always-provocative ideas:

Writer and social critic Stanley Crouch thinks the success of people like Powell and Rice "hasn't been allowed to become part of the general national discussion because some people think stressing what they have accomplished gives a false impression of what has been going on in the United States." Focusing on individuals' achievements, Crouch said, "distracts people who are looking for distraction from the fact there has been no serious move by federal government to reduce the ongoing violence by street gangs that has killed 10,000 black people over the past decade. That level would not be tolerated if it had been perpetrated in the white community by the Aryan Resistance."

I think there certainly is a desire by many in what would be considered the "civil rights community" to downplay any good news from "black America." I'm reminded of a great quote from Jim Sleeper's memorable review of William McGowan's Coloring The News:

This country's vast race industry of activists, consultants, foundation officers, civil rights lawyers and government monitors enhances its funding, job lines and moral cachet by playing up bad racial news and discounting the good. Whatever his mistakes, McGowan is right to argue that journalists should be investigating the race industry, not working for it.

But there's another explanation. Perhaps we've become accustomed to these accomplishments, and no longer regard them as overwhelming news:

Martin Kaplan, director of USC's Norman Lear Center and associate dean of its Annenberg School of Communications, wondered whether "the media, like the country, hasn't come sufficiently far in the struggle for social justice that we are just less race sensitive. We didn't notice this landmark because what's been accomplished is more ordinary. We don't report these individuals' successes in a racial context for the same reasons we no longer routinely report the race of people accused of crimes -- because it's irrelevant."

I personally think that is the case.

MEDIA BIAS UPDATE, PART 12,654: Reason has a nice piece on the media bias question, specifically the Democratic Party's efforts to boost its media profile. Along the way, it raises some excellent points:

Liberals continue to see their disengagement from the hotter regions of media as the fault of the messengers rather than the message. A party that offers nothing in the way of new ideas, that retains its fondness for failed policies and worn-out platitudes, should at least be able to draw some lessons from the November debacle. The need for more exciting anchorpeople is not one of those lessons.

If liberals are guilty of mulishness, the conservative approach to media bias is a litany of delusions. First, there is the problem of competing self-satisfactions. Ann Coulter's success, in the face of silence from the respectable news media, is frequently trotted out as proof that the American people are hungry for an alternative to the institutional media. Michael Moore's equal success, in the face of the exact same challenges, is not. Nor is the argument that The New York Times' adjectival choices or Dan Rather's intonations (and by the way, why is it always Dan Rather who gets picked out as the TV straw man?) mark them as anything other than centrist media terribly persuasive.

Good points each, though I dispute the assertion that conservatives only get upset about "adjectival choices" in the Times. How about failing to cite sources that might counter a story's thesis? Or twisted reporting on opinion polls? Also, I don't think Michael Moore has faced the same challenges as Coulter. For one thing, he was a well-known documentary film maker for more than a decade before Coulter surfaced. Another complaint:

There's also a more basic journalistic question. If Fox News and the Washington Times just balance out the partisanship of CNN and The New York Times, shouldn't it count for something that the latter have far more extensive news-gathering capacity? It may be an old-fashioned concept that going into the field, getting documentation, calling people for comment, and other forms of legwork still count as important tools of journalism, but to pretend none of this matters because of the hidden biases of the reporters is to give in to the kind of relativism conservatives are supposed to be against.

Most sensible conservatives don't see "bias" seeping into every single story. (I personally believe that the horse-race coverage of political races is more balanced than many conservatives believe.) Instead, they've noticed that certain subjects, such as race, homosexuality, AIDS, abortion, crime and immigration, to name a few, seem to be covered almost exclusively from a left-leaning perspective. (Again, see this guy's book for more.)

Those are my quibbles with what was an otherwise excellent article. Check it out.

DON'T SAY THESE WORDS: Now more than ever, and make no mistake about it, it's this year's list of words and phrases that should be banished.Enjoy.

APPALLING POLLING: The American Journalism Review's new issue is out, and its centerpiece is a look at out-of-control polling.

I tend to agree. There are too many polls, and, as blogger Iain Murray of the invaluable Statistical Assessment Service points out in the article, they're often poorly designed:

Iain Murray, director of research at the Statistical Assessment Service, an organization that helps journalists understand scientific and social surveys, says hypothetical questions, in particular, are pretty meaningless. "If the purpose of the poll is to find out information, then obviously a meaningless question doesn't help you in any way."

Just go read the entire multi-part series. It's well worth your time.

FAIR WATCH: Well, it seems FAIR has finally gotten around to writing about the famine situation in Zimbabwe. However, they're still not willing to criticize Robert Mugabe for allowing his people to starve so he can gain street cred by ousting white farmers from their land. In a remarkable piece that encapsulates the mind-set of the loonier elements of the left, FAIR bemoans the lack of TV coverage of a growing famine in southern Africa.

The thrust of the article is that the American news networks are "blaming the victims" for the famine. (Apparently the manner in which Africans run their governments cannot be criticized by white, Western -- or, here, "Northern" -- journalists.) With regards to Zimbabwe, here's FAIR's take on the issue:

According to the London Guardian (4/3/00), "About 4,500 white farmers own 11 million hectares of Zimbabwe's prime agricultural land, while about 1 million blacks own 16 million hectares, often in drought-prone regions." In other words, this is a country where a minority of less than one hundredth of one percent owns almost two-thirds as much land as the majority--and owns the choicest land, because they once ruled the country.

These whites were generally portrayed as hard-working, honest farmers who just wanted to till their land, rather than as giant land-owners who had usurped the most productive territory--although they were surely that, given the amount of starvation that such a small number of farms was reportedly able to cause.

Mugabe's administration in Zimbabwe has been thoroughly criticized by his own citizens, and the subject is clearly newsworthy. However, the omission of basic facts such as the skewed land ownership turned a potentially useful examination of the motives of Zimbabwe's land reform program into a one-dimensional promotion for a single message: It's their own fault they're starving.

And a basic fact omitted here is this: "Land reform" may be history's most savage political euphemism. It can be easily translated to mean "political famine," as it was in the Ukraine in the 1930s. Another glaring omission is any concern for those who must actually pay the price for a more equitable distribution of choice farmland. FAIR's complaint is akin to observers of a sinking ship complaining that the vessel fails to meet the standards of a luxury liner. The criticism may be apt, but the passengers are going to drown just the same.

Elsewhere in the article, we learn that Zambia could have helped alleviate its famine by accepting a shipment of genetically modified grain, but refused to do so. If that isn't government mismanagement on a massive scale, I don't know what is. We also get the usual discussion about "global warming" caused by "Northern" pollution.

But what we don't get is something pointed out in this BBC article -- the AIDS epidemic in the region that has decimated its most productive citizens. Surely AIDS is more than a "backdrop" to the crisis. Indeed, it may be the main cause, along with a sustained drought. And AIDS in Africa is one story that has NOT been ignored by the media. (Note this Google News search that reveals 1,980 links.)

I understand that FAIR comes at the question of media bias from a left-wing perspective. It would be nice if it would do so in an intellectually honest manner.

MORE ON BIAS: The American Prowler has a succinct response to a New York Times story on the Democrats' supposed inability to get their message to the masses via the media. Here's the clincher:

Neither this macho meathead nor anyone else was honest enough even to acknowledge the existence of a strongly liberal mainstream media, let alone ask why it isn't coming through for Democrats. Instead we heard that ''progressives'' are ''too erudite'' and so can't compete with ''fire and brimstone'' conservatives. Nothing like being too good for this world, the Democrats' problem all along.

Ouch.